Thesis M.A. Michigan State University. History 2017

ABSTRACTTWO SIDES ON "NORMAL:" A COMPARISON OF EIGHT VIEWS ON U.S. RAPPROCHEMENT WITH VIETNAM, 1989-1995ByNathan Robert Clason This thesis is a comparative study of the views of eight entities regarding the prospect of normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1989-1995. It first describes the views and actions of five entities in favor of normalization. These include the four US presidential administrations from Carter to Clinton, the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs (1991-1993), US Senators John McCain and John Kerry, and US businesses. It then examines the views and actions of three entities opposed to normalization. These include Ann Mills Griffiths, the Executive Director of the National League of POW/MIA Families; Texas billionaire Ross Perot; and politicians such as Robert Dornan and Vietnamese Americans from Orange County, California. By using a comparative approach, this thesis identifies several strange political alliances and enmities that would not have been clear in a more linear history. It includes a review of Vietnamese Communist Party documents that challenges some of the conclusions of the earliest diplomatic histories about normalization. It uses primary sources from key Senate Hearings to challenge elements of cultural histories about the myth of live US prisoners of war abandoned in Southeast Asia, and it personalizes the views of Ann Mills Griffiths and some Vietnamese Americans to give better context to their ardent opposition to normalization.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Communication Arts and Sciences – Media and Information Studies 2012.

"This dissertation explores issues surrounding adoption of social media in United Methodist churches by identifying how social media are used and what prevents these tools from being adopted." – From abstract.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF t.p. (ProQuest, viewed Oct. 8, 2013)

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2018

Over the course of the twentieth century, the comic book industry evolved from an amateur operation into a major institution of American popular culture. Comic books, once considered mere cultural ephemera or quite simply “junk,” became a major commodity business.The comic book industry emerged out of the pulp magazine industry. According to industry circulation data, new comic book releases increased from 22 in 1939 to 1125 titles by the end of 1945. Comic book scholars have yet to adequately explain the roots of this historical phenomenon, particularly its distinctly Jewish composition. Between the years of 1933 and 1954, the comic book industry operated as a successful distinct Jewish industry. The comic book industry emerged from the pulp magazine trade. Economic necessity, more than any other factor, attracted Jewish writers and artists to the nascent industry. Jewish publishers adopted many of the same business practices they inherited from the pulps. As second-generation Jews, these young men shared similar experiences growing up in New York City. Other creative industries actively practiced anti-Semitic hiring procedures. Many Jewish artists came to comic book work with very little professional experience in cartooning and scripting. The comic book industry allowed one to learn on the job. The cultural world comic books emerged out of was crucially important to the industry’s development. Comic strips, pulps, movies, and science fiction all inspired Jewish writers and artists. An exploration of the comic book industry’s working environment reveals how Jewish comic book writers, artists, editors, and publishers simultaneously created a space for themselves as Jews while developing successful comic book titles and characters. While many of them created an environment suitable to workplace camaraderie and collaboration, there were several areas of conflict. An investigation of these areas of conflict show how Jews responded to workplace disagreements, management exploitation, and battles over artistic credit. In particular, the practice of ghosting art remains a particularly contentious issue. Jewish writers and artists in the comic book industry did not form or join a labor union in order to protect their rights and interests. A consideration of this development shows that they stood in stark contrast to other industries with a large Jewish workforce. Finally, the examination of World War II through the comic book industry’s internal development provides a variety of different ways to unearth how the Jewish writers, artists, editors, and publishers shed their amateur roots and became a professionalized industry. This professional turn brought increased sales and increasingly mature content for an older readership. Many Jewish writers and artists feared being drafted into the military. However, those that were drafted came away from their experiences with a sense of pride and accomplishment. They could not foresee that their industry was coming under…

Thesis M.A. Michigan State University. History 2014.

