Digital Commons Network^™

A Call To Arms: A Comparative Study Of Mississippi And Kentucky Citizens During The Secession Crisis, 1859-1861, Amy Myers

Master's Theses

Many studies of the American Civil War have considered why Mississippi leaders voted to secede, while Kentucky politicians remained in the Union. Scholars have previously focused on political elites to understand the underlying motivations behind each state’s decision. These same scholars have often confined their studies to a synthesis of why secession occurred nationally or at the state level. The question remains as to what the common citizen saw and believed when faced with secession and if their views matched their delegates.

This study utilizes the governors’ papers of John J. Pettus and Beriah Magoffin, the Jefferson Davis papers, and …

Korngold's Dream States: An Analysis Of Transitional Passages In Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Opera "Die Tote Stadt", Tyler Brandon

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to compare Korngold’s treatment of altered states of reality in his 1920 opera Die tote Stadt to that of other composers and apply a theoretical approach to explain the transitions between the diegetic realms, or multiple narrative levels, that the work is contained within. These are outlined by William Cheng in his article entitled “Opera ‘en abyme’: The prodigious ritual of Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt.’” An overview of Cheng’s article is provided, recounting the claims that he posits and the analyses that he uses to explain the transitions between these diegetic realms. Next, other instances of altered …

​Burned Out But Barely Begun: A Qualitative Study On Newer Clergy And Communication Surrounding Emotional Labor And Personal Well-Being In South Mississippi, Lauren Noll

Master's Theses

This study provides an overview of the concepts surrounding clergy burnout,

organizational culture, and emotional labor theory. Furthermore, it explains the need

for  clearer understanding of clergy perceptions of their own personal

experiences with burnout and their emotional wellbeing in relation to their organizational environment and careers as clergy members. The methodology of qualitative interviews sought to understand the narratives and experiences of clergy members from their own words and worldviews rather than from a statistical basis or analysis.

This research found answers to key questions involving communication about burnout in the context of organizational culture and emotional labor, including …

Developing A Systematic Approach For Teaching Beginning Improvisation Using The Concert Percussion Ensemble, Ian Mcclaflin

Dissertations

Typically, when studying percussion at a University, a student is required to be proficient at multiple aspects of percussion (snare drum, mallet keyboards, drum set, hand drumming, etc.) and work through multiple method books and solos on the different instruments. This often leaves little to no room for the study of improvisation on their instrument.

Examined in this study are the following points pertaining to the state of teaching improvisation:

• There is an apparent lack of improvisation in the classroom
• Teachers often feel unprepared in teaching improvisation
• Improvisation is most commonly associated with jazz
• Both teachers and students tend to …

Editing The Double Bass Concerto Of Antonio Scontrino, Roberto Pineda

Dissertations

Antonio Scontrino (1850-1922) was an important Italian Romantic composer, virtuoso double bassist, and respected pedagogue who is relatively unknown outside of the Italian musical community. His compositional output is prolific and includes string quartets, operas, symphonies, concerti, solo pieces, songs, and religious works. Indeed, Scontrino was a compelling composer who deserves more attention from the international musical community. In addition to his compositional expertise, he was an artful double bass performer whose works for the instrument, while distinctly idiomatic, are compositions of high quality.

This dissertation provides a description of the composer’s life and the events that transpired around Scontrino …

Public Relations Education In Mississippi Today: Perceptions And Realities, Gail Brown

Dissertations

This two-component study assessed public relations educators’ (n=18) and public relations practitioners’ (n=53) perceptions and realities of public relations education in Mississippi today. A Qualtrics-designed survey ascertained the quantitative data for Study I (N=71). The researcher used telephone and email interviews to gather qualitative data from a convenience sample (N=10) of five public relations practitioners and five public relations educators for Study II. The dual study used education recommendations from the Commission on Public Relations Education (CPRE) 2017 Report, Fast Forward: Foundations and Future State. Educators and Practitioners, as assessment variables.

The survey was distributed to the Public Relations Association …

The Language Of Music, Music Theory For Non-Majors, Danny Beard

Open Textbooks

The Language of Music, Music Theory for Non-Majors, is a textbook written to share the fundamentals of music notation with students outside of schools of music. Topics covered include rhythmic notation, meter and time signatures, pitch notation, scales, key signatures, intervals, triads and Roman numeral and lead sheet notation.

Musical Forces In The Serial Music Of Igor Stravinsky, Adam Moffett

Master's Theses

In his 2018 book A Theory of Virtual Agency, Robert Hatten briefly describes the potential to analyze atonal music through the lens of musical forces. These musical forces are phenomenological sensations listeners experience, akin to physical forces felt in daily life. Larson (2012) categorizes and explains these forces as gravity, magnetism, and inertia, but his work only applies them to tonal music.

