American Studies Commons^™

The Tortured Pre-History Of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis And The Politics Of Public Health, 1877-1940, Taylor Desloge

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a long history of the contested legal and environmental category of blight, especially in its racialized dimensions, in tandem with the African American experience of living in blighted urban spaces and forging a black politics of public health and welfare. Rethinking the conventional view that identifies blight as simply a preoccupation of post-World War II planners, this dissertation relocates its roots in a politics of public health that emerged a hundred years earlier, in the Post-Reconstruction Era, when black migration to the city and the rise of industrial capitalism raised new questions over both the social needs …

The Historical And Cultural Influences Of Gagok 가곡 (Korean Art Song): A Musical Guide, Sarah Kim

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This document explores what Gagok (Korean Art Song) consists of, the origins and history of it and how one may approach it musically, vocally and interpret it textually. The main questions I answer in this document include: What makes these art songs distinctly Korean? What significance does the role of Eastern Asian history have in order to closely tie the inspiration of writing Gagok? How does the text and music express these important historical events? The answers to these questions are essential to understanding Gagok by analyzing and interpreting the songs also in relation to approach learning them.

The research …

The Miss America Pageant Should Restore Prioritizing The Evening Gown Segment, Keishel Williams

Capstones

Evening gown in pageants, as in society, has always represented a woman's way of expressing her personality and femininity through fashion. Miss America's attempt to stop requiring evening gowns implies that wearing formal gowns does not equate to being a modern, empowered woman.

Instead of attempting to erase the evening gown as an outdated part of a modern woman’s wardrobe, the Miss America pageant should restore the original gown segment and use this opportunity to reshape America’s perspective on how modern women can choose to wear gowns and still be empowered.

https://keishelawilliams.wordpress.com/

Super, Brown And Queer, Carolyn Adams

Capstones

In response to policy seeking to turn back time for marginalized communities, characters and creators - standing at their intersections - are springing into action to change lives in their worlds and ours. Carolyn Adams explores the circumstances surrounding contemporary mainstream representation of women of color and queer superheroes on the big screen and bookshelves alike.

link to capstone: https://www.carolyn-adams.com/writing-updates/capstone

Cuba Journals Volume I - Transcription, Laura Swarner

Undergraduate Theses

The document is a transcribed version of volume I of the digital copy of the Cuba Journals which can be found online at the New York Public Library Archives. The Cuba Journals were written by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne during her time abroad in Cuba recovering from illness.

Where Was I Going? What Was The Point? Archetypes, Frame, And Social Transgressions In Ovid And Twain, Jessica Bates

Honors Theses

The sound of a narrator telling a story can be difficult to depict in written prose, and yet both Ovid and Twain capture the effect of an old man telling a story; Ovid through Nestor's Story in The Metamorphoses and Twain in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." They both use this framework to discuss the theme of social transgressions. I maintain that both Twain and Ovid use a variation on the wise-mentor archetype as a frame to discuss, through the use of satire, social transgressions which neither of their narrators condemn. I aim to explore Ovid and Twain's …

“Where Are You From?”: Using Critical Race Theory To Analyze Graphic Novel Counter-Stories Of The Racial Microaggressions Experienced By Two Angry Asian Girls, Talitha Angelica Acaylar Trazo, Woohee Kim

Intersections: Critical Issues in Education

This article uses critical race theory (CRT) to analyze two stories about racial microaggressions from Where Are You From?: Short stories about being Asian in America, the graphic novel written and illustrated by Talitha Angelica Acaylar Trazo in fulfillment of her undergraduate honors thesis. Where Are You From? visually historicizes the counter-stories of 48 Asian and Asian American students at a predominantly-white undergraduate institution. In this article, we examine these microaggressions in relation to institutional and structural racism and the intersections of race, gender, and power dynamics between white faculty and Asian female students. Furthermore, we propose …

Performance: All Our Names Were Freedom, Jessica Wilkerson, Kevin Cozart

About the Project

Students in Jessica Wilkerson's class, SST 560 (Oral History of Southern Social Movements), participated in a staged reading of All Our Names Were Freedom: Agency, Resiliency, and Community in Yalobusha County, a multivocal and multilayered narrative inspired by listening to the interviews recorded that semester. The event at the Spring Hill M. B. Baptist Church was attended by approximately 70 community members, UM faculty and students, and six of the interviewees.

The Forgotten Sins Of Robert E. Lee: How A Confederate Icon Became An American Icon, Jennifer Page

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

After the Civil War, Charles Sumner said of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, "hand him over to the avenging pen of history." But has history been so been so avenging to Lee? In "The Forgotten Sins of Robert E. Lee: How a Confederate Icon Became an American Icon," this thesis argues that textbooks, public memory, and popular culture have collectively obscured the historical reality of Lee. In the years following the Civil War, the complex and tangled history of Lee as a slaveholding southerner were overlooked and, in many instances, erased in an effort to reunify North and South. In …

The Legacy Of Lynching: On Representation, Remembrance, And Reconciliation, Jackie Chesser

Liberal Arts Capstones

The Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial of Peace and Justice is a memorial rooted in recognizing and naming the victims of lynching and racial terror. This memorial is a safe space for people to connect with history and learn about the injustices faced by their ancestors, and, conversely, the injustices wrought upon others by their ancestors. This memorial doesn’t stop at recognizing the victims, it also explains the effects of racial terror beyond lynching, including the Jim Crow Era and mass incarceration.

