Recent Graduate Theses

This thesis examines a selection of automobile film advertisements from 1930 to America’s formal declaration of war in 1941 as a means of analyzing the cultural narrative associated with automobile promotion throughout the Great Depression. The films depict the white, working-class male as the model driver and the automobile as a bastion of safety, as well as the key to a prosperous economy. While this shift in the representation of the automobile and its driver can be attributed in part to the reported saturation of the automobile market through the latter part of the 1920s and the economic uncertainty of the 1930s, semiotic analysis of the films indicates that the change was more than an effort to attract prospective consumers. Rather, the films’ idealization of the working class was tailored to present a narrative of motoring that supported automakers and industrial capitalism in a period when both were being challenged.

In May of 1940, a wartime British government arrested those deemed “enemy aliens” and transferred them to safe areas of the country. Over 2000 of these “enemy aliens” were Jewish German and Austrian men. On June 29, 1940, the first group of Jewish refugees was sent to internment camps in Canada. This thesis explores three different examples of memory and community to illustrate the development of the internees’ search for meaning during and post-internment. Artwork created in the camps, a series of letters between ex-internees, and several issues of the Ex-Internees Newsletter are the focus of this study. Social network analysis tools are used to visualize the post-internment internee network. By looking at diverse aspects of the internment narrative, this thesis provides a unique lens into the conversation on memory and history.

This thesis applies Diana Taylor’s concept of repertoire to oral history interviews with ten first generation Irish Canadians living in Winnipeg who emigrated between 1957 and 2012. It argues that traditional performances, such as music and dance, have acquired a provenance with particular histories. This has made them both meaningful and politically contentious expressions of Irish identity. Memory tensions emerged when the performances were integrated into a new repertoire in Canada. Taylor’s concept is modified and applied to embodied encounters with landscape and weather. As experiences of a new place are incorporated into a spatial repertoire, they become infused with emotional significance, and emigrants’ stories about visiting Ireland, surviving Manitoban winters, or driving across flat prairie spaces, communicate feelings of displacement and belonging. Accompanying this thesis is a website which further explores emotional memories in these interviews through an audio exhibit (www.beingirishontheprairies.ca).

During the Second World War, the Mackenzie King government faced two conscription crises, in 1942 and 1944, which divided Canadians along linguistic lines. This is the first academic history to examine the contributions of New Brunswick Acadians to the war effort, and their response to the conscription crises of 1942 and 1944. As a result of their separate identity and historical experiences, the response of Acadians in New Brunswick differed from that of other French Canadians and the anglophone majority. Acadians prided themselves on their participation and support for the war effort and opposed any attempts by anglophones to accuse them of shirking their duty. For them, opposition to conscription and support of the war effort coexisted; as a minority in an anglophone majority province, their opposition was more nuanced than that of Quebec.

The Epistola Alfrici de consuetudine monachorum (Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham) is a monastic customary written in the form of a letter in 1005 CE by Ælfric, a key figure in the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine sphere. Ælfric’s Letter displays a powerful rhetorical strategy, by which Ælfric seeks to influence the emotional community of Anglo-Saxon monasticism in the eleventh century. This thesis explores his rhetorical use of pathos, ethos, and logos in the Letter to show that the layers to Aelfric’s seemingly bland injunctions persuaded the reader, and displayed the emotional community he envisioned for Eynsham. I also argue that while Ælfric’s audience was primarily the monks of Eynsham, the intended audience for this customary included a broader readership of reform-minded monks. The rhetoric presented in the Letter would have resonated with Ælfric’s colleagues from his formative years at Winchester Abbey.

