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The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

"They Could Not Guard Against It": The Failed U.S. Policy Response To German Sabotage At Black Tom Island, Benjamin Smith

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In the early morning hours of 31 July 1916, German agents successfully detonated a storage facility on an island in New York Harbor named Black Tom. The facility was filled with munitions meant for the Allied powers fighting against Germany in World War I. It was at that time the single most destructive subversive act ever perpetrated on U.S. soil. But it is not surprising that such an act occurred: the United States had no specialized counter-espionage agency and the area had relatively little protection. The remarkable thing is the miniscule amount of attention Black Tom, along with other instances …

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Liberalizing Salvation In Medieval Vision Literature, Drew Sorber

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

in 1960, the Chicago Congress of World Mission declared, "in the years since World War II more than one billion souls have passed into eternity and more than half of those went to the torment of Hell fire without even hearing of Jesus Christ, who He was or why He died on the Cross of Calvary." The issue of a restricted salvation-one granted only to those who fulfil a specific set of requirements-has remained central to Christian eschatology since the pre-Nicene period and before. While this issue is addressed throughout Christian history, a dramatic reaction to it came in the …

The Hut Tax War Of 1898: Political Spin And Chamberlain's Colonial Office, Chase Arnold

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In 1895, the British Empire underwent a dramatic change. This change was not precipitated by war, expansion, or discovery. Instead, the empire was changed by a renewed longing for the glory of the old empire. Where the empire had been shrinking, it would now be expanded. Where claims had been ceded, they would now be defended. All of this was undergone with the greatest hopes but resulted in the gravest consequences. Yet there was a brief moment in 1898 when this new imperialist vigor was almost cut short and this terrible history nearly averted.

The Men Who Could Speak Japanese: The Navy Japanese Language School At Boulder, Colorado (1942-1946) And The Legacy Of World War Ii Japanese-Language Officers, Katherine White

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

On their last day of class at the US Navy Japanese Language School (USNJLS or JLS), Captain Roger Pineau and his fellow classmates waited in a room on the second floor of the University of Colorado library. They had spent the last eleven months immersed in a rigorous study of the Japanese language, and today their teachers had promised a sample of what they would experience as Japanese-language officers in the Pacific War. The six students sat intently as their conversation sensei (teacher) entered the classroom, removed a Japanese newspaper from his briefcase, placed his pocket watch on the table, …

"Something Sounder, Nobler, And Greater": Neo-Gothic Architecture And National Identity In Confederation-Era Canada, Susannah Morrison

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The morning of 1 September, 1860 was unseasonably warm for Cananda, but the heat did not deter the thousands of spectators gathered on the southern banks of the Ottawa River to catch a glimpse of the young prince of Wales. As the crowning moment of Prince Albert's royal visit to Canada, the eighteen-year-old prince laid the cornerstone for the new government buildings in Ottawa. Keen to use the Prince's tour as an opportunity to show the colony off at its finest, Canada's leaders had outdone themselves in organizing an unabashedly imperial public reception for their future king. The Union Jack …

Elmer: The Shepherd Statesman, Cathy Hulse

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Plato quoted Socrates when he said that "The unexamined life is not worth living," He referred to self-examination for the purpose of self-improvement. In a broader sense, it is also important to study the lives of others to identify ways to improve ourselves. Life is a shared experience no matter where or in what era our individual paths lie. Today's society is often fascinated by extreme heroics or infamous people. It gives unbalanced attention to glamorous, athletic, or wealthy celebrities. Despite this trend, valuable wisdom can be learned from the lives of common folks.

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

The Mutation Of The Model Man: 1936-1945, Andrea Rassmussen

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Masculinity, or the ideal male model, differed significantly in the war years from the late 1930s. This evolution can be seen through articles in Coronet, in which the majority of stories had male heroes whose physical characteristics, personalities, and social graces all changed as the war started and progressed. The ideal man shifted from the Successful Businessman of the 30s to the Individualistic Team Player of the 40s. I chose these names because they encapsulate the contradiction that made up the model man of the war years. No more was the ideal a cutthroat businessman concerned with nothing except succeeding, …

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Medicine And The Mines, Troy Madsen

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

When Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad laborers stumbled onto eastern Utah's coal deposits in 1881, they sparked the development of Carbon County's explosive mining communities. Known across the state for their rampant disorder and untamed energy, the volatile coal mining towns of eastern Utah departed dramatically from the ecclesiastical, agrarian societies dotting the rest of Utah's map. Raucous taverns and seamy brothels quickly surfaced along Main Street in Helper. Violent union strikes shook the foundations of the communities' coal companies. Dark clouds of imminent danger hung continually above the portals of the region's somber, murky mines. Deeply rooted ethnic …

