Institutional Scholarship :: Browsing by Author "Friedman, Andrew, 1974-"

Browsing by Author "Friedman, Andrew, 1974-"

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A Battle for the Neighborhood: The 1917 Philadelphia Sugar Strike and Food Boycott
(2023) Israel, Jessie; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-; Gerstein, Linda
On February 21, 1917, a group of 40 Eastern European housewives marched in protest down to the Franklin sugar refinery in South Philadelphia. Shouting, “We want food!” the women had come to join the picket line where their husbands and sons stood, on strike from the city’s three sugar refineries. Demanding a living wage and shorter hours, thousands of Polish and Lithuanian workers had walked out three weeks prior and joined the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical socialist union. The spirit of protest soon rippled out into the surrounding neighborhood, when a group of working-class Jewish women announced the start of their own “strike”: a boycott on basic foodstuffs, whose prices had begun to rise since the beginning of World War I. For the following weeks, they rioted in the market streets of their immigrant neighborhood, toppling pushcarts, breaking shop windows, and pouring kerosene over boycotted foods. This thesis uses the 1917 South Philadelphia sugar strike and food boycott as a lens to understand the theories and techniques of urban immigrant organizing in World War I era Philadelphia. I argue that immigrant sugar strikers and food boycotters based their protest on a broad theory of labor which bridged every realm of life, in which both the domestic and industrial spheres afforded the laborer workplace rights. The protestors practiced a hybrid form of protest which was based in a place-based familiarity with the local geography of their neighborhood, ethnic social networks, and American socialist labor organizing traditions. Central to their community ties was food, which held importance in immigrant culture and the local economy, but also whose production (particularly in the case of sugar refining) was rooted in an extractive relationship between the refineries and their surrounding community. The strike and boycott represented a battle for control of the neighborhood, one combatant fighting for localized economic and social reproduction, and the other for international wartime and Progressive-era capitalist interests.
"A Magnificent Desolation" : How the Media Shaped the Space Race 1957 to 1969
(2010) Ross, Casey C.; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
My thesis examines the media's influence on and reflections of American space policy in the context of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. Faced with the challenge of maintaining its global position after World War II in a newly atomic world, the United States placed increasing emphasis on space exploration and technology as a means of achieving military, political, and ideological dominance. Over the course of the 12 years between Sputnik's launch in 1957 and the successful Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, the rhetoric of the Space Race went through three distinct phases. The first, discussed in section one of this paper, emphasized the technological and military threat posed by the Soviet Union. The second, discussed in section two of this paper, emphasized the political and ideological threat posed by the Soviet Union. And the third, discussed in the third section of this paper, emphasized the American spirit of ingenuity and determination. The examination of these phases of media rhetoric reveals the defining characteristics of the American space program, as well as the nuances that exist in the relationships between the press, the populace, and the makers of politics and public opinion in the United States of America.
"Against Training of Fellow Americans ..." The Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944, the FEPC, and Redefining Democracy in the Long Civil Rights Era
(2010) Guy, Alexander W.; Kitroeff, Alexander; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
Algeria and the World Conflict: The Development of American Imperialism and the Preface to Algerian Revolution
(2015) Smith, Alex; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
On November 8, 1942 American and British troops poured onto the beaches of Morocco and Algeria. Representing the first joint military operation between the US and Great Britain during World War II, Operation Torch marked the opening of second fighting front against the European Axis members. Prior to Torch, President Franklin Roosevelt sent Robert D. Murphy, a career State Department official and former chargé d'affaires in Paris and Vichy, as his Special Envoy to French North Africa, to prime the French for an Allied invasion. His charge: to gauge the interest of the Colonial officials to challenge the Vichy collaborationists and form a separate French government in the colonies. Murphy and his American compatriots in North Africa set out to fulfill their goals, but in the process, they developed an American vision of colonial empire. The Americans found a colonial system in North Africa, where racism and oppression defined the life of the French colonizer and the North African colonized. Approaching this system, Americans developed a program and language that redefined the French colonial world in American terms. From 1940 to 1943, while Americans in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia defined their power along racial lines, Algerian nationalist movements began changing their arguments from critiques of the French laws in Algeria to the denial of the entirety of Western colonial ideology. Developed out of Robert Murphy's papers, this thesis outlines where the American presence in North Africa and the newly radicalizing Algerian nationalist movements came into contact with each other, moving away from an American-centric narrative of World War II in North Africa in order to give a new approach to a history of Algerian nationalism.