This thesis explores a dark chapter in Ethiopia’s recent history. In 1974, student-led demonstrations overthrew the long-reigning Emperor Haile Selassie; however, the lack of political organization allowed a small group of military men to seize power. The military regime, known as the Provisional Administrative Military Council, or Derg, completely transformed Ethiopian life. Religious, traditional, and social gatherings were fundamental to Ethiopian culture and gave Ethiopians a sense of security and identity. In addition to widespread violence, the government attacked many religious and cultural institutions by prohibiting gatherings, suppressing religious practice and by enforcing a state ban on mourning – all of which was meant to destabilize Ethiopian society. One tradition that appears to have been unaffected by the regime was the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. This thesis examines why the coffee ceremony may have evaded the government’s radar as well as how it became a way for Ethiopians to cope with the social upheaval.

Can the methods of digital, quantitative analysis today be made to communicate with earlier eras of quantitative history? This thesis isolates one database and tests ways in which it can analyze its data to make a meaningful comparison with the quantitative analysis John Beattie performed in the 1980s on records from Surrey and Sussex. I am concerned with what we learn from this process. With certain caveats, a quantitative approach to the Old Bailey records does not generate findings for London that are significantly different than Beattie’s. Even if my current results are to accept the null hypothesis, the importance of “zero” in this case becomes that we now know where not to focus our research – not on looking for statistical difference in crime between these two areas in this period, instead focusing on qualitative data regarding the people who experienced crime in this historical context.

This thesis examines the membership and work of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa from 1898 to 1932. Through commemorations, historical tableaux, exhibitions of artefacts, and the publication, Transactions, they participated in the construction of a nationalist and imperialist collective memory, celebrating connections to the British Empire, a mythologized settler past, and Ottawa’s evolution from lumber town to national capital. Analysis of the origins, class and ethnicity of the Society shows that French-Canadian participation fell and membership broadened as Ottawa became a government town. The thesis describes competition from the male-dominated Bytown Pioneer Association in 1923 over the commemoration of Colonel By, and it posits that the masculinization of the historical profession led the Society to abandon written accounts in Transactions, and focus upon the collection and display of artefacts in the Bytown Museum.

This thesis examines two groups of women who lived and wrote in fin-de-siècle Paris. Marguerite Durand and the contributors to La Fronde used their writing to invade the male sector of journalism and prove they were capable of doing what men could, but doing it for women and without any men involved. Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien used poetry and theatre to remake Sappho’s tradition in a way that prioritized her desire for women and her centrality to Lesbos’s community of women to challenge sexological discourses that posited their own desires as isolating and corrupt. These case studies, taken together for the first time, suggest new lines of historical inquiry into women and how they used different types of writing in resistance to normative discourses that restricted them and their lives in Paris between 1897 and 1910.

This thesis examines the definition of religious orthodoxy promulgated by Peter the Venerable in the Adversus Iudaeos, a twelfth-century anti-Judaic polemic. Scholars have thus far categorized this polemic as a typical and traditional guidebook designed to aid monks in the refutation of Jews using scripture, logical argumentation, and an engagement with post-biblical Jewish holy text (and in this case, the Talmud). Despite this categorization, scholars have neglected to discuss the role of emotions in categorizing Judaism. I argue that Peter uses the emotional rhetoric of disgust to alter the traditional polemical purpose ascribed to it. When Peter compares Jews to “useless vomit”, he suggests that a Jewish way of thinking is filthy and worthy of disgust. These acts allow Peter the ability to unify and define his own version of Christian thought, and contrast it with the framework of thinking adopted by his rival monastic group, the Cistercians.

In this essay and documentary film, I explore the notion of “Chineseness” in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) through the lived experiences of Chinese diaspora in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area. I conducted an oral history project with eight individuals who shared their perceptions and memories of TCM. I interpret their stories through the theoretical frameworks of diaspora, affect, and performance, and situate them within the translocal history of TCM from China to its cultural peripheries. I argue that Chineseness emerges in liminal spaces and is narrated and negotiated in uneven and sometimes contradictory ways and explore ways TCM inscribes and transmits cultural knowledge in family. This inquiry has implications for policymakers and change makers who are able to integrate cross-cultural perceptions and practices into private and public healthcare systems in Ontario.

