Po'i Pentum Tammen Kimmappeh: The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone. Steven J. Crum, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1994, vii + 240 pages, index, bibliography, $29.95 (cloth).

This dissertation examines the U.S. colonial state's efforts to promote Filipino national sentiment and patriotism through the public school system between 1900 and 1934. During the early years of American rule, U.S. colonial officials argued that Filipinos lacked a sense of nationality due to their linguistic and religious diversity, cultural heterogeneity, and regionalism. This perception shaped U.S. educational policy in the Philippines, leading to the creation of a curriculum that would attempt to homogenize and foster national affiliation among Filipinos. Using administrator files, Bureau of Education records, textbooks, and curricular materials collected in both the United States and the Philippines, this study reconstructs the colonial curriculum, paying special attention to English language instruction, history and civics, and vocational education. It shows that colonial education aimed to quell Filipino anti-colonial nationalism and facilitate obedience to the colonial state by casting good citizenship and “proper” patriotism in terms of economic self-sufficiency and non-violence, and by defining national allegiance as loyalty to both the Philippines and the U.S. Its central contention is that American colonial education created a form of Philippine nationalism that would become the dominant strain of official nationalism among Filipino leaders and educators. Bringing local actors the fore, this study enlists Filipino students’ and educators’ writings, vernacular novels, newspapers, and Philippine education journals to examine how Filipinos, both in the colony and metropole, responded to colonial education. It finds that Filipinos reformulated colonial lessons to fit in with older strains of Filipino nationalism even as they saw their American education as a path to economic opportunity and Philippine independence. By looking at the U.S. colonial state’s promotion of a native national identity, this study contributes to and complicates current narratives of U.S. colonial education and Philippine nationalism.

Here we present the design and characterization of a fully wireless subretinal visual prosthesis, which delivers electrical stimulation via photovoltaic pixels, illuminated with pulsed near infrared light (880-915 nm). In this dissertation I characterize the retinal responses to this photovoltaic retinal prosthesis in-vitro. The results show that the devices preserve crucial features of natural vision, including adaptation to static visual scenes, flicker fusion, and transient responses to changes in luminance. Arrays comprised of hexagonal pixels that are each either 140 μm or 70 μm wide safely elicit retinal responses in-vitro, as well as cortical responses in-vivo, in both healthy and diseased animal models. The stimulation takes advantage of the existing retinal network and is highly localized, restoring vision in blind rats at up to half the normal visual acuity. The retina is able to respond to high-frequency stimulation (20Hz), approaching that of natural visual scenes, surpassing other retinal prostheses that fail to reliably produce visual responses above 7Hz. The ability of this device to reliably produce retinal responses to high-frequency images is a promising indication of a new level of patient satisfaction that might be obtained during the first human clinical trials taking place later this year.

The causes of the First World War remain a central preoccupation for international relations scholars. Some find them in the actions of particular aggressors, others in the logic of zero-sum competition between bipolar alliance blocs. Still others describe how an ever more mechanical European state system became increasingly inflexible until it seized up and exploded. I turn this perennial query on its head, asking not why war erupted in 1914, but how Europe’s political class was able to avoid wars during the thirty-three years of pan-Great Power peace stretching from the Berlin Congress (1878) to the Italo-Turkish War (1911).

I argue that the Berlin Congress founded an international regime, which, like its predecessor founded at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), was framed as a “Concert of Europe,” and was predicated not on a balance of power but on normative principles of international relations, chief among them being the inviolability of member state territorial integrity and sovereignty. Like its Vienna predecessor, this Second Concert recognized subordinate principles, namely minority protections, national self-determination, and human rights. By surveying reportage on the Concert during the regime-challenging crises these subordinate, and state-challenging, principles instigated, I show how the Concert-loyalty of the regime’s member states led to affirmations of the supremacy of the territorial state, thereby preserving both the Concert regime and general peace. This era of tranquility ended with the Bosnian Crisis (1908-09), which saw the first violation of Concert principles by one of its members since the regime’s founding, resulting in the Concert’s dissolution. Europe, plunged back into an international state of nature in which power alone ruled, experienced rapidly escalating violence that culminated in general war.

Using archival collections and published primary sources, this dissertation offers a bottom-up, social historical perspective on how several international human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the United States during the Cold War--the International League for the Rights of Man, Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch--formed a transnational advocacy network that exposed abuses and shamed governments into ending them. It finds that a small circle of rooted cosmopolitans--a term used by Sidney Tarrow to describe "outsiders inside/insiders outside"--was responsible for the emergence of a movement during the mid-1970s that was centered in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The activists profiled here were not the powerful, but neither were they the powerless. They tended to be highly-educated professionals who were drawn into activism after their moral sensibilities had been greatly offended.

The emotional connections that formed between activists and victims thus arose within the historical context of intensifying market relations in this contemporary era of globalization. But why the spectacle of distant suffering drove some people to devote themselves to advancing the cause of human rights can be answered only in deeply personal terms. Biography is crucial to understanding how this transformation occurred for them: religious beliefs, a long-held cultural interest, a friend who experienced political repression and symbolized the plight of an entire country, previous work on domestic civil liberties, or their own victimization. Their worldview was based on a far-reaching conception of one's ethical responsibilities. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, lives are given value by the identities that shape them--the philosophical basis of a cosmopolitanism that is premised upon "kindness to strangers." Activists proceeded in a similar path from an abstract notion of the rights-bearing individual to immersing themselves in the lived experiences of prisoners, dissidents, and other persecuted individuals they may have never actually met in person.

Lacking the authority of state actors, activists had to act as moral entrepreneurs. Their social value was providing elites with information. The researchers who gathered the material for the reports published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch became experts who were called to testify before Congress. Journalists quoted their findings to counter or corroborate the official version of events. NGOs also developed legal expertise that they used to expand the reach of international human rights law. As this subfield became more widely taught at law schools, some of which established programs dedicated to it, a generation of lawyer-activists took the international human rights movement in a new, more litigious direction. Publicity was just as important. It was easier to mobilize public opinion against repressive governments if the victims were well known; even better if activists became part of the story. By reaffirming their accuracy and objectivity, activists could gain the trust of reliable donors, philanthropic foundations, wealthy benefactors, and celebrities, all of whom became important sources of income that enabled their NGOs to expand during the last three decades of the twentieth century.

This dissertation examines the use of human remains as tools for research and display over the course of a fifty-year span in the United States. It explores the shift away from racial classification toward emerging ideas regarding human prehistory and evolution. This project serves as both an intellectual history of the discourse surrounding these remains and a cultural history of the exhibitions that millions of visitors encountered at museums and fairs throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth century.