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL U.S. Imperial Beauty Politics in Hawaii, from WWII to Statehood
(2020) Meyerhoff, Hayle; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-
Using an archive of magazine images, advertisements, film, and oral histories, this thesis argues that constructed ideas of beauty were deployed as disciplinary technologies for the American imperial project in Hawaii. I trace how beauty aided American imperialism in Hawaii through four periods: annexation to the pre-military era (1900-1939), the militarization era (1940-1941), the World War II era (1941-1945), and the lead up to statehood (1946-1959). In the first era, American media presented Hawaii as a white woman's playground. White feminine beauty was used to sell Hawaii, while simultaneously, the depictions of Hawaii were being shifted to accommodate for white women. In 1940, white women disappeared from advertisements, making way for the islands to be represented as a mysterious site of primeval beauty that needed to be carried forward into modernity by a necessary US military occupation. The new constructed vision of Hawaiian beauty borrowed from the white beauty formed in 1930s advertisements, but diverged to be more sexually available for the incoming American military. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was launched into World War II. In this period, beauty politics were renegotiated to protect white womanhood in the context of war, to justify Hawaii and its women as a defendable part of the United States, and to set up Hawaii as a resource for beauty in the post war years. The U.S. government regulated women's bodies, solidifying a hierarchy of beauty based on weight and race that was used to divide labor. Under this hierarchy, white, ‘beautiful' women were assigned higher class work, and ‘non-beautiful' women of color to lower class work. Even as military work established this racial hierarchy, the war period was also a turning point for American perceptions of Hawaii's mixed-race population. Through images of young mixed-race women, American media melted down Hawaii's mixed-race identity into a white-like composite that would make Hawaii incorporable in the statehood era. At the end of the war, the campaign for Hawaiian statehood gained momentum. American media turned back to imaginations of the Hawaiian paradise to entice American support for statehood and reinforce the submissiveness of Hawaii. Whitened images of Hawaiian women claimed American beauty alongside sexuality and strength, offering Hawaii as a new frontier in which white women might be able to find sexual liberation, and freedom beyond the strict American domestic spheres. Through statehood, the extraction of beauty itself became the new impetus for, and tool of, imperialism in Hawaii. By tracing the history of U.S. imperialism in Hawaii through the lens of beauty, I reveal how beauty was a political field of social power constructed by, and mutually constructing, gender, race, and consumerism.
“Arbitrary, capricious, and without reasonable relation to any purpose:” Pérez v. Sharp, Miscegenation Law, and the Interracial Consciousness of Post-War Los Angeles
(2019) Paez-Coombe, Paloma; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In October of 1948, a young interracial couple from Los Angeles won the right to marry, and in doing so overturned California’s state miscegenation law. Andrea Pérez, a Mexican American woman, and Sylvester Davis, an African American man, had originally been denied a marriage license because Mexican Americans were legally considered white under California’s complicated legal system of racial classification, and whites were not allowed to intermarry with other races. The opinion on the case stated that the law was unconstitutional because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that in any case the definitions of race under the law were too vague to be enforceable. The case made visible the extreme arbitrariness of the systems of racial categorization that were used to uphold everything from school segregation to miscegenation law. But despite the pivotal role of Pérez v. Sharp in changing the way that race was defined in the law, it would be another 19 years before Loving v. Virginia (1967) would overturn miscegenation laws at the national level. The case’s radical departure from the traditional race theory that was still accepted in most of the country reflected the specific brand of interracialism that was developing in post-war Los Angeles. The multiracial landscape of L.A. made it a place where the black and white lines that were drawn around race issues in many other parts of the country became blurred and distorted. This thesis examines how a fundamentally multiracial city built a strategically interracial movement that was reflected in a case that called into question the construction of race in America.
