The battles of Germantown: Public history and preservation in America's most historic neighborhood during the twentieth century

Young, David W The Ohio State University 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines how public history and historic preservation have changed during the twentieth century by examining the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1683, Germantown is one of America's most historic neighborhoods, with resonant landmarks related to the nation's political, military, industrial, and cultural history. Efforts to preserve the historic sites of the neighborhood have resulted in the presence of fourteen historic sites and house museums, including sites owned by the National Park Service, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the City of Philadelphia. Germantown is also a neighborhood where many of the ills that came to beset many American cities in the twentieth century are easy to spot. The 2000 census showed that one quarter of its citizens live at or below the poverty line. Germantown High School recently made national headlines when students there attacked a popular teacher, causing severe injuries. Many businesses and landmark buildings now stand shuttered in community that no longer can draw on the manufacturing or retail economy it once did. Germantown's twentieth century has seen remarkably creative approaches to contemporary problems using historic preservation at their core. What was tried, together with what succeeded and failed, help to explain how urban planning, heritage tourism, architectural preservation and museum studies have evolved in the country overall. Each decade offered examples of attempted solutions and success stories, frequently setting standards for historic preservation nationally. In Germantown's case, history was identified early and throughout the century as a useful tool to build into an economic engine for the neighborhood. And yet, history has not proved to be as beneficial to the neighborhood as had been hoped. Why did history not provide the development spark that people thought it would?. The answer to this question is beset with many ironies to be explored in this study. Germantown's greatest feature, its history, often got in the way. More specifically, the practice of history, locally and more generally, did not always help Germantown's expressed goal to make its history more effective in the economic development of the neighborhood. Beset with many competing groups and unable to overcome entrenched traditions, Germantown's primary selling point, its historic assets, often paradoxically served as a barrier to achieving those goals. Institutional, systemic, and cultural factors have all played in to how Germantown has not been able to take full advantage of its history for the benefit of the entire community. Germantown offers a way to study life in a twentieth century city through the ways that people think about history. Germantown history shows how thinking about preservation went from a notion of attempting to seal off the past in reverent isolation to one of the responsible management of change. The former required authority, the latter requires respect for multiple narratives. The process required the evolution, over many years and many contested issues, of the historical profession as whole.

Writing local history: Reflections on Omena, Michigan

Holmes, Amanda J University of Pennsylvania 2004 해외박사(DDOD)

In debates about history and academic and applied folklore, one area remains peculiarly silent: the relationship between folklore and local history. The central question that I explore is: When hired to write a local history of a place we know well, how do we resolve the tension between the history we want and the one the community wants? On its surface this study is a narrative of a small Midwestern town, but in fact the story of Omena is part of a larger story revealing of the nature of local history. Folklorists trained in the academy who then work in the public sector, particularly when writing local histories, are often not prepared for the myriad of issues which will face them---from negotiating a contract to having the community, rather than the folklorist, define the boundaries of projects. I argue that the difficulties I encountered while working on this project are emblematic of the kinds of challenges folklorists face in writing local histories, from the unpredictable structure of local historical organizations to the expectations many communities have for what should constitute their written local histories. Embedded within local histories and local history organizations are issues relating to power and professionalism that have broad implications for folklorists working on such projects. Folklorists bring certain biases to the table when doing research, particularly a predilection for the disenfranchised which stands in stark contrast to many communities' compulsion to narrate the notable, the successful, and the familiar. The project detailed in this study faced what sometimes seemed insuperable difficulties, yet it concluded successfully. Though the experience was sometimes unpleasant and always taxing, a combination of creative compromise, deliberate ambiguity, and subtle subterfuge kept the project moving. It was, in its way, a triumph of place, and thus of the enterprise of local history itself.

Cultures of Collection in Late Nineteenth Century American Natural History

Laubacher, Matthew Arizona State University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

Natural history is, and was, dependent upon the collection of specimens. In the nineteenth century, American naturalists and institutions of natural history cultivated and maintained extensive collection networks comprised of numerous collectors that provided objects of natural history for study. Effective networks were collaborative in nature, with naturalists such as Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian trading their time and expertise for specimens. The incorporation of Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory into natural history in the middle of the century led to dramatic changes in the relationship between naturalists and collectors, as naturalists sought to reconcile their observations within the new evolutionary context. This dissertation uses the careers of collectors Robert Kennicott, Frank Stephens, Edward W. Nelson, E.A. Goldman, and Edmund Heller as case studies in order to evaluate how the changes in the theoretical framework of late nineteenth century natural history led to advances in field practice by assessing how naturalists trained their collectors to meet new demands within the field. Research focused on the correspondence between naturalists and collectors, along with the field notes and applicable publications by collectors. I argue that the changes in natural history necessitated naturalists training their collectors in the basics of biogeography -- the study of geographic distribution of organisms, and systematics -- the study of the diversity of life -- leading to a collaborative relationship in which collectors played an active role in the formation of new biological knowledge. The project concludes that the changes in natural history with regard to theory and practice gradually necessitated a more professional cadre of collectors. Collectors became active agents in the formation of biological knowledge, and instrumental in the formation of a truly systematic natural history. As a result, collectors became de facto field naturalists, the forerunners of the field biologists that dominated the practice of natural history in the early and middle twentieth century.

