Browsing by Subject "Historiography"
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Item A historical study of the teaching of history in American colleges(Texas Tech University, 1978-05) Pruitt, Franklin BoucherNot availableItem Bodies of evidence: the rhetoric of simulated history(2007) Wright, Jaime Lane; Brummett, Barry, 1951-The past and the present are never involved in a fixed relation; they are, in fact, constantly shaping and affecting one another. As we seek to learn more about the past, our perceptions of the present change, and, as we seek to understand more about the present, our approaches to (and explorations of) the past alter. There is a mutually reinforcing rhetorical force to historical investigations and their connections to contemporary ends. Claims about the past set boundaries; when one person (or family or nation) makes a statement about history, rhetorical, social and political lines are drawn. Maneuvering within and between and around those boundaries is the rhetorical practice of historiography; the results of those rhetorical maneuvers are the political practice of historiography. Claims about the past are used to do many things, and this dissertation is about those rhetorical uses and the boundaries that they establish. This dissertation is about the epistemological power of historical rhetoric, the social and political work done in the present by knowledge claims we make about the past. Different ways of talking about the past are both a rhetorical practice (a way to construct believable histories) and a source of knowledge. It is important for rhetorical critics to recognize that the constructions of history are doing something at the same time that they are becoming something for others to use rhetorically, politically, and socially. In this dissertation, I explore four different rhetorics of history: Experienced History, Professional History, Collective Memory, and Simulated History. Suggesting that effective persuasive arguments are shaped and predicted by the cultures from which they stem, I investigate and compare these knowledge claims about the past. Using four rhetorical dimensions (Materiality, Perspective, Standards of Practice, and Silences), I examine how knowledge claims about the past differ, how the methods work rhetorically, and how those different rhetorical powers create distinct understandings of the past.Item Challenging the 'Shiʿi Century': the Fatimids (909-1171), Buyids (945-1055), and the creation of a sectarian narrative of Medieval Islamic history(2013-08) Baker, Christine Danielle; Spellberg, Denise A.; Aghaie, Kamran S; Frazier, Alison; Moin, A. Azfar; Mulder, StephennieThis dissertation focuses on two Shiʿi dynasties of the tenth century, the Fatimid caliphate (909-1171) of Egypt and North Africa and the Buyid Amirate (945-1055) of Iraq and Iran. It traces their rise to power from eighth and ninth-century missionary movements, the ways in which they articulated their right to rule, and reactions to their authority. By bringing the Fatimids and Buyids into a comparative framework, the goal of this dissertation is to challenge the notion of the ‘Shiʿi Century,’ a term used to describe this era, as a label that has needlessly narrowed analyses of this period into binaries of Sunni versus Shiʿi and privileged the urban, elite, Sunni textual tradition over experiences of medieval Muslims that are often discredited as ‘heterodox.’ This dissertation focuses on three aspects of Fatimid and Buyid history that have never been studied together. First, it explores the role of eighth- and ninth-century non-Sunni missionary movements in the conversion and Islamization of the non-urban peripheries of the Middle East, which led to the rise to power of the Fatimid and Buyid dynasties. Second, it analyzes the pragmatic ways that these two Shiʿi dynasties combined multiple forms of authority to articulate their legitimacy in a way that appealed to the heterogeneous populations of the tenth-century Middle East. Third, it compares tenth-century reactions to the rise of these two Shiʿi dynasties with depictions of them from the eleventh century and later, arguing that it was only in retrospect that the story of the tenth century was rewritten ex post facto as a sectarian narrative. By comparing the Fatimids and the Buyids and focusing on contemporary Sunni depictions of these dynasties, this dissertation concludes that the significance of the Shiʿi identity of these two dynasties has been exaggerated. Rather than being only Shiʿi anomalies, these dynasties fit into existing processes in the development of Islamic society.Item Harboring narratives : notes towards a literature of the Mediterranean(2015-08) Lovato, Martino; Tissières, Hélène; Ali, Samer; Bonifazio, Paola; El-Ariss, Tarek; Harlow, Barbara; Bouchard, NormaThrough the reading of several novels and movies produced in Arabic, French, and Italian between the 1980s and the 2000s, in this dissertation I provide a literary and transmedia contribution to the field of Mediterranean studies. Responding to the challenge brought by the regional category of Mediterranean to singular national and linguistic understandings of literature and cinema, I employ a comparative and multidisciplinary methodology to read novels by Baha’ Taher, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Abdelmalek Smari, and movies by film directors Merzak Allouache, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Vittorio De Seta. I define these works as “harboring narratives,” as they engage with the two shores of the Mediterranean in a complex process of interiorization and negotiation, opening routes of meaning across languages, societies and cultures. As they challenge constructions of otherness that materialize in present-day conflicts in the region, the works of these novelists and filmmakers