Ecology And Retribution: Blake, Tokarczuk, And Animal Rights, Kristina Isaak Powell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's 2008 novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, engages with William Blake's life and his writings on animal welfare and speaks to current conversations about multispecies justice in the environmental humanities. It argues, first, that in recognizing how this novel's protagonist, Janina, selectively reads Blake to rationalize retributive justice, readers should resist a tendency to mistake this character for Tokarczuk's ideal advocate for environmental ethics. Secondly, it asserts that legal scholars' division between retributive and restorative justice offers valuable framework for approaching both this novel and ongoing debates about …

The Performative History Of Tomboys In Anglophone Literature Prior To Little Women, Kimber Palmer

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the expansive history of literary tomboys in the century preceding Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868). Applying concepts from gender performativity theory, it explores earlier and previously overlooked portrayals of tomboys (or, alternatively, "hoydens" or "romps"), especially in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough (1777), Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Romp; A Comic Opera in Two Acts (1786), Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817), and E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859). Because the tomboy phenomenon emphasizes that gender roles must be learned and can be resisted, tomboy characters are …

Langland, Father Of American Literatures, John M. Bowers

Quidditas

Geoffrey Chaucer’s position as “father of English literature” has been steadily challenged in recent years. This paper both proposes and interrogates the other fourteenth-century English poet William Langland’s possible claims as the origin for the Puritan tradition of New England and, hence, the later traditions of American literatures—in the plural. We know that the first copy of his satirical, theological dream-vision Piers Plowman arrived in New England in 1630 with the father of Anne Bradstreet, and as a result any patriarchal genealogy is already problematic because the first author in the American family-tree was a woman. Rather than the linearity …

The Cholera-Fiend: Cheap Fiction, Medical Professionals, And Entertainment, Sariah Fales Harrington

Theses and Dissertations

First published in 1849, Charles Averill’s The Cholera-Fiend follows three villains as they attempt to artificially propagate cholera for their own villainous purposes in New York City. Gumbo, a Black servant to one of the villains, is meant to be the humorous relief in the text, but Gumbo experiences a calculated dehumanization from human to disabled, which causes him to be more at-risk for a health crisis—such as a tapeworm or cholera—than his white counterparts. Through analyzing the genre of cheap fiction, the views of medical professionals towards Black bodies, and other ways Black bodies were used as entertainment, I …

“Where Do We Belong?”: A Brief Collection Of Immigrant Daughter Musings, Andrea Amado-Fajardo

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

My friend groups have always been ethnically and racially diverse. Once, while pouring over pictures from my quinceañera celebration, my mom laughed and pointed out that my friend group could be on the cover of a magazine that celebrates diversity. I think that children of immigrants understand each other on an instinctive level, so we flock to each other. Regardless of mom’s and dad’s countries, we feel this shared sense of displacement. We’re too different from “typical American” kids, and we’re “too American” when we go back to our parents’ countries. For most of my life, this feeling went unsaid.

From Divinely Equal To Violently Oppressed: Brutality Against Women In The Bible, Shana Clemence

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The Old Testament tells us the first woman on earth, Eve, was created from the rib of the first man, Adam. To many, this symbolizes equality between the sexes. A historical theologian said, “to be formed from the side symbolically indicates equality rather than domination or subjection” (O’Loughlin, 1993). Wheelwright-Brown (2020) stated how the effect of mankind’s view of Eve’s brave choice to partake of the fruit of the tree of life had serious, harmful consequences for women:

There’s the effect it had on men, and the way they have been subtly influenced to perceive women and think of women. …

Another Paris: Gabriel And Greek Mythology In “The Dead”, Rebekah Olsen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The works of James Joyce, including his short story collection Dubliners, have been studied to distraction by academics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this paper, I expound on ideas of Edwardian masculinity in Joyce's "The Dead," as well as the links between the myth of the Judgement of Paris and Gabriel's experience with the three key women in the story: Lily, the maid, Molly Ivors, the modern woman, and Gretta, Gabriel's wife. These women are first perceived as graces, merely ornamental figures, but they force their personhood onto Gabriel, and he is shocked by their deviation from his …

The Man In The Tree: The Fantastic As A Bridge Between The Ideal And The Real, Weber Griffiths

