History

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Open Access
"Talking About Down There": The Development of a Public Discussion of Cervical Cancer in the Twentieth Century
(2014-07-09) Hadenko, Mandy Lee; Rutherdale, Myra
This dissertation emerged from personal and political concerns and aims to fill a historiographical lacuna. This thesis is a study of how Canadian women learned about cervical cancer and its prevention in the twentieth century. In particular, this thesis seeks to understand how, when and in what forms did a public discussion of cervical cancer prevention develop in late twentieth century Canada. Cervical cancer is significant in terms of its place in disease history. When discovered in the pre-cancerous stage, cervical cancer is quite preventable. Since the 1960s, the medical community has been aware that Pap smears can be used to recognize pre-cancerous lesions and that deaths from cervical cancer were avoidable. Its uniqueness as a “preventable” cancer provides an example of the relationship between scientific knowledge, public health, and popular practice. The public dialogue about cervical cancer prevention, I argue, was complex. There were numerous groups that were part of this public discussion including medical doctors, the medical profession, medical educators, women’s health activists, women’s organizations, newspapers, women’s press, individual women and support groups, and the municipal, provincial and state agencies. This thesis demonstrates that while dialogue among these historical actors was rarely in conflict, tensions did emerge as medical practitioners, women’s health activists and public health officials debated how best to link biomedical knowledge with preventive health policies.
Open Access
Exhalted Order: Muslim Princes and the British Empire 1874-1906
(2014-07-09) Radford, Kristopher Donald; Peers, Douglas
This dissertation charts the genealogy of a particularly British Indian form of colonial government called indirect rule. Indirect rule, which came to be deployed across several Muslim dominated states of Africa and Asia in the late Victorian period, was by that time a century old British colonial strategy. First employed by agents of the East India Company in the middle of the eighteenth century, this form of imperialism subsumed many of the states which comprised the Indian political landscape in the post-Mughal period. These so-called princely states were not conquered outright by the British, but rather came under their control though a range of technologies, from the deployment of powerful agents and coercive treaties, to the establishment of a discursive framework which conceived of these states as ‘oriental’ and hence requiring of a special form of government. Indirect rule, however, was never the most common form of administration in the British Empire. Even in India, direct rule, where precolonial social and political structures were replaced by new modes of government, was much more common. This work, therefore, explores why in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the architects of British rule in Malaya, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Zanzibar, and Northern Nigeria all elected to impose variants of this unusual form of government invented in eighteenth-century India. It does so by examining the ideas, assumptions, and strategies of the officials who were chiefly responsible for the form of these colonial regimes through a variety of archival and other documentary evidence. In so doing this work seeks to demonstrate that British Indian ideas and technologies had a definitive impact on the development of the British Empire across Africa and Asia.
Open Access
Plants and Fossils: Household Fuel Consumption in Hampshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire 1750-1830
(2014-07-28) Zylberberg, David; Neeson, Jeanette M.
The price and availability of different fuel sources shaped the material lives of English people during the Industrial Revolution. Fuel prices affected the location of industries, population growth and whether poorer people could afford to cook their own food. Fuel supplies were highly regionalized in this period and few people had access to wood, peat and coal at comparable prices. Depending on the community, people consumed wood, peat, local coal or non-local coal, the prices of which always differed. National averages or price-wage series do not reflect these diverse experiences. This dissertation offers a new perspective on living standards of the labouring poor by examining the role of regional environments and emphasizing their impact. It does so with a comparative analysis of Hampshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, two of the most geographically diverse English counties. Evidence is derived from fuel purchases of Overseers of the Poor and sales records of collieries, along with contemporary observations, the 1831 Census, court records of fuel theft prosecutions and the heights of prisoners in the West Riding House of Correction. These sources indicate that wood prices tripled in inland northern Hampshire between 1750 and 1830 and made cooking prohibitively expensive for most households. Purchased wheat bread increasingly became the staple food in that region. Meanwhile, coal was very cheap where it was mined and fuelled industrial expansion on the Yorkshire coalfield. Population growth was higher in this manufacturing region and residents continued to cook their own food but came to suffer from the smoke arising from such fires. The regional perspective of this dissertation indicates that living standards declined for most labouring poor English people during the Industrial Revolution, but for regionally different reasons.