give voice to a perspective on the Mediterranean radically different from that upheld by the “paradigms of discord.” Whereas according to these paradigms there is nothing in the Mediterranean but an iron curtain, these works present migration and conflict, historiography and religion, intimacy and translation as experiences shared across countries and societies in the region. By following routes of meaning that draw together the linguistic, the geographical, the economic, the historical, and the religious, I study how these novelists and filmmakers establish relationships between “horizons of belonging” and “elsewhere,” selfhood and otherness. In so doing, I respond to Kinoshita and Mallette’s call for challenging the “monolingualism” inherent in our contemporary ways of reading linguistic and literary traditions. As I show how the routes of meaning opened by these novelists and filmmakers across the region lead to hope that one day we will rejoice in sharing a common Mediterranean shore, however, I caution against easy enthusiasms. These novelists and filmmakers urge us to respond to the challenge of the present-day conflicts they address in their works, and a shared Mediterranean shore will eventually appear on the horizon only after we overcome monolingual conceptions of selfhood and otherness, setting sail towards a shore we have never seen.Item Hawaiian hula as commercial performance(Texas Tech University, 2004-05) Sitzer, Kelly DawnNot availableItem I don’t want to set the world on fire…or do I? : playing (with) history in Fallout 3(2010-12) Gonzales, Racquel Maria; Kackman, Michael; Kumar, ShantiWhile considering the role of media in shaping and examining histories, we must also grapple with formal limitations in approaching and understanding the past. The thesis aims to bring video games into critical conversations regarding history, memory, and nostalgia by considering the similar and unique perspectives the medium can bring alongside film, television, radio, and literature. Player positionality and interactivity within the unconventional, non-linear game storytelling form allows for different engagements with history. Focusing on the futuristic, post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 (2008), this study interrogates the game’s nuanced presentation of genre as a cultural mediation of the past, the negotiation of memory with history, and our problematic assumptions about technology and narratives of progress. While the study finds games may provide rewarding and potentially critical explorations of history, the self-reflexive nature of video gaming emphasizes the medium’s possibilities, limitations, and implications as a cultural product shaped by the very forces constructing history.Item Insurgent historiographies of planning in marginalized communities : competing Holly Street Power Plant narratives and implications for participatory planning in Austin, Texas(2011-05) Wirsching, Andrea Christina; Sletto, Bjørn; Paterson, Robert G.I am interested in investigating community perceptions of planning processes in marginalized communities. More specifically, through this project I will draw on the concept of insurgent historiography (Sandercock, 1998) to examine community members’ perceptions of planning processes, in particular for environmental justice mitigation in diverse communities. I will explore this topic through the case of the Holly Street Neighborhood and Holly Street Plant Redevelopment in Austin, Texas. Constructed in the 1950’s, the Holly Street Power Plant has served as a symbol of the trials and tribulations of marginalized communities in East Austin: institutionalized segregation, industrialization, and their disproportionate effects on minority communities in Austin. During its time in operation, the plant was reported to have had numerous spills and other detrimental events. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry lists 17 reported events related to the facility (2009). However, a Public Health Assessment conducted by the Texas Department of Health concluded that there was “no apparent public health hazard” associated with the site (Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, 2009). After years of protest, civil lawsuits and investigations, Austin City Council voted to close the Holly Plant in 1995. It was finally taken completely offline in 2007 after approval from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, shifting the community discourse to that of justice and healing: site remediation, decommission and demolition, and redevelopment. By utilizing ethnography and other qualitative research methods, I will document subjugated types of knowledge and memories of this planning process, and, drawing on concepts of insurgent historiography and difference, construct an alternative, insurgent historiography of the Holly redevelopment. I will conclude by discussing the implications of revealing insurgent historiographies for planning in diverse, marginalized communities, and how unlocking such narratives have the potential to improve community participatory planning.Item "Listen to the stories, hear it in the songs" : musical theatre as queer historiography(2010-05) Dvoskin, Michelle Gail; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Wolf, Stacy Ellen; Dolan, Jill; Kackman, Michael; Kearney, Mary; Paredez, DeborahThis dissertation takes musical theatre seriously as a historiographic practice, and considers six musicals that take the past as their subject matter in order to interrogate how these works craft their historical narratives. While there have been studies of historical drama and performance, musicals have generally been left out of that conversation, despite (or perhaps because of) their immense popularity. This project argues that not only can musicals “do” history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call “queer historiography.” While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use “queer” to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals’ queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it. Each chapter uses a different theoretical lens to guide close readings of a pair of thematically linked musicals. The first chapter considers 1776 (1969) and Assassins (1991, 2004) as challenges to official narratives of United States history. My primary lens in this chapter is form, as I analyze how musicals’ structures influence their queer historiographic potential. Chapter 2 examines two musicals that offer histories of U.S. popular culture, Gypsy (1959) and Hairspray (2002), considering how the placement of divas at the center of each show enables a historiography that is feminist as well as queer, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality while making women central to the histories they represent. In the third chapter I look to two musicals, Falsettos (1992) and Elegies: A Song Cycle (2003), which present histories of trauma while featuring overtly gay, lesbian, and queer characters. I use these two texts to theorize how musicals might not simply present history as it “really” was, but also as it might have been, thereby offering what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a “reparative reading” of history. In examining each of my six case studies, I analyze specific performances as well as written texts whenever possible.Item Microhistory: "The scent of human flesh"(Texas Tech University, 1996-05) Ellis, Julie DyessThis study analyzes the historiographical genre of microhistory which has been developed and practiced since the 1970's. While characterized by the use of narrative format to present an analysis of mentalite, the microhistory is controversial for its most remarkable element: an extremely small focus upon a single incident or community. Strongly influenced by interdisciplinary dialogue between history and the social sciences, particularly anthropology, microhistories take a case study approach to the past in order to extrapolate elements of cultural significance. Following a discussion of the historiographical context, including both the Annales school and the concurrent development of specialized Italian methodology, this thesis assesses the characteristics and content of nine microhistories which are representative of contemporary microhistorical scholarship. These are evaluated for type of source, and their effectiveness with handling textual distortions inherent within the source, as well as methodology and successful combination of these elements to produce results of historical relevancy. Microhistories enjoy an unusual position among historical genres as they have attracted much attention from the general public. Although generally applauded as a means of increasing the accessibility of history to non-professional readers, concerns have been voiced that such "popularity" also leads to a degeneration of scholarly value in the pursuit of book sales. This situation is the subject of discussion and suggestions toward possible remedies, including a return to histoire probleme orientation. Finally, future possibilities of the genre are considered in light of the recent interest in textual criticism and developments in the field of anthropology.Item News on film : cinematic historiography in Cuba and Brazil(2016-05) Hahn, Cory A.; Salgado, César Augusto; Ramirez Berg, Charles; Borge, Jason; Leu Moore, Lorraine; Roncador, SoniaThis dissertation is a comparative project that traces the co-evolution of film realism and communications media in Cuba and Brazil. Beginning with the end of Italian Neorealist-inspired movements in both countries in the late 1950s, I examine the ways in which filmmakers from each tradition incorporate radio, print, and televisual journalism into their cinematic narratives. Foundational directors whose bodies of work span and connect the popular filmmaking booms of the 1960s and 1990s—such as Santiago Álvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Eduardo Coutinho—expose the political and technological systems that form public knowledge and guide civic debate. My research dilates on two internationally celebrated periods of film production concurrent with two shifts in news media paradigms: from radio and print journalism to television and from television to the internet. I argue that the renewed interest in news technologies within Cuban and Brazilian films at the beginning of the twenty-first century orients the viewer not to material fact as it is captured on film or coded by digital cameras, but by laying bare the systems of power that control news media content.Item The past in the present and the present in the past : representing history and performing memory on television and in everyday life(2010-05) Rosenheck, Mabel Meigs; Kackman, Michael; Kearney, Mary CelesteMoving from the basic assumption that media and television are vital sites of memory, pivotal spaces in which we learn about the past, this thesis argues that the most productive and progressive representations of the past are those that allow the past to interact with the present. Yet the past is not simply a representation in the present, it is also performed as cultural memory. One of the key concepts here is the idea that if we do indeed find historical knowledge on television and in everyday life as well as in museums and textbooks, then we might apply the concepts, roles and institutions of the museum, concepts like the archive and the curator, to television and historical consciousness in everyday life. Through this logic television programs are archives and audiences are curators, selecting music and fashions from the representation of the past and using them, performing