Browsing by Author "Stephens, Robert P."
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- A Catalyst for the Development of Human Rights: German Internment Practices in the First World War,1914-1929Vick, Alison Marie (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-17)This thesis is a transnational study of the military actions and responses related to prisoners of war in World War I. Building on the works human rights scholars, I explore the how the collective rights afforded to prisoners of war under the 1906 Geneva Convention and 1907 Hague Convention served as a precursor to the concept of human rights that emerged after World War II. I argue that German military treated prisoners of war according to national interest, rather than international law. Specifically, I explore how the concepts of "military necessity" and "reciprocity" drove German internment practices, and how German internment practices escalated in violence during the last two years of the war. The violent practices committed by the Germans against prisoners of war produced an international demand to hold the perpetrators of wartime atrocities accountable for their actions in the postwar period.
- An Inconvenient Coalition: Climate Change and Democratic Party Elite Discourse on Class, 1988-2008Wheeler, Zachariah William (Virginia Tech, 2022-05-04)This dissertation uses Critical Discourse Analysis to study debates among elite members and affiliates of the Democratic Party from 1988-2008 on class issues and their relevance to the party's environmental agenda. This research builds off of several related historical and theoretical accounts (both primary and secondary) of new social and economic divisions between college-educated and non-college educated workers that have shaped American politics since the 1970s. I focus on how Democratic interest in environmentalism changed as a 'professional-managerial-class' or 'new class' supplanted unionized, industrial workers as the primary social base of the Democratic party. I trace how related people and groups associated with the party understood the relevance of these different classes to consolidating enduring electoral power, and how these informed specific arguments for what ideological views or policy proposals the party should publicly embrace. Furthermore, I identify 'green' narratives related to environmental protection, as an emerging thematic framework that some Democrats felt could help them build a coalition based primarily around support from educated, white-collar workers. I contend that the ideological character of the party's environmental rhetoric, as articulated in this debate, has been influenced mostly by attempts to tailor the party's agenda to the perceived sensibilities of the college-educated, rather than the older working-class base. My analysis proposes three overarching core concepts most often ascribed to the professional class and its members' ideological disposition. I use the discursive method described above to explore their relationship to the framing of the climate issue and its connection to broader ideological values. These are (A) Meritocracy (B) Technocratic Rationality, and (C) Individualism. I argue these professional-oriented climate narratives can be understood as adapting the conceptual reasoning of an older liberal tradition to the structural conditions of the post-70s, globalized economy. Specifically, that the frequent emphasis on these three concepts implicit to the PMC-centric discourse is consistent with a liberal view of freedom as 'non-interference', and a related hostility to democratic interventions into the market. This ideological analysis is significant to the dissertation's focus on framings of climate change because an account this conceptual logic reveals the potential limits of the Democrats' efforts to create majoritarian, political support for environmental protection.
- Market Challenges to Democracy: The Political Economy of Hyman P. MinskyKirsch, Robert Emmanuel (Virginia Tech, 2012-07-11)This dissertation seeks to reengage the field of political economy to establish a political response to financial crisis, as well as the resulting social crisis of everyday life, using the political economy of Hyman P. Minsky. As an academic field, political economy is in a strange kind of limbo. The separation of politics and economics is easy enough to see, and even within economics, there is another cleavage between economics proper and the history of economics. This yields some very strange conjectures about what it means to be an "economist," and how things can be a matter for either economic "policy" or "political economy" as if these categories were all jumbled up in a grab bag of available methodologies. This dissertation seeks to carve out some intellectual terrain in what can be called political economy by engaging in an interdisciplinary way, inspired by Minsky, in order to offer a cogent political analysis of financial crises. Minsky gives five possible definitions for political economy: the discipline of Economics, a code name for Marxism, rational choice theory of profit maximization, the management of macroeconomic policy, and finally an interdisciplinary view of political economy that works in concert with other social sciences and humanities in order to identify and remedy social ills such as unemployment and poverty. The reading of Minsky in this dissertation is thus in an explicitly political way in order to bridge the gap between various kinds of economics and the various social sciences. By analyzing and critiquing each of these possible definitions of political economy, it becomes clear that a properly social definition of political economy is the final, interdisciplinary one. This dissertation argues that Minsky had a "preanalytic vision" of the kind of society he wished his political economy to yield, and is a first step in fleshing out a political program for that vision.