This thesis focuses on the “Four Wars of 1812,” or simply 1812, exhibit produced by the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, open to the general public from 13 June 2012 to 6 January 2013.  An investigation of museum documents, academic literature and news media, viewer feedback, and interviews with museum staff involved with the project has been conducted. Examined here are exhibit development, approach, and content, as well as public responses to the exhibit, government policy, museum practice, and a national conversation about war and peace in the context of the Bicentennial of the War of 1812. The thesis concludes that the CWM successfully walked a tightrope, aware of but avoiding politics and controversy while appealing to a wide audience and fulfilling the museum’s responsibilities to stakeholders and scholarship.

This thesis examines three Roman Catholic congregations of women, the Congregation de Notre-Dame, the Religious Hospitallers of Saint Joseph, and the Sisters of Providence, and the services they provided between 1841 and 1874 in Kingston, Canada West and Ontario. A careful reading of the personal written records of Kingston’s women religious, informed by gender analysis, reveals their role in the building of hospitals, schools, and orphanages, and their dedication to bettering the lives of the disadvantaged and indigent. These contributions aligned with the larger goals of the provincial government and ecclesiastical authorities. Kingston’s women religious established multiple institutions, faced unspeakable risks to their health, and overcame overt anti-Catholicism in carrying out and expanding the city’s social services.

Changes occurred to the writing of History in eighteenth-century Scotland. Dissatisfied with traditional historical priorities, eighteenth-century Scottish historians changed the focus of their writing to reflect what they felt was more relevant to contemporary sensibilities, giving new importance to the social aspects of daily life, the inward life of the sentiments, and the history of manners. The long-standing historiographical model of the classical tradition, which had given precedence to the history of kings, public affairs and the political, gave way to a variety of new historical genres. This refocusing of historiographical emphasis was a response to a vibrant commercial society, to the era’s social interests, to the period’s predilection for delicate sensibilities and refined feelings, and to a burgeoning middle class.

One of these new genres of historical writing was called  conjectural history. A uniquely inventive eighteenth-century discursive form, conjectural history was unlike traditional history in methodology, and was differentiated by its ability to surmount traditional history’s intrinsic boundaries. Conjectural history inferred and speculated, as it strove to better understand the fundamental principles of human nature. Based on these changes to historical writing, this study asks a methodological question, and it looks at several different examples of the various historical genres being written at this time.

The new government of Pierre Trudeau was faced with an international crisis when, on 20 August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. This study is the first full account of the Canadian government’s response based on an examination of the archival records of the Departments of External Affairs, National Defence, Manpower and Immigration, and the Privy Council Office. Underlying the government’s reaction were differences of opinion about Canada’s approach to the Cold War, its role at the United Nations and in NATO, the utility of the Department of External Affairs, and decisions about refugees. There was a delusory quality to each of these perspectives. In the end, an inexperienced government failed to heed some of the more competent advice it received concerning how best to meet Canada’s interests during the crisis. National interest was an understandable objective, but in this case, it was pursued at Czechoslovakia’s expense.

I argue that mobility and ideas of New Womanhood were mutually constitutive by the late nineteenth century onwards. Through Isabella Bird’s writing and biographies, I find that she, and by extension others of the fin-de-siècle, connected mobility with Christianity and modernity in a Western imperialist context. Her biographers are discussed as representatives of each generation’s feminist view of New Women. I focus on Bird’s writing about Korea, where she advocated missionaries and views on race and Orientalism in ways that were not simply echoes of contemporary British jingoist ideas. For example, she concluded that Russia should take over Korea after the First Sino-Japanese War. Studying Bird reevaluates and historicizes the definition of New Womanhood by emphasizing how privileges of mobility and Christian missionizing were assumptions built into fin-de-siècle writing by “New Women,” despite how late thinkers characterized them as secular progressives, like the feminist movement.

