http://hdl.handle.net/10027/72 UIC Department of History Thu, 23 May 2013 15:53:12 GMT 2013-05-23T15:53:12Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9606 Before AIDS: Gay and Lesbian Community Health Activism in the 1970s At the start of the 1970s, gays and lesbians were sick. The medical profession deemed homosexuality an illness, and even as gays and lesbians challenged this theory of illness based of sexuality, many were suffering from actual illnesses in the form of venereal diseases. Propelled by a series of historical developments, including gay liberation, gays and lesbians began to create health services for themselves in the 1970s, which would grow in size and number throughout the decade, even after mainstream medicine altered its stance on homosexuality. These health services served as a vehicle for gays and lesbians to effectively challenge notions of their innate illness in mainstream medicine and society while also providing needed services and strengthening burgeoning gay and lesbian communities. This dissertation, through clinics in Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, traces the origins and evolutions of gay and lesbian health services in the 1970s. These services and organizations contributed to the gay and lesbian culture, politics, and communities that emerged during gay liberation. It also shows how gay health services grew directly out of the radicalism of the 1960s, a national discussion on health care and medical authority, and efforts by the state to provide health care services to underserved communities, ameliorate social discord, and slow rising poverty rates. Before AIDS illustrates the important role that health played in gay and lesbian identity and politics during the gay liberation period. Furthermore, the state emerges as an unlikely, and often unintentional, benefactor of gay and lesbian health services and community building efforts throughout the decade, not only allowing for the creation of these services, but also shaping their growth. The role of the state in creating gay and lesbian health services in the 1970s, the concern for sexual health among gays and lesbians at the time, and the resulting gay and lesbian medical and research infrastructure explored in Before AIDS recasts the events of the early AIDS crisis in 1980s. From this perspective Before AIDS provides insight into the dynamic and changing relationships between the state, the gay and lesbian communities, and health in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Fri, 14 Dec 2012 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9606 2012-12-14T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9465 Salud Colectiva: The Role of Public Health Campaigns in Building a Modern Mexican Nation, 1940s-1960s This dissertation argues that health campaigns in Mexico during the 1940s-1960s became more effective through the mediation of health promoters working in rural indigenous communities. By carefully balancing state-sponsored health initiatives with on-the-ground implementation, health promoters in this period perpetuated community-focused national health programs while further integrating rural populations into the modern nation. This dissertation innovatively combines social history with the history of health to reveal the lived reality of health providers working with Mexico’s indigenous populations. In a broad sense, the findings show a major shift away from previous national health programs that attempted to administer uniform healthcare regardless of culture or environment. Beginning the 1940s, healthcare providers worked to establish a dialectic relationship with rural populations to achieve short-term social and economic improvements. The three regional case studies that serve as the core of this dissertation each required a different organizational structure, set of agency collaborations, level of community participation, and range of provider mediations between officials and locals. Together, the three cases show the crosshatching of bureaucratic goals with international pressures, indigenous activism, and local participation as health providers put institutional policies into practice. Thu, 13 Dec 2012 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9465 2012-12-13T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9283 Gospel Order among Friends: Colonial Violence and the Peace Testimony in Quaker Pennsylvania, 1681-1722 This dissertation examines the development of gospel order and the Quaker peace testimony within the political and cultural milieu of Pennsylvania during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. My project uses Quaker peace discourse as a lens to explore the negotiation of colonial violence in early America. Rather than viewing Quaker peace discourse in isolation, I contend that it cannot be understood apart from the violence that underpinned the European settlement of Pennsylvania. Provincial Quakers were heavily implicated in slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, and their refusal to establish a militia and promptly remit war taxes to the Crown galvanized non-Quaker opposition in the colony and attracted the opprobrium of royalist officials. The cultural construction of Pennsylvania on Native lands also set off a contest for power in which neither Indians nor Friends could dominate the other. “Gospel Order among Friends” argues that the Quaker intimacy with colonial violence touched off a serious debate among Friends about the social, cultural, and religious meanings of peace. Provincial Quakers struggled to limit the economy of violence operating within their households, and by extension, for the colony at large. I use the term “gospel order” to describe the moral language provincial Friends employed to negotiate their collective relationship to violence. Quaker debates over gospel order culminated in the Keithian schism, one of the most serious religious and political controversies to engulf early Pennsylvania. My project treats slavery, settler-Indian conflict, and imperial warfare as interrelated forms of colonial violence and challenges the historical tendency to view peace rhetoric in isolation from the broader Anglo-American discourse on violence and social order. Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9283 2012-12-10T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9172 Responding to Rape: Contesting the Meanings of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1950-1980 Between 1950 and 1980, extraordinary and unprecedented changes occurred in the legal, medical, and social understandings and responses to sexual violence against women in the United States. These changes were largely driven by civil rights and second wave feminist mobilizations around sexual violence. The dissertation focuses on how social movement understandings of race and gender informed activism and proposed solutions to rape. I argue that anti-rape activism of the time period is characterized by complex intersections of movement politics around rape. The dissertation also highlights how social movements make change as activists negotiated one another’s politics on race and gender and negotiated and responded to significant state limitations and frameworks. Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9172 2012-12-10T06:00:00Z