Browsing by Author "Thorne, Susan"

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15

Open Access
A Caribbean Coupling Beyond Black and White: The Interracial Marriage of Catherine and Edward Marcus Despard and its Implications for British Views on Race, Class, and Gender during the Age of Reform
(2014) Gillis, Bernadette M
*Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15
British Army colonel, Edward Marcus Despard, and Catherine Despard, a woman from the Caribbean and most likely of African descent, were married some time during the late eighteenth century. Their marriage was quite unusual for its time, yet their union appears to have been successful and went unchallenged by the government and many individuals they encountered. This project explores the social and political environment that made their unlikely union possible and demonstrates how their interracial marriage serves as a marker of the more fluid and tolerant character of racial attitudes in the Age of Reform. An examination of the Despards’ political activity in London also offers insight into multiple social and political issues affecting Great Britain and its colonies during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, including race, class, gender, freedom, and human rights.
Open Access
Against the Grain: Reclaiming the Life I Left Behind
(2015-06-12) Brill, Margaret
* Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*
Against the Grain revisits a period of my life long neglected: the 20 years between my graduation from London University with a BA in African history in 1964 and my professional reinvention as an academic librarian. In keeping with second wave feminism's emphasis on professional life, I had dismissed this period of my life as subservient to "patriarchy": I was the dependent wife of a Foreign Service officer. At this point in my personal and professional history I have come to recognize this was anything but a prelude to a more real existence. With the benefit of historically informed insights, I recognize that I lived for extended periods in hotspots throughout Africa and beyond in the nineteen sixties and seventies, at moments of world historical significance: Ghana, Burundi, South Africa, Bulgaria, and Zaire. Moreover, because of my relative independence I was able to develop relationships that continue to shape my understanding of this complex period in US foreign policy. In classic feminist fashion, the personal and the political were inextricable. Somewhat more against the feminist grain are the rich experiences and examined life of an adventurous, independent woman in a traditional marriage. I eventually regained my independence; when I remarried and moved to North Carolina in 1984, I put those years behind me. Viewing that part of my life in historical context has revealed that, even without a career, I led a full and rich life that has helped to shape my identity today.
Open Access
Babel On the Hudson: Community Formation in Dutch Manhattan
(2007-05-10T14:54:50Z) Sivertsen, Karen
This dissertation focuses on New Amsterdam, the small port town at the tip of Manhattan Island that became the capital for the Dutch colony of New Netherland. It addresses two of the most entrenched stereotypes regarding New Netherland. One is the popular notion that religion never played an important role in New Netherland, since the colony was built upon commerce and economic considerations. The other is that community life and consciousness was stymied in Manhattan until New Netherland became an English colony. At the root of both stereotypes is the accepted perception that an intense and selfish drive for wealth, financial remuneration and self-advancement was the modus vivendi of New Netherland's settlers and colonial officials. Consequently, they neither gave much thought to religion nor took time to foster a shared sense of community. The central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Dutch Manhattan did develop a dynamic community life. It resulted from the difficulties encountered by both Europeans and Africans in trying to reconstruct in the New World aspects of societies they had left behind, and from the interactions of members of the Atlantic's three racial groups in Dutch Manhattan. The other important aim is to demonstrate the role religion played in the community and in community formation by discussing how religion was utilized to determine one's fitness for community membership and as a tool of colonization. Religion played a key role in the formation of alliances both within and outside the colony, and groups created spaces within the society for individuals to maintain and nurture practices that were not sanctioned by the larger community. This dissertation demonstrates that while the colony had its genesis as a trading venture, religiously infused ideas were at play during the early contact period prior to settlement. Furthermore, once the decision for permanent settlement was made, religion and religious considerations played a prominent role in the internal contestations for control and figured prominently in the process of community formation. Aside from religion, this dissertation also explores the role of trade, contestations for control both within and outside the colony, and war in shaping and redefining the contours of community in Dutch Manhattan.
Open Access
Charlotte’s Integration Era: The Life and Death of Court-Mandated Busing, 1971-1999
(2018-04-14) Pierpoint, James
In 1971, Charlotte, North Carolina confronted the problem of desegregating its education system, becoming a pioneer among the de-facto segregated Southern cities of that time. It did so through the creation of a groundbreaking busing program, per the order of Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education. However, economic growth shortly followed and with this growth came demographic change that profoundly entrenched the residential segregation of Charlotte. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a movement grew in the newly developed uppermiddle class communities of South Charlotte; a movement that advocated for a shift back to neighborhood schools. This grassroots effort was the driving force behind a lawsuit known as Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, filed in 1997, which challenged the Charlotte Mecklenburg School Board on its practice of using race in pupil assignment for its new magnet school program. This thesis will investigate all aspects of this case, exploring the ways in which the jurisprudence of its verdict played a fundamental role in the resegregation of Charlotte’s public school system. To do so, it proceeds by detailing the business history of Charlotte from 1971 onward as it relates to Charlotte’s demographics. It then analyzes the actions of both the School Board and the neighborhood schools movement as they became opposing forces in the 1990s. Finally, it interprets the proceedings of the U.S District Court and Fourth Circuit U.S Appellate Court in hearing the case.
