Browsing by Author "Dorsey, Bruce"

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16
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    Confronting Colonial Violence: Pueblo Women Using Indigenous History for Community Activism and Healing
    (2021) Mondragón, Sierra; Dorsey, Bruce
    Combining a critical dive into the archives of Indigenous history, a survey of Indigenous historiography, and recorded interviews with Pueblo women-led organizations Tewa Women United and Three Sisters Collective, this research focuses on how contemporary Pueblo Indigenous women use Indigenous models of history to confront ongoing forms of colonial violence. The programming and activist efforts of both organizations are highlighted for their ability to confront historical issues of sexual and physical violence, family disruption and trauma, and forced sterilization. The connections made between Indigenous history and the narratives of TWU and 3SC reveal successful models for how Indigenous history can be used to understand and confront contemporary violences with the intention of creating a thriving Indigenous future. Most importantly, by centering the narratives of Pueblo women, this research argues that in order for decolonizing efforts to be successful they must not only be done at the community level, but also actively prioritize and be led by Native women.
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    Critical Politics in a Neoliberal Institution: Gay and Lesbian Organizing at Swarthmore College, 1988-1993
    (2013) Roseberry-Polier, Ali; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper studies gay and lesbian organizing at Swarthmore as part of national trends of neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and queer politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Students in this period achieved numerous concrete gains and institutional resources, particularly the establishment of an annual gay and lesbian studies conference and the Intercultural Center. In the process, they entered into new coalitions with each other, changing the way that students conceptualized identity and engaged with the school. Change was limited due to Swarthmore’s corporate priorities and the challenges of achieving cultural transformation, but the process of organizing marked a valuable way of relating to the school and envisioning justice.
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    Detroit, Theory, Practice: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Black Power at the Point of Production, 1967-1971
    (2013) Aronoff, Kate; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper examines the work of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as it developed out of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, the city’s prosperous auto industry, the labor movement and the Black Freedom struggle. Heavily influenced by personal experiences in the civil rights and Black Power movements as well as the work of James and Grace Lee Boggs, the League’s leadership cadre created an organizing program unique from that of the Black Panther Party that can provide contemporary activists with an example of intersectional mass movement building informed by a careful attention to conditions and strategy.
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    The Evolution of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in American Cinema and Culture
    (2013) Hackeling, Patrick; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper traces the emergence and progression of cultural representations of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the United States from 1976-1988, as well as their impact on the present day. Due to the ambiguities left behind by the Vietnam War, American cinema became both a coping and exploratory vehicle for the population in the years that followed. Artistic and allegorical at first, the medium quickly shifted to commercially and patriotically driven with the election of President Reagan in 1981. As a result, this history was ostensibly rewritten. However, today, society has matured to a degree where it can look back on these times and better discern where certain inaccuracies might lie.
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    Hostile Forces: The Battle of Hampton Roads and Nineteenth Century America's Industrial Nightmare
    (2010) Stein, Mariel; Dorsey, Bruce; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
    Although primarily thought of as a land-based war, one of the most famous battles of the Civil War was fought on water: the Battle of Hampton Roads, which took place on March 8th and 9th, 1862, commonly understood as the first battle between ironclad warships: the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. However, the true significance of the battle lies not in its tactical or military importance, but in the ways in which it encompassed many of the deeper fears and anxieties involved in the Civil War. These fears and anxieties were centered on the increasing industrialization of nineteenth-century America, and the ways in which new, modem technology linked American society to violence and death. This thesis explores presentations of the Battle of Hampton Roads and its major players (the Monitor and the Virginia) and draws out the ways in which Americans grappled with their nostalgia for the past, their fears and hopes for the future of the United States, and their feelings towards widespread violence and death. The media surveyed in this thesis include contemporary newspaper articles about the battle, mass-produced relief-block lithographic prints, traditional paintings, and the Battle-Pieces poetry of Herman Melville, who more than any other author acknowledged the ways in which Hampton Roads was a harbinger of frightening days to come. By analyzing popular media across genres and from across the United States, this thesis creates a full picture of the fears and hopes of nineteenth century America, including national reunification, Northern industrialism and its relationship to Southern industrialism, and the increasing efficiency and speed of violent death.
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    Immigration, Nationality, and Xenophobia in Late-19th Century Marseilles
    (2013) McNeill, Patrick; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper investigates the “Vêpres Marseillaises,” a June 1881 anti-Italian riot in Marseilles, in order to discuss the intersection of working class nationalism, immigration, and French political and social discourses. The event is more than a simple manifestation of xenophobic nationalism; it is both a moment that illustrates the unique place of Marseilles as well as the inaugural expression of a discourse that sought to bring the working class under the French republican banner.