The rap group, the Wu-Tang Clan came out of a turbulent period of time in both the rap music industry and American society in the early 1990s. Lawsuits over sampling in rap music forced producers to rethink the ways they made music while crack cocaine and the War on Drugs wreaked havoc in urban communities across the nation, as it did in the Clan's home borough of Staten Island, New York. Before the formation of the group, Gary "GZA" Grice, had managed to land a recording contract as a solo artist, but his marketing was mismanaged and his career stagnated. He returned in 1992 as one of the nine member collective, who billed themselves as kung fu movie buffs melding low-fi, eerie productions with realistic raps about ghetto life. Drawing from the vibrant underground rap scene of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Brooklyn's rich African American chess tradition, the teachings of the Five Percenters, and the cult following for Hong Kong action cinema, the Clan became a huge hit across the country. Each member fashioned a unique masculine identity for himself, bolstering their hardcore underground image while pushing the boundaries of acceptable expressions of manhood in rap music. Their avant-garde approach and business acumen turned the group into `underground superstars' who sold millions of records worldwide. Despite their success as a multinational corporation, the Clan still managed to maintain their authentic image as underground devotees from the tough streets of Staten Island.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF t.p. (viewed on April 24, 2017)

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2018

This dissertation analyzes U.S. policy on higher education during the American occupation of Okinawa. As the rise of the Cold War shaped the character of the Ryukyu Islands, postwar educational rehabilitation was positioned as the basis of an ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Among educational rehabilitation projects, the University of the Ryukyus Project was a centerpiece of Cold War educational policy. The U.S. military expected that the university would consistently educate new pro-American elite groups. With the scope of education policy expanding, however, the military was forced to handle many issues which required advanced academic skill. To accelerate the reconstruction process, the Army sought assistance from outside experts. MSU was selected as the mentor of the University of the Ryukyus because its excellent curricula satisfied the Army's requirement of practical programs. While many scholarly works argue that postwar Okinawa succeeded in developing a democratic educational system, Okinawans were in fact disillusioned with American educational system because undemocratic practices and wide-spread racial and economic discrimination raised uncomfortable feelings in Okinawan society. Ironically, Okinawan teachers and the students of the university became the vanguard of the restoration movement in Okinawa.

Online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. American Studies - Doctor of Philosophy 2015.

This dissertation examines student-athletic protest during the latter part of the Vietnam Era (1966-1975) at four different Big Ten/Midwestern universities (the University of Michigan, Notre Dame University, the University of Minnesota, and Michigan State University) as part of the wider social justice movement in the United States. Utilizing archival research into university documents, personal letters, local newspapers, and letters to the editor, it analyzes the causes - historical, local, and societal - that led student-athletes, considered naturally conservative defenders of the status quo, to take political stands against their coaches, their university administrations, their conference, and even their fellow teammates; and it examines the structures of feeling evident in the rhetoric of the protestors, their allies, and their detractors at each campus and throughout the Midwest during this time period. Student-athletes risked being labeled as trouble-makers, their playing time, and even their educations to advocate for changes, both small and large, that they felt needed to come. For some, this activism was less revolutionary than protests by other activist students campaigning against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, or for gender equality. Indeed, aside from outright boycotts, a great deal of this student-athletic protest has been under-discussed and forgotten, and student-athletes have been left out of the historical memory concerning students of this time period and generalized student protest. Much of the student-athletic activism came through institutional means, working through university channels to bring attention to issues of concern or signing a petition in solidarity with fellow classmates, but still theirs were political acts of dissidence that caught most by surprise owing to the stereotypical conservative mythology of sports. For others, the activism was bolder: a university-wide boycott of practices or letter-writing campaigns to the student paper to raise awareness. Regardless of the scale or tactic, the activism of the student-athletes often resulted in reactionary outcry from their coaches and the community. Athletic departments downplayed, ignored, or denied the charges raised against them but usually acquiesced to some of the demands for change, eventually lauding themselves for their open-mindedness and progressive stance. However, those changes were slow to come and required continued activism to achieve results. In nearly every case, the universities argued that many of the student-athletic calls for change had been discussed previously by athletic departments and were necessary changes that would have come in time. But the universities' failures to enact such changes without prodding from below belie such arguments. The Big Ten did have a proud history of changing with the times and often before other universities had moved to do so. Especially in athletics, Big Ten schools were praised for their…