Turning nature into history: The professionalization of public history in the National Park Service during the 1930s

Meringolo, Denise D The George Washington University 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation analyzes the formation of the National Park Service History Division in order to track the professionalization of public history. Debates about the relationship of public historical production to academic professional standards have dominated the field's discourse for the past 25 years. As a result, public historians both inside and outside the academy have been reluctant to theorize the ways in which their profession is distinct from that of their academic peers. Yet, a close reading of the early days of Park Service history demonstrates the persistence of particular themes and concerns in the larger field of public history. Over the following four chapters, this dissertation theorizes and historicizes persistent sources of conflict in the field of public history; namely, the role of public history in mediating vernacular and official authority, the tensions that emerge between public historians and their audiences, and the insecurity that marks relationships between public historians and their academic peers. Historical professionalism has roots in the Progressive Era. As a result, historically specific trends in commemoration, preservation and collection established particular relationships among public historians, academics, audience constituencies and agents of official culture and government authority. This configuration set the stage for the creation of a unique habitus---or work culture---that we now recognize as public history. Public history's transformation from avocation to profession took place in the years between World War I and World War II. During these decades, several landholding institutions inside the federal government engaged in a series of power struggles concerning the governance of land and the ownership of artifacts. One of these power struggles, between the Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution, contributed to the creation of a new way of assigning meaning to artifacts. It also reconfigured the relationships among science, history, landscapes and meaning, establishing intellectual parameters for public history. In addition, during these decades, the maturation of mass culture and the ascendance of middle class professionalism created some anxiety about the power of official authority. Audience desires, far from simply outside sources of controversy, became embedded inside the discourse that is public history. Further, public history might have been better served by imagining academics as simply another audience constituency. However, by situating them as the guardians of standards and the gatekeepers of historical meaning, early public historians structured their own authority as inherently insecure.

Custom and history: Common law thought and the historical imagination in nineteenth century America

Parker, Kunal Madhukar Princeton University 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

History was an obsession of American legal thinkers throughout the nineteenth century. Sharing the historical sensibilities of their non-lawyer contemporaries, American legal thinkers of varying stripe thought of their society as being in history and brought their historical sensibilities to bear upon the law in general and the common law in particular. Viewed in terms of these historical sensibilities, themselves shifting over the course of the nineteenth century, the common law could be seen as contingent, set in context, and subjected to critical analysis. It could be systematized and organized, explained and criticized, parts of it rejected or retained. Yet at the same time, even as they brought varying historical sensibilities to the common law, many nineteenth century American legal thinkers nevertheless retained an affiliation to the special non-historical temporality of "immemoriality" associated with the common law in its claim to represent the "custom" of the community. "Immemoriality" was a special time given by the common law to itself: a time that came from a place outside history and that was not reducible to it. According to the logic of "immemoriality," the common law was both thoroughly temporal and utterly resistant to being pinned down in historical time. It embodied the wisdom of multiple generations. It began but could not be seen to have begun; it changed but could not be caught in the act of changing. It blurred distinctions among past, present and future. In focusing on nineteenth century American legal thinkers' incessant shuttling between the times of history and the time of custom, the dissertation draws attention to a rich and varied conversation, itself historically sedimented and theoretical, about the relationship between history and law. This conversation stretches from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, and includes a range of legal and non-legal thinkers, from James Kent to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from Edmund Burke to Herbert Spencer. It continues in our own day. In its focus on the intertwining of historical and legal thought, the dissertation contributes to American intellectual history, the history of American legal thought, and the philosophy of history.