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the effect of genre on storytelling, specifically the effect of the Fantastic in creating, within narrative, intrinsic meaning. In life and fiction, there exists a gap between what is ideal and what is real, a gap of mortality. Human’s struggle with this gap results in many forms of creation and meaning making. The Fantastic, as defined by literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, seeks to bridge this gap. In this examination, we take Todorov’s literary critique and apply it to four films of modern fantasy, showcasing the language and mechanics of the genre and its effectual way of bridging …

Poetic Maturity, Identity, And A Troublesome Future In “Personal Helicon”, Taylor Bitton

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Full Issue Fall 2020

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Seamus Heaney And The Role Of The Political Poet, Alex Coleman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

"Was Is Not Is": "Give Unto Them Beauty For Ashes" (Isaiah 61.1-3), Katey Workman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Humorous Spaces And Serious Magic In William Baldwin’S Beware The Cat, Ashley Jeanette Ecklund

Quidditas

When spaces transform in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, the transition is marked with humor, consistently signaling magic to follow. As an amalgamation of folklore, including magic that manifests around, for, and through cats, Baldwin’s work offers adventure, laughter, and danger alike. Some cats are diabolical, worshiping or holding the soul of a witch; however, their wit constitutes a jocular contrast to that of our interior narrator, Maister Streamer, whose quotation above demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of St. Augustine’s beliefs. Though Beware The Cat was published at the start of the early modern period, the folklore it contains speaks …

"Defensive Flippancy": Play, Disorientation, And Moral Action In Brian Friel's The Freedom Of The City, Hannah Brooke Azar

Theses and Dissertations

When Brian Friel’s play The Freedom of the City premiered in 1973, just a year after the events of Bloody Sunday, it was met with harsh criticism and called a work of propaganda. In the play, three peaceful protestors flee a civil rights demonstration turned violent and end up trapped inside the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland. By the end of the play, they are shot dead. These three protestors, disoriented by violence as well as the aftereffects of life-long poverty, on the surface are not emblems of morality. However, this thesis employs Ami Harbin’s theorization of disorientation and moral …

A Grundtvig In America, Thorvald Hansen

The Bridge

Frederik Lange Grundtvig was the third son of Nikolai

Frederik Severin Grundtvig. He came to America in 1881 at

the age of 27, spent less that 19 of his 49 years here, served in

only one pastorate and yet became one of the most controversial

figures among the Danish immigrants. Grundtvig

came to America a budding young scientist; he left as an

accomplished clergyman. He wrote numerous articles,

pamphlets and books, all which are buried in the Danish

language, but none of which have real significance for this

day. Beyond the Danish community his name is little known

today, yet …

Shakespeare's Leading Franciscan Friars: Contrasting Approaches To Pastoral Power, Amy Camille Connelly Banks

Theses and Dissertations

A popular perception persists that the Franciscan friars of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing bear heavy blame for the results of the play, adversely for Friar Lawrence and positively for Friar Francis. The friars do formulate similar plans, but their roles vary significantly. I contrast their approaches using Michel Foucault's definition of pastoral power, with Friar Lawrence as an overly manipulative friar controlling the lovers in spiritual matters, and Friar Francis as a humble military friar returning from the Wars of Religion to share his authority with others. This distinction--especially with Friar Lawrence appearing chronologically first--demonstrates Shakespeare …

Charming Child-Snatchers: Forming The Bogeyman In The Pied Piper, Peter Pan, And The Ted Bundy Tapes, Maren Noel Nield

Theses and Dissertations

In January 2019, Netflix released the unexpectedly popular Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Joe Berlinger, true crime director, compiled interviews with Bundy, law enforcement authorities involved with Bundy’s arrest and trial, and members of Bundy’s community to create a four-part docu-series focusing “on a man whose personality, good looks, and social graces defied the serial-killer stereotype, [which allowed] him to hide in plain sight” (Berlinger). The somewhat romanticized Ted Bundy Tapes serve as an example of modern folklore, in which the archetypal bogeyman has been narrativized for contemporary society as a charming, rather than hideous, monster. This …

How Governor Thomas Ford's Background, Choices, And Actions Influenced The Martyrdom Of Joseph Smith In Carthage Jail, Stuart Rulan Black

Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Ford was the governor of Illinois at the time of Joseph and Hyrum Smiths’ martyrdoms in Carthage Jail in 1844. Before his tenure as governor, Ford’s professional life included service as an attorney and judge throughout Illinois. His background in the legal field gave him a unique perspective which may have influenced his career as governor of Illinois from 1842-1846. Although Governor Ford is relatively well-known for his association with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its history, his background and the bearing it had on the martyrdom of the Smiths has received relatively little attention …