Open Access
Poor Soils and Rich Folks: Household Economies and Sustainability in Muskoka, 1850-1920
(2015-01-26) Watson, Andrew; Coates, Colin M.
This dissertation examines the social, economic and environmental dimensions of the transformation of the Muskoka region in southcentral Ontario from an Aboriginal place into a renowned tourist mecca between 1850 and 1920. More specifically, it explores how changing social relationships, patterns of economic exchange and environmental conditions shaped sustainability in a marginal landscape located at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield and in close proximity to large urban populations. Focusing on the household level, this study situates the challenges and opportunities faced by people in Muskoka within a broader set of social, economic and environmental histories of Ontario, Canada and North America. This work draws on a variety of primary sources, including diaries and journals, ledgers, legal testimony, Indian Affairs reports, local histories and memoirs, government files and oral interviews. The rural and environmental history of the southern Shield region has received little attention from historians. This dissertation begins with two chapters on the history of transportation in the Muskoka region, which establish the importance of mobility on the lakes and access to outside resources as central to the narrative that follows. These chapters also identify the transition from an exclusively organic fuel economy to a largely mineral fuel economy as central to the history of sustainability in the region. The dissertation then turns to the history of the region’s First Nations and the relationship of continuity and change they had with the marginal landscape of the southern Shield during this time period. The next section devotes three chapters to Eurocanadian settlement of Muskoka during the 1860s and 1870s, the rise of tourism during the 1880s and 1890s and the emergence of a culture of conspicuous consumption on the lakes during the 1900s and 1910s. Finally, the dissertation considers the alternative small-scale household approach to logging that co-existed with the commercial exploitation of Muskoka’s forests before 1920. This dissertation argues that society at the southern edge of the Shield was shaped by environmental limitations and a reliance on resources, manufactured goods and wealth from outside the region. Ultimately, this dissertation concludes that life in a marginal environment, such as Muskoka was never completely sustainable only more or less sustainable. Sustainability was part of a process, not a condition, of life in Muskoka. Life at the southern edge of the Shield became more sustainable when social relationships, patterns of economic exchange and environmental conditions were shaped mainly by local material and energy flows, and became less sustainable when local material and energy flows are greatly exceeded or undermined by exogenous ones. The most sustainable moment occurred during the 1880s and 1890s when visitors and residents formed interdependent relationships, while less sustainable moments existed before those relationships had been established and after the turn of the century when they were eclipsed by a consumer culture. The history of Muskoka did not unfold on a trajectory toward or away from an exclusively sustainable or unsustainable end. Changing circumstances either enhanced or diminished the potential for people in Muskoka to reproduce or maintain certain social, economic and environmental arrangements over time.
Open Access
Writing Desire: The Love Letters of Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams
(2015-01-26) Perdue, Katherine Anne; McPherson, Kathryn
This dissertation analyzes the intimate relationship produced by and reflected in the written correspondence between Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams, arguably the largest correspondence of its kind in North America. Frieda Fraser was a professor of microbiology at the University of Toronto and Edith Williams was one of the first female veterinarians in Canada. Their correspondence was written from 1924 to 1927 and then intermittently from 1933 to 1943. This dissertation contends that Frieda’s and Edith’s correspondence was a place wherein the women created a self-defined sexual description that was in dialogue with cultural discourses that denoted the meaning of the modern lesbian. Frieda and Edith referred to themselves as “devoted women,” their designation of a sexual subjectivity that marked their differentiation from these discourses. Edith and Frieda arrived upon a unique notion of romantic devotion, shaped alongside an awareness of contemporary depictions of the lesbian in literature, in science, and in the theatre. This dissertation analyzes how two middle-class Canadian women came to live their lives as “devoted women” within a culture that did not recognize, nor mirror their sexual identities. Affected by modernism, Edith’s and Frieda’s letter-writing produced, enhanced, and helped the women define their desire for one another. Moreover, the women’s devoted relationship benefitted their medical careers and their medical careers benefitted their partnership. In relation to family and profession this dissertation asks to what degree was discretion employed in order to preserve their relationship? In focusing on the correspondence, this dissertation is more than an exercise in “finding the lesbians” in Canadian history: it asks “how did the lesbians find themselves?”
