Browsing by Subject "Socialism"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access Building a Better World: Youth, Radicalism, and the Politics of Space in New York City, 1945-1965(2012) Teal, OrionAccording to conventional wisdom, the period of intense antiradicalism that followed World War II effectively drove all radical activity underground by the early 1950s, severing the intergenerational connection between the "Old Left" of the Great Depression era and the "New Left" of the 1960s. Building a Better World revises this narrative by examining how radical activists in New York City carved out space for young people's participation in leftwing political culture between 1945 and 1965. Contrary to most studies of the postwar Red Scare that focus on the Left's decline, this study tells a story of survival. Despite concerted efforts by social critics and governmental officials to curtail radicals' political influence among the young, radicals maintained a surprisingly robust radical social world centered in summer camps, private schools, youth groups, cultural organizations, union halls, and homes throughout New York City and its environs. In these spaces, youth continued to absorb a radical worldview that celebrated the labor movement, decolonization struggles, and African Americans' quest for freedom, while forwarding a biting critique of American capitalism. This process of intergenerational transmission would not have been possible without access to social space and an ever-evolving interpretation of radical values responsive to changes in political culture and demographics. Building a Better World relies on extensive archival research, print material, visual sources, and original oral histories to document this hidden history. In so doing, the dissertation significantly revises our understanding of the American Left, the history of American childhood, spatial change in New York City, and the evolution of political, ethnic, and racial identities in modern American history.
Item Open Access Disappearing Socialism: Volker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte.(Monatshefte: fuer deutschsprachige literatur und kultur, 2010) Norberg, JItem Open Access Playing the State: Imagining Youth in Cuban Baseball(2021) Daley, ChristopherMy research lies at the intersections of youth and their imaginaries in late socialist Cuba. Through ethnographic and historical research, I explore how Cuban teenagers and young adults make sense of their place in a changing world. My dissertation asks, what does the experience of young baseball players tells us about the way that socialism works and how it is experienced in Cuba today? I argue that baseball in Cuba reflects the distinctive trajectory of this island nation that remains one of the world’s last socialist states. I detail how the amateur athlete can be seen as an on-going experiment in the state’s attempt to create new subjectivities, which are channeled through an equally new system of ethical values based on sacrifice, care, and anti-colonial nationalism. But while players are seen to embody socialist values, I argue that baseball creates a range of meanings and possibilities for players that exceeds the State’s ability to direct or control.
Item Open Access The Last Shall Be First: The Genealogy of Russian Historical Exceptionalism and the Road to Revolution, 1830-1917(2023-04-22) Duan, PatrickThe legitimacy of Russia’s October Revolution of 1917 is widely debated due to its divergences from a western-centric Marxist view of historical progression. In particular, socialism was hastily declared amid underdeveloped economic conditions while being executed via authoritarian means. Scholars have long sought to either critique or justify such conspicuous departures from Marxist Orthodoxy and Occidental normativity. This thesis looks past the Marxist and western-centric parameters of discussion to instead investigate the indigenous intellectual traditions which prefigured, influenced, and shaped these peculiar characteristics of the Russian Revolution. Contrary to the dominant view that the Russian revolutionary tradition was essentially unilaterally defined by a ‘Westernizing’ worldview, this thesis discloses alternative roots of revolution in an anti-western philosophy that diametrically opposed the former ethos. To draw this connection across eight decades, this study uncovers ideological continuities across multiple movements, otherwise thought to be mutually-hostile, ultimately identifying and organizing a novel genealogy of ideas. This investigation finds that the non-western ‘aberrations’ of the Russian Revolution were rather a logical continuation of an intellectual heritage which precisely sought to bulk Western precedents for a historically-exceptional road of the nation’s own.