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Educational Policy 2018

Prior to the 1960s, educational purpose was conceptualized both humanistically and pluralistically; educational reform occurred primarily through a process of persuasion and change at the local level; and equality of educational opportunity focused on both quantitative and qualitive resources and, for African-Americans, emphasized desegregation. In No Child Left Behind, the only purposes of education explicitly mandated by the Federal government were economic—to address poverty and the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, especially for minorities, and to make the nation more economically competitive at the global level. Standardized test scores were the only measurement that mattered in terms of the evaluation of teachers and schools and “data-driven” decision making became a necessity. When schools failed to meet ambitious prespecified goals, teachers and local administrators were assumed to be unmotivated, uncaring, or even racially prejudiced.These dramatic changes can largely be explained by the success of a policy paradigm, particularly at the federal level, based on the ideas, theories, and methods of neoclassical economics. Initiated by the introduction of human capital theory into educational policy in the late 1950s, this paradigm was also comprised of the education production function and the principal-agent theory. The paradigm was supported by various interest groups from both the left and the right for ideological purposes; supporters benefited from what was perceived as the legitimacy of economic research, but economists benefitted as well. Strong political support for the economic paradigm has come from the left and from a body of advocacy research that arose in the early 1970s known as the Effective Schools Movement. Economists’ notions of both the production function and principal agent theory were used by ESM researchers to support the idea that all children were educable to high levels (as measured by standardized tests), regardless of non-school factors, and that differences in academic achievement between racial groups was the fault of the school. The research of economists, often described by its critics as “neo-liberal” or “neo-conservative,” has actually been used quite powerfully by those committed to social justice and equality of educational opportunity.

Online resource;

Thesis M.A. Michigan State University. History 2014.

This paper examines comic book fanzines published between 1974 and 1986, and argues that the theoretical model of the public, as defined by Jürgen Habermas and adapted by Michael Warner, is useful for understanding how fandom functions as a social construct. It explores the mechanisms of production and distribution of fanzines and how they contributed to the creation and maintenance of this public. The comic book public was engaged in a conversation with the power of capitalist producers and consciously resisted reproducing the comic book industry's relationship between producer and consumer. To illustrate this, the paper investigates discussions about gender and religion found within the public and explores the complexity of those discussions. Comic book fans saw problems with the comic book industry, such as its representation of women, and sought to illuminate and address those problems, while at the same time demanding that comic book fanzines keep discussions related to the content of, as opposed to the social issues raised by, comic books. It concludes by tracing the transformation of comic book fans into comic book professionals and offers insights into the value of studying fandom as a public in order to better understand contemporary capitalism and the relationship between producers and consumers.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF t.p. (viewed on August 20, 2014).

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Media and Information Studies 2017

The present study investigates whether increases in sports team identity and sports media involvement correlate with increased amounts of daily sports media consumption. In addition, antecedents to involvement are incorporated into the research model to determine which discrete motivations show significant relationships with changes in involvement and time spent consuming.This project measured both team identity and sports media involvement on multidimensional levels to determine if influences by the constructs' first-order facets would provide a richer source of explaining variance. These multidimensional predictor variables (six 3-item scales for team identity and three 3-items scales for sports media involvement) were tested in the model, as were similar unidimensional scales of team identity (4-items) and sports media involvement (5-items). It was discovered that the more parsimonious unidimensional scales explained more variance in the model predicting time spent consuming sports media, thus exposing the multidimensional scales as superfluous for a model such as the one tested here.From the perspective of fandom and fan identification, this study examined the attitudes and behaviors of adults who regularly watch or follow sports media in order to determine the strongest drivers of time spent consuming. Forms of media consumption included watching or following sports on television, the radio and podcasts, social networks and the Internet, and newspapers and magazines. These separate types of consumption were summed to produce the outcome variable of total time spent consuming sports media per day. The results of this project showed significant correlations between team identity, three antecedent motivations (vicarious achievement, escape from problems, and social media interaction), sports media involvement, and sports media consumption, while revealing partial and complete mediation. Additionally, gender differences regarding the motivational drivers of sports media involvement and time spent consuming were revealed by the predictive structural model. These findings illustrate the different ways in which male and female sports media consumers engage with sports media, thus providing a deeper understanding of what components drive sports consumption in conjunction with increased levels of sports team identity. The present study employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test a path model consisting of a team identity instrument based on Social Identity Theory, antecedent motivations of involvement, sports media involvement, and finally, the effects of the preceding constructs on total time spent consuming sports media per day.The findings of this study are potentially helpful from both a communication and sports management perspective, as this project reveals the psychological drivers of today's multimedia sports fans. Beyond the practical implications, this project builds on existing literature by…