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    In Radical Defense of Themselves: Women Prison Organizing in the 1975 Raleigh Revolt
    (2013) Jacome, Andrea; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    As an intervention in the limited, male-centric historiography of prisoner organizing in the 1970s, this paper focuses on a weeklong revolt in the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women in 1975 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Developing out of the legacy of North Carolina’s homegrown tradition of Black armed resistance throughout the rise and wane of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the women of the Raleigh Revolt challenged the respectability politics of earlier, dominant forms of Black women’s activism. The women inmates at NCCCW understood and articulated the modern day emergence of mass incarceration as a form of systemic and state-sponsored violence and physically revolted against these conditions in defensive of their livelihoods and dignity. As poor and incarcerated women, their radical public assertion of subjectivity and humanity, documented in their self-produced zine Break de Chains of U$ Slavery, contests the scholarship of prison activism in which incarcerated women are portrayed as passive victims.
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    Knowing Nothing: Labor, Nativism, and Class Divisions in turn-of-the century Pittsburgh
    (2013) Kober, Jay; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper examines the labor movement in Pittsburgh between the years 1892-1919. The labor movement at the turn of the century met new challenges as a new wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe flooded the industrial sector. Organization was difficult due to class division, nativist depictions of immigrants, and management’s concerted effort to keep labor disorganized. These factors coupled with the extensive reach of management’s influence helped prevent any significant gains for organized labor.
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    Let Not a Red Come in Thy Bed: Construction of Hair in 17th Century England
    (2013) Smith, Holly; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper analyzes three seventeenth century English ballads in order to understand the complex factors that contributed to the views and understandings surrounding hair. It was around this time that the view of men and women’s bodies as inversions of each other was beginning to change. The construction of hair in the examined ballads supports the presence of this change.
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    The mass lynching of Italians in 1891 New Orleans: Marking Italians as racially “Dago”
    (2013) Borkowski, Nicholas; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper contextualizes the 1891 mass lynching of Italians in New Orleans as a moment in which Italians in New Orleans are marked as racially “Dago.” This paper draws from historical scholarship on race and nativism to explore how the lynching manifested racial, and to a smaller degree nativist, prejudice towards Italians from everyday mindsets in New Orleans at the time.
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    Native American Military Participation in World War 1: What Kind of Victory?
    (2013) Lipnick, Abigail Rose; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper questions the supposed linkage between Native Americans’ military service in World War 1 (1914-1918) and the Native American Citizenship Act of 1924 that granted citizenship to the remaining 125,000 noncitizen Native Americans living within the territorial limits of the United States. Historians tend to cast the Citizenship Act as a ‘boon,’ a legislative move that advanced Native Americans’ social and political rights and rewarded them for their courageous acts on the battlefield. Within the Native American context, however, citizenship was fraught with far more complex and conflicted meanings than the secondary literature often suggests. Despite Native Americans’ outward displays of U.S. patriotism via wartime service, the Act of 1924, in many ways, cemented Native Americans’ status as an ‘inferior’ race.
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    The Pennsylvania County Fair: A Snapshot of America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
    (2013) Duda, Sarah; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper explores the controversial popularity of horse races at Pennsylvania agricultural fairs at the turn of the twentieth century. While the excitement of horse races and the gambling that surrounded them attracted large crowds to fairs, agriculturists were angered by their detraction from agricultural exhibits and moralists mortified by the gambling.
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    Progressive Ambivalence: Upholding and Upending Tradition in Philadelphia’s First Public Bathhouse
    (2019) Hearn-Desautels, Gabriel; Dorsey, Bruce
    Philadelphia’s first, charity-run public bathhouse was established in 1898 by the Public Baths Association of Philadelphia. By the turn of the century, bathing had become inexorably linked to a series of social beliefs, particularly regarding hygiene, morality, and domesticity. In this paper I examine the development of these beliefs and discuss the ways in which the PBA’s first bathhouse became a site in which they were simultaneously upheld and challenged. In doing so, I hope to shed light on the relatively ambivalent nature of bath reformers’ feelings toward the city’s poor.
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    Remembering “Der Noether”: The Gendered Image and Memory of Women in Mathematics
    (2022) Rak, Gwendolyn; Shokr, Ahmad; Dorsey, Bruce
    German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935) is known today for her contributions to abstract algebra and a 1918 theorem foundational to many theories of physics. She is also remembered as one of the most notable women mathematicians of the early 20th century and a significant figure in the history of women in science. Due to her position as an early female mathematician, her memory has been continually gendered in the decades since her death, reflecting the ways in which the image of the mathematician has frequently been constructed as heroic and masculine.
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    Seward Collins as Provocateur: A New View on Collins’s Fascism and the American Review
    (2013) Becker, Tyler; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper explores a new view of Seward Collins, the publisher of the 1930s journal known as the American Review—as a provocateur par excellence. Normally labeled a “fascist” in historical literature, this paper tries to understand the nuances behind this position. Collins’s supposed fascism presents a historical and epistemological problem for historians, and the paper proposes changing Collins’s label to that of provocateur.
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    The Space Between “Justice” and “Expediency” in Woman’s Suffrage Speech, 1870-1920
    (2013) Lane, Heather; Dorsey, Bruce; Azfar, Farid
    This paper explores the rhetoric of the woman suffrage movement from a historical perspective. It maintains that suffragists were making arguments about justice and rights much more often—and for longer--than previous historians believed, and that such arguments appear to have been relatively useful in arguing for suffrage. It focuses on the late 19th through the very early 20th century, a period in which previous historians have claimed the “justice” argument was growing thin.