From 1941 to 1943, incidents in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War seemed to bring the conflict closer and closer to the shores of British Columbia. Anxieties about a potential Japanese attack began to grow. British Columbia’s newspapers discussed fear and anxiety through their articles, editorials and opinion pieces, bringing together the thoughts and words of Canada’s military and government officials, and the writers and readers of the newspapers. The newspaper pieces dealing with the potential threat appeared most frequently surrounding major events in the Pacific, notably the attack on Pearl Harbor, the shelling of Estevan Point, and the Japanese occupation of the Aleutian Islands. Fear and threat were presented, debated, and reshaped within these newspaper communities. As the nature of the Japanese threat evolved with each major incident in the Pacific, so too did the discussions of fear.

This thesis explores the shifting human perceptions of wildlife in Gatineau Park, Quebec, from 1938 to 1958, and argues that these views came into conflict with the actual animals that roamed there. It draws upon records of the Federal District Commission, animal studies methodology, and naturalists’ field observations to demonstrate that non-human animals, as much as human animals, shaped the conservation practices that developed in the park. White-tailed deer and their predators frustrated attempts to order and classify them as they transgressed physical and conceptual boundaries: deer were domesticated, farm dogs went wild, and “brush wolves” challenged taxonomic boundaries by breeding with coyotes. Upon their reintroduction beavers “destroyed” park landscapes, defying Grey Owl’s construction of the beaver as a symbol of wildlife conservation. These encounters with animals challenged the expectations of rural residents, park visitors, and the Ottawa Ski Club who called for the removal of troublesome beavers and wolves.

This thesis focuses on the Merchant Navy’s redress campaign and appraises shifting government attitudes towards the mariners in veterans’ legislation. It traces the wartime experience of the mariners and discusses their postwar treatment. By examining the factors that contributed to the mariners’ initial exclusion as veterans, this study sheds light on the complex process whereby the state evaluates and then reassesses what is owed to those who serve. It demonstrates that concepts of “veteranhood” are fluid, and, that in the case of the Merchant Navy, once neglected wartime narratives can be reincorporated into the nation’s military past. In the case of the Merchant Navy, renewed public engagement with Canada’s social memory of its involvement in two world wars helped the merchant seamen find an audience willing to validate their claims. This study of Merchant Navy redress serves as an exploration into the nature of the state-veteran relationship.

Despite the growing national interest and body of literature concerning the Indian Residential School System, there has been little acknowledgement of the history of hockey within these schools. This thesis is an examination of hockey programs at three Protestant-run Indian residential schools in northwestern Ontario and western Manitoba during the middle of the twentieth century. By using church and government documents, this study highlights the complex relationship between settler colonialism, sport, and Indigenous survival. It reveals that while hockey was implemented into residential school curriculum as a means of assimilation, public relations, and eventually integration, it was also a space of negotiation, entertainment, identity, and even survival for Indigenous children within these schools. Microlevel decisions and effects greatly influenced the advancement of hockey from a local-level disciplinary technique to a federally mandated aspect of Indian education.

This thesis was completed in order to analyze how Carleton University has viewed accessibility during its history. It will do so by using two theoretical perspectives of disability, the medical and social models. They will be used to demonstrate how Carleton University has gone about building not only its physical infrastructure but also policy for its intellectual infrastructure under influence of the medical model. It first looks at how Carleton built its reputation of being one of Canada’s most accessible post secondary institutions. To understand this a number of different sources were put to use. Along with standard secondary sources, such as books and journal articles, this thesis also contains a series of interviews, an accessibility audit, and personal vignettes. These interviews and vignettes are excellent tools to demonstrate how Carleton has shifted its focus of accessibility away from physical and towards cognitive disabilities.

This thesis explores the cowboy as an iconic figure of white masculinity in the middle-class in 1950s America, focusing on film and advertising as a means of interpreting images of idealized manhood. It explores films including High Noon, Rio Bravo, and The Searchers, as well as print advertising from Levi’s and Marlboro, to juxtapose different projections of masculinity. It finds that, contrary to expectation, the cowboy was not just a singular image of stoicism and martial power, opposed to domesticity and consumerism. Instead, he was more of a language through which different values could be expressed. This creates an intriguingly contradictory image: the cowboy is domesticity and anti-domesticity, invincibility and anxiety, fashion and anti-fashion, and a relic of America’s past and the herald of its future all at once. In this regard he becomes a surrogate for diverse masculinities interacting on the backdrop of the early Cold War.