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2016

When the mass-market bicycle emerged in the late 1880s, women jumped at the chance to ride. Despite its popularity, the historiography of American bicycling is quite limited. Women’s bicycling has remained understudied by scholars of women’s history, sport history, and nineteenth-century American life. This dissertation responds to these gaps by repositioning women from the margins to the center of bicycling scholarship. It argues that in the 1890s, women used bicycling as the front lines to challenge widespread gender constraints and the testing grounds to put their new political ideologies of empowerment and independence into practice. In small towns and large cities, wheelwomen used their everyday experiences as cyclists as the inspiration and authority to rewrite nineteenth-century norms of athletics, dress, harassment, medicine, work, public space and travel. They viewed recreation and activism as joint projects to embody and enact their visions for individual fulfillment and sociopolitical change, and they successfully used this consumer good to engage in the politics of everyday life in unprecedented ways. Despite powerful opponents and rampant inequalities, wheelwomen used this seemingly apolitical technology as an opportunity to answer the woman question on their own terms, sustain the Woman’s Rights Movement during a decade with few major victories, and construct new visions of modern, American womanhood well before the age of suffrage and automobiles.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2016

This dissertation uses archival documents, newspapers, and previously collected oral histories to construct a history of post-World War II black working-class activism in Charleston, South Carolina. I examine the women involved in one of the lesser-known events of the civil rights and black power movements, the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969. These women, primarily working-class and black, were central to the success of the 113-day strike. As union leaders, strikers, soup-kitchen volunteers, and national fundraisers, black women ensured the viability of the strike. Without their participation in every facet of the strike, the push for better wages, working conditions, and a union would not have had a chance to succeed. While scholarship on the intersection of labor and civil rights focuses on Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, specifically the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, the Charleston Strike has lingered in the background. This study argues that black women were central to the success of the Charleston strike and that their leadership in the Charleston events was unique. The Charleston strike was a women’s movement not only because over ninety percent of the participants were women, but also because women led the strike on the local and national stages.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis M.A. Michigan State University. Journalism 2013.

The noticeable increase in the number of imprisoned journalists in the past three years drew national and international attention to the problems of press freedom in Turkey. Arrests of distinguished reporters of Turkey's mainstream media, along with the ongoing limitations on the freedom of Kurdish and socialist press, caused the country to be referred as "the world's biggest prison for journalists" by the non-governmental press freedom organizations such as Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Statements of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government authorities claiming that the imprisoned journalists are "not journalists but terrorists," and their reluctance to amend the laws that cause hundreds of journalists to be jailed led to questioning the influence of politics on journalist imprisonments.This study explores the problems of press freedom with a focus on imprisoned journalists. Based upon in-depth interviews with journalists who were behind bars in the last decade, this study aims to answer the questions of what has changed in terms of freedom of expression in the last decade under AKP rule, for what obvious and underlying reasons the journalists are imprisoned, whether censorship has been a part of the problems of press freedom in the last decade, and how limitations on the freedom of expression affect the public.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Sept. 2, 2014).

Thesis M.A. Michigan State University. Journalism 2018

This thesis reexamines the historical visual narrative of early 20th century immigration inthe United States investigating the contributions made by photographers Lewis Wickes Hine andAugustus F. Sherman, and immigration officials William Williams and John R. Robinson.Though widely accepted as the visual record of early 20th century immigration, the Ellis Islandwork of Hine was in direct conversation with the work of amateur photographer Sherman.Compared to Hine’s egalitarian perspective of immigrants, Sherman’s photographs provide anarrower, darker view of immigration by focusing on representation of those classified“undesirable” upon arrival due to health, religion, culture, race or ethnicity. While Sherman’swork was largely forgotten over time, Hine’s work endured to create a visual mythology thatelicits nostalgia of Ellis Island as the celebrated entry point for millions of white Europeans.Hine’s work as a documentarian is compared to the topological portraiture Sherman made whichillustrates the exclusionary nature of his body of work. As agents of state power, Williams andRobinson collected photographs of undesirable immigrants that also construct a dark and narrowview of immigration. Comparing and contrasting the activities of these four actors builds anargument that photographs illustrating race and ethnicity were methodically produced andcollected to categorize ethnic and racial types and surveil undesirable immigrants.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2019.

