History
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/10211.4_37
2024-03-29T12:18:23ZPower and anxiety in Kett's Rebellion, 1549: the role of drama, masculinity, and festivals in shaping resistance to socio-economic change
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/213465
Power and anxiety in Kett's Rebellion, 1549: the role of drama, masculinity, and festivals in shaping resistance to socio-economic change
Paintner, Chris
Cultural historians have firmly established a link between popular culture and subversive challenges to elites by broader elements of society utilizing festivals, religious traditions, and entertainment as discursive tools in the late medieval and early modern periods. However, this framework has not yet been systematically applied to many of the specific uprisings and rebellions that occurred from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Scholarship studying these events primarily interpret them through economic and social lenses, focusing on the direct causes for rebellions, such as enclosure or religious changes. These interpretations provide valuable insight into the conditions inciting widespread unrest, but they assume an external consistency, seriousness, and rationality as the primary factors guiding resistance among large swaths of the population.
Instead, this study seeks to focus on the internally consistent logic guiding the construction of gendered and political identities in the context of popular forms of entertainment. Urban and rural individuals alike participated in festivals, watched performances, and feasted to celebrate fantastical events, idealized lives of saints, and other events with a tenuous connection to reality. This is apparent in the actions of the individuals participating in Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 East Anglia, who interpreted the problems of enclosure and economic changes and responded to those challenges through this discourse. Examining the rebellion in this context provides valuable insight into the construction of mentalités in sixteenth-century East Anglia and provides an explanation for the apparent inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions in the rebels' behavior during the summer of 1549.
2019-09-26T00:00:00ZSugarpush: a history of West Coast Swing, race, and gender
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/213382
Sugarpush: a history of West Coast Swing, race, and gender
Lavin, Kellie Marie Swier
West Coast Swing’s history began around the mid-twentieth century, with roots in Lindy Hop. Despite its fascinating history and its formal status as California’s state dance, however, no academic history of this dance and its community yet exists. This project seeks to remedy this, exploring West Coast Swing’s predecessors and its history from mid-twentieth century until early 2019. The author employs extensive primary source documents, including more than twenty interviews, to illuminate this topic. The resulting thesis highlights major themes such as community organization and leadership, expansion and globalization, musical trends and their impacts, and the role of technology. It also provides in-depth analysis of issues of race and gender in the history of West Coast Swing. With regards to gender, it finds that West Coast Swing’s community has, in some cases, experienced more egalitarian sex representation in its leadership but, at other times, has largely followed American trends. Additionally, this thesis examines recent changes in West Coast Swing’s gender dynamics by tracking changes to the gendered lead and follow roles. It finds that the West Coast Swing community embraces dance roles that more closely match modern relationships than do those found in ballroom dance. Ultimately, the author argues that the history of West Coast Swing offers insights into broader Californian and American history.
2019-09-18T00:00:00ZThe impacts of the state and federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Acts in conservation efforts on California's Trinity River
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/211201
The impacts of the state and federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Acts in conservation efforts on California's Trinity River
Muraki, Michael I.
River conservationists often proclaim the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and its state counterpart, the California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, to be the most effective river-specific pieces of conservation legislation in the United States. The Trinity River, situated in northern California, was designated as “wild and scenic” under the state act in 1972 and the federal act in 1981. This study recounts the narrative of the Trinity River’s relationship with the state and federal Wild and Scenic Rivers acts with the goal of evaluating the impacts of both laws on the river and its struggling salmon and steelhead populations. While its inclusion in the state and federal wild rivers systems was symbolically important as the codification of intensifying public and institutional concern for the health and aesthetics of river ecosystems, this study finds that the acts had only modest practical impacts on conservation efforts along the Trinity River.
Although the laws provided the river with its only formal protections from additional dams and reservoirs, a myriad of other factors suggest that it was highly unlikely that the numerous proposed water impoundment facilities would have been built, regardless of the Trinity’s wild and scenic designations. Because of public and institutional concern for the river’s anadromous fishery, most managing agencies were already taking precautions to prevent harming the river’s ability to support natural fish populations. Most importantly, neither acts contained the language to require the restriction of water diversions by the Trinity River Division of the Central Valley Project.
2019-06-26T00:00:00ZCiting divine and human laws: women of African descent and the New Orleans Cabildo, 1769-1800
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/211074
Citing divine and human laws: women of African descent and the New Orleans Cabildo, 1769-1800
Adame, Jeanette
This thesis explores how free and enslaved women of African descent utilized the New Orleans courts from 1769 to 1800, and how their actions affected the formation of the city’s social order. While some scholars have engaged a few of these women’s court cases in their works, I explore these cases as a collective body. In doing so, I argue that these women’s activities and the reactions that they elicited from the city’s elite population, all had a part in the development of New Orleans society. This thesis first provides contextual information regarding the Spanish institution of the New Orleans Cabildo courts, and then explores the major court cases that African and Afro - Creole women were involved in, including litigations in which enslaved women legally freed themselves, free women acquired or protected their property, and other civil and criminal cases. As these women gained power over their own lives and influence in New Orleans society, their appearances in the courts increasingly concerned the elite men who served as the Cabildo. These elite men in power then responded by attempting to limit the socio - economic activities of enslaved and free Afro - Louisianan women in formal litigations and official legislations. Some of their efforts were more successful than others. Regardless, women of African ancestry continuously struggled against the Cabildo’s oppression against them. As these women strove to attain power and influence over their own lives and social standing, the elites continued to try and keep them in positions of relative powerlessness. This resulted in a multi - faceted process of action and reaction that assisted the formation of the New Orleans social order, and it was the activities of both free and enslaved women of African descent that remained intrinsic to its creation.
2019-06-19T00:00:00Z