This thesis demonstrates that legislation introduced by the National Party of South Africa between 1950 and 1988 was ineffective in subduing the exchange of homoerotic commodities. Ultimately, the quantitative and qualitative methodology used in this thesis reveals that despite increased regulation, some same-sex desiring men in South Africa had the means to participate in a transnational network of exchange. This transient network of commodities and images created a community beyond borders and boundaries that resisted regulation and created a space for like-minded individuals to communicate.
Methodologically, this thesis is a composite of macro- and micro-history that navigates contentious issues with cultural history and simultaneously addresses some limitations of visualizing data in this manner. Collections from the Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) archive in Johannesburg, South Africa are digitized and processed to visualize two different commodity networks (http://dangerdeviancyanddesire.com). Associated correspondence, editorials, newspaper clippings, and oral histories corroborate these visualizations.

Throughout the Cold War, the world lived with the fear that international tensions might lead to the outbreak of a devastating nuclear conflict. This fear drove Canadian policy makers to pursue civil defence, which entailed the organization of local communities and patriotic citizens to assist with the defence of their country by preparing for a nuclear conflict. Ottawa, as the national capital, was a possible target of a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. From 1950-1962, the high watermark of civil defence, the city uneasily managed to reconcile the competing interests of stakeholders and the public with its civic responsibilities, evolving circumstances, and changeable federal policies. In the end, however, municipal squabbling pushed balance over the line into imbalance, and Ottawa’s civil defence program came crashing down.

This work explores shifting attitudes about aging in the first half of the twentieth century by tracing the rise of four figures, and by examining discussions that surrounded their work on aging in the press. Bacteriologist Élie Metchnikoff, food scientist Gayelord Hauser, and advice columnists Josephine Lowman and Elizabeth Thompson were seen as authorities on their subjects and wrote during a period of significant change: increased longevity, the advent of retirement, and growing scientific interest in aging produced a plethora of press discussion that plunged into the “problem” of old age. Their ‘prescriptions’ captivated attention in both Canada and the United States, illustrating the growing search for management and improvement that dominated discussions of aging. It is argued that while aging became the specialization of experts who studied it objectively, popular messages relayed that there was an “art” to growing old, its success determined by preparation, attitude, and personal will.

This thesis uses documents from the Department of Defence and the Department of External Affairs to analyze the 1987 White Paper on Defence and the changes in defence priorities in the period 1987-1993. The purpose of the White Paper was to improve the functionality of Canada’s military, offer a full commitment to NATO, and portray Canada as a good ally. The end of the Cold War in 1989-1991 and a deep recession from 1989-1992 forced the government to reduce the military budget, and the White Paper policies never reached fruition. Canada’s NATO allies valued Canada’s forces in Europe, and the government was initially willing to fund a Task Force in Europe. The decision in 1992 to cancel the Task Force and focus on the core capabilities of the military damaged Canada-NATO relations, but Canada continued to be a contributing member of the alliance and a player in European security.

Working alongside Adolf Hitler, architect Albert Speer pioneered his theory of Ruinenwert, or “ruin value”, which was employed in the design of monumental architectural projects. These structures were designed to evoke imagery of the Nazi’s contemporary power and ideology and were created to function as lieux de mémoire (“places of memory”) for subsequent generations of Aryans, providing heroic ruins for a future audience imagined as both bearers of the regime’s cultural legacy and witness to its destruction. The regime itself was understood to possess the contradictory qualities of the eternal and terminal, and its architecture was to reflect this. Little attention has been given to contextualizing the architecture of temporality National Socialism within the regime’s greater culture of future-mindedness. This work seeks to establish connections between existing discussions of National Socialist architectural futurity and those that explore the regime’s fascination with its own future more broadly.