History

The “forgotten war” is the label most frequently used to recall the conflict that took place in Korea from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, with variations of this phrase found in museum exhibitions and monuments across the country. Since the widespread presence of so many mentions of Korea clearly demonstrates that the Korean War is not forgotten, this project critically evaluates several forms of public memory (including museum exhibitions, historical scholarship, films and television shows, state and local monuments, and memorial infrastructure including bridges, highways, buildings, and trees) in order to explore how the war has come to be called forgotten. This project also seeks to examine the foreign policy issues of labeling the Korean War as forgotten, by exploring how it is recalled globally and why it is essential to remember details about the war. This project also seeks to fill a niche in the scholarly literature on public memory of American wars by examining Korea as prior studies have both WWII and Vietnam. In addition, this project intervenes in several more scholarly conversations ranging from the argument that the television series M*A*S*H was not primarily an allegory for Vietnam, as is often alleged, to the contention that a Korean Anti-War Movement was much more widespread than has been appreciated by academics interested in the history of activism. This dissertation is designed to highlight the ongoing need to remember the Korean War in detail, given the threats to world peace made by North Korea, and to make clear that it is vital to understand the enduring legacy of the war for twenty-first century diplomacy, which can only be done by examining how the war has been publicly recalled and why the forgotten war label persists despite evidence that Korea has been widely remembered.

Temple University – Theses

Religion

Liberation in White and Black studies, respectively, Washington Memorial Chapel (WMC) and The Church of the Advocate (COA), which are two Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. This dissertation investigates the ways that the visual culture of these spaces represents and affects the religious, racial and national self-understanding of these churches and their ongoing operations by offering particular and opposing narrative interpretations of American history. These "sacred spaces" visually describe the United States (implicitly and explicitly) in terms of race and violence in narratives that set them in fundamental opposition to each other, and set a trajectory for each parishes' life that has determined a great deal of its activities over time. I develop this thesis by situating each congregation and its development in the context of the entire history of both the Episcopal Church and Philadelphia as related to race, violence and patriotism. WMC is what historian of religions scholar Jonathan Z. Smith calls a "locative" space and tries to persuade all Americans to patriotically covenant with images of heroic "White" freedom struggle. COA is what Smith calls a "utopian" space and tries to compel its visitors to covenant with a subversive critique of the United States in terms of the parallels between biblical Israel and the African American freedom struggle. My analysis draws especially on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and David Morgan. A major focus of Pierre Bourdieu's work in both Language and Symbolic Power, and The Logic of Practice is the power of group-making. Group-creating power is often exercised through representations that create a seemingly objective sense of group identity and a social world that is perceived as "natural." David Morgan writes that religious visual culture functions as this sort of political practice through the organization of memory among those who are drawn to "covenant" with images. The Introduction of my dissertation lays out the theoretical approaches informing the visual culture analysis of these Episcopal Churches and raises the significant questions. Three main chapters provide: 1) an historical background of patriotism, race and violence in the Episcopal Church and in Philadelphia in particular, and 2-3) a thorough analysis of the history and visual culture of each space in context. A great deal of my analysis will be interpretive "readings" of the visual culture of the aforementioned churches in their larger contexts to explain how the visual culture represents social classifications to affect the constituents religious, racial and national self-understanding, and their ongoing operations by offering particular and opposing narrative interpretations of American history. The project concludes by summarizing the ways that the analysis of these spaces explicates the thesis with thoughts about the implications for the disciplines involved and further research.

Temple University – Theses

History

There Used To Be Nowhere To Eat In This Town: Restaurant-led Development In Postindustrial Philadelphia This project examines the roles that restaurants have played in the revitalization and reconceptualization of postindustrial Philadelphia. While many studies of Philadelphia after 1945 focus heavily on race relations, politics, deindustrialization, large-scale renewal, or historic tourism, analyses of restaurants as spaces of consumption and experience have been conspicuously absent in the historiography. This project elevates the history of restaurants to determine how they allowed Philadelphia to cope with the many challenges of deindustrialization, the flight of human and monetary capital, and the rise of competing suburban centers of gravity. The research procedures for this project included readings and analyses of secondary works centered on urban history, foodways, and histories of consumption; readings of food magazines, trade journals, menu collections, cookbooks, guidebooks, restaurant reviews, and restaurant design works; the conducting of oral interviews with many participants and employees of the restaurant, real estate, and public relations industries; archival research in Philadelphia, New York, and Wilmington, DE; market analyses of the restaurant industry both locally and nationally; and many hours of personal observation in Philadelphia's restaurants. Situating restaurant-led development within the postindustrial city required considerable personal debate. The basic premise was that after factories closed and suburban malls drained Philadelphia of its retailing strength, restaurants became new factories in the experience economy. Deciding on which restaurants to focus and how neighborhoods were altered by them proved challenging. Ultimately, a combination of specific restaurant genres and selected neighborhoods seemed the most feasible strategy. "The New Urban Dining Room" considers how sidewalk cafes, one of the most popular phenomena in Philadelphia, regenerated public space and reflected changing tastes for urban experiences. Stemming from European traditions and influenced by the postwar romance of La Dolce Vita, Philadelphia had in 2010 more than two hundred sidewalk cafes. Many people equated dining al fresco on a busy street or plaza with the good life. American cities, namely New York and Los Angeles, contained sidewalk cafes as early as the 1950s. But Philadelphia and its residents preferred the intimacy of homes or the elite seclusion of hotel dining and supper clubs. Coupled with those traditions, the development of sidewalk cafes produced years of legal battles and cultural divisions. Once those battles subsided and the political divisions mended, sidewalk cafes grew exponentially in Philadelphia, clearly indicating a new appreciation for public urban experiences. "Brokering Beef" examines the many high-end steakhouses on the South Broad Street corridor, once the nerve center of Philadelphia's business district. From the 1890s to the 1940s, the area thrived as Philadelphia's…

