This dissertation examines the often-overlooked work of scientists investigating nutrition at land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations in the mid to far West, especially in Wisconsin and California, from 1887 to 1930. It challenges the historiography’s dominant narrative that nutrition science was exclusively laboratory-based and quantitatively-focused; that it was primarily a tool of social control; and that it was chiefly the work of scientists and reformers in the urban Northeast. Rather, I argue, chemists working at land grant colleges and experiment stations around the nation forged a holistic tradition of nutrition research that countered the reductionist views of the Northeast’s “pure” and industrial scientists and urban reformers. Chemists working in the agricultural tradition were skeptical of the ability of quantitative methods alone to assess nutritional value. They placed a value on taste, pleasure, and custom in their approach to nutrition and expressed caution over the use of new industrially-processed foods and preservatives. They were concerned not only for the health of consumers, but also about the impact of new industrial foods and food systems on their farming constituents. They worked assiduously for the passage of pure food and drug laws. Nutrition science itself was transformed by their pioneering vitamin experiments. Drawing on the archival papers of chemists investigating nutrition at the agricultural colleges and experiment stations in the Midwest and California, I trace the rise and fall of the agricultural tradition of nutrition science through five significant events in nutrition science in the United States from the 1880s to the 1920s. These events include the first USDA dietary surveys of the 1890s; the debates over pure food laws leading up to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; precursors to and early vitamin experiments in the 1910s; the work of scientists in the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War; and food fortification research and university-industry partnerships at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s. I explain how these chemists investigated nutrition questions, framed their understanding of healthful diets, and positioned their role in relation to farmers, consumers, processors, and government in the increasingly industrial food system throughout these events. Shifting the focus from nutrition workers and urban reformers in the Northeast to agricultural chemists in the Midwest and California, my dissertation also positions the development of the science in the changing agricultural landscape and industrializing food system. Finally, I show how this history challenges the linear narratives that have dominated the historiography, how it reveals an alternative possible trajectory for the science, and how it significantly shaped the development of nutrition science and its role in American society.

The purpose of this study was to explore the decision-making processes of Black high school students, regarding their post-graduation plans (e.g. going to college, entering the workforce, etc.).While there is seemingly more attention, research, and money spent on college outreach, preparation, and promise programs (Perna, 2002), recent literature has shown us that higher education institutions target their college access efforts toward white, higher income communities (Jaquette & Salazar, 2018). Thus, as research has shown, urban students possessing the qualifications to enroll into four-year institutions often do not apply or enroll into these institutions (Roderick, Coca, & Nagaoka, 2011). This undermatching of urban students leads to the overrepresentation of low-income, students of color in the community college sector of higher education, and underrepresentation in the four-year sector (Anderson et al., 2015). To remedy this, this study takes a deeper look into not just college access, matriculation, and choice, but further asks what decisions Black high school graduates are making around their futures, and why. While understanding the inequity in K-12 urban schools is important and deeply affect Black student decision making processes, this study expands literature around how, against the odds, students are making informed decisions. Considering the aforementioned, and guided by Social Reproduction Theory (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005), and Black Critical Theory (Dumas & ross, 2016), this study asks: 1) What are Black students from “South LA high school” post-graduation decisions? 1a) Does, and if so how does, antiBlack racism affect their decisions? 2) What other factors influence their decision-making processes? 3) How do Black students from “Henry Lacks High School” make their decisions regarding their futures following high school? 3a) Does, and if so how does, antiBlack racism affect their decisions? Utilizing semi-structured interviews, walking interviews, and photo elicitation interviews this study will provides a number of implications for research, theory, and practice. Most prevalent is the need for researchers and practitioners to understand the political economy and how that affects student behaviors. Accordingly, it is necessary to understand how students recognize the ways in which antiBlack racism permeates through Black communities and schools, and make their decisions accordingly. Additionally, there must be a development of programming and policies that take identity-based approaches, have discussions of race and racial identity, and actually engage in equity work.

Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Christian reformers of the North American Young Men’s Christian Association and related organizations set themselves the task of training the rising leadership of nations around the world in a set of ideals they termed “Christian citizenship.” Motivated by ideas about God’s universal grace, by liberal ideals of personhood, and by fears of moral crisis, the middle class evangelical reformers of the YMCA, the YWCA, the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), and the World’s Student Christian Federation (WSCF) sought not only to “evangelize the world in this generation,” but to teach good citizenship and encourage fair play among individuals and among nations—to foster ideals of justice, equality, and democracy among their constituencies in China, Japan, India, and beyond, in a millennial project ultimately designed to save the world, politically as well as spiritually. From the 1890s into the 1920s, Christian reformers dedicated themselves to the work of imparting the ideals of “Christian citizenship” through educational, social, and religious programs, as well as through training in sports and sportsmanship. By the 1920s, many of these reformers had come to assume that democratic nationhood should be universal—provided that both the national leaders and a critical mass of citizens had acquired a particular kind of personhood. Ultimately, however, their responses to struggles for national self-determination in the 1920s would show that their universalist commitments were, in most cases, indefinitely deferred, contingent on a pedagogical process that was never complete.

This dissertation tells the story of the ideals of “Christian citizenship” as developed by these reformers between 1886 and 1925. On the basis of ideas and attitudes expressed by celebrated Association leaders such as Nobel Laureate John Mott, by less known figures such as YMCA Physical Director Harry Kingman, and more generally in institutional histories and surveys, official periodicals, newspaper articles, conference reports, memoirs and personal writings, and visual representations such as logos and architectural drawings, this dissertation argues that the project of fostering “Christian social relations” and instilling the ideals of “Christian citizenship” in the so-called “plastic nations” of the world was at the heart of the North American Associations’ Foreign Work during this period, and it suggests that the history of these ideas contributes to an understanding of the history of the democratic project more broadly.

When litigants entered Southern courtrooms after the end of the Civil War, they encountered a tangled morass of unexpected legal questions related to the end of slavery. Though the need to face such problems was ubiquitous across the former slaveholding republic, each state contended with such matters uniquely, producing a series of different solutions to the same fundamental problems. Principal among them: Why were there so many legacies of slavery contested in court? How should the law treat slavery and former slaves after the supposed end of the peculiar institution? In what ways did litigants themselves help to shape the meaning of freedom? How complete was the abolition of slavery if the institution itself remained open to ongoing litigation?

State courts and individual petitioners were forced to confront the altered legal terrain of the post-Civil War South and negotiate the precise meanings of the Thirteenth Amendment, the end of slavery, the transformation of the former slave states, and ultimately, the reunification of the United States. Evaluating the many responses to these issues exposes legal Reconstruction’s many possibilities; some would become the road not taken, while others set the standard for managing slavery’s remaining legal quandaries. In some courtrooms, jurists were committed to a total eradication of slavery and the laws that had once supported it, revealing Reconstruction’s fleeting potential to secure true freedom for four million former slaves. The outcomes of other cases reveal judges clinging to assumptions about race, law, and Southern society that reflected the antebellum past. As this dissertation shows, the more conservative route ultimately became the prevailing legal paradigm, but it took nearly ten years to arrive at this conclusion, challenging the notion that there was ever a fixed meaning or moment of emancipation.

This dissertation explores the intersection of the New Deal and the war on crime in the 1930s and 1940s, and argues that their interaction drove state-building in three major ways. First was the expansion and modernization of American law enforcement and criminal justice. Second was the legitimation of national political authority, which had been unstable since Reconstruction. This legitimation relied on a new war on crime coalition built by the Roosevelt administration. Third was the transformation of American government, particularly in the structure of American federalism, which in turn transformed American liberalism as both a political ethos and a political program. The chapters narrate the predicament for American law and order from the late-nineteenth century through World War II, and along the way describe the New Deal developments in criminal law, the FBI, criminological thought, drug control, constitutional interpretation, and security-state policy.