them in everyday life. To explore this, I begin with textual analyses of the television shows American Dreams and Mad Men. Examinations of music and fashion in each show then gives way to inquiries into how the musical and sartorial artifacts contained in each program are brought out into everyday life. While these chapters primarily consider gendered histories and feminist cultural memories, I conclude with a consideration of racial histories, silenced memories and how unique juxtapositions can point to alternative archives and repertoires.Item Storytelling and truthtelling: discursive practices of news-storytelling in Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey(Texas A&M University, 2006-08-16) Park, JungsikFocusing on new-journalistic nonfiction novels by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey, this dissertation conceptualizes the discursive practices of news-storytelling as a necessary matrix of storytelling and truthtelling activities. Despite the dominant postmodern emphasis on storytelling over truthtelling in such disciplines as literature, historiography, journalism, and legal studies, storytelling-in-the-discipline is also constrained by a set of assumptions and practices about what constitutes professional storytelling. Since news-stories report on events in a public arena where numerous competing stories abound, they are highly aware of other neighboring stories and so relate, compete, and negotiate with other stories to make their stories not merely repetitive but argumentative and re-tellable. As a socially regulated and conditioned discourse, news-storytelling in its enterprise is predicated upon different sets of discursive authorities, material conditions, and audience expectations, where various facts and interpretations are argued, tested, and judged. Chapter I briefly surveys the ways in which news-stories?? claim to referentiality is problematized and even stigmatized by the postmodern ethos of storytelling. Chapter II then explores the discursive dynamics of newsstories, which arise from the paradoxical status of being simultaneously news and a story. Particularly, this chapter highlights the discursive practice of ??source marking?? and ??counter-storytelling?? through which news-storytellers foreground their reliability as able researchers, analysts, and contenders. Chapter III discusses the issue of (inter-) textuality in the vectors of storyteller and the world, and examines how news-storytellers draw on, blend into, and counter competing and neighboring stories to situate their own stories in the web of intertextuality and to reinforce the competency, honesty, and quality of their news-stories. Chapter IV is a historical examination of a ??transcript?? mode, a particular discursive practice of news-storytellers, through which they try to uphold the empirical status of their news-stories. Chapter V concludes the dissertation by arguing that news-stories provide a clarifying vantage point from which to understand the transactions of historical discourse, where newsstorytelling replaces (story) knowledge with argument, poetics with rhetoric, and a story with a discourse.Item Translating the discipline : on the institutional memory of German Volkskunde, 1945 to present(2015-05) Randall, Amanda Ziemba; Arens, Katherine, 1953-; Hake, Sabine; Hoberman, John; Pierce, Marc; Nonaka, AngelaThis study examines how Europeanist ethnologists (Volkskundler / Europäische Ethnologen) in Germany (East, West, and reunified) have reconstructed their discipline’s history from the end of World War II to the present. In this treatment, historiography is understood not simply as a discourse, but as a narrative performance by and for parties invested in the discipline. These performances, it will be shown, have real implications for the field’s organizational and epistemic structuring, and vice versa—a symbiosis referred to here as “institutional memory.” The project’s goal is not to produce another history of the discipline, but rather to trace how institutional memory is rewritten or translated (in André Lefevere’s sense) across historical ruptures and in conversation with other social fields (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense). By mapping the disciplinary identities performed by the field’s authorized parties in monographs, articles, programmatic statements, and interviews conducted with three generations of Volkskundler / Europäische Ethnologen, the analysis reveals to what extent the field’s institutional memory aligns with postwar Germany’s ongoing struggle to connect its past with its current national and global identities. Part I considers how the trope of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past) came to dominate institutional memory in West German and post-reunification Volkskunde / Europäische Ethnologie. Parts II and III then consider latent and emergent boundary issues that had been eclipsed by the long shadow of the National Socialist past. Part II examines the dynamics of East German Volkskunde’s institutional memory and the challenge of gathering the two national traditions into a unified institutional memory after national reunification in 1989/90. Part III considers patterns of interdisciplinary and international boundary-crossing and -reinforcement shown to be both latent across the field’s postwar institutional memory and emergent as the field continues to translate its identity in confronting new external pressures. By considering narrative performances of boundary problems as sites of institutional memory in their own right, the final analysis reveals how the preoccupation with the effects of the Nazi era is in fact only one of several possible, concurrent translations of a centuries-old anxiety over the field’s legitimacy as an independent and institutionalized scientific discipline.