Open Access
The Frigid Golden Age: Experiencing Climate Change in the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720
(2015-01-26) Degroot, Dagomar Sebastiaan; Hoffmann, Richard C.
During the nadir of the Little Ice Age between 1565 and 1720, average European temperatures declined by nearly one degree Celsius. While altered weather patterns strained the adaptive abilities of Europe’s agricultural societies, the northern Netherlands enjoyed the prosperity of its Golden Age. The economy, culture, and environment of the Dutch Republic yielded a distinct pattern of vulnerability and resilience in the face of early modern climate change. In this dissertation, newly interpreted documents are examined alongside scientific evidence, first to establish relationships between local, short-term environmental conditions and human activity, and ultimately to identify broader connections between long-term climate change and the history of the Dutch Republic. This methodology reveals that the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age presented not only challenges but also opportunities for Dutch citizens. Central to the increasingly capitalist economy of the Dutch Republic was the development, maintenance, and continued expansion of transportation networks that spanned the globe. Complex relationships between local environments, weather, and climatic trends stimulated new discoveries in Arctic waters, quickened the journeys of outbound United East India Company ships, hampered Baltic commerce, and altered how travelers moved within the borders of the Republic. Weather patterns that accompanied the Little Ice Age also affected how commerce was forcibly expanded and defended. The Anglo-Dutch Wars, fought from 1652 to 1674, were contested in a period of transition between decade-scale climatic regimes. In the first war, meteorological conditions that accompanied a warmer interval in the Little Ice Age granted critical advantages to English fleets, which were usually victorious. By contrast, in the latter wars, weather patterns that now reflected a cooling climate repeatedly helped Dutch fleets prevail over the English and later French armadas. Finally, climatic fluctuations affected mentalities within the Dutch Republic. Understandings of weather in the Republic may have demonstrated a vague awareness of climate change, and cultural responses to weather reflected the resilience of the Republic by expressing the conviction that weather could be confronted and endured. Ultimately, the influence of the Little Ice Age was ambiguous for the resilient society of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age.
Open Access
"You Are Your Own Alternative": Performance, Pleasure, and the American Counterculture, 1965-1975
(2015-01-26) Abraham, Mark; Stein, Marc Robert
“You Are Your Own Alternative” examines influential countercultural groups in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to historians who dismiss the politics of the counterculture and blame the counterculture for contributing to the collapse of social movement activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this dissertation highlights the intensely political and productive aspects of the counterculture. With case studies that focus on the Los Angeles Freaks, the San Francisco Diggers, the New York Yippies, and the lesbian feminists of Olivia Records, “You Are Your Own Alternative” demonstrates that the counterculture offered powerful political and performative challenges in this period. Countercultural activists valorized free expressions of sexuality; outlandishly adorned bodies; complex music; theatrical celebrations of community; and free access to collective resources like food, clothing, and health care. They staged participatory performance-based protests intended to seduce passersby into experiencing new paradigms of human interaction and expression. In joining in to act out, countercultural activists argued, new converts would discover, through performance and pleasure, their authentic selves. But while “You are Your Own Alternative” emphatically argues that each of the four countercultural groups it examines was radical, progressive, political, and thoughtful about the way it conceptualized the dominant order and the performance-based methods of activism that could be used to resist that order, it also critiques these countercultural groups for the limitations of their vision; for their problematic politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality; and for their failure to move beyond narrowly advocating for what I call “alternative norms,” which countercultural leaders suggested were simultaneously authentic and universal. The result is a set of arguments that casts new light on the counterculture and the changing nature of political protest and cultural resistance in the post-1960s era.