Blackface Minstrelsy and the Theater of Empire, 1838-1860
(2019) Johnson, Miranda; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In the early 1830s, blackface minstrelsy burst onto the American entertainment landscape and remained a dominant form of popular culture for the rest of the century. Unsurprisingly then, as the first United States naval voyages sailed into the Pacific Ocean, beginning with the United States Exploring Expedition in 1838, amateur minstrels were often present among the crews. They performed not only for their fellow sailors but also for the people they encountered abroad. This thesis explores the various roles blackface minstrelsy played in the first wave of US maritime imperialism in the Pacific, from the 1830s to the 1850s. It situates blackface minstrelsy within a landscape of other performances of the theatricality of early American imperial ventures in the Pacific, such as performatively brutal acts of violence, military pomp, and diplomatic ceremony in order to examine the ways in which minstrelsy both shaped and reflected how American racial norms impacted the United States’ early imperial ambitions in the Pacific. Through examinations of the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) and the Perry mission to Japan (183-1856), this paper investigates how blackface minstrelsy was deployed in different contexts, and how these differences reflected developments in imperial strategy over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. The U.S. Ex. Ex. performances were not part of any cohesive strategy, but a single element of many, often contradictory, performances of American presence and power. At both Tahiti and Fiji, blackface was performed for a combined audience of Americans and indigenous people. Blackface minstrelsy was initiated by everyday sailors for entertainment value and as an extension or presentation of American culture. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, meanwhile, incorporated blackface minstrelsy as part of a strategy of pageantry in Japan which specifically emphasized representations of blackness as a uniquely American diplomatic currency.
Bridging the Movement: A Geography of the San Francisco Women's Building
(2014) Mayer, Emily; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
This thesis maps the history of the San Francisco Women's Building, the first women-owned and -operated community center in the United States. Telling the chronology of the Building but also situating it within the long narrative of "women's space," this thesis demonstrates how the shape of the Building was the product of particular configurations of feminism arising from the radical proximities of the San Francisco Bay Area. Traversing New Left collectives, women-only conferences, lesbian bars, and small offices, the activists in San Francisco Women's Centers (SFWC), the organization that bought the Building in 1979, sought to use the Building to respond to the possibilities and limitations of the spaces populating the landscape of their lives. Marking a moment in which many groups involved in women's liberation turned to non-profit status, this thesis wrestles with the simultaneous onset of institutionalization and a burgeoning Third World women's critique of separatist space and feminist politics. As this thesis situates the Building at the convergence of these two phenomena, it argues that the shape and place of the Building enabled women to produce a new kind of social and political space unprecedented within the movement. In structuring the staff's daily struggles with the varied dynamics of power and race, the architecture of the Building made possible a truly integrated yet difficult activism that sought to speak directly to those made most vulnerable by the racist and sexist climate of the state in the eighties. While actively displacing many women disillusioned with the premium put on a "correct" way of doing politics, SFWC moved towards a vision of the Building as a haven from a hostile political climate and the embassy of a counter state. By drawing a concurrently narrower and more expansive political map, the Building paved the way for a language of conservative backlash yet also preserved the radicalism of the earlier years of women's liberation. Armed with the privilege of privately owned space, activists at the Building remade the contours of feminist and progressive politics. Illustrating how the San Francisco Women's Building structured a lived experience of a "bridge," this thesis provides a window into the sites that produced and transformed the women's movement into and through the eighties.
"Brought Up Among Their Own People": Mixed Race Families and Custody in the Post-Civil Rights Era
(2020) Garbarini, Brooke; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
Although the United States' legal system has always contended with families which crossed racial boundaries, the legalization of interracial marriage in 1967 and the accompanying civil rights era significantly altered the legal and social status of these families. In the era that followed, family courts across the country struggled to account for the racial composition of these families when they became involved in custody disputes. The mid- to late-1970s and the early-1980s provide a number of informative court cases which dealt with questions about mixed race families in custody disputes. In 1984, one case even rose to the level of the United States Supreme Court. These cases are largely notable for their diversity and inconsistency, so it is difficult to make definitive statements about what these cases demonstrate about race in this period. That said, the cases do reveal a debate about how to evaluate the harms of racial discrimination when determining a child's best interests. While some courts deemed the harms of racial discrimination to be important in deciding a child's living situation, others suggested that ignoring the issue of race would result in better outcomes for both society and for children themselves. Using evolving doctrines of social science and changing terminology, courts did their best to offer definitive legal standards on the use of race in custody cases but, in the end, often left the questions they confronted unanswered.
