American Studies Commons^™

Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment ...

The Same Ten People (Stps) Of Rockville: Volunteerism, Preservation, And Sense Of Community In Small-Town Southern Utah, Tori Edwards

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the central role that volunteerism plays in creating a strong sense of sense of place and community within the town of Rockville, Utah, located 4.7 miles from Zion National Park. Rockville has no commercial businesses within its boundaries and relies heavily upon the volunteer efforts of its residents to carry out the majority of civil services within the town. Drawing from interviews of the STP’s (a group of Rockville residents who volunteer on a regular basis), this thesis highlights how the act of volunteerism helps residents feel membership within their community. This thesis also looks ...

Wonder Woman (Movie Review), Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work: Comprehensive List

"'I used to want to save the world, but I knew so little then.'” So says Diana the Amazon in the opening of Wonder Woman, a movie that mixes the worlds of comic books, World War I, and ancient Greek myths."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the movie Wonder Woman from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

http://inallthings.org/wonder-woman/

Pop Goes La Cultura: American Pop Culture’S Perpetuation Of Latino Paradigms And Stereotypes, Adrian E. Quinones Rivas, Berlinda Saenz

Ursidae: The Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Northern Colorado

This article examines the perpetuation of Latino stereotypes and paradigms within American Pop Culture. Pop culture venues such as film, television, and the web platform YouTube were used as a basis for analysis. In addition, a few television primetime shows and movies are referenced, including The George Lopez Show, Jane the Virgin, Gilmore Girls, Scarface, and Mi Vida Loca (my crazy life), and critically analyzed as evidence of Latino subordination. Latino Americans face many challenges including being stereotyped as uneducated, poverty-stricken, lazy, aloof, and obtaining low end jobs such as janitors, housemaids, and gardeners. These negative depictions have created an ...

The Attitudes And Stigmas Surrounding Modern Day Interracial Relationships, Charisse Allen

Siegel Institute Ethics Research Scholars

Interracial relationships are defined as relationships where each person is of a different race than the other. Historically, we’ve seen interracial relationships between slave owners and their slaves and in recent years among many different types of people across different races other than the “traditional” black and white. The current study that will be discussed is concerning people’s views on interracial relationships amid an election and 49 years after the court case Loving v. Virginia which overturned anti-miscegenation laws.

Outlandish Outsourcing, Traci Grodner

Best Integrated Writing

Grodner Provides a review of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree that relates a personal anecdote about outsourcing to her academic analysis of the text. Grodner concludes that outsourcing has dire implications for both domestic and foreign workers.

Best Integrated Writing 2017 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Green, Frank Henry (Sc 3125), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan (click on "Additional Files" below) of Manuscripts Small Collection 3125. “Glacier National Park, Montana, United States of America (Part of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park): A Few Stories as Told by Frank Henry Green, Season Park Ranger at Avalanche Creek Campground.” The text is liberally illustrated with photos.

Mcdonald, Nancy D. (Sc 3122), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3122. Note from Nancy D. McDonald accompanying a copy of "I'll Take My Stand" acknowledging that Dr. Lowell H. Harrison, a Western Kentucky University (WKU) history professor, had loaned her the book around 1970. She had failed to return it, and decided, after the deaths of Dr. Harrison and his wife, to donate it in their memory to the Kentucky Library at WKU.

A Heads Up On Kathy Griffin's Trump Head Depiction, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This essay is a feminist analysis of the controversy involving Kathy Griffin's depiction of Trump's head.

“The Past That Was Differs Little From The Past That Was Not”: Pictographs And Petroglyphs In Cormac Mccarthy’S Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West, Cami Ann Dilg

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports

This literary analysis expands the scholarly canon concerning Cormac McCarthy’s regional writing by identifying the purpose of pictographs and petroglyphs in Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). Not only do pictographs and petroglyphs tie the narrative to place, but they create a commentary regarding the erasure of Native American histories in the United States. These images record Native American memory and presence in the landscape, and by referencing them, McCarthy confronts concepts of exposure and shame, which facilitates conversations concerning Native American genocide. A close analysis of character interaction with and scene placement of these ...

"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into ...

Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Beyond the Vale is a data visualization project dedicated to the study of slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Focusing on Gooding’s Township, a rural farming community in the eastern county of Craven, it is designed to address basic questions about the experiences of the county’s antebellum enslaved population. These questions represent points of contention between local heritage narratives and the direct testimonies of former slaves. Where former slaves describe a complex, yet undeniably exploitative system in which they had only minimal control over their own lives, county literature echoes larger themes in North Carolina state scholarship by either ...

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success ...

Thine Is The Kingdom: The Political Thought Of 21st Century Evangelicalism, Joanna Tice Jen

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self-regulation; and ...

Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed representations, as separate layered events were cut to multitrack tape.

When mixed together, these overdubbed tracks presented the listener with the impression of collective, interactive performances. Features central to the ethos of R&B music making – vocals in call and response, instruments in apparent rhythmic dialogues, and funky syncopation usually resulting from interactive group dynamism – were increasingly the product of the technologically mediated process of overdubbing, and performed often by one musician singing all of the parts or layering several instruments. By 1990, in part due to the popularity of newly developed drum machines, MIDI sequencers, samplers, and digital synthesizers, to record collectively in R&B-based black popular music was the exception rather than the norm.

This study considers new practices of record production that developed in this era of multitrack recording and electronic experimentation through an examination of four case studies: Stevie Wonder’s recordings in the early 1970s; Prince’s recordings from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s; Michael Jackson’s composition and recording process from this same period; and the mid-to-late 1980s sampling and sequencing processes of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production collective. The producers of these recordings, well aware of the collective ethos of earlier black music styles, conceived imaginative ways ...

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt ...

The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The India, Empire and its Colonial Practices in South Asia" Yubraj Aryal claims that Bharatiya discourse supports colonization in South Asia. This discourse justifies oppression of institutions, practices, of the non-Bharatiya colonized. The article examines Indian Empire's colonialism toward the weaker, smaller nations along its border and the Bharatiya ideology at the heart of the repressive empire, which is taken to represent the South Asian subcontinent. The article looks at the way in which Bharatiya is perhaps a more oppressive ideology than Orientalism and gives a glimpse into how society, culture, history, and textuality work around ...

A Comparative History Of Resurrection Plants, John Charles Ryan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Comparative Literary History of Resurrection Plants" John Charles Ryan assembles a comparative history of resurrection plants through textual analysis of early botanical commentaries, herbal references, prose, poetry, and other sources. Resurrection plants include a diverse range of botanical species, typically of arid regions, that appear to come back to life after complete desiccation. Historical and contemporary observers—from sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard to contemporary Australian poet John Kinsella—have expressed an abiding fascination for resurrection plants' capacity to survive harsh environmental conditions. The plants court their own deaths by paring down—then restoring—physiological processes in ...

Adoption, Cynical Detachment, And New Age Beliefs In Juno And Kung Fu Panda, Fu-Jen Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Adoption, Cynical Detachment, and New Age Beliefs in Juno and Kung Fu Panda" Fu-Jen Chen situates his study within today's prevailing climate of global consumption to argue that the 2007 film Juno—featuring an unconventional portrayal of the adoption triad and a cynical detachment from public values—not only trivializes and depoliticizes the practice of adoption but also serves as an ideological supplement to today's global capitalism. Furthermore, Kung Fu Panda 1 & 2 (2008; 2011) provide two ideological messages of contemporary New Age spirituality—"the belief in nothing" in part I, and "the attitude of inner peace ...