Browsing by Subject "20th century"
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Item The aberration of Eritrean secession, 1961-1993(2011-05) Thomas, Charles Girard; Falola, Toyin; Vaughn, James M.Despite its reputation for instability and weak states, the continent of Africa has seen very few attempts at secession. The 1960s saw the early attempts of Katanga and Biafra to split away from their host states, only for these attempts to be crushed in short order. Since then there have only been a handful of notable attempts at secession: the early attempts by the Southern Sudan to split from the North, the secessionist desires of Cabinda to separate from Angola, the Casamance separatists of Senegal, and finally the long and still unrecognized separation of Somaliland from the failed state of Somalia. What is notable is that none of these have borne permanent fruit despite the persistence of the separatist fronts (although the Southern Sudan may now finally be embarking on its own separate existence). In each case, from Katanga to Somaliland, the theoretical state has encountered resistance on the national, regional, and global scale to their existence and have never yet been recognized. However, despite these setbacks, there currently has been one successful secession in Africa: that of Eritrea. Eritrea faced the same political and military difficulties that all other secession attempts have faced in Africa. Their host state of Ethiopia was perhaps the most revered on the continent and throughout the thirty year conflict had the international support of alternatively the United States and the USSR. The Organization of African Unity and its members remained unrelentingly in favor of territorial integrity for all African States. The Eritreans could not even gain regional recognition for their struggle. Despite all of this, they prevailed in their thirty-year struggle for independence. Critical to their success were four interwoven factors that allowed them to overcome those barriers that had stopped their secessionist predecessors: the anomalous history of Eritrea and Ethiopia, the Eritreans' practice of the theories of protracted war, the simultaneous social revolution the Eritreans carried out, and finally the Eritreans' pragmatic relations with their surrounding dissident groups. This work argues that these four central factors were the keys to Eritrea's aberrant and so far unique victory in their struggle for secession.Item The architectural imperative : a dual history of sustainability and informal housing within architectural discourse(2011-05) Taylor, Christine Lynn; Lara, Fernando Luiz; Long, ChristopherThis study is an initial attempt to assemble a dual history of the topics of informal settlements and sustainability within architectural discourse over the past fifty years. During the 1960s and 1970s, architecture adopted a renewed sense of social immediacy, which increased the study into informal and slum settlements, as well as a burgeoning concern of its own ecological impact, which encouraged investigation into sustainable design. While these interests all but disappeared amidst the artistic and political climate of the 1980s, they have again become relevant to architectural discourse, albeit as separate entities. The aim of this study is to unite these two discussions within architecture so that they may together become more potent.Item Beyond sexual satisfaction : pleasure and autonomy in women’s inter-war novels in England and Ireland(2011-05) Bacon, Catherine M.; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Eastman, Caroline; Garrity, JaneMy dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity.Item Cold cuts : visions of refrigerators in United States media, 1942-1968(2011-05) Gansky, Paul Alton; Kackman, Michael; Kearney, MaryAfter World War II in the United States, the household refrigerator and freezer became interwoven into a domestic reality defined by consumption, mechanical innovation, and a tension between spatial isolation and cultural interconnectivity. This thesis positions narrative Hollywood cinema, television and print media as the dominant sites where the refrigerator and freezer’s social identities were formed and negotiated. These productions employ the devices to explore postwar family gender roles, the influence of culture industries and consumer economies within the home, and technological fantasies and fears. They also illustrate a fertile conversation between household media technologies and kitchen accessories. As a result, viewing the refrigerator and freezer through film and television representations substantially alters existing conclusions over who interacted with the objects on an everyday basis, and their effect for a culture increasingly reliant upon appliances to provide basic human needs and generate a satisfying, entertaining lifestyle.Item "A dame to kill for" or "a slut-- worth dying for" : women in the noir of Frank Miller(2011-05) Lamfers, Jordan Scott; Bremen, Brian A.; Kornhaber, DonnaThe depictions of women in film noir and neo-noir have long been objects of interest for feminist scholars. In this report, I extend this scholarship to examine Frank Miller's Sin city graphic novel series as a version of neo-noir that is both intimately connected to noir tradition and innovative in its approach, specifically in terms of his representation of women. Miller depicts his female characters in a variety of ways that reflect both the positive and negative imagery of women in classic noir and neo-noir; in doing so, he