“But I am not ashamed of any act I have ever done:” the 1880 Apsáalooke (Crow) Delegation to Washington, D.C.
(2018) Cohen, Rosemary Ryden; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In April of 1880, six chiefs and headmen of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Indians traveled in a delegation to Washington, DC to meet with federal officials. In the city, they discussed a proposed land cession that would greatly diminish the Crows’ territory in order to clear land along the Yellowstone River for the Northern Pacific Railroad. The Crow leaders vehemently refused to sell their land and were held as political hostages in the national capital until they finally signed a “compromise” treaty that would wrest roughly one-third of their Western lands as well as transition the Crows from nomadic hunters to sedentary farmers through mandated family land allotments. While in Washington, the delegates occupied a unique positionality in which they were treated at once as honored diplomats and political hostages. They attended high society receptions, toured Mount Vernon, and “negotiated” the future of their people with the federal government. This thesis narrates the nuances of the Crow delegation’s journey to Washington in 1880 with the intention of complicating the historiographic binary of “assimilative” and “resistant” responses to settler colonialism from indigenous groups in the late nineteenth century.
Capitalizing on Socialism: The Berlin Wall and American Victory Culture
(2018) Albertson, Julia; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-; Saler, Bethel
When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Berliners and foreigners alike seized the opportunity to smash, chop, and haul away the barrier that had symbolized the global division of the Cold War for nearly three decades. Through the deliberate and powerful rhetoric of his conservative supporters, the historic destruction was immediately credited to American President Ronald Reagan, and the wall was promptly redefined as a kind of trophy for the broader American victory in the Cold War. Separated from its formerly unified structure, the wall gradually became a more flexible commemorative icon, allowing each segment’s owner to project their personal interpretation of the Cold War’s conclusion onto their specific piece. Over the course of the next decade, these segments emerged across the country to serve as trophies to a seemingly infinite series of secondary victories. From mass suburban sprawl and individual political success to academic prestige and economic freedom, this thesis outlines the evolution of the acquisition of Berlin Wall segments in the United States throughout the 1990s in an effort to illuminate the shifting interpretations of what it meant to win the Cold War.
Classroom Deception: School Civil Defense in Atomic America
(2011) Sills-Takyi, Adrian; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first ever atomic bomb on another country and with it forever changed not only the face of war, but also the very nature of society. As civil defense programs pushed into American culture during the 1950s, many Americans, especially young ones, pushed back against its tactics and message. In this thesis, I will show how school civil defense programs throughout the 1950s and early 1960s deceived young people by presenting them with a false reality of the dangers of nuclear war. This deception was recognized by both teachers and students, and severed a divide between the educational community and the United States Government. Ultimately, this mistrust caused many young people to lose faith in their government, and played a significant role in creating the rebellious, anti-government youth culture that has come to characterize the 1960s and 1970s.
Copper’s Care; Public Welfare, Paternalism, and Worker Expression in a Michigan Company Town
(2023) Lasinsky, Nicholas; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-; Hayton, Darin
This thesis aims to investigate paternalism of the Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Mining Corporation (C&H) through the built environment of Calumet, Michigan, by analyzing the town’s school, library, hospital, and theater between 1870 and 1930. It investigates four “branches” of corporate control—social paternalism, economic paternalism, moral paternalism, and spectacular paternalism—and focuses on one branch for each building. Social paternalism can be understood as C&H’s attempt to control the lives of its workers “from cradle to grave.” In this spirit, C&H tracked the ethnicities of the Washington School’s student body, and used spaces of industrial training to craft a cohort of Americanized laborers perfectly suited to company needs. Economic paternalism is the idea that communal gifts ought to be deployed rationally, with scientific precision. This self-interested analysis was exemplified by the Calumet library, where every book was screened to weed out those which might have encouraged dissident politics, or threatened the business’ bottom line. Moral paternalism is broadly defined as the idea that C&H leveraged built space to shape lived moralities in its favor. Through the C&H Miners’ Hospital, for example, the company was able to reframe violence generated by its own extractive industry as a culture of communal care. Finally, spectacular paternalism was a paternalism of edifice and aesthetics; exemplified in the shining copper chandelier and illumination of the Calumet Theater, this branch acted as a visual progress narrative, one which argued that C&H’s industry—and copper more broadly—was an engine of advancement and modernity for Calumet’s citizens. The thesis also traces wider histories of C&H’s rise and fall, including the formation of the company under President Alexander Agassiz, the 1913 copper district strike, and the subsequent decline of the region’s industrialism. Finally, this thesis strives to go beyond the bare metrics of spatial control in Calumet, elevating instead detailed readings of the everyday resistance and reoccupation which chafed against the grain of company purpose, challenging and reoccupying corporate space.