Open Access
At the Intersections of Nations, Diasporas, and Modernities: North American Finns in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
(2015-08-28) Efremkin, Evgeny; Perin, Roberto
In the early 1930s, approximately seven thousand North American Finns, many of whom were born in Canada and the United States, left for Soviet Karelia, an autonomous republic in north-western Russia, bordering on Finland. Through the case study of the Karelian fever (a term by which North American Finnish migration to Soviet Karelia is now known), this work analyzes processes of identity construction at individual, regional, and national levels. My argument is that transnational migrant labour became a means by which diasporic, regional, and national leaders defined and redefined the cultural and political borders of their imagined communities. Whereas the movement of people was physically and psychologically transnational, national and diasporic imaginaries on both sides of the Atlantic were engaged in a perpetual effort to include, and in other instances reject, the cultural, social, economic, and political memberships of these migrants in their communities. The study focuses on a specific community, but transcends geographical boundaries in a period of less than a decade and shows a vibrant, tumultuous historical process of identity formation, both structural and subjective. In addition to analytical frameworks of nation and diaspora, my work looks at immigrant lives in dissimilar and competing versions of modernity, western capitalism and Soviet socialism. Finns on the move across the Atlantic in the 1920s and the 1930s were transnational agents, who by virtue of their mobility infused elements of western modernization into the Soviet society. As a result, these Finnish migrants who moved across land and sea borders in search of a social, economic, and political haven, became embroiled in the process of modern nation-state construction, but also found themselves within a larger, global contest of alternative modernities, that is between competing notions of what the new subject of the modern nation-state should look like. What follows is a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of the way immigrants’ ethnic identities were forged, and contested in different social contexts and varying levels of scale. In other words, what were the ways by which social spaces such as diasporas (locally), nations (regionally), and modernities (globally) were culturally produced.
Open Access
The Purchase of the Past: The Elizabethan Past and the uses of History in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(2015-08-28) Slinger, Lee Stewart; Rogers, Nicholas C. T.
“The Purchase of the Past: The Elizabethan past and the uses of history in eighteenth-century Britain” examines the place of the late sixteenth-century Elizabethan and Shakespearean pasts in eighteenth-century popular culture and politics. Through an analysis of five moments, three times at which Elizabeth and the men of her era had particular purchase and twice when Shakespeare, as a historical person, was given particular cultural importance, “The Purchase of the Past” argues this period experienced a transformation in understandings of historical time and of history’s function in the present. These changes stemmed from the accumulation of a rationalized nationalist history, which popularized particular historical narratives, but, in so doing, marginalized alternative perspectives. These interpretations increasingly focused on the individual and on interior personal development, confining the Elizabethan past to an interesting cast of characters, limiting its ability to legitimize contemporary political issues and identities. Individuals participating in public discourses increasingly saw themselves as living in a modern moment whose origins lay in the age of Elizabeth. It was a modernity that celebrated a Protestant, commercial, imperial past, but was consequently deeply troubled about contemporary changes to the means of production and the emergence of new forms of social and political bonds. This understanding of the past meant that those who seriously harkened back to its ideas and priorities appeared to be illogical and out-of-step. This analysis of how one time period understood and used another in popular discourses and entertainments demonstrates how history has been an integral part of the modernizing, imperial, and nationalizing projects.
Open Access
Fecunditas, Sterilitas, and the Politics of Reproduction at Rome
(2015-08-28) Hug, Angela Grace; Edmondson, Jonathan
This dissertation is a cultural history of the role of human fertility – fecunditas – in Ancient Roman society c. 200 B.C. – A.D. 250. I ask how the Romans chose to understand human fertility, how they sought to preserve and encourage it, and how the absence of fertility affected their marriages, their families and their political careers. It is an investigation of the place of fertility in the Roman cultural consciousness. Using a wide range of sources – literary, epigraphic, papyrological, juridical, and numismatic – I argue that the Romans conceptualized fecunditas (fertility) not just as a generic female quality, but as one of the cardinal virtues that all married women were expected to embody. A woman’s fecunditas could be evaluated and judged according to how many children she bore, how often she became pregnant, and how many of her children survived into adulthood. Although fecunditas was constructed as a female responsibility, élite Roman men were able to take advantage of having a fertile wife. Official benefits, such as those accrued by law under the ius trium liberorum, the rights of three children, brought one level of honour. An élite man could also exploit the fecunditas of his wife to increase his own social capital. In return, women of proven fertility were thought to deserve conjugal loyalty from their husbands and ought not to be divorced. Infertility could lead to the dissolution of a marriage. Fecunditas was not a private matter, nor were the members of the imperial family, the domus Augusta, immune to its pressures. At all levels in Roman society there was a strong interest in the safeguarding of the fecunditas of Roman citizen women, for through them the strength of the Roman state was preserved. It is not wrong, I argue, to speak in terms of a sort of fecunditas project, an obsession with the numbers of Roman citizens and the importance of fertile women to bear more of them, which permeates Roman society from the beginning of the Republic into the third century A.D.
