Showing 1 - 10 of 35 Items
Hermeneutic Encounters: Hans-Georg Gadamer in North America, 1968-1986
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Ian Ward
Access: Open access
- Hans-Georg Gadamer’s myriad contributions to the continental philosophical tradition have been well documented, but his influence on North American intellectual life has gone largely gone unrecognized. This paper attempts to fill that gap, using primary and secondary source material to document Gadamer’s scholarly activities in the United States and Canada between 1968 and 1986. The paper also evaluates Gadamer’s influence using detailed accounts of “hermeneutic encounters” that occurred between Gadamer and four notable North American philosophers: Richard Palmer, Paul de Man, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Through these accounts, this paper argues that Gadamer made lasting contributions to ongoing debates in the humanities about the nature of literary interpretation, the social sciences, and analytic philosophy. Finally, the paper explores the philosophical and historiological possibilities that Gadamer’s hermeneutics opens up for intellectual history more broadly, especially in the field of reception history. Building on Gadamer’s own hermeneutics and Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception aesthetics, it develops the concept of the “encounter” as the starting point of a more hermeneutically-sensitive approach to intellectual history.
Building Home in Diaspora: New York’s Jewish Left and the History of the Bronx Housing Cooperatives
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Micah Benjamin Wilson
Access: Open access
- This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending the era that is typically considered the movement’s “peak” in the 1910s, this thesis demonstrates that the era of the Bronx cooperatives must be central to any study of the Jewish labor movement by revealing the ways radical Jews attempted to maintain and negotiate their various worldviews against the backdrop of the threats posed by the capitalist housing market, assimilation, and sectarian struggles. I reconsider the disproportionate attention the “success story” of the Amalgamated Cooperative has received, situating its politics as but one of many responses to the contradictions embedded in the housing cooperative model. Finally, I analyze the role of nostalgia present across resident recollections of the cooperatives and situate it in the contexts of 1970s neoliberal urban reform and suburbanization, while considering the discursive power of this emotion to obscure the persistent legacy of anti-black racism entangled in the cooperative housing movement despite its progressive reputation.
Urban Modernity and Turbulent Water: Toward a Transnational History of Expansion in Northern Japan, 1866-1882 Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Ethan Barkalow
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
“One of Folly’s Failures”: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the Decline of the Thirteenth Amendment This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Grace Ann Fenwick
Access: Embargoed
The Politics of Land Rights in the Transition to Democratic South Africa: The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Property Clause
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Anna Louisa Roosevelt Lennon
Access: Open access
"Know-Nothingism, Abolitionism, and Fanaticism:" An Analysis of the Collapse of the Second Party System in Maine
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Justis Dixon
Access: Open access
- The 1850s were a tumultuous period in American politics, with a complete partisan realignment fundamentally shifting the balance of power away from the status quo and toward possibilities for change. This paper focuses on the collapse of the Second Party System in Maine, and understanding how we can explain this stunning and rapid shift. The varying factors can be placed into two broad categories First, ethnocultural issues were primarily responsible for much of the growing turmoil within and between the major parties throughout the 1840s, and accelerating greatly in the early 1850s with rising levels of immigration and the increasing draw of the temperance movement, which was then followed by the passage of highly controversial legislation concerning these issues. Second, national-level issues such as the Fugitive Slave Act and detailed reports of the violence out West in local newspapers brought the consequences of the unfettered expansion of slavery closer to home for many Mainers. Scholars of this period have expressed varying opinions as to the relative importance of local and national level issues in generating a change to the political system. Using Maine as a case study due to its position as a leader in the temperance movement and its geographical distance from the battlegrounds of national politics at the time, I conduct an in-depth examination of the political history of the state and conclude that rising tensions on both local and national levels were necessary to cause such transformational change.
“The Spirit of Turbulence”: East Indian Political Imaginaries in Early 20th Century British Guiana
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Faria A Nasruddin
Access: Open access
- After the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office instituted an indentured labor scheme that lasted from 1838 to 1917, in which they brought East Indians to the plantation colonies as laborers under five year contracts. Due to the planter class’ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guiana’s agricultural landscape and became the single largest ethnicity in the Colony by 1920. This thesis explores the early negotiations of the meaning of diaspora and diasporic citizenship for East Indians in British Guiana. They comprised a diverse conglomerate of different socio-economic positions: agricultural estate laborers, village residents, and middle-class business professionals. Each socioeconomic group had a different lived experience in the colony and different outlook on what it meant to be a creole-born East Indian. This thesis traces the multiple and contingent ideas of citizenship and nationality that were circulating at the time. Against a backdrop of changing imperial politics that promoted modernity and the discourse of the nation, East Indian visions centered around how to construct permanence, and negotiate belonging. By drawing on colonial documentation–local reports, commission transcripts, personal correspondence–and documentation produced by East Indians–memorandums, speeches, and books–this thesis ultimately argues that East Indians came to view culture as integral to their self-worth and definitions of place within the imperial system. Culture thus became the primary lens to negotiate the various meaning of citizenship and place in the imperial-national moment.
Student Activism and Malaysian Politics, 1955-74: Revising the History of the Malay Language Society (PBMUM)
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Song Eraou
Access: Open access
- In the literature on student activism in Malaysia, the years from 1967 to 1974 are emphasized as vibrant years—students organized large-scale demonstrations, regularly asserted their opinions in the political arena, and even participated in electoral politics. This period was followed, however, with the imposition of strict laws in 1975 limiting freedom of speech and expression. Such laws were part of the broader containment policy pursued by the state after the May 13, 1969, racial riots, which allowed the state to stifle any form of political dissidence to ensure peace between different ethnic groups. One particularly active organization in this period was the Malay Language Society (PBMUM) of the University of Malaya. While PBMUM began with a dream of using language as a mode to foster national unity, after the riots it would be remembered as a race-based organization oriented toward Malays. This thesis offers a historical analysis and reinterpretation of the PBMUM, characterizing it as a platform for students at the University of Malaya to meet, discuss, and mobilize around the most important issues concerning Malaysian society. Importantly, members exhibited a continued devotion towards changing the fate of the rakyat (the people). In revising the history of PBMUM, this thesis also offers a deeper understanding of the Malaysian political landscape in the ‘60s and ‘70s, focusing on political discussions around nation-building in the lead up to the May 13 riots and its aftermath.
Greening the Market: Natural Groceries from the Countercuisine to Whole Foods Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Livia Kunins-Berkowitz
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community