Abstract

“Prison Bound”: South Central LA Graffiti Writer Narratives of Carcerality and the Making of a Youth Carceral Culture, 1941—2000

by

Alejandro Garcia

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Rebecca McLennan, Co-Chair, Professor Waldo E. Martin, Co-Chair

From World War II to the early 1990s, Black and Brown people maintained peaceful intergroup relations on the streets of Los Angeles, California. The historical record shows that conflicts between these groups remained minimal and isolated, and that race only played a peripheral role. After the mid-1990s, this changed. Black-Brown interracial tensions and violence on the streets became more frequent. I argue that both California’s formal neoliberal carceral state and its informal neoliberal carceral culture decisively shaped this change.The thesis here is that when California developed its formal neoliberal carceral state between the 1970s and 2000s, its informal neoliberal carceral culture was also set in motion. By the 1990s, LA’s street power dynamics and race relations were informed by relational carceral interactions that intersect with the formal carceral state, the informal carceral culture of prisoners, and the free-world of the streets, or what I call carcerality. The primary research bases are archival research, newspapers, policy records, papers of government officials, including papers from the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR), music lyrics and music videos, graffiti writings, gang member narratives, and oral histories of graffiti writers that I conducted. I argue that South Central LA’s interracial graffiti crews of the 1980s and early 1990s echo in part a long history of fundamentally peaceful Black-Brown relations. In addition, I argue that the rupture between them in the mid-1990s reflects in large measure the impact of formerly Brown and Black prison gang members released concurrently onto LA’s streets and into LA’s communities. As mass institutions forge mass culture, then institutions of mass incarceration help create sufficient carceral cohesion to form mass informal carceral cultures. The scholarship on the carceral state and mass incarceration mostly focuses on official top-down processes of incarceration. We still know very little about how informal carceral cultures can appropriate the formal functions of the carceral state. Conversely, the scholarship on informal carceral cultures treats prisoners’ interactions as having little, at best limited impact, on the outside world. However, a historical examination of carceral interactions that intersect a massive carceral state, its informal carceral culture, and the free-world of the streets provides us opportunities to deepen our understanding of the width and breadth of carceral intersubjectivities. The scholarship on LA’s Black-Brown relations emphasizes the interracial tensions and violence of the 1990s. But, that scholarship fails to account for a longer history of Black-Brown peaceful coexistence prior to the 1990s and how it ruptures under massive formal and informal carceral forces in the 1990s. The story of South Central’s interracial graffiti crews helps us understand this. Prior to the 1990s, California prisons were the major site of Black-Brown interracial tensions and violence. When California massively expanded its carceral infrastructure during the 1970s throughout the early 2000s, this changed dramatically. With the release of prisoners from California’s prisons in the 1990s, Black and Brown gang members and the related cultural dynamics spilled out into Black-Brown communities and helped fracture Brown-Black relations. As I demonstrate here, graffiti crews were not gangs, but they were also not exempt from the reach of prison gangs, especially once formerly incarcerated Brown and Black gang members left prisons and rejoined the ‘free’ world. Ultimately, in concert with street gangs, prison gangs sought to discipline or punish interracial graffiti crews, seeking to incorporate them inside the larger informal neoliberal carceral culture of California. To reiterate, as a result, the peaceful relations between LA’s Black and Brown peoples endured a tremendous assault.

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This review aims to assemble many years of research and clinical experience in the fields of neurodevelopment and neuroscience to present an up-to-date understanding of the clinical presentation, molecular and brain pathology associated with Fragile X syndrome, a neurodevelopmental condition that develops with the full mutation of the FMR1 gene, located in the q27.3 loci of the X chromosome, and Fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome a neurodegenerative disease experienced by aging premutation carriers of the FMR1 gene. It is important to understand that these two syndromes have a very distinct clinical and pathological presentation while sharing the same origin: the mutation of the FMR1 gene; revealing the complexity of expansion genetics.