- The Political Economy of Transpositions: A Study of the Eurozone CrisisEngel, Sascha (Virginia Tech, 2016-03-16)This study offers a reinterpretation of the so-called Eurozone crisis, arguing that its crisis character is overstated and that it is rather a normal stage in the process of European banking sector integration. Particularly, I maintain that it is neither a sovereign debt crisis caused by profligate peripheral governments, nor a crisis of the Eurozone's common monetary policy. Nor, however, are the Eurozone's low growth, high unemployment, and economic and political instability deliberate policies, whether by German or Greek governments, European institutions, or the European banking circuitry. Rather, I trace the Eurozone's low growth and high unemployment back to what I call transpositions. Transpositions change the possible boundaries of perceiving political and economic situations by altering the syntagmatic structure governing their intelligibility. The shift from 2003-2007 'boom times' to post-2007 'times of crisis' is one such transposition, which occurs behind the backs of human actors and thus forms the horizon of possible behavior of market and political actors. The Eurozone's 'crisis' transposition, results in differentiations within the asset class of Euro-denominated sovereign debt between a 'core,' comprising Germany, Austria, Latvia, and Finland, among others, and a 'periphery,' encompassing Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus. It follows that the solvency of Eurozone member states is a derivative function of banking sector liquidity, reversing the conventional 'sovereign debt crisis' explanation to what I call the country-fundamental transposition. The second transposition I explore is the austerity transposition. I maintain that the Eurozone's real economy is more interconnected than conventional narratives of European economic unification allow, and that supposedly national European economies – including particularly that of Germany – are integrated subcircuits of Europe's real economy. Constituting them as supposedly national economies is itself a transposition, necessary for the preservation of the European banking circuitry's interconnected balance sheets. Yet, the austerity transposition goes further, beyond a form of political economy oriented towards growth and sustainability, and into a moral economy of condemnation differentiating between morally virtuous and morally pernicious economies in the Eurozone. Its destructive effects are therefore neither irrational nor the result of a German hegemonic agenda, but that of the Eurozone's post-2007 syntagmatic structure.
- Should Women Vote?Ewing, E. Thomas; Gumbert, Heather L.; Hicks, David; Lehr, Jane L.; Nelson, Amy; Stephens, Robert P. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2008)History Practice: Using Cartoons to Teach the Suffrage Campaign in European History
- Violent Actors and Embedded Power: Exploring the Evolving Roles of Dons in JamaicaBlake, Damion Keith (Virginia Tech, 2012-12-11)The Jamaican don is a non-state actor who wields considerable power and control inside that nation's garrison communities. A don is a male figure, usually from the community in which he plays a leadership role. Garrisons in Jamaica have often emerged as neighborhoods that are don-ruled shadow versions of the official State. These are poor inner city communities characterized by homogeneous and, in some cases, over-voting patterns for one of Jamaica's two major political parties: the Peoples National Party (PNP) or the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP). This dissertation explores the major roles dons played in Jamaican garrisons. It focused on one community in the downtown metro area of one of the nation's cities. Additionally, it investigated the factors that account for the evolution of such roles performed by dons from the 1960s to the present. I used governance theories and the concept of embeddedness as an analytic framework to interpret the power and authority dons have in garrisons. Dons, as it turned out, perform four central roles in garrisons: security/protection, social welfare, partisan mobilization and law, order and conflict resolution via "jungle justice" measures. Different types of dons perform alternate mixes of these roles. The case study described here led me to develop a taxonomy of these informal community leaders by separating them into Mega, Area and Street Dons. I argue overall that dons are embedded governing authorities in Jamaican garrisons based on the socio-economic and political roles they carry out. By examining the responsibilities of dons in Jamaica, this analysis contributes to the literature on the activities of non-state criminal actors and their forms of influence on governance processes. The study suggests that it may now be appropriate to re-think the nature of governance and the actors we broadly assume are legitimate holders of power and authority in developing nation contexts.
- Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, vol 2, full issueLennon, Heather; Aiken, Erica; Cardwell, Grace; Bolt, Carmen; Bolton, Emily; Burton, Luke; Drews, Kelly (Virginia Tech Department of History, 2013-05-01)Full issue of volume 2
- Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, vol 3, full issueAiken, Erica; Seabrook, Tom; Heath, Victoria; Serlin, Devin; Alcorn, Adam; Gipe, Will; Hemmingson, Grace (Virginia Tech Department of History, 2014-05-01)
- Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, vol. 4, full issueSeabrook, Thomas R.; Skiles, Faith; Ledesma, Andrea; Ingalls, Danielle; Pope, Anna; Cherry, Earl K. Jr.; Gomulkiewicz, Abigail; Sykes, Morgan; Goatley, Rachel (Virginia Tech Department of History, 2015-05-01)Full issue
- Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, vol. 5, full issueBoggs, Eleanor; Caprice, Kevin; Cooper, Kelly; Giesy, Beck; Howell, Courtney; Lash, Molly; Litvak, Derek; Snyder, Rachel; Shank, Ian; Skiles, Faith (Virginia Tech Department of History, 2016-04-25)This edition of the Review contains six outstanding articles, beginning with Tyler Abt’s On Sands Stained Red. Abt takes a bottom-up approach to examining the successes and failures encountered by the American troops on Omaha beach during the Normandy invasion. In his paper, Abt argues that success was jeopardized due to poor planning from top military officials, and victory was only won through the poise and courage of low ranking troops. Next, Virginia Tech Alumnaus Nancy Fowlkes Mason takes us to China in her cross-cultural look at American home economists’ work in the country between the 1920s and 1940s. Fowlkes Mason shows that the home economists she studied prioritized scientific ideas about home economics over the cultural practices of both Chinese and American societies. Ellen Boggs continues our look into history outside of the United States in her article on UNESCO’s involvement in efforts to save the Buddhas at Bamiyan from destruction by the Taliban. Boggs shows that the Taliban’s religious agenda, determination to gain international recognition, and influence from Al-Qaeda blocked the international agency’s efforts. Elyse Sulkey, from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill provides an historical/literary analysis of the transformation of thought in Benedictine monk Guibert of Nogent from anti-Judaic clerical sentiments in his early work to anti-Semitic rhetoric in his later work. Moving us back to American history, Courtney Howell’s Convict Leasing reassesses the convict leasing system in place in the U.S. South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that the primary function of the system wassupport and criticism for the system focused on economic, rather than racial, issuescontrol. Last but not least, Rachel Snyder’s Bewitched sheds light on an oft-forgotten murder network that spanned the East Coast in the early twentieth century. Snyder finds that this network, steeped in Italian traditions, used murder and insurance fraud as a strategy for economic survival during the Great Depression.
- The Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, volume 1, number 1, spring 2012Whitney, Chris; Kennedy, Rae; Dauterive, Myles; Kalnajs, Luke (Virginia Tech Department of History, 2012-05-01)
- "We Weren't Kidding": Prediction as Ideology in American Pulp Science Fiction, 1938-1949Forte, Joseph A. (Virginia Tech, 2010-05-03)In 1971, Isaac Asimov observed in humanity, a science-important society. For this he credited the man who had been his editor in the 1940s during the period known as the golden age of American science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell was editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, the magazine that launched both Asimov's career and the golden age, from 1938 until his death in 1971. Campbell and his authors set the foundation for the modern sci-fi, cementing genre distinction by the application of plausible technological speculation. Campbell assumed the science-important society that Asimov found thirty years later, attributing sci-fi ascendance during the golden age a particular compatibility with that cultural context. On another level, sci-fi's compatibility with "science-important" tendencies during the first half of the twentieth-century betrayed a deeper agreement with the social structures that fueled those tendencies and reflected an explication of modernity on capitalist terms. Tethered to an imperative of plausibly extrapolated technology within an American context, sci-fi authors retained the social underpinnings of that context. In this thesis, I perform a textual analysis of stories published in Astounding during the 1940s, following the sci-fi as it grew into a mainstream cultural product. In this, I prioritize not the intentions of authors to advance explicit themes or speculations. Rather, I allow the authors' direction of reader sympathy to suggest the way that favored characterizations advanced ideological bias. Sci-fi authors supported a route to success via individualistic, competitive, and private enterprise. They supported an American capitalistic conveyance of modernity.