Cultural History Commons^™

Unveiling Laïcité: Secularism Algerian Muslims And The Headscarf Affair In Modern France, Coleen Nugent

Honors Theses

The historical relationship between the French state and its form of secularism, laïcité, and the French Muslim population is fraught with conflict, misunderstanding, and ambivalence. Laïcité, is a form of secularism unique to France, thus why it refuses to be translated from its native French. France also has a unique colonial relationship with Algeria, which was considered an integral part of France during France's colonial empire. Both the history of laïcité and the history of this colonial relationship help to explain the modern relationship between laïcité and the French Muslim population. In order to analyze this conflict, the "Head Scarf …

Pacifying Paradise: Violence And Vigilantism In San Luis Obispo, Joseph Hall-Patton

Master's Theses

San Luis Obispo, California was a violent place in the 1850s with numerous murders and lynchings in staggering proportions. This thesis studies the rise of violence in SLO, its causation, and effects. The vigilance committee of 1858 represents the culmination of the violence that came from sweeping changes in the region, stemming from its earliest conquest by the Spanish. The mounting violence built upon itself as extensive changes took place. These changes include the conquest of California, from the Spanish mission period, Mexican and Alvarado revolutions, Mexican-American War, and the Gold Rush. The history of the county is explored until …

How Liberal Korean And Taiwanese Textbooks Portray Their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”, Frances Chan

Student Work

A 2015-2016 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Frances Chan (Timothy Dwight College '16) for her essay submitted to the Department of History, “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”.” (Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, advisor.)

Frances Chan’s essay “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles,” is a fascinating exploration of the creation of historical memory as seen in textbooks on the history of postwar economic development in Korea and Taiwan. Drawing on her remarkable linguistic skills in both Korean and …

Angie Martinez, Nick Martinez Jr., And Lorna Martinez-Garcia, Csusb

South Colton Oral History Project Collection

No abstract provided.

Major League Baseball's Latin American Connection: Salaries, Scouting, And Globalization, Ezequiel Kitsu Lihosit

Theses

This research examines the history of foreign, Latin American Major League baseball players. It looks at the history of the players, their countries and the expansion of recruitment and training in Latin America. Other factors such as race and labor relations contributed greatly to shifts in player recruitment by MLB. Baseball is an international game and today more than 25% of all major leaguers are foreign-born Latin Americans. This project lays out how this occurred and how the academy training system has evolved and become the industry standard for teams. Through both the history of the earliest Latin American players …

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?: Food Inequlaity And Black Americans, Christina Foster

Capstone Collection

Food insecurity is an issue that plagues many people throughout the world. It only requires a brief search on the United Nation’s (U.N.) World Hunger Map to determine that this is indeed a worldwide crisis. Conversely, within the United States, the issue of hunger is often treated as “minimal” in comparison to other countries. A deeper inquiry into hunger within the U.S. reveals an even more disturbing connection: the role of white supremacy and systemic racism in regard to hunger. Academic research pertaining to food access is quite recent. Be that as it may, it is of no surprise that …

Giving The Global High Sign: Coca-Cola Advertising Of The “American Way” In Life Magazine, 1941-1947, Scott Greenfield

History Theses

Magazine advertising through these years marketed American products to a consumer base that was becoming more patriotic. This “patriotic consumerism” manifested itself both in its foundational support for the United States’ involvement in World War II and in its constant implementation of the “American Dream” ideology that mixed nostalgia and modernity in preparation of a post-war world. Expanding upon the resulting cultural behavior of classifying the support of American business as a quasi-civic duty, The Coca-Cola Company successfully situated the “American Way of Life” as a global aspiration through its product’s entanglement in the global settings of war, ensuring that …

“Casey Saw It Through”: Guy “Machine Gun” Molony And The Creation Of A Rugged Individual, Brett Spencer