Gravity is a universal force that exerts influence over the music on a global level. In a tonal context, this would be the tonic pitch, however in the absence of tonal hierarchy the locus of gravity comes …

A Study Of Select World-Federated International Piano Competitions: Influential Factors In Performer Repertoire Choices, Yuan-Hung Lin

Dissertations

In the last ninety years, international music competitions have increased steadily. According to the 2011 Yearbook of the World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC)—founded in 1957—there were only thirteen world-federated international competitions at its founding, with at least nine competitions featuring or including piano. One of the founding competitions, the Chopin competition held in Warsaw, dates back to 1927. The number of world-federated international competitions has since increased to 122 in 2019, with a total of fifty-nine piano competitions (thirty-two dedicated solely to piano). More and more, pianists strive to participate in several competitions in order to win a …

Watching Disability: A Discourse Analysis Of Representations Of Disabled Characters In Scripted Television Programs, Wilbur Martin

Dissertations

This dissertation is a discourse analysis of three television series, Speechless, Atypical, and Breaking Bad. A close reading of those series was performed to analyze the representations of disability in those television series and whether those representations enforced classic stereotypes or differed from those classic stereotypes for disabilities. The representations were also analyzed to see if those representations enforced the medical or social model of disability.

All three series had instances of stereotypical representations as well as representations that were not stereotypical. All three series representations identified with the medical and social model of disabilities. Series that …

A Narrative Case Study Of Transfer Students In Instrumental Music Education, Ashley Glenn

Dissertations

Transfer students in music fields face challenges that are different from other fields of study. Research has shown that transfer students in music are expected to acclimate and operate as upperclassmen with minimal onboarding while also potentially having to retake courses they received credit for at the community college level. This study examines the experiences of five transfer students in music education through the lens of Schlossberg’s transition theory and Dewey’s model of transaction. Building on existing transfer student research, it asks: what do transfer students experience in terms of acceptance and self-integration, and how do these experiences affect transfer …

Instructor Perspectives And Jazz-Related Courses For Undergraduate Music Majors At Nasm Accredited Colleges And Universities, David Carter

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to describe instructor perspectives and curricular content of jazz courses within undergraduate instrumental music education programs at selected colleges and universities accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM). Respondents (N = 69), comprised of music department chairpersons or suitable jazz education music faculty, answered 16 Likert-type and open-ended content questions that asked about jazz-related course offerings and faculty member perspectives. Likert-type items allowed participants to indicate their level of importance ranging from Not Important (1) to Absolutely Essential (10) and level of agreement ranging from Strongly Disagree (1) to …

Containing The Blemmye: Anxiety Towards Congenital Difference In The Old English Wonders Of The East, Jessica L. Carrell

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to illuminate early medieval anxieties about sex, procreation, and congenital physical difference by applying a lens of critical disability theory to the Old English Wonders of the East, primarily as it survives in the eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v. This thesis focuses on the textual and illustrative representation of one Wonder, the Blemmye—an approximately eight-foot-tall, eight-foot-wide androgynous humanoid, whose eyes and mouth are in their chest and who does not possess a head—as a historic embodiment of what disability meant in relation to the early medieval English worldview. This thesis considers the …

Suspicious Minds: A Study Of The Attitudes That African Americans Held Regarding The Japanese During World War Ii, Timothy E. Buchanan

Honors Theses

This thesis explores African American viewpoints about the Japanese, from just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor up to Allied occupation of Japan after the Second World War. The primary sources for this thesis include Black newspapers, the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as oral histories from African American veterans. The goal of this research is to provide a historical view of the African American perspective, both in the United States and abroad. This thesis also aims to fill the gap in the scholarship on this topic by bringing different groups …

Malaria Risk On Ancient Roman Roads: A Study And Application To Assessing Travel Decisions In Asia Minor By The Apostle Paul, Daniel C. Browning Jr

Master's Theses

This study models malaria risks for travelers on ancient Roman roads with the goal of providing a tool for historical assessment of travel accounts from antiquity. The project includes: identification of malaria risk factors and associated spatial datasets, malaria risk model construction, verification and validation against available pre-eradication data, overlay of ancient Roman road data, and an initial case-study application to the journeys of the Apostle Paul, as narrated in the New Testament book, Acts of the Apostles (Acts). The project is intentionally cross-disciplinary in bringing the technical capabilities of GIS to the task of evaluating nuanced textual sources for …

The Unknown War: Army Of The Republic Of Vietnam Combat Operations 1962-1963, Justin Major

Master's Theses

The American historiography of the Vietnam War has tended to focus on the actions of the United States Armed Forces, the People’s Army of Vietnam, and the Viet Cong, while the history of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) has remained largely untold. ARVN, when mentioned, is usually portrayed as incompetent, ineffective, and even cowardly. Recently, historians like Andrew Wiest and Mark Moyar have challenged this view of ARVN that was originally advanced by journalists Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. Moyar even suggested that ARVN was winning the war until the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh …

Oh, My Stars: A New Map Of The Universe In Paradise Lost, Michael R. Coats

Master's Theses

Milton’s geographical descriptions in Paradise Lost are heavily influenced by his fascination with maps. Furthermore, his design of the universe in Paradise Lost follows a cartographic style that has led to several attempts at mapping it. These attempts, however, have followed the erroneous assumption that Earth centers the universe. As a result, cosmographical maps of Paradise Lost are inaccurate. I argue that Milton’s universe is Deocentric and provide a new map with a pyramid design that places God at the center of Milton’s universe.

