Disease and hygiene in the construction of a nation: The public sphere, public space, and the private domain in Buenos Aires, 1871–1910

The maturation of the public sphere in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a critical element in the nation-building process and the overall development of the modern state. Within the context of this evolution, the discourse of disease generated intense debates that subsequently influenced policies that transformed the public spaces of Buenos Aires and facilitated state intervention within the private domains of the city’s inhabitants. Under the banner of hygiene and public health, municipal officials thus Europeanized the nation’s capital through the construction of parks and plazas and likewise utilized the press to garner support for the initiatives that would remedy the unsanitary conditions and practices of the city. Despite promises to the contrary, the improvements to the public spaces of Buenos Aires primarily benefited the porteño elite while the efforts to root out disease often targeted working-class neighborhoods. The model that reformed the public space of Buenos Aires, including its socially differentiated application of aesthetic order and public health policies, was ultimately employed throughout the Argentine Republic as the consolidated political elite rolled out its national program of material and social development.

Pirates, exiles, and empire: English seamen, Atlantic expansion, and Jamaican settlement, 1558–1658

A life of piracy offered marginal men a profession with a degree of autonomy, despite the brand of "outlaw" and the fear of prosecution. At various times throughout history, governments and crowned heads suspended much of their piracy prosecution, licensing men to work as "privateers" for the state, supplementing naval forces. This practice has a long history, but in sixteenth-century England, Elizabeth I (1558-1603) significantly altered this tradition. Recognizing her own weakness in effectively prosecuting these men and the profit they could contribute to the government, Elizabeth began incorporating pirates into the English naval corps in peacetime—not just in war. This practice increased English naval resources, income, and presence in the emerging Atlantic World, but also increased conflict with the powerful Spanish empire. By 1605, making peace with Spain, James VI/I (1603-1625) retracted Elizabeth's privateering promotion, prompting an emigration of English seamen to the American outposts they had developed in the previous century. Now exiles, no longer beholden to the Crown, seamen reverted back to piracy. The Carolinas and Jamaica served as bases for these rover communities. In 1650, the revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell (1649-1658) once again recognized the merits of such policies. Determined to demonstrate his authority and solidify his rule, Cromwell offered citizenship and state support to Caribbean exiles in exchange for their aiding of his navy in the taking of Spanish Jamaica. Official chartering of Port Royal, Jamaica served as reward for these men's efforts and as the culmination of a century-long cycle of piracy legislation, creating one of England's most lucrative colonies in the middle of a traditionally Spanish Caribbean empire. Through legal and diplomatic records, correspondence, and naval and demographic records from England and Spain, this dissertation explores early modern piracy/privateering policy and its impact on the development of the Atlantic World. European disputes and imperial competition converged in these piracy debates with significant consequences for the definitions of criminality and citizenship and for the development of Atlantic empire.

Re -"interpreting" the conquest: European and Amerindian translators and go -betweens in the colonization of the Americas, 1492--1675

This dissertation aims to recover the lives and careers of those Amerindians and Europeans who voluntarily or involuntarily took on the role of intercultural interpreters in the contact, conquest, and early colonial period in the Americas between 1492 and 1675. It intends to prove that these so-called “marginal” figures assumed roles that went far beyond those of linguistic and cultural translators, and often had a decisive impact on early Indian-colonial relations. ^ In the course of my research, I consulted hundreds of published sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles, narratives, and memoirs in my search for references to interpreters. I augmented these accounts with information derived from unpublished archival documents, drawn primarily from the Archivo General de Indias, in Seville, Spain. ^ I organized my findings in theme-driven chapters that begin with a consideration of the historiography of that subject. Each chapter is further subdivided into chronologically-arranged historical vignettes that focus on the interpreters who mediated between the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English and Dutch and the various Native American polities and cultures. ^ I found that colonial authorities and Amerindian communities alike recognized the absolute necessity of recruiting competent and loyal interpreters and go-betweens, and that both sides tried to secure their loyal service by means both fair and foul. Although pressured, pushed, and pulled in contrary directions, most interpreters recognized the pivotal position they held in cross-cultural negotiations and rarely remained passive pawns in the contests between the forces of domination and defense. ^ All across the Americas, interpreters used their linguistic and diplomatic skills, and their intimate knowledge of the “other” not simply to facilitate conquest or spearhead the opposition, but to transform themselves from “culture brokers” into “power brokers.” Many of the decisive events that shaped colonial-Indian relations turned on the actions of these culturally-ambiguous individuals, a fact bemoaned and begrudgingly acknowledged by most of the contemporary conquistadors, chroniclers, and colonial founders, and recognized by this author. ^

