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- All Subjects: history
- Creators: Manchester, Laurie
- Creators: Szuter, Christine
Description
The Victorian era was the age of museum development in the United States. In the wake of these institutions, another important figure of the nineteenth century emerged--the flâneur. The flâneur represents the city, and provided new mechanisms of seeing to the public. The flâneur taught citizens how to gaze with a panoptic eye. The increasing importance of cultural institutions contributed to a new means of presenting power and interacting with the viewing public. Tony Bennett's exhibitionary complex theory, argues that nineteenth-century museums were institutions of power that educated, civilized, and through surveillance, encourage self-regulation of crowds. The flâneur's presence in the nineteenth century informed the public about modes of seeing and self-regulation--which in turn helped establish Bennett's theory inside the museum. The popular writing and literature of the time provides an opportunity to examine the extent of the exhibitionary complex and the flâneur. One of the most prominent nineteenth-century authors, Henry James, not only utilizes museums in his work, but he often uses them in just the manner Bennett puts forth in his theory. This is significant because the ideas about museums in James's work shaped the minds of an expanding literary public in the United States, and further educated, civilized, and regulated readers. James also represents the flâneur in his writing, which speaks to broader cultural implications of the both exhibitionary complex on the outside world, and the effects of broader cultural influences on the museum. Beyond the impact of James's work, in the late nineteenth century American culture increasingly became centered around the printed word. The central position of books in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century allowed books and libraries to appropriate the exhibitionary complex and become tools of power in their own right. The book and the library relate to the museum as part of a larger cultural environment, which emerged as a result of modernity and a response to the ever-changing nineteenth-century world.
ContributorsHarrison, Leah Gibbons (Author) / Szuter, Christine (Thesis advisor) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This thesis analyzes how several well-known biographies of popular nineteenth-century British literary figures overturned and upset the usual heroic literary biographies that typified the genre during the Victorian era. Popular public opinion in the nineteenth century was that literary biographies existed as moral guideposts--designed to instruct and edify readers. Richard D. Altick's theory of biographical conventions of reticence--which contends that ultimately literary biographies were committed to establishing or preserving an idealized image of the author--is utilized to explore the nuances of how certain radical biographies in which the biographer is forthright about the subject's private life displeased and disturbed the public. In order to illustrate this study's central argument, several literary biographies that were considered among the most radical of the late Victorian period--John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, James Anthony Froude's Life of Carlyle, Mathilde Blind's George Eliot, and John Cordy Jeaffreson's The Real Shelley--are analyzed as case studies. These biographies of writers' lives made heroic figures appear human, vulnerable, petty, et cetera by exposing private life matters in a public biography--something that was not done in an age that called for discreet biographies of its literary icons. Victorian periodicals such as magazines and newspapers assist in ascertaining just how the British public reacted to these biographies, and the ramifications they possessed for worshipping literary idols. Additionally explored are the implications that candid literary biographies had for Victorian author-worship and the role of literature, authors, and biography in British society. This study concludes with a discussion of the implications that these candid literary biographies had into the early twentieth century with the publication of Lytton Strachey's "deflated" biography, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, and summarizes overall findings and conclusions.
ContributorsLeTourneur-Johnson, Jessica Ann (Author) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie F. (Committee member) / Szuter, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The Kootenai River landscape of southwestern British Columbia, northwestern Montana and the very northern tip of Idaho helped unify the indigenous Ktunaxa tribe and guided tribal lifestyles for centuries. However, the Ktunaxa bands' intimate connection with the river underwent a radical transformation during the nineteenth century. This study analyzes how the Ktunaxa relationship with the Kootenai River faced challenges presented by a new understanding of the meaning of landscape introduced by outside groups who began to ply the river's waters in the early 1800s. As the decades passed, the establishment of novel boundaries, including the new U.S.-Canadian border and reserve/reservation delineations, forever altered Ktunaxa interaction with the land. The very meaning of the river for the Ktunaxa as a source of subsistence, avenue of transportation and foundation of spiritual identity experienced similar modifications. In a matter of decades, authoritarian lines on foreign maps imposed a concept of landscape far removed from the tribe's relatively fluid and shifting understanding of boundary lines represented by the river at the heart of the Ktunaxa homeland. This thesis draws on early ethnographic work with the Ktunaxa tribe in addition to the journals of early traders and missionaries in the Kootenai region to describe how the Ktunaxa way of life transformed during the nineteenth century. The works of anthropologist Keith Basso and environmental philosopher David Abram are used to develop an understanding of the powerful implications of the separation of the Ktunaxa people from the landscape so essential to tribal identity and lifestyle. Two different understandings of boundaries and the human relationship with the natural world clashed along the Kootenai River in the 1800s, eventually leading to the separation of the valley's indigenous inhabitants from each other and from the land itself. What water had once connected, lines on maps now divided, redefining this extensive landscape and its meaning for the Ktunaxa people. However, throughout decades of dominance of the Western mapmakers' worldview and in spite of the overwhelming influence of this Euro-American approach to the environment, members of the Ktunaxa tribe have been able to maintain much of their traditional culture.
