History

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 51
  • Item
    Superdome Services, Inc.: Tracing the Convergence Between Black Enterprise and Neoliberalism in a Post-Civil Rights Era New Orleans, 1974-1977
    (2022) Pantini, Daniel
    Utilizing records drawn from New Orleans’ Times Picayune and Louisiana Weekly newspapers, this research paper will attempt to explore early manifestations of neoliberalism during the 1970s Superdome controversy. In 1974 a predominantly-Black firm, Superdome Services, Inc. (SSI) was awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to manage the new Superdome, making them the largest Black-owned public contractor in the country. Within 3 years, political and media campaigns emphasizing on the company and its leaders’ alleged incompetence, theft, and criminality led to the cancellation of their contract and privatization of Superdome management. This paper will attempt to relate the press coverage of this era to early developments in neoliberalism its relation to racial politics, demonstrating how neoliberal rhetoric and ideology successfully infiltrated public figures across the political divide.
  • Item
    Korean Transnational Adoption as an Act of Violence
    (2022) Titcomb, Isabelle
    Building on an emergent  eld of critical adoption studies, this paper traces the transformation of the Korean orphan into adoptee through the army camp, orphanage, women’s magazine, and family. In doing so, it demonstrates how Korean transnational adoption stood at the nexus of discourses concerning U.S. militarism, American consumerism, Cold War Orientalism, and white heternormative kinship formation. It concludes that adoption was not the radical act that its architects heralded it to be, rather it reproduced and rei ed pre-existing notions of race, gender, and sexuality founded in Orientalism.
  • Item
    Remembering “Der Noether”: The Gendered Image and Memory of Women in Mathematics
    (2022) Rak, Gwendolyn; Shokr, Ahmad; Dorsey, Bruce
    German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935) is known today for her contributions to abstract algebra and a 1918 theorem foundational to many theories of physics. She is also remembered as one of the most notable women mathematicians of the early 20th century and a significant figure in the history of women in science. Due to her position as an early female mathematician, her memory has been continually gendered in the decades since her death, reflecting the ways in which the image of the mathematician has frequently been constructed as heroic and masculine.
  • Item
    “Either on Account of Sex or Color”: Policing the Boundaries of the Medical Profession During Reconstruction
    (2022) Lloyd-Jones, Adam
    In 1868, the American Medical Association (AMA) was asked to permit consultation with female physicians and admit them as delegates. In 1870, a delegation of Black doctors sought entrance to an Annual AMA meeting. The AMA refused entrance to both female and Black physicians. This paper argues that these meetings, and the question of inclusion for Black and female practitioners, arose out of the political climate that Reconstruction created. Expanding from previous scholarship, this paper further analyzes the role of Chicago doctor Nathan Smith Davis in the perpetuation of a white medical profession.
  • Item
    “The Music Did All the Talking:” Community, Resistance, and Improvisation in Louis Armstrong’s Cultural Diplomacy
    (2022) Posel, Leo
    This paper examines the many meanings and implications of Louis Armstrong’s role in the Jazz Ambassadors program, and his tours of West and Central Africa in the 1950’s and 60’s. Specifically, I argue that musical evidence is crucially important in a comprehensive understanding of this program, as well as the politics of creating and consuming Black American music at this time. By relying on live recordings, documentary footage, and radio interviews as well as a rich historiography that relates this music with American Cold War culture, I demonstrate the underlying connections between Armstrong’s performances and American notions of race, diaspora, and community that lie both against and beyond an analysis of state power.