Links across the Gulfstream: The Florida /Bahamas zone, 1780–1900

The links created between Florida and the Bahamas from 1780 to 1900 constituted a major influence in the evolution of a unique society. This dissertation adds to the understanding of this topic by using primary sources and architecture to follow the odyssey of the people who shaped this region. Building on the historiography which examined each area separately, this work focused on the ties forged in the interactions between Florida and the Bahamas. Following the immigrants who shaped Florida and the Bahamas, this work examines cultural holdovers which influenced this region during times of demographic flux. Aesthetic preferences stood out as one way that people maintained connections to their past. The use of architecture as a lens to view this process provides a concrete example of this phenomenon. The societies of Florida and the Bahamas remained intertwined during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Forced migrations shaped the trajectory of the evolution of a distinctive culture in these areas bordered by the Gulfstream. This dissertation proves that the links forged between these societies reinforced the patterns which endured throughout the maturation of this area.

A study of the effects of a service-learning experience on student success at an urban community college

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of a service-learning experience on student success as measured by class attendance, course completion, final course grades, and end-of-term evaluation data. Though many outcomes of service-learning experiences have been studied, including ethical values, self-esteem, student personal development, and career preparation, relatively few studies have been conducted on the effects of such experiences on academic achievement, and the studies that have been done have primarily studied students at traditional, four-year, residential universities. The study consisted of 286 students enrolled in six paired courses taught by five instructors at a community college in the Fall term 1996. One section of each pair (the control group) was taught using traditional subject matter and course materials and the other section of each pair (the treatment group) participated in a 20-hour required service- learning activity in addition to the regular course curriculum. The courses in the study included American History, Sociology, College Preparatory English, and Introduction to English Composition. The results of this study indicate that, overall, students who participated in a class in which service-learning was a requirement, achieved higher final course grades and reported greater satisfaction with the course, the instructor, the reading assignments, and the grading system, and the treatment section of one course pair had fewer absences. In addition, the faculty members reported that, in the treatment sections, class discussions were more stimulating, the sections seemed more vital in terms of student involvement, the students seemed more challenged academically, more motivated to learn, and seemed to exert more effort in the course.

Atlantic Ais in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Maritime Adaptation, Indigenous Wrecking, and Buccaneer Raids on Florida’s Central East Coast

The Ais were a Native American group who lived along the Atlantic shoreline of Florida south of Cape Canaveral. This coastal population’s position adjacent to a major shipping route afforded them numerous encounters with the Atlantic world that linked Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Through their exploitation of the goods and peoples from the European shipwrecks thrown ashore, coupled with their careful manipulation of other Atlantic contacts, the Ais polity established an influential domain in central east Florida during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pre-contact peoples of Florida’s east coast, including the ancestors of the Ais, practiced a maritime adaptation concentrated on the exploitation of their bountiful riverine, estuarine, and marine environments. The Ais then modified their maritime skills to cope with the opportunities and challenges that accompanied European contact. Using their existing aquatic abilities, they ably salvaged goods and castaways from the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch vessels dashed on the rocks and reefs of Florida’s coast. The Ais’ strategic redistribution of these materials and peoples to other Florida Native Americans, the Spaniards of St. Augustine, and other passing Europeans gained them greater influence. This process, which I call indigenous wrecking, enabled the Ais to expand their domain on the peninsula. Coastal Florida Native Americans’ maritime abilities also attracted the attention of Europeans. In the late seventeenth century, English buccaneers and salvagers raided Florida’s east coast to capture indigenous divers, whom they sent to work the wreck of a sunken Spanish treasure ship located in the Bahamas. The English subsequently sold the surviving Native American captives to other Caribbean slave markets. Despite population losses to such raids, the Ais and other peoples of the east coast thrived on Atlantic exchange and used their existing maritime adaptation to resist colonial intrusions until the start of the eighteenth century. This dissertation thus offers a narrative about Native Americans and the Atlantic that is unlike most Southeastern Indian stories. The Ais used their maritime adaptation and the process of indigenous wrecking to engage and exploit the arriving Atlantic world. In the contact era, the Ais truly became Atlantic Ais.

Tittmann and the 'Tiger Car' : competing conceptions of modernity in Haiti, 1946-50

The purpose of this project was to address the lack of scholarship on mid-twentieth century Haitian history and illustrate its significance. It employs primary and secondary sources in shaping a Gramscian historical narrative. Ideas of "everyday resistance" and internal and external politics are also be of significance to this work. In mid-twentieth century Haiti, the black-nationalist rhetoric of noirisme became the dominant political ideology. Blackness was amorphous and its application to politics was dependent upon class. In proclaiming blackness the average Haitian was attacking the class schism that beleaguered the island. Yet for the elite noirismewas a conduit to modernity and a useful tool for muting the division between rich and poor. With the election of Dumarsais Estimé in 1946, dialogue between the U.S. government, the Haitian elite, and the masses, relative to definitions of modernity played out within the new political reality of noirisme.