Open Access
Life Moving Forward: Soviet Karelia in the Letters & Memoirs of Finnish North Americans
(2015-08-28) Saramo, Samira Susanna; Perin, Roberto
In the first years of the 1930s, some 6500 Finnish Canadians and Finnish Americans moved to Soviet Karelia, motivated by the economic depression and the dream of participating in the building of a Finnish-led workers’ society, with employment, education, and healthcare for all. Their recruitment as “foreign specialists” who would modernize the Karelian economy secured for them preferential access to food, housing, and work postings, but life in Karelia was very different than what the immigrants had previously known. Despite difficulties and a heavy return migration, those who stayed threw themselves into the building of socialism. However, by 1936, the Stalinist regime viewed ethnic minorities and foreigners as threats to the Soviet order, and the Finnish leadership in Karelia was ousted and a violent attack on ethnic Finns and Finnish culture took over the region, shattering the dream of the ‘Red Finn Haven.’ This dissertation examines letters written by Finnish North Americans in Karelia to friends and family remaining in Canada and the United States, as well as memoirs and retrospective letter collections that look back on life in Karelia in the 1930s. These sources, brought together under the umbrella of life writing, are analysed in two ways. They are used to construct a history of the immigrants’ everyday life, with chapters exploring topics such as travel and first impressions, housing, food, health and hygiene, clothing, children’s experiences, formal labour, political participation, celebrations, popular culture, sociability, and repression. The study of everyday life is grounded in the broader context of the immigrants’ North American and Finnish backgrounds and the evolving realities and contestations of Karelian autonomy and life in the Soviet Union. Life writing also offers opportunities to analyze the ways that individuals represent their experiences, form group identifications, and have used narratives to work through the emotional aftermath of the Great Terror. An examination of how gender and life cycle impact both experiences and their representations lies at the core of this work. Narrative analysis allows this dissertation to engage with the growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship that considers the form and applications of letters and memoirs.
Open Access
Making the "New Lourinhã, a European Lourinhã": Democracy, Civic Engagement, and the Urban Development of Lourinhã, Portugal Since 1966
(2015-08-28) Costa, Raphael John; Shubert, Adrian
Since 1966, Lourinhã’s urban landscape has transformed as Portugal democratized. From a rural town with little infrastructure and few institutions in 1966, Lourinhã emerged by 2001 as an ostensibly modern European town. This work highlights key areas of economic and urban development and argues that Lourinhã’s political culture became more institutionalized leaving less room for, and withering expectation of, citizen participation in local development as Portugal transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. This dissertation examines Portugal’s transition from the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-1974) to European social democracy by focusing on Lourinhã’s – a town of 22,000 people, north of Lisbon – urbanization since 1966. Lourinhã’s urbanization involved, and indeed required, a shift in its institutional and political culture. In the 1960s and 1970s people were expected to participate in development at a cultural, political and financial level, acting as substitutes for non-existent state mechanisms of development. However, by the late 1980s, the momentum had shifted as regional, national, and European institutions participated in developmental programs, marking a dramatic change in how citizens engaged with the state and the Portuguese nation. From this shift has emerged a debate about the nature of Portugal’s transition to democracy. With the Carnation Revolution of 1974 – the military coup that toppled the Estado Novo – at the center of analysis, academics and pundits ask whether that event represented “evolution or revolution” for Portugal. Was Portugal on the path towards democracy before 1974? And, given contemporary problems, was the rapid shift to European social democracy the blessing it appeared to be by the 1990s? Did democratization disenfranchise the Portuguese in important ways? Are commentators like Jorge Silva Melo, a Lisbon playwright who began his career in the Estado Novo years, correct in asserting that, “under the dictatorship there was hope … that was in ‘72/’73. Nowadays [2011], its exactly the opposite: there is no hope”? This dissertation uses Lourinhã's development as an example of a Portuguese experience to argue that the Carnation Revolution, although a watershed in Portugal's politico-cultural evolution, should not be understood as the moment when democracy came to Portugal.