Open Access
Compiling Inequalities: Computerization in the British Civil Service and Nationalized Industries, 1940-1979
(2009) Hicks, Marie
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Great Britain's computing industry led the world in the development and application of computers for business and administrative work. The British government and civil service, paragons of meritocracy in a country stratified by class, committed themselves to implementing computerized data processing techniques throughout the sprawling public sector, in order to modernize their economy, maintain the competitiveness of British high-technology industries, and reconsolidate the nation's strength and reputation worldwide. To succeed in this project, the British government would need to leverage the country's existing expertise, cultivate the heterogeneous field of computing manufacturers, and significantly re-train labor.
By the 1970s, Britain's early lead in the field of computing had evaporated, government computing projects had produced disappointing results, and the nation's status as a world power had declined precipitously. This dissertation seeks to explain why British computing achieved so few of its intended results by looking at the intractable labor problems within the public sector during the heyday of the Britain's proclaimed "technological revolution." The dissertation argues that the interpretation of, and solutions for, these labor problems produced disastrous effects.
Sources used include government documents, civil service records, records of the nationalized industries (the Post Office, National Health Service, Central Electricity Generating Board, Coal Industry, Railways, and others), computing industry records, press accounts, and oral interviews. By using methodologies from the history of technology, institutional history, and labor history, as well as gender analysis, this dissertation shows that despite the government's commitment to both high technology usage and labor meritocracy, competing claims of technological expertise and management tradition led the government to misjudge the role of computing within the public sector and the nation.
Beginning with a labor situation in which women did the majority of computing work, and seeking to achieve a situation in which young men and management-level technocrats tightly controlled all digital computing, the British government over-centralized its own computing endeavors, and the nation's computing industry, leading to a dangerous winnowing of skill and expertise within the already-small field. The eventual takeover of the British computing market by IBM, and purchase of the last viable British computing company by Fujitsu, marked the end of any hope for Britain's computing dominance in either their home market or the global market.
While multiple factors contributed to the failures of government computing and the British computing industry--including, but not limited to, American competition, inability to effectively create a global market for British machines, and misjudging the public sector's computing needs--this dissertation argues that labor problems, arising largely from gendered concerns about technological change and power, constituted a critical, and unrecognized, stumbling block for Britain's government-led computing revolution.
Open Access
Every Three Hours
(2020-12-14) Shaw, Janet
Every Three Hours is a memoir about raising my son Patrick who has two rare medical conditions--Glycogen Storage Disease 1a (GSD1a) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). As I analyze the events in Patrick’s life when my spouse and I educated and nurtured him, it raises the central question for my research: how can parents of chronically ill children foster safety and independence for their children? This master’s project is multi-disciplinary in that it incorporates primary and secondary data as well as creative writing. Using first-person narrative, I explore how my husband and I navigated the uncharted medical and parenting challenges of GSD1a and MCAS. Secondly, woven into this primary research is data exploring the medical and psychological aspects of GSD and MCAS. Additional insights come from memoirs of parents who have walked down a similar road. As I chronicled Patrick’s life, I realized that this project has become not only a story of raising an ill child to become independent. This memoir has become an awareness of life choices I had to make once I had a compromised child. This memoir is also about my false sense of control as a young adult and the loss of that control. Additionally, this account acknowledges that almost all parents love their chronically ill children and only want the best for them. The reality of raising an ill child is that it takes health insurance and money—not moral superiority.
Open Access
From Sunningdale to Good Friday: The Challenge of the Relationship Between Politics and Paramilitaries for Achieving Peace in Northern Ireland During The Troubles
(2018-03-27) McKaughan, Cynthia Rudd
The British government made three official attempts to end the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as The Troubles: the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Drawing on media coverage and the actual text of each agreement, as well as the considerable body of scholarly research on each individual process, this project identifies the issues confronting the British government in all three instances: which organizations in Northern Ireland to include at the negotiating table, what role the British government would play in Northern Ireland in the treaty’s aftermath, what security measures to take to stop the violence while ensuring human rights, how to address the political challenges posed by paramilitary organizations, and whether or not to include other nations in negotiating the peace, as well as in Northern Ireland’s affairs once the Troubles ended. The Good Friday Agreement succeeded where its predecessors failed primarily because of the decision to include representatives of paramilitary groups despite their history of complicity in violence. All sides finally agreed to participate in a political power-sharing arrangement that militants on both sides long viewed as a betrayal to the cause for which they willingly killed and died. The Good Friday Agreement’s utilization of the Republic of Ireland and international authorities strengthened the commitment to new political structures. Finally, the British removal of Direct Rule and military occupation, as well as reforms to Northern Ireland’s policing and justice, signaled the end of The Troubles. This project concludes by discussing recent events since the end of The Troubles that potentially affect the maintenance of peace in Northern Ireland.