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This thesis explores the influence of masculinity in twentieth century American foreign policy through examining the career of Guy “Machine Gun” Molony. Molony was an Irish American mercenary from New Orleans, whose career saw the transformation of Honduras from a banana republic to a recipient of dollar diplomacy. Unlike the majority of mercenaries who did not use their experience to build successful careers, Molony made a name for himself in American newspapers, becoming respected and even feared by policemen and politicians. His life tells a fascinating tale of the individual male in American foreign policy, where rebellious youth used …

Daily Life At Crystal City Internment Camp 1942-1945, Caitlin T. Dietze

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Throughout World War II, the belligerent countries took enemy civilians, as well as soldiers, prisoner. The majority of the camps created to hold these prisoners were located in the European and Asian theaters of battle, but the United States operated prisoner of war camps and civilian internment camps as well. American internment camps, administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), imprisoned persons from the Axis countries of Japan, Italy, and Germany, deemed a threat to national security and categorized as a group as “enemy aliens.” Generally, these individuals were not threats, and a sizable number were legal U.S. citizens. …

“Art Had Almost Left Them:” Les Cenelles Society Of Arts And Letters, The Dillard Project, And The Legacy Of Afro-Creole Arts In New Orleans, Derek Wood

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1942, in New Orleans a group of intellectual and artistic African-Americans, led by Marcus B. Christian, formed an art club named Les Cenelles Society of Arts and Letters. Les Cenelles members both looked to New Orleans’s Afro-Creole population as the pinnacle of African American artistic achievements and used their example as a model for artists who sought to effect social change. Many of the members of Les Cenelles wrote for the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Program (FWP). A key strategy the members of Les Cenelles used to accomplish their goals was gaining the support of white civic leaders, in particular …

Apocalypse & Affect: Political Passivity In Film And Television Representations Of Nuclear Holocaust, W W. Rooks

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Within the expanding canon of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film and television, this project studies the subgenre that makes use of nuclear holocaust as a narrative device or setting in order to understand how, rather than engaging audiences with the dire off-screen politics that inform such films, it imposes a sense of political passivity on its characters. Similarly imparted is an assumption of that same sense for the audience. In this way, the framing of modern apocalyptic narratives meet an “affective limitation,” which is a concept steeped in the examination of media as a potential tool to motivate political action (Massumi …

Hamilton, Democracy, And Theatre In America, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

I, along with University of Richmond professors Lázaro Lima and Laura Browder, received an National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association Latino Americans grant this year to organize the Latinos in Richmond program, which coincided with two classes that we taught this spring: the Tocqueville Seminar “Performing Latino USA: Democracy, Demography, and Equality” and the First-Year Seminar “Telling Richmond’s Latino Stories: A Community Documentary Project.” Since the goal of both courses was to explore how Latinos—the nation’s largest “minority” group in a representative democracy like America­—is also the most underrepresented, I was interested in understanding Hamilton through …

Picturing The Cajun Revival: Swallow Records, Album Art, And Marketing An Identity Of South Louisiana, 1960s-1970s, Jessica A. Dauterive

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In South Louisiana in the late 1950s, Ville Platte native Floyd Soileau joined a network of independent recording companies across the United States that provided an opportunity for local entrepreneurs and artists to profit from the global music industry. This paper analyzes the album covers of Floyd Soileau’s Cajun recording label, Swallow Records, during the 1960s-1970s. This period overlaps with a movement to subvert a negative regional identity among Louisiana Cajuns that is often referred to as the Cajun revival. Through a consideration of album covers as objects of business strategy and creative expression, as well as oral histories with …

Their Swords, Our Plowshares: "Peaceful" Nuclear Weapons, Propaganda, And Cold War Memory Expressed In Film: 1959-1989, Michael A. St. Jacques

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons as tools of warfare and diplomacy. Immediately following the Second World War, American attitudes toward the atomic bomb were overwhelmingly positive. Once the Soviet Union developed their own atomic bomb and the United States lost the atomic monopoly, attitudes started to shift. After the first hydrogen bombs tests, public sentiment, as demonstrated in film, became markedly negative. To counter these negative attitudes and portray their nuclear weapons as peaceful tools instead of weapons of mass destruction, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed …

We Need A Little Christmas: The Shape And Significance Of Christmas In America, 1945-1950, Ellen D. Blackmon

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

As soon as the weather turns cold, countless commercial, domestic, and cultural landscapes across the United States begin their collective metamorphosis into Christmas wonderlands. Christmas is such a force that, not surprisingly, it has received considerable scholarly attention. Numerous historians have traced the evolution of Christmas from a pre-Christian pagan winter festival to a staid Victorian domestic holiday, citing the latter period as the final stage of its development. Christmases since the Victorian Era, they argue, have not deviated significantly enough to warrant further analysis. Others have recognized the uniqueness of Christmas’s twentieth-century form but have not paid sufficient attention …

The Inuit Vs. The Steamboat: Human Exhibitionism And Popular Concerns About The Effects Of The Market Revolution In The Early Republic, Ryan Bachman

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In the early nineteenth century, a new form of human exhibitionism spread through eastern American cities. While public displays featuring live human beings had existed since the colonial era, these new shows specifically focused on Native Americans. This paper examines one such show, the Inuit Exhibition of 1820-1821, as a case study of this phenomena. Primarily through the use of contemporary newspaper accounts, this project argues that shows like the Inuit Exhibition occurred within a cultural context that legitimized the practice of human exhibitionism as a genuine, post-Enlightenment method of educating citizens about the natural world. Furthermore, so-called “Indian Exhibitions” …

In Search Of Askia Mohammed: The Epic Of Askia Mohammed As Cultural History And Songhay Foundational Myth, Joe Wilson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis offers a detailed historical analysis of The Epic of Askia Mohammed, a foundational myth that ranks among the more well-known global tales of cultural heroes and state formation. The sudden regime change that resulted in the collapse of the Songhay Sunni dynasty and the ascent of the Songhay Askia dynasty in 1492-93 is one of the most important events in West African history. This swift rebellion reversed decades of destructive economic and religious policies. As such, the memory of these dynamic and transformative times was captured by the griots, the oral historians of the Sudan. Nouhou Malio, …

The Power Of A Secret: Secret Societies And The Easter Rising, Sierra M. Harlan

Senior Theses

The Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) and the Irish Volunteer Force (I.V.F.) altered Irish Nationalist tactics from Parliamentary supported Home Rule to a republican movement for Irish Independence. The actions of these secret societies between 1900 and 1916, during the Irish Revolutionary period,[1] are the reason that Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1922. The change from political negotiations by the ineffective Irish Parliamentary Party to the republican movement would never have happened without the Easter Rising of 1916. The centennial anniversary of this Easter Rising makes The Power of a Secret: Ireland’s Secret Societies and the Easter …

The Hunt For Lost Blood: Nazi Germanization Policy In Occupied Europe, Bradley Jared Nichols

Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the Second World War, the National Socialist regime enacted a wide-ranging campaign to enhance the German nation by assimilating conquered populations into its demographic structure. At the axis of this multifaceted enterprise stood the Re-Germanization Procedure, or WED – a special program designed to absorb “racially valuable” foreigners into the German body politic by sending them to live with host families in the very heart of the Third Reich. The following dissertation provides the first ever study of the Re-Germanization Procedure and examines the momentous influence this initiative exerted over Nazi policy-making in occupied Europe. It is a story …

The Reality Of Combat!: An Analysis Of Historical Memory In Broadcast Television, Kaleb Q. Wentz

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is an analysis of the World War II television drama COMBAT!, which ran from 1962 to 1967, and how this program dealt with and addressed the national memory of the Second World War. The way in which the “Good War” is remembered has changed over time. In the years of the conflict and immediately following its conclusion, there was a sense of zealous patriotism surrounding the war, but as our culture changed, a more critical approach was taken.

This paper examines the way in which the show deals with its two main subjects – the American forces …