Open Access
Raising Christian Citizens for the Twentieth Century: Children, Religion, and Society in Protestant Ontario
(2015-08-28) Rooke, Angela; Bradbury, Bettina
This dissertation examines the Sunday school as an important site for understanding children’s lives in Canada’s past. It argues that examining children’s engagement with institutional religion in Ontario offers valuable insights into Canada’s religious history. When it came to dealing with children, Protestant churches sought to modernize their methods and they self-consciously broke with the past. Between the late 1880s and the early 1930s, Sunday Schools nurtured children’s peer cultures and drew on modern pedagogy by encouraging age-graded Sunday school classes and age-graded auxiliary organizations. Children were also meant to feel part of a wider, sometimes transnational, community. In their attempt to teach children how to navigate the modern world in appropriately Christian ways, Sunday school teachers also impressed on children their responsibility for bettering their homes, their communities, their nation and the world. In this way, this is also an examination of how Sunday Schools adopted, and adjusted to, the social gospel. Sunday school curricula focused on nurturing very young children’s Christian character and, as they grew older, teaching them how to live up to those character ideals as active, Christian citizens. Though it is difficult to gauge the success of these Protestant efforts in terms of what children believed, the importance of religion to Canada’s childhood history is evident in the sheer numbers of children who participated in Sunday School programmes, the large amounts of money children raised for missionary and other purposes, and the vast resources that churches devoted to the religious education of their young flocks.
Open Access
Belonging to Greece and the Soviet Union: Greeks of Tashkent, 1949-1974
(2015-08-28) Lampropoulos, Elaina Maria; Gekas, Athanasios
This thesis illustrates the narrative of the Greek political refugees of Tashkent and seeks to recognize their Greek and Soviet identity. By examining the public and private spaces of Greek political refugees in Soviet Tashkent between 1949-1974, the thesis identifies the beliefs, symbols and practices, which reveal the hybridity of Greek-Soviet identity. Research was based on oral histories and Greek-language newspapers published during the period as well as on memoirs of Greeks who lived in Tashkent. This will aid our understanding of the collective memory and homemaking narrative of the Greek experience in Soviet Tashkent. The collective narrative of Greeks of Tashkent was very positive and idealized. Greeks legitimized their settlement in Tashkent by defending Soviet ideology and contributing to and developing Soviet society. The homemaking narrative allowed Greeks to belong to the imagined Greek Soviet Community, the imagined Soviet community and the imagined Greek community.
Open Access
Masculinity, Medicine and Mechanization. The Construction of Occupational Health in Northern Ontario
(2015-08-28) Wilde, Terence Peter; McPherson, Kathryn M.
This dissertation examines workplace issues and events that shaped men’s health, and the healthcare services in support of them, in northern Ontario’s resource extraction industries. Between 1890 and 1925 there were important transformations in the hardrock mining sector including: technological innovations and refinements of the materials and devices used to extract ores; the healthcare mandated and legislatively prescribed but challenging to deliver to frontier workspaces; and how the complex interactions of the men, their work, their communities, wartime demands and collective bargaining combined to construct new definitions of masculinity. Using quantitative data from the Ontario Bureau of Mines on the numbers of annual accidents and fatalities, a clearer understanding emerges that reveals how workingmen’s bodies were understood over time. Together with newspaper accounts, the reports of coroners’ juries, personal papers, doctors’ memoirs and popular histories, the role of work and workplace conditions clarifies how health was managed or how it suffered as the exploitation of the provinces natural resources began in earnest. The impact of World War One caused a wholesale change in the scale and importance of the mines and the men that worked them. This was seen in their solidarity, strength and successful strike immediately after the war and in fewer accidents and fatalities. The pace of change however faded in the post-war era. The gains that were made were kept and men’s health and safety never again saw the alarming losses as those enumerated here.