Open Access
Gendering the Conservative Party’s Rise From The Ashes, 1945-51
(2022-04-20) Thurston, Hannah
The Conservative Party’s shock defeat to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party at the 1945 British General Election cast the party into a period of profound crisis. For the first time in its history, the Labour Party succeeded in securing an outright majority in the House of Commons. Their victory was carried by the collective sentiment of the People’s War which was forged under the hardship of the Home Front, and spurred by Labour’s promise of a brighter future. However, despite this early postwar momentum, just 6 years later, the Conservative Party and Winston Churchill had been restored to government, thus appearing to halt Attlee’s Socialist experiment. How the Conservative Party completed this remarkable electoral recovery is the subject of this thesis. During the party’s postmortem after defeat in 1945, it discovered that while a majority of women had supported the Labour Party, women were far more likely to vote Conservative than men. Thus, it appeared that women held the key to the revival of their electoral fortunes and given the party’s long history of women’s mobilization, it was women to whom they turned. What emerged was a distinct Conservative feminism that on one hand, recognized the changes to women’s roles in the aftermath of war and on the other, spoke to their longing for the security and stability of a quiet family life. This new conservatism mobilized women in their political and professional capacities, whilst at the same time continued to embrace the ideological comforts of tradition and family life. The emergence of a 12-point gender gap favoring the Conservative Party at the 1951 General Election is testament to the success of this campaign.
Open Access
Histories and Historiographies of Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century England
(2016-05-28) Chernova, Ekaterina
This thesis explores the history of juvenile delinquency in England during the decades bracketing the nineteenth century’s turn and how modern historians have analyzed this period. The purported birth of juvenile delinquency during this tumultuous period is widely attributed by both historians and Victorians to the explosive growth in England’s urban population. Contemporary statistics of criminal prosecutions confirmed emergent literary tropes that viewed childhoods spent on city streets as inevitably corrupting. Public policy and private charity for more than a century thereafter would recommend removal from the city’s corrupting cultural influences to a highly romanticized vision of rural space as healing innocence. This thesis challenges the juxtaposition of country and city on which such explanations of juvenile delinquency rest. Utilizing the neglected testimony of magistrates, constables, rural residents, and juvenile criminals themselves, it will demonstrate that rural England also suffered from increasing juvenile crime in this period. It will illuminate the complex social, economic, and political dynamics responsible for the oft-cited statistical gap between rural and urban arrest rates, showing that the latter were in neither case transparent measures of criminal activity. Crime was on the rise in English rural counties as transformed by industrial capitalism as were England’s booming cities, suggesting that historians who continue to emphasize the dichotomy between the city and the country have not only recycled a Victorian narrative but also limited their own understandings of the time.
Open Access
How Cities Became Kindling: Racism and the Decline of Two Once-Great American Metropolises, Detroit and Baltimore
(2016-05-04) Ruble, Laura
*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
Baltimore, Maryland, and Detroit, Michigan, were once sparkling examples of postwar American progress. In the early 20th century, their thriving manufacturing industries and lively cultural scenes brought wealth and acclaim, attracting a steady influx of immigrants and southern Americans searching for a share of their offerings. Like other metropolises across the American Rust Belt, however, the cities have since suffered the effects of postwar deindustrialization. Unemployment and poverty trouble urban centers that once burgeoned during those pre-WWII swells. While the roots of their urban crises are complex, decline in both Detroit and Baltimore demonstrates the powerful impact of racist practices and policies that American cities developed and implemented long before the flight of industry. In this research I explore the role that racism—in both its informal, personal manifestation and its formal, systemic manifestation—had in the decline of both cities. Prewar records including court cases, government ordinances and informal documents demonstrate that Detroit and Baltimore pioneered groundbreaking discriminatory policies and procedures in response to their growing African-American populations in the early 20th century. African Americans were systematically excluded from all but the lowest-level employment positions, resulting in low wages, high unemployment, low work satisfaction and low safety. This discrimination created a grave disparity in wealth between white and black communities within the cities. Concurrent housing discrimination, which controlled the physical residency of black families and their access to wealth investment options via homeownership, further separated the status of racial groups in Detroit and Baltimore. When deindustrialization after the Second World War depleted urban centers of jobs and revenue, white residents of means were able to relocate. This flight of capital from Detroit and Baltimore cities served to concentrate African-American populations—with few resources at their disposal—into census tracts that became plagued with poverty, crime and a lack of opportunity. Detroit and Baltimore city residents—mostly African-American—have experienced continued employment, housing and environmental discrimination since, further damaging their capability to restore the cities themselves. By instituting racist practices in the decades prior to deindustrialization, both cities—in effect—crippled themselves to deal with its consequences.