The abductive imperative of world history: Undergraduate history curricula for the new millennium

Bernhart, John L Temple University 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

In assessing the field of history in the United States in the introduction of <italic>A Global History</italic> (1999), L. S. Stavrianos lauds the successful transition from an irrelevant and misleading, traditional West-oriented history to a new global-perspective history; while in the new introduction to the updated edition of <italic>Covering Islam</italic> (1997), Edward W. Said laments that the field of history in the United States has become even more insensitive and belligerently hostile towards non-Western societies, giving rise to ever greater misrepresentations, distortions, and stereotypes. How can these extremely divergent views be reconciled? Treating the field of history in the United States as a culture of scholarship, an examination of undergraduate history textbooks and curricula reveals an orientalist globalism. A more all-inclusive, encyclopedic non-Western history has been truly integrated into the field of history in the United States, but the specific process which has integrated non-Western history has given rise to greater misrepresentations, distortions, and stereotypes. Non-Western history, Third World history, and area studies have become required fields of study for gaining perspective on the modernity of the West; and non-Western history, Third World history, and area studies have been distortingly delineated into pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods to conform to the periodization of the West. While many colleges and universities in the United States have retained the Western Civilization course, others have replaced the Western Civilization course with the World History course. This change, however, remains cosmetic, as a critical analysis of approaches to World History and of World History textbooks suggests little structural change in the curricula. As a means for remedying the egregious failings of orientalist globalism, an abductive argument is made for the development of the field of World History as a necessary macrohistorical foundation for history curricula for the new millennium.

Reading, Interpreting, and Teaching African American History: Examining How African American History Influences the Curricular and Pedagogical Decisions of Preservice Teachers

King, LaGarrett Jarriel The University of Texas at Austin 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

African American history and how it is taught in classroom spaces have been a point of contention with activists, historians, and educators for decades. In it current form, African American history narratives often are ambiguous and truncated, leaving students with a disjointed construction about U.S. history. Additionally, the pedagogical decisions made by teachers regarding African American history are sometimes problematic. To fix this problem, critical scholars have surmised that both pre- and in-service teachers need to be more knowledgeable about African American history. This knowledge will help teachers move past simplistic constructions of the past and provide a transformative educational experience. In essence, these scholars believe that teachers cannot teach [African American history] because they do not know it. This study, however, examines what if they do know [African American history], will they teach it? The purpose of this study was to investigate how knowledge influences teachers’ pedagogical decisions. Using the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of cultural memory and knowledge construction, this qualitative case study explores how four preservice teachers interpreted African American history after engaging in a summer reading program and how that knowledge was implemented in their classroom during their student teaching semester. The reader, entitled A Winding River, was a collection of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and primary and secondary source documents. Data collection measures included three classroom observations, reflective journals, three interviews, and other classroom documents related to the participant’s student teaching experience. Findings indicate that knowledge acquisition is complex and the process to teach is a generative process. Although, knowledge is an important component in teaching, sociocultural factors also influenced the divergent ways African American history was interpreted and taught. The study indicates that the access of African American history is not always a prerequisite in teaching the subject in transformative ways.

Rehabilitationen Roms: Die roemische Antike in der deutschen Kultur zwischen Winckelmann und Niebuhr

Holzer, Angela Cornelia Princeton University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation uncovers the Roman discourse in late eighteenth century Germany by discussing the characterizations of ancient Rome in art history, historiography and literary theory. The last two decades of the eighteenth century experienced a renewed interest in Roman antiquity. This interest can be fathomed on a quantitative level -- e.g. in an increase in translations of Latin authors -- but it is also perceptible on a theoretical level. The emphasis on the importance of the Greek ideal in German culture after Winckelmann has tended to obscure the continuous reception of, and reflection on Roman antiquity. The negative view of Roman antiquity, especially on the early Roman Empire as part of a critique of French classicism developed by the Storm-and-Stress movement, was not a common attitude in Germany. An analysis of a wider range of texts -- e.g. enlightenment children's books -- shows that there was a heterogeneity of positions toward Rome. The last decades of the eighteenth century moreover demonstrated an interest in early Roman history and, after Edward Gibbon, in the later empire. Characterizations of a "Roman epoch" in world history came to be part of universal history, philosophies of history and literary history. Early Romanticism finally discovered the modernity of Roman antiquity in aesthetic and philosophical regard and postulated the continuing relevance of Rome while devaluing Greece. It thus paved the way for major contributions on Roman history and art history in the nineteenth century. The importance of Roman antiquity was now seen in its function as a culture of transformation. The first part engages Winckelmann's history of art and argues that Winckelmann increasingly engaged with the Roman tradition in his later works and, despite his provocative negation of a Roman style, developed a notion of Roman art. It was, moreover, not common practice to adopt Winckelmann's view on Rome in the decades following his death. F.A. Wolf and Wilhelm von Humboldt, C.G. Heyne and Friedrich Schlegel developed different visions of Rome after Winckelmann, which are also presented in part one. The second part deals with the historiographical discourse on Roman antiquity and especially with the ensuing popularization -- translation, adaptation and transformation -- of French and English historiography in Germany. It emphasizes the increasing importance of the Roman Empire in children's literature of the late Enlightenment. The third part focuses on the early modern genre of Roman antiquities, or "Altertumer", and the ways in which it acquired a new relevance when enriched with autoptic elements that lead to a mixture of textually transmitted and observational knowledge. The fourth part engages the discourse of literary history and aesthetics and argues that during the last years of the eighteenth century, the discovery of the modernity of Roman culture lead to a new perspective on Roman antiquity that was decisive also for the theoretical discourse on Rome during the nineteenth century. The epilog sketches the reflections on the value of the study of Rome on a theoretical level in the historiography and cultural critique of Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Importing Italy: Representations of Italian history in Britain, 1790--1830 (Edward Gibbon, William Roscoe, Lord Byron, J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Felicia Hemans)

