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.

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.

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.

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.

Time's visible surface: Alois Riegl's art history and the discourse on temporality in fin-de-siecle Austria

Gubser, Michael Donald University of California, Berkeley 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation considers the seminal work of the art historian Alois Riegl, specifically his concepts of temporality and history, within the context of the fin-de-siècle Austrian academic milieu. One of the foremost late-nineteenth-century architects of the modern discipline of art history, Riegl helped to establish his field as an autonomous discipline by distinguishing its subject matter, thematic goals, and analytic methods from the parent disciplines of history and aesthetics. His work has attracted increasing attention toward the end of the twentieth century because of its impact on such figures as Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin. My dissertation has two primary aims. First, whereas most interpreters of Riegl focus on his notion of <italic>Kunstwollen</italic> or his theories of representation, I approach Riegl's oeuvre as a sustained investigation of the categories of temporality and history. I examine Riegl's notion of the relationship between time, history, and art as it developed from his earliest essays on calendars through his later work on the Roman art industry and Dutch group portraiture. I argue that Riegl's concept of art was fundamentally temporal in constitution; artworks registered the movement of historical time in a formal manner, rendering temporality in visible forms that were available for the empirical investigations of the historian. Thus Riegl's work can be fit within the methodological debates in the human sciences of the late nineteenth century. The second aim of this dissertation is to challenge a pervasive assumption in the recent literature on Austrian cultural and intellectual history, namely, that Austrian modernism adopted a self-consciously ahistorical stance in its investigations of social, cultural, and political phenomena. Faced with political and social turmoil and a nineteenth-century history of decline, so the argument runs, the Austrian cultural elite turned away from history and sought out alternate fields of inquiry that might explain contemporary problems, suggest redemptive solutions, or provide escapes from the social world. By embedding Riegl's analysis of temporality within a broader discourse on time, history, and empiricism that engaged his teachers at the University of Vienna, this dissertation challenges the ahistoricist characterization of Austrian culture. Among the figures discussed are the philosophers Franz Brentano and Robert Zimmermann, the historians Theodor yon Sickel and Max Büdinger, and the art historians Moritz Thausing and Franz Wickhoff.

History and human experience in the art of David Wilkie, 1806--1835 (Scotland)

McCurdy, Melinda Ruth University of California, Santa Barbara 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores the relationship between written and painted history in early nineteenth-century Britain as it was carefully negotiated in the work of Scottish-born artist David Wilkie. In eighteenth-century Britain, historical writing was closely allied with the discipline of rhetoric, designed to persuade its young aristocratic audience to model themselves on the great heroes it described. By the 1824s, however, history had come to be more concerned with social aspects of everyday life that contribute to a broader understanding of a culture and its institutions than with the deeds of heroes and statesmen. This period's re-evaluation of the relationship between individuals and the past also forced a change in written history's visual counterpart, whose sophisticated references to past art geared toward an elite audience had now become obsolete. The major thesis of this dissertation is that the visual language required by new forms of written history evolved out of the work of genre painters, and that it was Wilkie, mainly known as a genre painter, who first successfully used it to express the elevated themes of history painting. I suggest that genre painters, with their focus on everyday life, were better equipped to express the new history than artists working within the stylistic confines of traditional history painting. Through an analysis of three of Wilkie's paintings, contemporary accounts of their reception, and comparisons between his works and those of two of his contemporaries, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Richard Parkes Bonington, I consider how artists struggled to adapt to changing views of history in this period. This study also places Wilkie's art within the contemporary political context in which it was made, when war with France, economic depression, widespread agitation for political reform, and the rise to power of the middle class, challenged Britons' notions of what history meant, and to whom it spoke. A conservative artist with elite patrons, Wilkie found his hybrid works particularly vulnerable to shifting interpretations centered on the struggle between individual enfranchisement and the rights of the established order.

He polis gar dustokei: The question of Alcibiades in Aristophanes' "Frogs" and Thucydides' History (Greece)

Warren, Brian Matthew The Johns Hopkins University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation investigates the controversies that surround Alcibiades as presented in Aristophanes' <italic>Frogs</italic> and Thucydides' History. In Chapter 1, I use Aristophanes' <italic>Frogs</italic> to illustrate the way in which the question of Alcibiades was a real and immediate historical question for the Athenians. It also introduces two of the basic themes of the controversies that surround Alcibiades also in Thucydides' History: the problematic relation between public and private interest, and the tensions in the relationship between the powerful individual and the city. In Chapter 2, I use Aristotle's <italic>Poetics 9</italic> to begin developing a reading of Thucydides' History which sees Alcibiades as a crucial figure. In Chapter 3, I examine the four passages that pertain to Alcibiades in Thucydides' History which can be classified as narrator interventions. In these passages, Thucydides' evaluation of Alcibiades and his role in Athens' defeat take a very complicated, often “double-edged” form. Furthermore, these passages show that the same issues that emerge in connection with Alcibiades in the <italic>Frogs</italic>—the problematic relation between public and private interest, and the tensions in the relationship between the powerful individual and the city—also receive attention from Thucydides. In Chapter 4, I examine the way in which Thucydides has woven Alcibiades into the fabric of his History. In particular, I examine the parallels between Alcibiades' story and the stories of Pausanias and Themistocles as developed in Book 1 of the History. On a larger scale, Thucydides' History, especially at 6.15, develops an analogy between Alcibiades and Athens which speaks to many of the History's most important themes. Especially at 6.15, there begins to emerge a connection between Thucydides' presentation of Alcibiades and his History's elaboration of <italic>to anthropinion</italic>, the principle according to which events in the past have transpired and will transpire in the same or a similar way. In Chapter 5, I consider three readings of Thucydides' Alcibiades in modern scholarship, those of Westlake, Gribble, and Forde. I conclude by offering a perspective on the profound ambivalence and studied ambiguity of Thucydides' presentation of Alcibiades in terms of Aristotle's categories of rhetoric.

Race, nation and education: Black history during Jim Crow

Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron New York University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

"Race, Nation and Education: Black History During Jim Crow" traces the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the early black history movement, with an emphasis on the formative role played by the following five scholars--philosopher Alain Locke and historians Carter G. Woodson, Charles Wesley, Rayford Logan and John Hope Franklin. Woodson and his colleagues in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History researched, wrote and promoted black history as if it were a "life-and-death struggle." "The cause," as Woodson called the movement, spanned the years from 1915 through the 1950s and was both a professional and a grassroots enterprise. It reached all the way from seminars at Howard University to one-room schoolhouses in Alabama and encompassed everything from textbook campaigns to Negro History Week celebrations. This dissertation demonstrates that the study and celebration of black history had a formative influence on some of the most important twentieth-century black institutions and movements from segregated schools and the black press to the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights. It also shows that Woodson and his colleagues turned to history not only to contest racism but also to contest the very idea of "race" itself. With the advent of Negro History Week in 1926, the scope and influence of black history increased dramatically. From the late 1920s through the 1930s, segregated black schools became crucial sites for the transmission of the Harlem Renaissance, broadcasting its art, literature and music to African Americans across the country during their annual Negro History Week celebrations. The emphasis on recovering and showcasing a rich African American artistic and cultural heritage in the 1920s and 30s shifted to an overarching concern, during the 1940s and 50s, with tracing the roots and branches of an energetic black freedom struggle. What remained constant, however, was an almost evangelical faith in the power of history--Association members fervently believed that "the cause" would have a transformative effect on the hearts and minds of women and men, building black pride, on the one hand and reducing white prejudice, on the other.

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.