creates a new and complex vision of women in noir. This report uses three different characterizations of women in film noir--the spider woman, the femme moderne, and the angel--to explore the ways in which Miller's female characters can be understood to simultaneously uphold and challenge these conventions.Item Daughters of Ruth : enterprising black women in insurance in the New South, 1890s to 1930s(2011-05) Garrett-Scott, Shennette Monique; Walker, Juliet E. K., 1940-The dissertation explores the imbricated nature of race, gender, and class in the field of insurance within the political economy of the New South. It considers how enterprising black women navigated tensions between New South rhetoric and Jim Crow reality as well as sexism and racism within the industry and among their industry peers. It complicates the narrative of black southern labor history that focuses more on women as agricultural laborers, domestics, and factory workers than as enterprising risk takers who sought to counterbalance personal ambition and self-interest with communal empowerment. Insurance organizations within black-run secret fraternal societies and formal black-owned insurance companies emerged as not only powerful symbols of black business achievement by the early decades of the twentieth century but also the most lucrative business sector of the separate black economy. Negro Captains of Industry, a coterie of successful, influential, self-made men, stood at the forefront; they represented the keystone of black economic, social, and political progress. The term invoked a decidedly masculinist image of “legitimate” leadership of black business. Considering fraternal and formal insurance, gender-inscribed rhetoric, shaped by racism and New South ideology, imagined black men as the ideal protectors and providers; women became the objects of protection rather than agents of economic development, job creation, and financial security. The dissertation explores how women operated creatively within and outside of normative expectations of their role in the insurance business. The dissertation considers the role of state regulation and zealous regulators who often targeted insurance organizations and companies, the primary symbols of black business success; in other ways, regulation dramatically improved profitability and stability. The dissertation identifies three key periods: the Pre-Regulatory Era, 1890s to 1906; the Era of Regulation, 1907-World War I; and the Professionalization of Black Insurance, Post-WWI to the Great Depression. It also considers the barriers to black women’s involvement in professional organizations. By the late 1930s, enterprising women in insurance lost ground as fraternal insurance waned in influence and as the strongest proponents of the black separate economy promoted a vision that embraced women as consumers rather than business owners.Item Imaginative appropriation : confronting otherness through the female body in the works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino(2011-05) Abell, Lynn Valerie; Raffa, Guy P.; Bini, DanielaThis report examines the ways in which Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino use images of the foreign woman as other. Specifically, both authors inscribe foreign territories onto the bodies of their female characters in order to confront complex cultural differences. Italy is the site of this gendered inscription in Pavese’s Il carcere, while various real and imagined foreign lands are made female in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili. In Pavese’s novella, the satyr-like Concia and the overly maternal Elena are embodiments of Southern and Northern Italy, respectively, and the failure of the protagonist to form a relationship with either woman represents his failure to assimilate into the mezzogiorno and his simultaneous rejection of northern society. In Calvino’s two works, female characters and attributes are consciously used to embody various foreign countries so that the protagonists may grasp the unknown, both physically and psychologically. By linking woman and terrain, Pavese and Calvino attempt to dominate distant lands, which are otherwise enigmatic and incomprehensible, in the typical Orientalist fashion.Item Interpreting the mourning process through Hindemith's Trauermusik(2011-05) Schumann, Scott Charles; Neumeyer, David; Buhler, JamesPaul Hindemith traveled to London in 1936 intending to give the British premiere of his concerto for viola and chamber orchestra titled Der Schwanendreher on 22 January. The premiere--and much else--was put into question a few minutes before midnight on 20 January 1936, however, when King George V passed away. The next day, Hindemith worked from 11:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. composing Trauermusik (Music of Mourning) for solo viola and string orchestra as a tribute to the recently deceased King of England. Thus, the circumstances surrounding the compositional origin of this piece invite a discussion of mourning in both a historical and musical context. In this paper, I will touch on issues such as how mourning defines us as humans and how emotions associated with mourning can be represented in music and experienced by the listener. I will illustrate how mourning helps us to understand the meaning of Trauermusik when it was written and first performed in 1936, following the death of King George V. To do this I will use Maurice Blanchot's ideas from his La Communauté inavouable, specifically his discussion of how death and mourning