Open Access
Mighty England Do Good: Culture, Faith, Empire, and World in the Foreign Missions of the Church of England, 1850-1915.
(JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES, 2016-01) Thorne, Susan
Open Access
Multicultural Cold War: Liberal Anti-Totalitarianism and National Identity in the United States and Canada, 1935-1971
(2007-05-03T18:53:45Z) Smolynec, Gregory
In Cold War North America, liberal intellectuals constructed the Canadian and American national identities in contrast to totalitarianism. Theorists of totalitarianism described Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as monolithic societies marked by absolutism and intolerance toward societal differences. In response, many intellectuals imagined Canada and the United States as pluralistic nations that valued diversity. The ways in which Canadians and Americans imagined their respective national identities also varied with epistemological trends that were based on the ideas of totalitarianism and its correlate, anti-totalitarianism. These trends emphasized particularity and diversity. Using archival sources, interviews with policy-makers, and analysis of key texts, Multicultural Cold War outlines the history of theories of totalitarianism, related trends in epistemology, the genealogy of the social sciences, and the works of Canadian and American proponents of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. It centers attention on Canada and the United States where the unreflective ideology of anti-totalitarianism was widespread and the postwar enthusiasm for ethnicity and cultural pluralism became especially pronounced. In the U.S.A. this enthusiasm found expression among public intellectuals who defined cultural pluralism in their scholarship and social criticism. In Canada, discourses of multiculturalism originated in the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the political thought of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. This dissertation shows that enthusiasm for sub-national group particularity, pluralism, and diversity was a transnational North American trend.
Open Access
Singularity, Solidarity, and Gender France 1945-1997
(2022-03) Wharton, Elisabeth
This paper examines how French Philosopher Mona Ozouf’s theory of French Singularity answers for the state of French feminism at the end of the 20th century. It also examines the historical and moral gaps in this theory and offers social solidarity as an alternative lens through which to understand the theory. Chapter One provides a historical explanation of Ozouf’s response to American feminists’ critique of the French women’s movement. Ozouf attributes the French women’s movement’s relative quiescence after 1945 to the fact that French women benefited from a legacy of female power that existed during the Ancien Régime as well as France’s legacy of social (sexual) mixing. After the French Revolution, Ozouf points to educational privileges (thanks to Rousseau) advanced in service of Republican motherhood that French women enjoyed, making French women’s experience of womanhood superior to that of women in the rest of Europe or the United States. Chapters Two and Three survey Claire Duchen’s historical challenge to Ozouf’s singular representation of the women’s movement in postwar France. This includes longstanding campaigns for legislative removal of laws limiting women’s marital and reproductive rights that laid the groundwork for reforms in the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapter Two also examines internal conflicts between Lacanian Psychanalyse et Politique and the rest of the French second wave women’s movement. Chapter Four proposes an interpretation of French Singularity through Sally Scholz’s theoretical framework of solidarity and demonstrates how French Singularity, once detached from its problematic underpinnings and understood through the lens of social solidarity, stands as a useful historical explanation of French gender relations in the 1990s.
Open Access
Swept into the Abyss: A Family History of Cornish Methodism, Missionary Networks and the British Empire, 1789-1885
(2012) Penner, Robert
On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures.
The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.
Open Access
The Reframing of Black America: The Portrayal of African Americans in American Television Crime Dramas
(2017-04-24) Omoni, Femi
Crime dramas are one of the most popular genres in film and television history. For over 100 years, American audiences have watched depictions of the conflicts that occur between cops and bad guys, and sometimes between cops and cops, or bad guys and bad guys. In the early days of film, the most common role of police officers was that of the bumbling fool who was there to serve as a laughingstock for the audience, and to serve as both a set-up and a punchline for the protagonist. But what happened when people were asked to take onscreen police officers more seriously? And what happens when lines between worlds fictionalized and real begin to blur? This research explores the evolution of the police drama from the series that invented the genre in the 1950s to the one that deconstructed and revolutionized it in the 21st century, and it particularly looks at the roles that race and racism played in the changing nature of this genre. It examines how African Americans are represented in crime dramas and looks at the way that these television shows replicate or challenge stereotypes that suffuse American media and popular culture. Sometimes the shows acted as a mirror to reflect the broad national view. At others, they were intended to serve as a gadfly to instigate change.

Browsing by Author "Thorne, Susan"

Results Per Page

Sort Options