Ink Under the Fingernails: Making Print in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.

Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.

This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.

Investigative journalism in Mexico: between ideals and realities. The case of Morelia

The aim of this paper is to analyse the state of the investigative journalism in Mexico, especially the one that is practiced at the local level in the provinces. That is, this research is based upon a case study conducted in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán. The empirical evidence will show that there is an evident divergence regarding the practice of the investigative journalism: on the one hand, journalists are aware of what this concept involves and they consider that they practice it on a regular basis; but, on the other, the content analysis prove otherwise. In other words, the account of what is actually printed significantly differs from the news workers’ perceptions, because the former shows a poorly developed journalistic investigation practice.

What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.

Estrategias museográficas actuales relacionadas con la museología crítica

Este artículo evita la mera disquisición teórica sobre museología crítica, sugiriendo en lugar de ello algunas pistas para calibrar su influencia en la praxis museal. Ante todo, se propone como emblemático de la museografía crítica el uso de interrogaciones en lugar de discursos asertivos; en segundo lugar, la sustitución de la impersonal autoridad institucional por prácticas participativas e interpretaciones compartidas, para dar idea de una variedad de opiniones, incluyendo las de gentes ajenas al museo; finalmente, es un rasgo distintivo el énfasis en la naturaleza subjetiva de los montajes museísticos, mostrando sus cambios a través de la historia, y señalando la autoría personal de las presentaciones y textos en el museo.

Diálogo con Europa, diálogo con el pasado. Antepasados y tradición entre la nobleza colonial nahua

En este trabajo presentamos un acercamiento a los modos de referirse al pasado en los testimonios dejados por los miembros de la nobleza colonial nahua. La lectura de las fuentes nos permite distinguir dos perspectivas –intelectual y pragmática– asociadas respectivamente con el proyecto de unir las tradiciones históricas indígena y europea y con la búsqueda de argumentos en la lucha por tierras y privilegios. El enfoque del artículo son los conceptos nahuas de «tradición» y «antepasados» (huehuetqueh), manifiestos en ambas perspectivas. Al analizar el vocabulario, retórica e iconografía intentamos entender el significado de estos conceptos dentro de la cultura nahua prehispánica y su modificación bajo las circunstancias coloniales, tanto como su papel en la continuación de la identidad nahua.

The Persistence of Torture: Explaining Coercive Interrogation in America’s Small Wars

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

CAST OFF: MARITIME LABOR IN AMERICA FROM 1935 TO 1955

Many studies have observed the precipitous decline in American shipping following the Second World War. Most focus on changes in maritime policy and the upsurge of flags of convenience. Yet this interpretation relegates mariners to a footnote. This thesis argues that America abandoned its seamen years before it abandoned its merchant marine, and that the labor story is an integral and largely overlooked dimension of the industry’s broader decline. It explores how the status and makeup of American seamen underwent monumental shifts from 1935 to 1955. Increased nationalization, improved conditions, and a patriotic cause boosted the standing of the industry, but federal and union intervention also changed the composition of the workforce and even eroded seamen’s status. These greater controls on mariners negatively affected the industry and this work contends that labor played a role in the transformation, and even decline, of the overall American Merchant Marine.

Symbiotic Cities: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Mass Culture, 1910-1960

This dissertation examines how Buenos Aires emerged as a creative capital of mass culture and cultural industries in South America during a period when Argentine theater and cinema expanded rapidly, winning over a regional marketplace swelled by transatlantic immigration, urbanization and industrialization. I argue that mass culture across the River Plate developed from a singular dynamic of exchange and competition between Buenos Aires and neighboring Montevideo. The study focuses on the Argentine, Uruguayan, and international performers, playwrights, producers, cultural impresarios, critics, and consumers who collectively built regional cultural industries. The cultural industries in this region blossomed in the interwar period as the advent of new technologies like sound film created profitable opportunities for mass cultural production and new careers for countless theater professionals. Buenos Aires also became a global cultural capital in the wider Hispanic Atlantic world, as its commercial culture served a region composed largely of immigrants and their descendants. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Montevideo maintained a subordinate but symbiotic relationship with Buenos Aires. The two cities shared interlinked cultural marketplaces that attracted performers and directors from the Atlantic world to work in theatre and film productions, especially in times of political upheaval such as the Spanish Civil War and the Perón era in Argentina. As a result of this transnational process, Argentine mass culture became widely consumed throughout South America, competing successfully with Hollywood, European, and other Latin American cinemas and helping transform Buenos Aires into a cosmopolitan metropolis. By examining the relationship between regional and national frames of cultural production, my dissertation contributes to the fields of Latin American studies and urban history while seeking to de-center the United States and Europe from the central framing of transnational history.