A handsomely improved place : economic, social, and gender-role development in a backcountry town, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1750-1810

As a social history of the town and people of Carlisle, Pennsylvania from 1750 to 1810, this dissertation traces the evolution of communal identity in the early American backcountry. By focusing on the growth and development of one urban community, this work details not only how and why one group of backcountry inhabitants took pride in their town\u27s outward accomplishments and material prosperity, but also explains how Carlisle\u27s evolutionary growth prompted the town\u27s people to see themselves as key players in an economic and social universe that stretched far beyond the geographic boundaries of their localized realm.;Using state and county records, personal correspondence, business account books, and material evidence to delineate expanding networks of association on the local and regional levels, this study demonstrates that it was the combined expectations and aspirations generated by personal interactions and economic exchanges that governed how the men and women of Carlisle defined themselves and their roles within the rapidly changing worlds of colonial, revolutionary, and early national America.;In Carlisle, as in the rest of the American backcountry, communal identity was ultimately determined by the convergence of several competing, but nonetheless complementary, developmental forces. Carlisle\u27s sense of itself was profoundly shaped by the independent and highly localized social, economic, and personal associations forged among the town\u27s men and women in the private sphere of backcountry homes and in the public realm of frontier marketplaces. Carlisle\u27s identity was also derived, however, from the town\u27s gradual social, economic, and cultural integration into the metropolitan realms of the eastern port cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore

The Influence of a Pacific Invasive Sponge on Coral Reef Dynamics in Hawai‘i.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

The Flow of History along Chester Creek

The Chester Creek watershed comprises 67.2 square miles of southeastern Pennsylvania and includes parts of fourteen townships, five boroughs, and one city. The main branch flows from its source in Westtown Township and runs a length of 24.5 miles through rural, suburban, and urban parts of Chester and Delaware Counties before reaching the Delaware River.This illustrated story highlights many of the natural and cultural features of the Chester Creek watershed, from its sources to where the creek finally meets the waters of the Delaware River

The Flow of History along Ridley Creek

Ridley Creek flows southeast for 24 miles from the South Valley Hills of southern Chester County through Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where it enters the Delaware River between the City of Chester and the Borough of Eddystone. Ridley Creek and its tributaries flow within a narrow 38 square mile watershed that includes parts of eleven townships, five boroughs, and one city. This illustrated story highlights many of the natural and cultural features of the Ridley Creek watershed, from its sources to where the creek finally meets the waters of the Delaware River

Updates

Richard Bud Meade worked in Human Resources at the College at Brockport from 1968-2000. He knew many of our faculty and staff and in retirement he began to circulate an email newsletter which passed on stories and news about various college retirees. This remarkable, ongoing project has captured a tremendous amount of information about the folks who built the college over the last 50 years. This collection of his Update is searchable, and covers from the beginning in 2001 up to August, 2020. More will be added as time goes on..

Containment and nuclear memory in contemporary climate change fiction

Confronted with the global existential threat of climate change, human subjects in the Anthropocene must grapple with a parallel teleological crisis: how do we direct ourselves as individuals and collectives in the face of an ongoing global catastrophe? To answer this question, this thesis seeks to understand the material, cultural, and psychological mechanisms that authenticate meaningful action toward large-scale, systemic changes that might forestall the worst effects of climate change. This thesis names these mechanisms containment, exploring how contemporary climate change fiction, or “cli-fi,” uses the metaphorically flexible figure of the fallout shelter to help negotiate a relationship to the scale, complexity, and horror of climate change. The fallout shelter is inflected with the legacies of Cold-War containment culture, which developed in response to the similar existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Originally, containment culture was associated with resistance to the perceived threat of communism, but its ideological principle of defensive exclusion replicated throughout society, creating racially exclusive suburban localities that came to stand in for the space and place of the American nation. Contemporary cli-fi featuring the fallout shelter necessarily grapples with containment culture in its efforts to capture and manage global-scale problems, often in hyperlocal contexts. Such fictions position readers and spectators as "contained subjects," converting pleasurable literary and cinematic escapism into a psychological survival tactic against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. This thesis also aims to broaden ecocriticism’s understanding of what cli-fi can be, selecting texts from a variety of narrative media that center the fallout shelter space as their primary dramatic fulcrum. While many of the texts examined in this thesis appear to have little to do with climate change, understanding them through the lens of containment demonstrates how climate change can be rendered in modalities beyond the apocalyptic imaginary. This thesis concludes by examining recent real-world deployments and imaginings of the fallout shelter, suggesting that containment culture persists in a more globally-conscious (but potentially more dangerous) fashion

Federal Register

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii

Reading Boredom in Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti

Focusing on the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the early poetry of William Morris and the poetry and prose of Christina Rossetti, this thesis examines how boredom emerges in Victorian aesthetic culture. Drawing from writings in visual culture, gender studies, social history, and recent returns to new formalism in Victorian studies, this thesis attends to how renderings of boredom open up our understanding of the relationship between poetry, art, temporality, embodiment, and explorations of everyday life and living in Victorian England. Chapter One of my thesis is an introductory explanation of boredom and the term an aesthetic of boredom—a concept that I use to explore the connections between poetry, art, the psycho-somatic phenomenon of being bored, and poetic developments in Victorian socio-political and artistic contexts. It also outlines the connections between boredom and various affects of discontent (such as acedia, melancholy, and idleness). Chapter Two considers how Tennyson’s understanding of boredom is shaped by complicated attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and work—as seen in his poems “Mariana,” “Mariana in the South,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Lotos Eaters,” and “Ulysses.” Chapter Three concentrates on how repetition and thwarted desire influence the multiple versions of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel,” his paintings of women from the later 1850s, onwards and aspects of The House of Life. Chapter Four considers how William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems fleshes out an aesthetic of thwarted desire that links to his developing views on art, gender, and everyday life. Chapter Five discusses the ways in which Christina Rossetti understands boredom in an expressly moral, albeit paradoxically ambivalent, light: it is either a form of affective purgation or else a symptom of spiritual lukewarmness, as shown in Maude, “The Prince’s Progress,” and Commonplace. My thesis concludes with a Postscript that comments on how both Victorian art and poetry—and its ways of encoding time, playing with rhythm and rhyme, and exploring the dynamics of desire—provide us with a profound sense of the embodied nature of boredom, in its various forms, in Victorian England