Media & Communication

Public memory of "the Asylum" in contemporary American culture is communicated through a host of popular forms, including horror-themed entertainment such as haunted attractions. Such representations have drawn criticism from disability advocates on the basis that they perpetuate stereotypes and inaccurately represent the history of deinstitutionalization in the United States. In 2010, when Pennhurst State School and Hospital, a closed Pennsylvania institution that housed people understood as developmentally/intellectually disabled, was reused as a haunted attraction called "Pennhurst Asylum," it sparked a public debate and became an occasion for storytelling about what Pennhurst meant to the surrounding community. I apply theoretical perspectives from memory studies and disability studies to the case of "Pennhurst Asylum" in order to understand what is at stake when we remember institutional spaces such as Pennhurst. More specifically, this case study uses narrative analysis of news stories and reader letters, ethnographic observation at the haunted attraction, interviews with key storymakers, and historical/cultural contextualization to examine why this memory matters to disability advocates, former institutional residents and employees, journalists, and other community members. The narrative patterns I identify have ramifications for contemporary disability politics, the role of public communication in the formation of community memory, and scholarly debates over how to approach popular representations of historical trauma. I find that Pennhurst memory fits within contemporary patterns in the narrative, visual, and physical reuse of institutional spaces in the United States, which include redevelopment, memorialization, digital and crowd-sourced memory, amateur photography, Hollywood films, paranormal cable television shows, and tourism. Further, this reuse of institutional spaces has been an occasion for local journalists to take on the role of public historian in the absence of other available authorities. In this case study, the local newspaper (The Mercury) became a space where processes of commemoration could unfold through narrative – and, it created a record of this process that could inform future public history projects on institutionalization in the United States. In the terms of cultural geographer Kenneth Foote (1997), disability advocates attempted to achieve "sanctification" of the Pennhurst property by telling the story of its closure as a symbol of social progress that led to the community-based living movement. Paradoxically, since this version of the Pennhurst story relied on a narrow characterization of Pennhurst as a site of horrific abuse and neglect, it had this in common with the legend perpetuated by the haunted attraction. In contrast, other community members shared memories that showed Pennhurst had long been a symbol of the community's goodwill, service, and genuine caring. In short, public memory of Pennhurst in 2010 was…

Anthropology

This dissertation focuses on mid- to late-19th-century Philadelphia immigrants, their experiences, and how their lives have been remembered or, as in this case, forgotten. During the course of this study Elfreth’s Alley in Old City Philadelphia is used as a lens through which to critically examine elements of immigrant experience and memory construction from an archaeological perspective. Designated as a National Historic Landmark, Elfreth’s Alley is credited with being one of the oldest, continuously-occupied residential streets in the nation. Formed in the early-18th century, Elfreth’s Alley became home to a large immigrant population, predominantly from Ireland and Germany, during the mid- to late-19th century. In the 20th century the narrow thoroughfare was selectively recognized as an important historic site in Philadelphia based on its colonial origin and early American architecture. Within this context, this dissertation expounds two interconnected lines of rediscovery at Elfreth’s Alley. The first is the rediscovery of the physical world in which immigrants lived; the second is the rediscovery of the abstract landscape of memory in which they were forgotten. The archaeological analysis of 124 and 126 Elfreth’s Alley in this text focuses on deconstructing the physical built environment on the street to understand the lived experience of immigrant occupants, while an examination of the public archaeology program implemented on the Alley explores how programming helped reshape memory at the historic site and fostered dialogue about the presentation of history and contemporary immigration. Through combining the results of documentary research, urban archaeological excavation, and public programing, this dissertation reveals the complexity of urban immigrant life and memory at Elfreth’s Alley specifically and Philadelphia at large.

Temple University – Theses

History

This dissertation makes three key arguments regarding politics and print culture in antebellum Florida. First, Florida’s territorial status, historic geographical divisions, and local issues necessitated the use of political parties. Second, Florida’s political parties evolved from a focus on charismatic men and local geographic loyalties to loyalty to party regardless of who was running to national and regional loyalties above local issues and men. Lastly, the central and most consistent aspect of Florida’s political party development was the influence of newspapers and their editors. To understand Florida politics in the nineteenth century it is necessary to recognize how the personal, geographical, and political divisions in Florida’s territorial past remained a critical factor in the development and function of national political parties in Florida. The local divisions within Florida in the 1820s created factions and personal loyalties that would later help characterize national parties in the 1840s. Political leaders, with the help of editors and their newspapers, created factions based more on personal loyalties than on ideology. By the 1850s party loyalty became paramount over personal or regional loyalties. In the last years before the Civil War Democrats linked Southern loyalty to the Democratic party and accused their opposition of treason against the South leading Florida and the nation to Civil War. Yet, throughout these political changes, editors and their newspapers remained central to political success, becoming the voice of political parties and critical to attracting and maintaining potential voters. In addition to understanding how politics functioned in antebellum Florida, this dissertation contributes to our larger understanding of the Second Party System and the South. An underlying argument of this dissertation is that while the Democrats tended to be better organized and more ideologically coherent, the Whigs suffered from constant in-fighting and splintering. This led to the Democratic domination of politics and, in the South, the ability of secession supporters to control the public conversation during the Sectional Crisis of the 1850s and lead the nation to war. This dissertation also claims that there is not just one South but many and exposes the myth of a changeless and monolithic South.

Temple University – Theses