Open Access
Of Outcasts and Ambassadors: The Making of Portuguese Diaspora in Postwar North America
(2015-08-28) Fernandes, Gilberto De Oliveira; Perin, Roberto
How can a small peripheral government with few material resources assert itself as a geopolitical player in an era of rising global governance and dwindling nation-state sovereignty? This was the question in the minds of Portuguese officials when developing their foreign policies in the aftermath of the Second World War and again after the Revolution of the Carnations of April 25, 1974. In their case the answer was similar in both contexts: tie Portuguese nationhood with imperial and diasporic imaginings, and develop a national diaspora with close ties with the homeland and its government. This study examines the social, cultural, religious, economic, and political processes by which Portugal's Estado Novo dictatorship laid the foundations for the diasporic discourse and institutions that followed the end of the colonial empire and the introduction of a new democratic political order after 1974. I will focus on the role played by homeland diplomats, ethnic entrepreneurs, Catholic missionaries, political activists and other transnational intermediaries in shaping a diasporic consciousness among the Portuguese communities of eastern Canada - Toronto and Montreal - and northeastern United States - New Bedford, Fall River, Boston, Providence, Newark, and other cities in New England and the Greater New York City area. This dissertation also engages with current discussions in the field of migration studies, especially those related with diaspora, transnationalism, and nation-state, as well as ethnicity, class, and race, and introduces an imperial and homeland dimension to our frame of analysis. The period examined (1950s-70s) covers the inauguration of Portuguese mass migration to Canada and its resurgence to the United States; the rise of large international governing bodies, rival Cold War superpowers and their spheres of influence; the Portuguese Colonial Wars in Africa and the downfall of settler colonialism; the emergence of cultural pluralism and identity politics in Canada and parts of the United States; the radicalization of the Portuguese "anti-fascist" opposition; and the revolutionary transition to democracy in Portugal. These larger processes framed the local, national, and transnational histories of Portuguese immigrants in North America and had significant impact in the development of their diasporic communities, consciousness, and identities.
Open Access
The Oldest Professions in Revolutionary Times: Madames, Pimps, and Prostitution in Mexico City, 1920 - 1952
(2015-08-28) Peralta, Pamela Jeniffer Fuentes; Rubenstein, Anne G.
This dissertation examines the impact of the end of state-regulated prostitution in Mexico City. It analyzes the results of debates on prostitution and the trafficking in women against the backdrop of revolutionary politics and the consolidation of state authority in Mexico in the interwar period. The League of Nations’ resolutions asking for the criminalization of intermediaries, brothels, and call houses prompted global debates and actions. In the capital city prostitutes resulted to be disempowered, madams prosecuted, while authorities and pimps turned more violent towards sex workers and extorted them more often. Through the lens of gender it is argued here that the transition of power from madames to pimps played a central role in the reconfiguration of commercial sex in modern Mexico City. The most important finding of this investigation is that over time, power shifted from women involved in Mexico City’s sex trade —madames and sex workers—to men —pimps, landlords, and cops. This doctoral research contributes to debates on prostitution and labor. It highlights several attempts made by women involved in the sex trade to gain recognition as workers and to be part of the new national project. Another aim of this work is to show the importance of sites of prostitution to the social life of the city, as well as to illuminate the relationship between modernity, urbanization, commercial sex, and different cultural expressions such as literature, cinema, and music. In order to show the complex dynamics of prostitution, this dissertation draws from a wide array of sources: images, film, court records, letters, legislation, memoirs, newspapers, and periodicals show the contested nature of the discourses that shaped legal, cultural, and social notions which ruled commercial sex during the first half of the twentieth century.
Open Access
He Thinks He's Down: White Appropriations of Black Masculinities in the Civil Rights Era, 1945-1979
(2015-08-28) Bausch, Katharine Lizabeth; Stein, Marc Robert
“He Thinks He’s Down” examines the ways in which a significant and influential collection of white artists and activists in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, seeking an alternative to hegemonic white middle-class masculinity, appropriated imaginary black masculinities into their lives and work. The dissertation demonstrates that during the civil rights era images of black men circulated widely in U.S. popular culture, in part because of the acceleration of the black freedom struggle. Media depictions of black men engaging in struggles for civil rights, integration, self-determination, and the end of white supremacy highlighted their rebelliousness, strength, freedom, and power. In this same moment, many white middle-class men felt anxious, disempowered, insecure, and disillusioned with norms of middle-class manhood, especially in the context of a growing white-collar economy, the nuclear arms race, suburbanization, and political corruption. These emotions were expressed in various popular culture forums, including literature, political movements, magazines and films. “He Thinks He’s Down” argues that one strategy adopted by white artists and activists to reinvigorate white middle-class masculinity was the appropriation of imaginary characteristics of black masculinity circulating in media, including rebelliousness, strength, freedom, and power. The four case studies examined here—Beat writers, Students for a Democratic Society activists, Playboy fashion editors, and Blaxploitation film directors—show that the artistic and political appropriations over the course of the period changed as the images of black men in the media varied, but that they nevertheless had similar consequences. Though often celebrating the strength of black masculinity, they ultimately reduced black manhood to a series of consumable images, perpetuated many racist stereotypes, silenced the role of black women and black femininities, and reinforced the structurally-based privileges that were denied to black men to either accept or reject hegemonic masculinity.