help to both define humans and bring them together into a community. Having established this critical framework, I will then provide a hermeneutic reading of Trauermusik, using analytical insights based on Hindemith's use of the 0167 pitch collection as my evidence. At the heart of my thesis is the belief that combining both historical insights and detailed analytical knowledge of Trauermusik will heighten the listener's experience of the piece to a greater extent than either perspective could on its own.Item Leprosy and social exclusion in Italo Calvino’s Il visconte dimezzato and Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa(2011-05) Marcin, Sarah Elizabeth; Raffa, Guy P.; Biow, DouglasThe leper is the ultimate symbol of the social outcast. Plagued by connotations of not just contagion but of sinfulness and moral depravity, lepers have long been stigmatized and excluded from society. The Hebrew Bible declared them to be unclean, and their influence was believed to be wholly corrupting, as if their physical deformities were an external sign of their defiled souls. In the Middle Ages, those diagnosed with leprosy were made to undergo a particularly severe ritual that closely resembled the office of the dead, making them effectively dead to the world. They were then isolated from the healthy population in leprosariums, and their movements and behaviors were strictly controlled. However, their exclusion can be seen as serving a larger purpose than just the protection of normal society from infection in that it can be used by those in power as a mechanism of social control. The imputation of danger to undesirable persons of a given community ensures that they will be duly feared and ostracized. It is within this context that Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco make use of the idea of the leper as a social outlier in their novels, Il visconte dimezzato and Il nome della rosa, as a way to critique certain processes of exclusion, namely the construction and stigmatization of a social “other” as a means of maintaining social order. This report draws on the historical and literary treatments of the leper to discuss the ways in which Calvino and Eco successfully employ the image of the leper to represent the machinery of exclusion and to shed light on the continued marginalization of outcast groups down to the present day.Item "Living in truth" : moral and political intersections in Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Václav Havel(2011-05) Harger, Jennifer Leigh; Friedman, Alan Warren; Kornhaber, DavidOften considered to be apolitical playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard each dedicated dramatic works to dissident Czech playwright (and later President) Václav Havel in the late 1970s and early 1980s—during his imprisonment for his role in writing and distributing the dissident document Charter 77. These dramatic works, with a few others, collectively mark simultaneous, parallel shifts in Beckett’s and Stoppard’s careers toward uncharacteristically explicit political engagement. This report examines these works—Beckett’s Catastrophe and What Where, and Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul—through the lens of Havel’s political philosophy, especially as expressed in his 1978 essay “The power of the powerless.” This report argues that Havel’s model of apolitical resistance to injustice, a model he calls “living in truth,” expresses humanist values that these playwrights had long affirmed in their art. Their shared moral vision, along with sympathy for Havel’s plight under a totalitarian regime that distorted language as a tool of oppression, was the catalyst for their new, direct involvement in political matters. The report establishes the historical context of the Soviet-dominated Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, along with relevant biographical and professional narratives for each figure. It then examines closely this selection of Beckett’s and Stoppard’s dramatic works and their shared thematic concerns, and demonstrates how they artistically embody and communicate Havel’s model of “living in truth.”Item Los silencios fenomenologicos en Soledad Puertolas(Texas Tech University, 2006-05) Pradanos-Garcia, Luis I.; Pérez, Janet; Pereira-Muro, Carmen; Pérez, Genaro J.Los silencios derivados de la perspectiva fragmentaria del uso focalizador del narrador-protagonista genera una abundancia de lo que aqui se ha llamado silencios fenomenologicos que soportan la construccion ficcional de la obra de PuertolasItem Media cold warriors of Operation Pedro Pan : examining the impact of U.S. Cold War rhetoric on contemporary U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba(2011-05) Vail, Meghan Elizabeth; Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna"Media cold warriors of Operation Pedro Pan" is a case study in which I examine the impact of 1960s Cold War rhetoric on contemporary U.S.