ContributorsColeman, Robert (Author) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Thesis advisor) / Szuter, Christine (Committee member) / Fixico, Donald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Museums reflect power relations in society. Centuries of tradition dictate that museum professionals through years of study have more knowledge about the past and culture than the communities they present and serve. As mausoleums of intellect, museums developed cultures that are resistant to relinquishing any authority to the public. The long history of museums as the authority over the past led to the alienation and exclusion of many groups from museums, particular indigenous communities. Since the 1970s, many Native groups across the United States established their own museums in response to the exclusion of their voices in mainstream institutions. As establishments preserving cultural material, tradition, and history, tribal museums are recreating the meaning of "museum," presenting a model of cooperation and inclusion of community members to the museum process unprecedented in other institutions. In a changing world, many scholars and professionals call for a sharing of authority in museum spaces in order to engage the pubic in new ways, yet many cultural institutions s struggle to find a way to negotiate the traditional model of a museum while working with communities. Conversely, the practice of power sharing present in Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) tradition shaped a museum culture capable of collaboration with their community. Focusing on the Akwesasne Museum as a case study, this dissertation argues that the ability for a museum to share authority of the past with its community is dependent on the history and framework of the culture of the institution, its recognition of the importance of place to informing the museum, and the use of cultural symbols to encourage collaboration. At its core, this dissertation concerns issues of authority, power, and ownership over the past in museum spaces.
ContributorsHeisinger, Meaghan (Author) / Fixico, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Szuter, Christine (Committee member) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Baseball is the quintessential American game. To understand the country one must also understand the role baseball played in the nation's maturation process. Embedded in baseball's history are (among other things) the stories of America's struggles with issues of race, gender, immigration, organized labor, drug abuse, and rampant consumerism. Over the better part of two centuries, the national pastime both reflected changes to American culture and helped shape them as well. Documenting these changes and packaging them for consumption is the responsibility of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Founded as a tourist attraction promoting largely patriotic values, in recent decades the Baseball Hall of Fame made a concerted effort to transform itself into a respected member of the history museum community--dedicated to displaying American history through the lens of baseball. This dissertation explores the evolution of the Baseball Hall of Fame from celebratory shrine to history museum through an analysis of public history practice within the museum. In particular, this study examines the ways the Hall both reflected and reinforced changes to American values and ideologies through the evolution of public history practice in the museum. The primary focus of this study is the museum's exhibits and analyzing what their content and presentation convey about the social climate during the various stages of the Baseball Hall of Fame's evolution. The principal resources utilized to identify these stages include promotional materials, exhibit reviews, periodicals, and photographic records, as well as interviews with past and present Hall-of-Fame staff. What this research uncovers is the story of an institution in the midst of a slow transition. Throughout the past half century, the Hall of Fame staff struggled with a variety of obstacles to change (including the museum's traditionally conservative roots, the unquestioning devotion Americans display for baseball and its mythology, and the Hall of Fame's idyllic setting in a quaint corner of small-town America) that undermined their efforts to become the type of socially relevant institution many envisioned. Contending with these challenges continues to characterize much of the museum's operations today.
ContributorsMangan, Gregory (Author) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Thesis advisor) / Szuter, Christine (Committee member) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis is based on the responses of Soviet Displaced Persons collected by the Harvard Study on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), an oral history conducted in Munich and New York from 1950 to 1951 in which former Soviet citizens were interviewed. They were primarily interviewed about daily life within the Soviet Union. A total of 331 displaced persons were interviewed over the course of the study, with most individuals receiving multiple interview sessions. These sessions were divided broadly as A and B sections. The A-section, which the majority of interviewees received and was viewed by the compilers as a broad sociological inquiry, was divided into subsections focusing on Soviet work, government, family, education, communication, philosophy of life, and ideology. The B-sections were used for deeper anthropological inquiries and are potentially more controversial due to the use of Rorschach tests and situational responses. Fewer respondents were continued on to the B interviews which contained a variety of subsections, though most respondents were only asked questions from one or two sections of the greater whole. A portion of the B section interviews do provide valuable insight to my thesis for their focus on the Displaced Person status of the interviewees. The project consisted of 764 separate interviews of the 331 respondents. The interviewers for the HPSSS were primarily graduate students, ranging from history, sociology, psychology and economics departments, with varying degrees of fluency in Russian and Ukrainian. Some of the interviewers went on to become leading experts in Soviet Studies in the years to follow. Others stopped publishing, following the major publication of the HPSSS in the late 1950s, which may indicate a move to the private sector or employment within the federal government rather than academics. While not possible to include within my analysis, the major publications of the study also included the insights garnered from nearly ten thousand written questionnaires of DPs that were tabulated and discarded prior to publication.