Insalaco, Danielle Janiene New York University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British writers found inspiration in tales from Italian history. Byron, for instance, is well-known for adapting Italian history in his poems and plays. Yet the histories of Italy published in English during the period have been all but ignored by students of literature, despite the current interest in cultural history. For many British writers, Italy was viewed less as cultural “other” than as “likeness,” an instructive mirroring of Britain itself. Italy's history was constructed by these writers sometimes as cautionary tale, sometimes as exemplar of libertarian values that Britain might profitably emulate. This “identity paradigm” is embedded in their historical prose, whose narratives were frequently mined by later poets. “Narrative” is an apt term for these histories, for in them the historical format is infused with literary elements that are ideological in implication. In <italic>Antiquities of the House of Brunswick</italic> Edward Gibbon emphasizes both the literary nature of history and its ideological ground. In tracing the Italian ancestry of the current kings of Great Britain, he posits the cultural growth of medieval and renaissance Italy as a metaphor for a comparable growth in Britain. In his <italic>Life of Lorenzo de' Medici </italic> William Roscoe narrates the grandeur of the Italian past, finding in renaissance Florence worthy models of human behavior. The voluminous <italic> Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge</italic> of J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, an historical “epic” published in French and English, is a call to emulate the independence of the medieval Italian republics through a revolution in modern Italy. In turn, the poetry of Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans utilizes episodes from these histories to advocate an internationalist, republican perspective. In the hands of these writers, Italian history <italic>qua</italic> literature becomes an ideological vehicle for presenting a wide range of views on contemporary British and European sociopolitical events. The dual trends of history as literary narrative and history as ideological and cultural statement are brought together within one discourse, each document of which becomes a project of the imagination whereby the past can be explained and the future considered.

The re-appropriation of the past: History and politics in Soviet Armenia, 1988--1991

Krikorian, Robert Owen Harvard University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

Historical narratives played an important role in the undermining of Soviet rule in Armenia during the final years of the Soviet Union. Competing, non-Communist interpretations of history influenced large segments of the population, which in turn led to a “divorce from Sovietism,” and ultimately to secession from the USSR. History was contested terrain over which battles were waged for the “hearts and minds of the nation.” In the Armenian case, history was a tool for mobilizing the resources of the nation in its struggle against Soviet central authorities as well as its neighbor Azerbaijan. The political mobilization and manipulation of history by the Soviets over many decades succeeded in subordinating history to the ideological and strategic needs of the Communist Party. During the relative freedom of glasnost, Armenians began to reassess their past and take issue with the prevailing grand historical narrative of Armenian history constructed by the Soviets. In this narrative, Russia played the role of liberator and savior of the Armenian people, with the Armenians themselves cast in a subordinate role. Given the hardships suffered by the Armenians in the past, including the 1915 Genocide by the Ottoman Turks, this Soviet Armenian grand historical narrative remained the dominant paradigm until the beginning of 1988 and the advent of the Karabagh movement in Armenia. The present study argues that a major paradigm shift occurred in February 1988, when Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait were subjected to a pogrom. This one event, more than any other, shattered the tacit social contract between the Soviet state and the Armenian people, whereby loyalty was exchanged for the physical inviolability of the Armenian nation. This social contract was itself based on a particular construction and reading of history. After Sumgait, Armenians began to explore the causes for their inclusion within the USSR. Based on fieldwork in Soviet Armenia from 1988 to 1991, as well as subsequent archival research, this work demonstrates how, from 1988 to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the de-construction of Soviet history in Armenia contributed to a vigorous debate regarding the state of affairs in the country. A re-assessment of the Armenian past and the undoing of Soviet revisionism undermined the pillars of Soviet rule in Armenia and led to an irreversible crisis of legitimacy.