Crosshair Dreams: Visions of American Character in Somalia, 1992-1993
(2020) Breault, Harry; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In December 1992, the United States invaded Somalia in response to catastrophic famine and violence. Yet, America's humanitarian mission there, Operation Restore Hope, has been remembered far more for how it ended—with the death of eighteen American soldiers in October 1993—than for how it began. A mission that ended in destruction was born in the grand rhetoric of the New World Order. The narrative of the mission was profoundly humanitarian. Today, however, it has been reduced to the war and death captured in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down. Neither narrative is adequate for telling the story of America's intervention in Somalia. The mission was neither manna from heaven nor fire from hell; it was far more complicated and nuanced than either manichaean binaries and social scientific structures could ever capture. The story of the intervention is the story of the American soldiers who carried it out. Yet, in order to understand them, we must reach into the social forces that gave meaning to their lives. This thesis draws on new archival material from these soldiers' lives to accomplish this. In their personal writings, we witness U.S. troops in Somalia forging complex relationships with humanitarian ideology. Bringing humanitarianism into a war zone forced U.S. troops to traverse complex emotional territory. In their attempts to navigate the national moral imperatives of the intervention in Somalia, soldiers brought both honor and disgrace to their country. The mission in Somalia also invoked motifs drawn from throughout American life. At the time of the invasion, only one devastating conflict—the Cold War—had recently ended. The assault on the nation's urban black communities continued, unabated. Indeed, only months before the intervention began, U.S. troops had deployed into the racial battlegrounds of the home front, responding to the Los Angeles riots and to Hurricane Andrew in South Florida. In Somalia, these two conflicts—humanitarian intervention and domestic war—intertwined in troops' minds, exporting American understandings of race, policing, and authority to distant shores. The manifold complexities and contradictions of the intervention crystallized around a court martial case in the spring of 1993. After two Somali boys were shot on the streets of Mogadishu by a Marine named Harry Conde, lawyers, journalists, and fellow Marines met in court to decide questions that went far beyond guilt and innocence. America itself was exposed in Somalia, bunkered in the breach with her guardians. The largest of questions were on the table. What, and why, was America? Who were Americans? And, most importantly, how should both enter the world stage in the post-Cold War era? Throughout the intervention, the nation's soldiers offered an array of answers to this last, crucial question. In Somalia, soldiers tried tapping emotional wells of hate and love in their attempts to process humanitarianism. When confronted with complex social dynamics and a mission to provide stability to the Somali people, they rallied around the banner of authority, modeling themselves after domestic police. And, in the legal domain of the court martial, they adjudicated American morality for the mission, even as they marginalized Somali victims in the process. In word and deed, American soldiers sought ways to understand themselves and the world around them in Somalia. In doing so, they touched profoundly on the moral questions that occupied the nation. During the intervention in Somalia, soldiers did nothing less than test visions of American character for the post-Cold War world.