The National Memorial of Peace and Justice is also focused on extending its impact though its Memorial Monument …

Movie Review: Ford V. Ferrari, Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The movie asks: do American companies care about making the highest quality goods?"

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the movie Ford v. Ferrari 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.

https://inallthings.org/movie-review-ford-v-ferrari/?highlight=ford%20v.%20ferrari

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

(In)Equality., Jongin Choi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

(in)Equality. centers around my experiences as a transnational person and those around me who have affected my current concept of equality and cultural histories. My visual methodologies cover digital photography and editing, inkjet printing, and laser engraving: multimedia in a process of new discovery, translation between analog and digital, and rearticulation. The exhibition includes portraits peering down from above, illuminated by projected patterns and manipulated messages from Nike’s “Equality.” (2017). The purpose of this thesis paper is to describe the elements of identity, marginalization, and personal reaction to advertising, as well as the and theories which have shaped this project. …

Amjambo Africa! (December 2019), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

New American Leaders .............p. 2

Ladder to the Moon Conference p. 3

Appeal from 350 Maine .............p. 3

Asylum Seekers & Work Permits p. 4

Palaver Strings ............................ p. 9

Ikirenga Cy'Intore .................... p. 11

New Deal for New Americans Act .............p. 13

Coffee by Design Supports Arts ..........................p. 18

DACEP & ILAP in Lewiston...... p. 18

Mid Coast New Mainers Group ............................................... p. 19

Housing Scams ......................... p. 19

Metal Storytellers: Reflections Of War Culture In Silverplate B-29 Nose Art From The 509th Composite Group, Terri Wesemann

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Most people are familiar with the Enola Gay—the B-29 that dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Less known are the fifteen Silverplate B-29 airplanes that trained for the mission, that were named and later adorned with nose art. However, in recorded history, the atomic mission overshadowed the occupational folklore of this group. Because the abundance of planes were scrapped in the decade after World War II and most WWII veterans have passed on, all that remains of their occupational folklore are photographs, oral and written histories, some books, …

Shall I Sing You A Ghost Story: The Nature And Purpose Of Ghost Songs In Maritime Communities Of Northern New England And Atlantic Canada, Richard A. Blake

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This paper will be discussing the nature of maritime ghost stories put forth in musical narrative. There are two questions that I will be endeavoring to answer. 1) What kinds of changes can occur to a ghost story when it is put into a song and 2) How would the understanding of a folksong’s story change when it crosses boundaries from one place to another? More specifically it will discuss those changes when crossing provincial or national boundaries. The investigation into these questions will involve the use of several written and audio sources. The written sources include titles like the …

The Time Is Now: Embodiments Of The Hyper-Present In Contemporary American Literature, Robert Bruss

Theses and Dissertations

For many years, writers have argued the predominant temporality of contemporary experience is an intensified present. David Harvey and Fredric Jameson argued that such an intense emphasis on the present was one of postmodernism’s principle features. Harvey argued that new communication technologies resulted in a "time-space compression” that created the sense that “the present is all there is.” Similarly, Jameson argued that postmodernism reflected the logic of late capitalism, resulting in a society that “has begun to live in a perpetual present” that obliterates one’s awareness of the past or future. Although many consider we have moved beyond postmodernism, our …

American And Iraqi Prose Fiction Of The Iraq War: Traumas Of The Self, Traumas Of The Nation, Ghyath Manhel Alkinani

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

War is so omnipresent in our contemporary world that the story of war is too important to be left to fiction writers to frame and give meaning for. This dissertation provides an analysis of two dominant patterns in contemporary Iraqi and American prose fictional representations of the Iraq War: the individualistic trauma hero narrative and the nationalistic, collective narrative. I argue that the trauma hero myth that dominates American representations of the Iraq War psychologizes and de-politicizes war experience alienating the victim of trauma by decontextualizing their experience and negating the Other. On the other hand, the sweeping nationalistic narrative …

The Anonymous Web In Adichie’S Americanah, Michelle Jude Gibeault

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adichie’s Americanah is a novel that elevates anonymous blogging into black cultural performance. The novel follows a young Nigerian, Ifemelu, who arrives in the United States on a student visa and depicts her stressful confrontation with racism in post-slavery America. Through beginning a blog, Ifemelu voices her experiences as a black woman and immigrant in ways that renew the concerns of James Baldwin, an author whom she studies closely. Like Baldwin, her style blends humor and techniques of persuasion that trace to traditional oral folklore. Ifemelu’s success rests partly on Adichie’s construction of her as a character of good ethos, …

A Religious Interpretation Of The American Civil War As Evidenced By Biblical Language In Songs And Hymns, Alyson J. Punzi

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

Both Union and Confederate soldiers claimed the same moral confidence about being on the right side of the American Civil War. Significant studies have evaluated the religiosity of the Civil War, but the religious content of songs and hymns, namely their use of biblical language has not been studied for the insight into a religious interpretation of the war they provide. Because the moral claims appear in songs and hymns and utilize biblical language to interpret the conflict, their role in the war, and the expected outcome, this research is important to provide a full understanding of religion’s role in …