The precarious positions of African American political exiles provide an instructive window into the fluctuations of international support for the black freedom struggle. Exile Is Hell examines the strategies used by Robert F. Williams's activist network to survive and maintain their involvement in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement from outside the United States. Expatriates such as Williams, Richard Gibson, Julian Mayfield, and others most plainly bore the vicissitudes of political shifts occurring in the 1960s against the backdrop of the Cold War. Exile Is Hell tracks this ebb and flow by foregrounding the day-to-day experiences of Williams, Gibson, Mayfield, and others to reveal their methods of navigating an erratic political climate and capricious activist community. International rhetoric formed an integral component of the Black Power era, yet many activists struggled to forge lasting, transnational coalitions due to the variable politics of the Cold War. Using Williams as the central hub of this activist network, this project contributes a detailed narrative of exile through a collective biography that explores the daily work of expanding the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement to incorporate global ambitions. This research further establishes the impact of changes in international support upon an activist network in order to extrapolate the effects on the African American freedom struggle.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2019.

This dissertation examines the debates around Chicana/o nationalism, nationhood, and self-determination by using archival documents and oral histories to study the ideologies and actions of the August 29th Movement (ATM) and the League of Revolutionary Struggle that interpreted the Marxist canon based on their unique experiences as Chicana/os in the U.S to organize against oppression. I explore how these groups used a hybrid of nationalist ideologies with those around class to contribute to both the intellectual tradition of Latina/o activism while diversifying our understanding of activists who utilized the Marxist canon. The activists in these organizations complicate the dominant narratives of identity politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to further enrich the legacy of the Chicana/o movement as one that was ideologically diverse, international, cross-racial, and cross-ethnic. The multi-and cross-racial framework in this research highlights the intersection of race, class, and gender by activists seeking equal citizenship and an end to U.S. capitalism and imperialism. This project is an intellectual, social, and institutional history of Chicana/o communists between the 1960s and 1990.The every-day lives of communist activists fighting for better citizenship and democratic rights during the global Cold War are at the center of this study. These groups and activists identified as some combination of Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, or Stalinists at a time when political surveillance was rampant and being affiliated with communism was seen as being anti-American. I explore how the organizations responded to this surveillance and how they continued to operate across various spheres of activism including in the labor sector, on college campuses, and in electoral politics by using a United Front approach.I show how the groups mobilized among lower stratum workers in the auto industry, cannery factories, and among hotel and restaurant workers because the point of production is where they believed they could be most effective. They also organized students on college campuses by participating in the fights for establishing and protecting Chicana/o and Ethnic studies, as well as affirmative action. These groups such as the League which was the result of the merger between Chicana/o, African American, and Asian American communists were critical because they created linkages between these various spheres of activism that at times were not speaking to one another in order to fight a restricting U.S. capitalist society during the 1970s and 1980s that was switching to neoliberal policies. I argue that this strategy allowed for the organizations to be effective in building support for the struggles they took up in the name of fighting for better democratic, social, and human rights.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2016

How the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) transitioned from practicing the most unconventional marriage system in the nation to representing a model of family stability has surfaced as one of the most riveting and perplexing questions in the field of American religious history. A common explanation for this remarkable transition centers upon the assumption that church members were eager to be welcomed into and prove their allegiance to the United States after contending with intense persecution and ostracism. However, this dissertation complicates this narrative and explores how acclimation into the mainstream United States was not a swift process for the church’s youngest female members. My dissertation examines how the church’s young women contended with and pushed back against the leadership’s expectations during this transition. The LDS church leadership and influential membership exercised their expectations and anxieties for the future of Mormonism through attitudes and actions directed toward adolescent female church members. Mormon girls embodied multiple possibilities for the future of the religion in the minds of the church leaders and the wider community. In the most literal sense, they represented the continuation of the religion through their desire to marry and have children. The leadership envisioned that adolescent Mormon women held the ability to push the religion into the twentieth century while still maintaining sacred religious traditions. Young women could impede the leadership’s desires by choosing intermarriage, not marrying at all, and failing to want children. To counteract these possibilities, the leadership looked to methods such as the organization of youth groups and the development of prescriptive literature to outline their expectations of how girls should act as proper Mormon women. An exploration of young women’s diaries, letters, school notebooks, memoir, and other life-writings illuminates how young women used a variety of methods and spaces to assert their agency within Mormonism. While some young women developed autonomy within church structures like the auxiliary female groups, others depended on secular higher education and professional opportunities to embrace their agency outside of the church. Their acts of agency were not necessarily directed against the church, but a way for young women to grapple with changes in their church, families, and personal lives.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Media and Information Studies 2016

