Matching Items (2)
Filtering by
- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
This thesis in partial fulfillment of my degree from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University delves into the career and viewpoints of Elizabeth Banks, a nineteenth-century American journalist who traveled to London in the 1890s to write about differences between American and British culture and lifestyles. Her three books include Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London (1894), The Autobiography of a "Newspaper Girl" (1902), and The Remaking of an American (1928). Banks asked that all of her personal documents be destroyed after her death, so these published books serve as the only remnant of her transatlantic life. With that in mind, I approached the documents with the idea that Banks chose what to include, what to exclude, and how to present her persona as opposed to giving a complete, unbiased picture. Banks used these books to formulate a public identity that served her purposes, which makes sense considering she needed the approval of her readership in order to subsist financially. The contradictions among the three works, and even within each individual work, allowed Banks to appear nonthreatening to the status quo, but still interesting enough to deserve attention. While the context of her environment experienced changes, so did her public "performance." She altered her image in conjunction with what she identified as important to her readers. I rely on a careful reading of her three published books, contextualized with secondary sources to understand how Elizabeth Banks constructed a public identity during a time characterized by social shifts, especially due to the rise of the women's movement, an interest in access to rights previously reserved for men, and reevaluation of the relationship between the social classes. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach that utilizes concepts from women and gender studies to better analyze Banks and her lived experiences. While other research on Elizabeth Banks reaches the same conclusions I do, and while other historians have identified Banks's public character as complex and contradictory, this work focuses specifically on how these contradictions operated. By placing portions of her works directly alongside one another, and by analyzing exactly how she incorporated differing ideologies into her pieces, her public identity can be more fully understood as multifaceted and existing in relation to society's changing demands. Also, this thesis considers the importance of the social constructs of class and gender to Banks's identity. The first chapter focuses on gender and her experience as a woman journalist. The second chapter deals with class politics as they impacted her work. Even though I address these social identities in separate chapters, I approached Banks with intersectionality in mind, as Banks's experience of gender is related to class, and vice versa. Elizabeth Banks crafted her public identity in conjunction to public opinion. She knew that she required the approval of her readers. By policing boundaries created by gender and class, she appears as an outsider looking in. She blurs the lines between masculine and feminine and middle class and working class. She does not firmly set herself in any one group, which allowed her to expand her appeal. This analysis of Banks illuminates how a woman could effectively navigate the public arena in nineteenth-century England.
ContributorsColes, Alexandra Patricia (Author) / Fuchs, Rachel (Thesis director) / Hopkins, Richard (Committee member) / Switzer, Heather (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Despite the reactionary Habsburg regime under Emperor Franz Joseph, forces within the government and leading intelligentsia proposed various reforms to solve the issue of ethnic discrimination across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, attempting to resolve the tensions that the Ausgleich of 1867 had further aggravated by the inclusion of Hungarians as a privileged class to the detriment of the remaining minorities. This paper will look at the Austro-Marxist and Federalist reformers and the ways in which their concepts, if implemented, could have saved the Empire from its downfall in 1918. Ultimately, neither the Austro-Marxist concept of a centralized system of universal rights across the borders of all nations within the existing empire nor the Federalist idea of a national territorial sovereignty allowing for a certain degree of individual autonomy managed to be adopted by the Allied victors of World War I. The myopic focus of the ‘Big Four’ on the German Empire blinded them to the intricate economic and political balance needed for peace in the Balkans. While France, Britain, and Italy exhibited a general lack of concern to the outcome in the Balkans, Wilson’s ‘self-determination’ doctrine is most responsible for creating the unsustainable, irredentist-driven states that the reform-minded intellectuals—Austro-Marxist or Federalist—most had sought to avoid. In addition to a discussion of the reform movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this paper will explore the reforms’ strong similarities to the present struggles within the European Union, particularly the divide between Euro-federalists and Euro-sceptics. The crisis situation and reform efforts of the Austrian Empire from 1867 to 1914 reveal significant policy lessons applicable to the European Union as it navigates the current crossroads between further federal integration or a return to medieval disintegration.
ContributorsAppel, Michael Edwin (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Carrese, Paul (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor, Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor) / School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05