Dance Floor Democracy: American Bandstand and the Formation of a Youth Body Politic
(2010) Wolfman-Arent, Avi; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
At the end of World War II, America's youth looked with palpable vigor toward the prospect of a peaceful and prosperous future. Buttressed by an air of cautious optimism, America's young people seemed to embody a broader spirit of national renewal. It was in this context of abundance and forward-looking confidence that advertisers first used the term teenager to describe the nation's youths. Through the concept of a teenager advertisers sought to isolate and pursue a group of young consumers made exponentially more powerful by the rising income of their parents. And as the term began to circulate more commonly, Americans engaged in a cultural debate over what exactly the term meant. In this decisive historical moment I detect a major shift in how teenagers defined themselves. Intended as a way to describe the middle step between childhood and the domestic roles of homemaker or breadwinner, the teenager initially fit neatly into a postwar liberal consensus that held the nuclear family unit as its societal keystone. Despite these intentions, however, teenagers began to reformulate and subvert the term's meaning. In the fifteen years after World War II, teenagers increasingly understood themselves and youth culture as something verifiably separate and outside the nuclear family unit. I examine this shift in teenage identity by looking closely at the rock 'n' roll dance show American Bandstand, one of the most influential youth-oriented television programs in broadcasting history. The show first aired in 1952 on WFIL-TV, Philadelphia's local ABC affiliate. Originally known simply as Bandstand, the local installment reinforced a nuclear notion of the teenager. Over time this notion evolved, and changes in the show's format, presentation, and content reflected larger changes in teenage culture. In 1957 the show entered national syndication, and in the following six years American Bandstand developed into a primary outlet for non-nuclear expressions of youth identity. Through American Bandstand I capture a generation pledging their allegiance to the age-restricted domain of adolescence. This generational sense of belonging dulled the prohibitions of an identity based on whiteness, or suburbanness or normative familial roles. This is not to say that the teenager eradicated any of the nefarious "isms" associated with such exclusionary identities, but it did necessarily expose the teenager to certain marginalized groups and lifestyles. It was through the identity of teenager that adolescents on American Bandstand listened to rock 'n' roll music or performed various suggestive dance moves. When young people entered the realm of teenager, they necessarily stepped outside the nuclear family unit and its postwar liberal consensus. And what began as a cultural departure in the late 1950s grew increasingly political as the 1960s began. This union of age transformed into a feeling that the young people understood their world in ways that their adult counterparts did not, and that those same youth had a mission to parlay that vision into action. It was the beginnings of what I call the youth body politic and the teenager was its primary precondition. Before there could be a teenage body politic there had to exist some group that saw itself as separate and bounded by age and age only. As such, the story of American Bandstand is the prehistory of youth politicization.
“Discriminate, but Do Not Persecute”: Mussolini’s Urban Plan for the Jews of Rome
(2015) Sanchez, Meghan; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-; Gerstein, Linda
During the early 1930s, Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini began his urban plan to reconstruct and rebuild Rome to its former ancient glory. Black-and-white photographs were taken to mark each momentous, groundbreaking occasion. These images depict Mussolini and his squads of Fascist youth and political goons traipsing across the ruins and remains of classical Rome. Through reconstruction, he wanted to uncover the great city that was once the capital of the leading empire of Western civilization and graft this legacy onto Fascist Rome. This urban project would create a nation that would be envied by all. While Mussolini sought to use these sites from ancient Rome as a bridge between classical antiquity and the modern capital of Italy, he also reemphasized a relationship between the Romans and Jews that had lain dormant among these ruins, in which Roman Jews from antiquity were not seen as Roman, but as “others” living in a land amongst true Roman citizens. The three sites that I focus on, Largo Argentina, the Roman Forum, and the Theater of Marcellus, are all within a mile of the Roman Jewish ghetto. Mussolini’s urban renewal project uses these sites to separate the revitalized center of Rome from the Jews, and attempts to marginalize them from Italian Fascist history. My thesis uses photographs of the three sites to demonstrate the revival of these ancient spaces and how they separate the Jews from the Roman architectural landscape, which acts as a precursor to the 1938 racial laws implemented to discriminate against the Jews of Italy. Many historians suspect that Mussolini enforced these laws to appease and follow the lead of Nazi Germany, but I claim that anti-Semitism has always been a part of Italian history and this relationship resurfaced in 1930 as a way to align Fascist Italy with its forefathers of classical Rome.
"Family Ties": Operation Babylift, Transnational Adoption, and the Sentimentalism of US and Vietnam Relations (1967-2002)
(2012) Phan, Yen; Smith, Paul J., 1947-; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
On April 3rd, 1975, in light of the military situation in Vietnam, President Ford formally announced the evacuation of Vietnamese orphans lamenting, "We are seeing a great human tragedy as untold numbers of Vietnamese flee the North Vietnamese onslaught. The United States has been doing and will continue to do its utmost to assist these people." This assistance came with $2 million made available to fly 2,000 South Vietnamese orphans to the United States. These airlifts came to be called "Operation Babylift." When the babylift officially ended on May 1st, it transported 2,894 Vietnamese and Cambodian children to America to be adopted into white American homes. The process was described as a humanitarian mission despite the fact that it was under the control of the US Air Force. In my thesis, I aim to explore how Operation Babylift's sentimental language of rescue was established, dispersed, and perpetuated within the context of American and US imagined familial relationship. I argue that through the sentimental language of Operation Babylift, American obscures the systems of military, racial, and economic oppression.
