Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe cultural interaction between nuclear technology and the American West was a two-way process. On one side, an elite brotherhood of scientists and engineers at Los Alamos incorporated the romance of the frontier into the nation's atomic origin story. On the other side, the mythical construct we call "the West" mutated and matured due to its entanglement with the nuclear cycle. Only recently has it become clear that the engineer left an indelible mark on the American West equal to or even greater than that left by the cowboy. However, the engineer and the cowboy were always twin figures in the western imagination, even if the engineer usually lurked in the cowboy's shadow. The links forged between these two symbols early in the twentieth century were deliberately co-opted into the national atomic story after the war. In response, a variety of western atomic discourses began to emerge that both resisted and interacted with national narratives. As nuclearism wrote itself into the West, the stories westerners tell about themselves and their history started to change. Although the focus of this research is on the atomic literatures and discourses of the West-including fiction, memoir, poetry, drama, and nature writing-this is a multidisciplinary project that incorporates an extensive amount of history as well as a bit of scientific theory in order to more fully explore how nuclearism contributed to the changing cultural constructions of wilderness and technology in the twentieth-century American West

An analysis of selected ""cyberpunk"" works by William Gibson, placed in a cultural and socio-political context

This thesis studies William Gibson's ""cyberspace trilogy"" (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). This was an extremely interesting and significant development in 1980s science fiction. It was used to codify and promote the ""cyberpunk"" movement in science fiction at that time, which this thesis also briefly studies. Such a study (at such a relatively late date, given the rapid pace of change in popular culture) seems valuable because a great deal of self-serving and mystifying comment and analysis has served to confuse critical understanding about this movement. It seems clear that cyberpunk was indeed a new development in science fiction (like other developments earlier in the twentieth century) but that the roots of this development were broader than the genre itself. However, much of the real novelty of Gibson's work is only evident through close analysis of the texts and how their apparent ideological message shifts focus with time. This message is inextricably entwined with Gibson's and cyberpunk's technological fantasias. Admittedly, these three texts appear to have been, broadly speaking, representations of a liberal U.S. world-view reflecting Gibson's own apparent beliefs. However, they were also expressions of a kind of technophilia which, while similar to that of much earlier science fiction, possessed its own special dynamic. In many ways this technophilia contradicted or undermined the classical liberalism nominally practiced in the United States. However, the combination of this framework and this dynamic, which appears both apocalyptic and conservative, appears in some ways to have been a reasonably accurate prediction of the future trajectory of the U.S. body politic -- towards exaggerated dependency on machines to resolve the consequences of an ever increasingly paranoid fantasy of the entire world as a threat. (It seems likely that this was also true, if sometimes to a lesser degree, of the cyberpunk movement as a whole.) While Gibson's work was enormously popular (both commercially and critically) in the 1980s and early 1990s, very little of this aspect of his work was taken seriously (except, to a limited degree, by a few Marxist and crypto-Marxist commentators like Darko Suvin). This seems ironic, given the avowedly futurological context of science fiction at this time

Maine Alumni Magazine, Volume 85, Number 3, Fall 2004

Contents: Leaving the Job You Love: Peter Hoff looks back on his UMaine presidency --- More Than Maintaining the Status Quo: Interim president Robert Kennedy will be more than a caretaker --- Lobstering Her Way Through College: Christina Rackliff \u2704 learned the value of hard work from her father --- From Boardman Hall to the Halls of Justice: Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen \u2764 is elevated to America\u27s second highest court --- Bolting to the Top: John Tortorella \u2781 leads the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Stanley Cup --- Remembering President Paul Silvermanhttps://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/alumni_magazines/1548/thumbnail.jp

James Michael Curley Scrapbooks Volume 63

The James Michael Curley Scrapbook Collection consists of digitized microfilmed copies of notebooks kept by Curley from 1914-1937. These notebooks contain news clippings that were drawn primarily from Boston newspapers. Curley was born in Roxbury, MA in 1874. He served four terms as Mayor of Boston: 1914–1918, 1922–1926, 1930–1934 and 1946–1950. He also served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1935-1937. In addition to Curley’s political career, the scrapbooks also include clippings about his first wife Mrs. Mary Herlihy Curley (1884-1930) and their daughter Mary D. Curley (1909-1950). A selection of the notebooks were microfilmed in 1962. The microfilm can be found in the holdings of Dinand Library, Holy Cross’s main library. This volume includes clippings from 1931https://crossworks.holycross.edu/curley_scrapbooks/1094/thumbnail.jp