-Cuba policy. In my report, I contextualize the 1960s covert U.S. endeavor Operation Pedro Pan and draw parallels between the media portrayals of Pedro Pan children from the 60s and the discourse utilized by adult Pedro Panes today to market their immigration experience to contemporary voters and younger generations of Cuban Americans. Operation Pedro Pan was intended to undermine the Castro Government and accomplish democracy in 1960s Cuba. I argue, however, that because of the contemporary publicity surrounding Pedro Panes and their use of the same Cold War rhetoric to characterize their immigration experiences, the children of Operation Pedro Pan will ultimately prevent the same achievement of democracy in Cuba that the covert endeavor purported to accomplish in the 1960s.Item “Mirrors for princes” and kingship in modern Iran(2010-08) Oakes, Summer Cozene; Aghaie, Kamran Scot; Minault, GailThis report examines the legacy of “mirrors for princes” literature, or advice literature for kings, in Iranian political thought, particularly in the modern period. While most scholars have studied ‘mirrors’ literature as a predominantly medieval phenomenon, this report argues that the genre and the ideals of kingship it articulates continued to flourish well into the modern period in Iran. Through an analysis of themes found both in the medieval Persian texts and the ‘mirrors’ composed in the Safavid and Qajar periods, this report demonstrates a remarkable continuity in the genre and in the ideology of kingship throughout centuries of dynastic and structural changes in Iran. Moreover, although the genre of ‘mirrors’ appears to have faded with the Qajar dynasty, this report shows how its ideology of kingship continued to influence the rhetoric of political legitimacy in the Pahlavi period. Muhammad Reza Shah in particular relied on the office of the king and his duties of executing justice and protecting Islam to justify both the necessity of the monarchy and his right to the throne.Item Modernism and the classical tradition(2010-12) Wood, Dafydd Gwilym; Comparative Literature; Wolitz, Seth L.; Cable, Thomas M.; Arens, Katherine M.; Whitbread, Thomas B.; Cooper, Andrew M.; Blevins, JacobThis dissertation seeks to abolish the inherited cliché that the Modernist writers and artists rejected earlier art and literature, particularly that of the classical tradition. In fact, both literature and art of the early 20th century made widespread use of the inherited Greco-Roman tradition in a myriad of ways. Moreover, beginning after the First World War and maturing in the 1920s, a demonstrative Neoclassical “movement” appeared across different types of art and different nations. A neoclassical or classicizing style or form is inherently malleable, an empty signifier that can, through an artist or writer’s emphasis, point towards any number of meanings. This allowed a classical style to become widespread along with its seeming resiliency as the ordered, traditional bedrock of the West. In the 1930s, however, the fascist parties of Germany, France, and Italy began to appropriate the neoclassical as a state- or party-style because of the ease with which politics could be incorporated into a relatively vacant form. Their systematic use of the classical tradition in large part “tainted” classical subjects and styles, which allowed for the post-World War II institutionalization of the avant garde. I argue that texts which used the classical tradition could do so in four distinct manners—four types of classicism. Symbolic Classicism controls its classical material by using it only at the level of hollow icon which pregnantly gestures towards antiquity. Traditional Classicism, like an adaptation of a classical narrative particularly in drama, becomes completely dependent on its borrowings. Formal Classicism borrows an inherited, vacant form which can then be injected with Modernity. Finally, Synthetic Classicism necessitates a careful balancing of the classical material, not reducing it to symbolic meaning, but producing a novel narrative or mirroring-effect, that controls its various elements designed into a modern theme or objective.Item The nature of the marvelous in René Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves(2011-05) Belleroche, Jean Élie, 1968-; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Cauvin, Jean Pierre; Tissi?res, H?l?neMy goal is to study the nature of the Marvelous in René Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes rêves. I want to demonstrate that René Depestre, in his novel, combines a number of surrealist or neo-surrealist premises that have influenced him as a Haitian writer. This goes beyond differences that can be discerned between the "Surrealist marvelous" endorsed by André Breton and the surrealists, and Alejo Capentier's "marvelous real"later proposed by Jacques Stephen Alexis as "marvelous realism" Depestre adapts Haitian natives' perceptions deep-rooted in their historical and social, cultural and religious past and ever-existing political and economical struggle. Taking into account both the surrealist perspective and the Haitian context, I shall address the complexity of the concept of the Marvelous and discuss Depestre's use of "zombification"as a form of metamorphosis, which preserves the mystical nature of Vodou as a religion that syncretizes the Roman Catholic ritual of exorcism of the Christian West and the animist and magical practices inherited from Africa. Scholars have explored the Marvelous and marvelous realism in Depestre's works as a whole, but not in Hadriana dans tous mes rêves specifically. The exclusive nature of this study will show that Depestre draws from Haiti's complex cultural ethos as well as from surrealism'es key principles, to create a hybrid Marvelous typical of Haiti and Depestre'es aesthetic as a writer.Item On the traumatic origins of political community in modern Syria(2011-05) Casey, James Francis Byrne; Di-Capua, Yoav, 1970-This project offers an alternative perspective on the appearance of new forms of political community, types of social solidarities, and intellectual spaces in the French Mandate in Syria. Most