Stratified Boston: The Brahmins, the Irish and the Boston Police Strike of 1919

This thesis explores the Boston Police Strike of 1919 through the lens of class struggle and ethnic tension. Through an examination of the development of Boston’s class structure, particularly focused on the upper class Brahmins and the Irish working class, it concludes that the Brahmins’ success in suppressing the police strikeallowed for their maintenance of socioeconomic power within the city despite their relatively small population. Based on their extreme class cohesion resulting from the growing prominence of Harvard University as well as the Brahmins’ unabashed discrimination against their ethnic neighbors in almost every sphere of society, theBrahmins were able to maintain their power in Boston’s cultural world. The Irish working class, on the other hand, which attempted to use the increasing popularity of public and police unionization to challenge the status and power of the Brahmins through the creation of the Boston Police Union and subsequently through the notorious Boston Police Strike of 1919 was ultimately unsuccessful, and it was left in the same position in which it started, at the bottom of the social ladder. The suppression of the strike by members of the upper class and their allies, particularly those in high government positions, served to preserve and affirm the socioeconomic power of the Brahmins over much of Boston society and brought the era of public police unionization to a close.

Nature, Poetry, and Liminality in the Poetry of Robert Frost

Explores how Frost examines and configures the divide between life’s imperfections and its rewards. I am particularly interested in how Frost positions both the non-human natural world and poetry itself as intermediary (or liminal) realms that might help us live simultaneously in the worlds of reality and the imagination, or truth and beauty, or heaven and earth.

The Syntax of the EPP in Irish

In this paper, I will provide a detailed analysis of the EPP, a principle of theoretical syntax, in Modern Irish. I will document previous scholarship on this issue to give a comprehensive view of ways of reconciling the syntax with the language data, as language data is key to testing theoretical predictions. I will also provide my own model incorporating the EPP into Irish. First, I will provide necessary information about the background and development of the EPP and the Minimalist system in syntax, as well as a discussion of the Irish language and the features which make it relevant to the study of the EPP. Then, I will present the models of Irish and the considerations of the EPP which have shaped and influenced my own. These models include both instances of altering the definition of the EPP to increase its universal application and of adapting models of VSO languages to fit the prevailing definition of the EPP. Lastly, I will detail my own model for Irish sentence structure, which suggests an alternate subject position in the syntax which would allow for the EPP to adapt to fit VSO word order. An analysis of passive and the unaccusative constructions, as well as support from contemporary syntactic theory, will support this model. To complete my consideration of Irish and the EPP, I will also provide a discussion of whether of not pleonastic pronouns function in Irish and how they would be accounted for in my model.