Open Access
Building Boys, Building Canada: The Boy Scout Movement in Canada, 1908-1970
(2015-08-28) Trepanier, James Daniel; Martel, Marcel
This dissertation examines Canada’s largest organization for boys of the twentieth century - the Boy Scouts. In Scouting for Boys [1908], Robert Baden Powell argued that Scouting provided a universal model for countries of the British Empire to develop the physical, mental and spiritual development of boys. The process of transplanting Baden-Powell’s movement to Canada led to the establishment of two separate organizations, divided along linguistic and religious lines. The movement also extended its reach to the Canadian North as missionaries and government officials adopted the movement in residential and day schools across the country. The Canadian Scout movement provides a compelling lens to understand how language, religion, race and class shaped the construction of Canadian boyhoods. This dissertation taps into the archival records of the Boy Scout movement, Canadian churches, state records, and private collections from the 1910s through to the 1960s to examine the motivations, objectives and tensions within the Scout movement’s network of institutional and cultural support. It argues that, as part of the frequent renewal of masculinities, Scouting and its supporters embraced the modern and the antimodern in order to shore up, revive, or reinvigorate masculinities that were deemed to be threatened. Perceptions of what boys needed were not always complementary and reflected broader religious, linguistic and racial assumptions and expectations about masculinity. The relationship between Scouting and Canadian churches, for instance, was fluid - reflecting a more complicated picture of religiosity in the postwar period than existing scholarship has considered. The relationship between French-Canadian and English-Canadian Scouting was also complex and symptomatic of larger shifting relationships between the French-Canadian diaspora, Quebec and English-speaking Canada. Northern nationalists, meanwhile, latched onto the Scout movement as a means of promoting particular “ideas of north” for southern boys and northern Aboriginal and Inuit boys. These different supporters were, however, tied together by a shared desire to mitigate the perceived “feminizing” effects of modern life through a “modernizing antimodernism.” Masculinity’s ties to political and social citizenship remained strong well into the 1960s as Scouting’s coalition of supporters sustained the belief that building better boys was the key to building a better Canada.
Open Access
Stone of Power: Dighton Rock, Colonization and the Erasure of an Indigenous Past
(2015-08-28) Hunter, Douglas William; Podruchny, Carolyn
This dissertation examines the historiography of Dighton Rock, one of the most contested artifacts of American antiquity. Since first being described in 1680, the forty-ton boulder on the east bank of the Taunton River in Massachusetts has been the subject of endless speculation over who created its markings or “inscription.” Interpretations have included Vikings, Phoenicians and visitors from Atlantis. In its latest incarnation the rock is celebrated in a dedicated state park museum as an artifact of a lost Portuguese explorer, Miguel Corte-Real. I accept the Indigenaiety of its essential markings, which has never been seriously contested, and show how antiquarians and scholars into the twentieth century pursued an eccentric range of Old World attributions. I contend that the misattribution of Dighton Rock (and other Indigenous petroglyphs, as well as the so-called Mound Builder materials) has been part of the larger Euro-American/Anglo-American colonization project and its centuries-long conceptualization of Indigenous peoples. As with colonization itself, the rock’s historiography is best understood through the criteria of belonging, possession and dispossession. The rock’s historiography not only reflects that colonization project and its shifting priorities over time, but its interpretation has also played a significant role in defining and advancing it. By disenfranchising Indigenous peoples from their own past in the interpretations of Dighton Rock and other seeming archaeological puzzles, colonizers have sought to answer to their own advantage two fundamental questions: to whom does America belong, and who belongs in America?