Feelin' the Burn(out): America, Burning Man, and the Birth of Post-Cold War Culture
(2020) Canada, David; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
Between September 1990 and September 1999, the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert expanded its attendance from 90 to 23,000 people, growing from a scattered campsite into Black Rock City, a proclaimed bastion of American counterculture. This thesis posits Burning Man as a cipher for the United States' post-Cold War political, social, and cultural landscape, attributing its meteoric rise to a palliative acceleration of the 1990's outward speculation, inward anxiety, and fixation on historical myth. Conversely, it uses Burning Man to interrogate the period's common historiographical status as a post-Cold War, pre-9/11 cultural interregnum, accentuating the profound affective and imaginative energy present amid its boosterist triumphalism, material and psychic precarity, and postmodern pastiche. Linking it to a locus of cultural, commercial, and state conjecture, this project proposes that Burning Man's foremost cultural origins lay in Silicon Valley's (counter/cyber)-cultural Internet and its libertarian digital utopianism, refining event historiographies that describe its inception through generic countercultural platitudes. Modeling the Internet's commercial scalability through its fusion of social and economic liberalism, the festival mirrors cyberculture's conceptual amenability to dot-com capitalism, demonstrating corporate consolidation as an outgrowth of countercultural ideals, not an external imposition. While the event also showcases internal dissent to this transition, this thesis indicates its profitability and subsequent encouragement of pecuniary interest, underscoring the shortcomings of performative protest under post-Fordist informational capitalism. Identifying a thematic culmination in Burning Man's built environment, the study turns to its digital, nuclear, frontier, mall, and suburban spatial imaginaries to elucidate the relationship between its speculative mode and insurgent historical materiality, emphasizing utopian aspiration's ironic reproduction of gendered, governmental, indigenous, and racial suppression through Nevada and urban planning history. This study utilizes interviews with Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, magazine and newspaper coverage, event-specific press, government paperwork, mock advertisements, site plans, and participant ephemera to construct its portrayal of Burning Man and the 1990s.
"Forward, Sisters, in the Struggle!": Gender Politics in the Young Lords Party, 1969-1976
(2011) Alvarez, Alejandra M.; Beltrán, Cristina; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
1960s America was an era defined by the eruption of an array of political, cultural and social movements. With the intensification of the war in Vietnam and the growing dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Movement's inability to create institutionalized change, students across the country took to the streets, protesting an array of social injustices and demanding change. In the midst of all of this social turmoil and political energy, the young Puerto Rican men and women of the Young Lords Party established themselves as a socialist Puerto Rican nationalist group from 1969 to 1976, focusing much of their efforts on empowering the poor, marginalized, Puerto Rican communities of New York City through their community-based "serve the people" programs. Throughout this thesis, I aim to explore the gender politics and integration of a feminist discourse within the Young Lords Party's revolutionary nationalist rhetoric. I argue that the women of the Young Lords Party initiated a feminist struggle within the party, urging it to incorporate a radical intersectional politics around race, class, sexuality and gender into their nationalist agenda. Due to the multifaceted nature of intersectional identity politics, these women developed a sense of political agency within the party via a complex intersectional way that also simultaneously made it more difficult for them to negotiate their own identity politics. As a paramilitary nationalist organization, the party's militant hypermasculine nationalist rhetoric both furthered and challenged this radical feminist discourse.
From Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan: How the Religious Right Formed to Elect the First Born-Again Christian and Then Turned on Him For Ronald Reagan and the Political Right.
(2010) Crabtree, Robbie; Gerstein, Linda; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
The Religious Right shifted from an organization that backed a candidate who shared their beliefs to one who would take action on social issues. This group that has become such a strong supporter of the political Right once helped elect a liberal progressive Democrat from Georgia. But Ronald Reagan offered them the legislative action they wanted and the group seized the opportunity to form a type of alliance with the political right. This powerful group of Evangelicals looking to change America became known as the Religious Right.

Browsing by Author "Friedman, Andrew, 1974-"

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