previous scholarship on this period pivots on the presumption of once-and-future nationalisms as the driving historical force. The argument here articulates this history by reinscribing it into a wartime and postwar landscape of physical destruction and mass social, intellectual, and economic trauma. Through a close examination of wide variety of French and Arabic primary sources, this project emphasizes the traumatic origins of political communities and solidarities in the space of historic Greater Syria especially the area of the French Mandate of Syria. Arising initially out of the mass physical and institutional destruction of the First World War, this situation was reified by the persistence of manifold forms of French physical, economic, and intellectual violence. While recognizing the eventual nationalist historical outcomes, this project challenges the accepted primacy of its role in defining the historical period it emerged out of. The driving historical force in this period was not an amorphous nationalism but a shattered society’s intense political, social, economic, and intellectual anxieties about their current and future place in a vastly changed world. This defined the political shape Syria would assume and better explains how Syria and the region as a whole arrived at a nationalist historical outcome.Item The perfect storm : violence in Qasim Era Iraq, 1958-1963(2011-05) Moe, Jeffrey Donald; Di-Capua, Yoav, 1970-; Brower, Benjamin C.This thesis explores new ideas for the foundations for state violence in Iraq by looking specifically at the outbreaks of spectacular violence during the Qasim Era (1958-1963). In order to frame the discussion, this study looks first at how the British established a model for state violence during the Monarchy period (1921-1958), which eventually both validated and radicalized the opposition parties. The second chapter examines the violence of the everyday in Iraq, and how the spectacular violence of the Qasim Era finds historical context within everyday violence and ritual. In the final chapter, this thesis discusses how the radicalized violence of the opposition parties melded with the violence of the everyday to create spectacular acts of ritualized violence. After the coup d’état of 8 February 1963, the Ba’ath Party institutionalized this radical new brand of violence, creating a foundation for the state violence to come under Saddam Hussein. This violence was experienced only by the Iraqi Communists at first, but was later experienced by the whole nation.Item Permanent underground : radical sounds and social formations in 20th century American musicking(2012-05) Cline, John F.; Smith, Mark C.; Hagstrom Miller, Karl; Thompson, Shirley; Hoelscher, Steven; Lewis, RandolphMusical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass production-oriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the re-purposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation.Item "The primacy of discourse" : language lessons in Samuel Delany's Hogg(2011-05) Dechavez, Yvette Marie; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Pritchard, Eric D.In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language.Item Protecting Argentina : lawmaking, children and sexual crimes in Buenos Aires, 1853-1921(2011-05) Rahe, Julia Grace; Twinam, Ann, 1946-; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia"Protecting Argentina" explores how the definitions of sexual crimes (rape, seduction, abduction and the corruption of minors) changed in Argentine penal law during the process of congressional codification between 1853 and 1921. It contextualizes an in-depth analysis of legal definitions within the legislative process and the shifting ideologies of criminology that influenced it. It argues that, as nineteenth century positivist criminology replaced Enlightenment-inspired "Classical" criminology, the meaning and foundational presupposition of these crimes shifted from those of their colonial predecessors. Where in colonial times "Acts of lechery" were criminal when committed against chaste women, in the republican era, the law punished "Crimes against honesty" when the victims were children. Liberal lawmakers defined these sexual acts primarily by the age of the victim and secondarily by the violence used in their perpetration. The year 1903 was a watershed in this process, as it marked Positivism's displacement of "Classical" criminology as the guiding ideology of criminal law. These conclusions suggest there were substantive correlations between elite campaigns to ensure the future of the nation by saving children and the codification of national criminal law undertaken by Congress. As argentine elites began to witness what they perceived to be the negative effects of modernization, rapid population growth, industrialization and the accompanying increase in crime, they sought to ensure the future of the nation through "child saving" campaigns. The increasingly age-based definitions of sexual crimes, which aimed to protect young victims, fit within the broader state-led campaign to protect future citizens. "Protecting Argentina" therefore suggests that historians should consider legislative processes of state building as forming an integral part of turn-of-the-century nationalist projects in Latin America. Tying together positivist penology, nationalist discourse, and congressional codification, this report places children at the center of Argentine elites' attempts to ensure the future of the nation through the protection of children.