ContributorsWilder, Ian (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
ContributorsScribner, Quinton Donald (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
ContributorsScribner, Quinton Donald (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Between 1941 and 1953, thousands of Lithuanians were deported by the Soviet Union as far from their homeland as the northern reaches of Siberia. While many perished as they contended with hunger, thirst, illness, harsh weather, ill-suited clothing, and poor housing, several survived, returned, and recounted their experiences. Returned adult deportees often recall solidarity among Lithuanians, interactions with locals and authorities, and efforts to maintain agency and continue cultural traditions. Children remember going to school, relying on their parents, and returning to Lithuania. Deportees and others involved in recording their memoirs wrote them in Lithuanian or translated them into English for different purposes and with different intended audiences. The ways in which deportees describe their experiences and what they omit from their stories have shaped Lithuania’s national identity when it reemerged as the Soviet Union fell following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Lithuania redeclared its independence in 1990. The years in which memoirs were published also likely influence their contents. Despite the horrors of deportation, returnees describe positive aspects of the experience. Many deportees portray themselves as struggling for survival, but not as helpless victims. Relatively rare mention of conflict among Lithuanian deportees and identification of non-Lithuanian deportees’ ethnicities suggest the importance of Lithuanians striving together for a common goal: survival and return to Lithuania. The creation of museums focused on deportation, incorporation of memoirs in school curricula, observation of a Day of Mourning and Hope, and portrayal of deportations in works of literature and film demonstrate their lasting impact and significance.
ContributorsDaulys, Gintare K. (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis director) / Cichopek-Gajraj, Anna (Committee member) / Watts College of Public Service & Community Solut (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The first official history of the Great Patriotic War appeared in the Soviet Union in 1960-1965. It evolved into a six-volume set that elicited both praise and criticism from the reading public. This dissertation examines the creation of the historiographical narrative of the Great Patriotic War in the decade following de-Stalinization in 1956. The debates historians, Party and state representatives engaged in, including the responses they received from reviewers and readers, shed new light on the relationship between the government, those who wrote state-sponsored narratives, and the reading public.
The narrative examined here shows the importance and value placed on the war effort, and explores how aspects of the Stalinist period were retained during the Thaw. By focusing on previously unexplored archival material, which documents debates and editorial decisions, an examination of how officials sought to control the state’s explanation of events, motivations and consequences of the war can be examined in-depth. To date, the periodization, terminology and areas of concentration that define the course of the Great Patriotic War are fixated on topics that Stalin’s war narrative favored, assigning significance to events according to Stalinist preferences rather than objective analysis. My study of the war’s historiography shows how contentious its memory became at every level, making it difficult to clearly discern who represented and opposed the party line throughout Soviet society.
The author argues that the collective memory of the war, as propagated by the state, became so all-encompassing that it was often the preferred version, infiltrating individual memories and displacing or blending with personal recollections and factual documentation. Because the war touched the entire population of the Soviet Union, its story became the foundational myth of the USSR, replacing the October Revolution, and was used as a legitimizing tool by Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Most recently, it has experienced a revival in the post-Soviet period by Vladimir Putin as a way to unify Russia and build popular support for his administration. Viewing how the public interacted with representatives of the state over the creation of the official history of the war suggests that like no other event, war compels any state, even a totalitarian state, to reexamine its foundations, historical memory, foreign and domestic policies and views on censorship.
The narrative examined here shows the importance and value placed on the war effort, and explores how aspects of the Stalinist period were retained during the Thaw. By focusing on previously unexplored archival material, which documents debates and editorial decisions, an examination of how officials sought to control the state’s explanation of events, motivations and consequences of the war can be examined in-depth. To date, the periodization, terminology and areas of concentration that define the course of the Great Patriotic War are fixated on topics that Stalin’s war narrative favored, assigning significance to events according to Stalinist preferences rather than objective analysis. My study of the war’s historiography shows how contentious its memory became at every level, making it difficult to clearly discern who represented and opposed the party line throughout Soviet society.
The author argues that the collective memory of the war, as propagated by the state, became so all-encompassing that it was often the preferred version, infiltrating individual memories and displacing or blending with personal recollections and factual documentation. Because the war touched the entire population of the Soviet Union, its story became the foundational myth of the USSR, replacing the October Revolution, and was used as a legitimizing tool by Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Most recently, it has experienced a revival in the post-Soviet period by Vladimir Putin as a way to unify Russia and build popular support for his administration. Viewing how the public interacted with representatives of the state over the creation of the official history of the war suggests that like no other event, war compels any state, even a totalitarian state, to reexamine its foundations, historical memory, foreign and domestic policies and views on censorship.
ContributorsMann, Yan (Author) / Von Hagen, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Holian, Anna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016