ABSTRACTBUT WILL IT PLAY IN GRAND RAPIDS? THE ROLE OF GATEKEEPERS IN MUSIC SELECTION IN 1960s TOP 40 RADIOByLeonard A. O’KellyThe decision to play (or not to play) certain songs on the radio can have financial ramifications for performers and for radio stations alike in the form of ratings and revenue. This study considers the theory of gatekeeping at the individual level, paired with industry factors such as advertising, music industry promotion, and payola to explain how radio stations determined which songs to play. An analysis of playlists from large-market Top 40 radio stations and small-market stations within the larger stations’ coverage areas from the 1960s will determine the direction of spread of song titles and the time frame for the spread of music, shedding light on how radio program directors (gatekeepers) may have been influenced in their decisions. By comparing this data with national charts, it may also be possible to determine whether or not local stations had any influence over the national trend. The role of industry trade publications such as Billboard and The Gavin Report are considered, and the rise of the broadcast consultant as a gatekeeper is explored. This study will also analyze the discrepancy in song selection with respect to race and gender as compared to national measures of popularity. Interviews with disc jockeys, program directors, and music directors seek to determine exactly what role the individual air personalities had in determining the songs that were played and, as such, what role these specific gatekeepers had in shaping the popular culture of a decade.

Description based on online resource;

Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2014.

This dissertation analyzes the processes behind post-World War II stadium-driven urban renewal in three major American cities: Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. The historical and political contexts varied dramatically within these cities, allowing for an analysis of similarities and reoccurring trends in the processes of stadium-driven urban renewal that transcend the limitations inherent in an analysis of one particular place or time in history. This historical analysis of stadium construction provides a lens through which we can better understand the processes behind postwar urban renewal over the second half of the twentieth century. Previous scholarship on stadium construction, as discussed in the introduction, has demonstrated the well-documented motives of Major League Baseball owners who see publicly-funded stadiums as a means to dramatically increase revenues while catering to an increasingly upper-class clientele. And yet, even with more than three decades of scholarship that has definitively shown stadium construction to be a poor investment of public dollars, public officials all over the country continue to find ways to invest public money into private enterprise with little, if any, tangible return on investment for taxpayers.American cities are complex organisms made up of multiple clusters of associated people whose reasons for association vary as widely as kinship, race, gender, community, faith, employment, commercial partnership, or political affiliation. These clusters, which yield very different levels of influence and power, have competing visions and interests regarding the development of the city. And when it comes to stadium construction, or any other form of urban redevelopment, there are varying levels of personal impact; some clusters have more at stake. Losing a baseball team is extremely painful for local fans. The loss of local homes, businesses, and entire communities in the process of stadium development has adversely impacted the lives of local citizens. Major League Baseball owners always profit from the construction of a new stadium. But for this unequal return on investment to have continued successfully for so long, there must be clusters of association within the urban power structures that also, as they say, "make a killing" in these deals.This dissertation examines the clusters, or the connected associated interests, involved in the process of stadium construction. The term coalition is often used in public discussion and scholarship in the field, but there are some associated interests involved in these processes that are not overtly named (often intentionally) in the public presentation of these clusters. Moreover, one often finds "stadium coalitions" working with "pro-growth coalitions" with connections to "political coalitions" all simultaneously involved in these processes. This dissertation will first identify, and then articulate, the general processes and interests that form and influence those larger clusters…