“You Must Live, And Show To The World What They Have Been Doing Here”: The Survival Of The “Rabbits” Of Ravensbrück, Regina Coffey

Master's Theses

The Polish women who would later come to be known as the kroliki or “rabbits” arrived at Ravensbrück with a death sentence. As a result of their work for underground organizations back in Poland, the camp administration planned to execute them within a few years. Because the women were already intended to die, they were chosen as the subjects of experimental operations in which muscles and bones in their legs were mutilated and many of them were injected with various diseases and bacteria. Most of the rabbits survived the experiments, though many were permanently crippled, and several suffered from additional …

An Assessment Of The Use Of Photogrammetry In Cranial Metric And Non-Metric Studies, Amy Hair

Master's Theses

Methods in biological anthropology have made tremendous leaps in recent years and with the increasing rise in technology there is no reason to suspect that this trend will be decreasing. Particularly methods in 3D digitization have not only increased but have also become more accessible in bioarchaeology. One method, photogrammetry, offers bioarcheologists a unique opportunity to easily collect and process cranial metric and non-metric data that can be used to quantify biological relatedness. While these advances are expected to continue, it is ignorant to assume that they represent a fail proof solution. A critical examination is necessary to quantify the …

Tonal Expectations Defining Narrative Archetypes, Seth Weesner

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the contributions of tonal analysis to narrative readings of three nineteenth-century pieces. The method used originates from the work of two theorists, Byron Almén and Fred Lerdahl. Almén’s 2008 book, A Theory of Musical Narrative, outlines narrative archetypes. Lerdahl’s 2004 book, Tonal Pitch Space, provides a sophisticated approach to tonal analysis. These methods are combined to analyze striking modulations in Robert Schumann’s “Dein Angesicht” Op. 127, no. 2, tonal ambiguity in Johannes Brahms’s “Der Kranz” Op. 84, no. 2, and the lack of tonal closure in Gabriel Fauré’s “Hymne” Op. 7, no. 2. These striking …

Cultivating Spaces For American Citizenship In Pauline Hopkins’S Contending Forces, Jonathan Puckett

Honors Theses

Rediscovered through archival recovery in the late 1970s, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930) was an African American author, journalist, and activist at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Hopkins’s African American characters craft spaces, both sacred and secular, where they can freely exercise their citizenship in the Jim Crow era. As Hopkins utilizes the sentimentalist genre to portray realistically life at the turn of the century, my thesis highlights the historical and literary significance of sacred spaces like Boston’s black Baptist churches. I also review two minor characters …

The Typewriter And The Literary Sphere: An Analysis Of Turn-Of-The-Century Literature, Emma K. Holdbrooks

Honors Theses

My thesis explores the typewriter’s impact on early 20^th century American literature. By providing authors with the means to produce work accurately and effectively, the typewriter changed the process of writing. Typewriters also created job opportunities for women, who often served as typists. The typist became the foothold position that changed America’s perception of women in the work force and helped usher in a new social concept, “the New Woman.” To illustrate my claim, I show how the typewriter allowed poets like E. E. Cummings to experiment with spacing. Cummings made the typewriter’s standardization of text and spacing into …

“More Beautiful Than God!”: Hair And Makeup Design For Eugene O’Neill’S Ah, Wilderness, Jackson L. Jones

Honors Theses

This thesis follows an undergraduate theatre designer’s process of designing and realizing hair and makeup for the University of Southern Mississippi’s Spring 2020 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! The student conducted a thorough script analysis, researched Edwardian style and society, and collaborated with the production’s artistic team to produce effective hair and makeup designs and fulfill practicum requirements.

“Part Of That (Man’S) World”: Analyzing “Cinderella” And “The Little Mermaid” Fairy Tale Variants Through A Feminist Lens, K. Morgan Mitchell

Honors Theses

Fairy tales are often reduced to nothing more than the moral lesson that can be taught to children. However, when we move past the impulse to search for the simplified moral of the story, we can begin to ascertain the impact of fairy tales on different audiences. This thesis uses both impact theory, which yields a close reading of the textual and cinematic evidence, and reception research, which provides an opportunity to discuss the significance of the material by speculating about the message that readers receive. Under consideration are four variants each of the “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid” fairy …

Tectonic, Rebecca E. Holifield

Honors Theses

Tectonic is a collection of original poems accompanied by a critical preface.

The Incorporation And Effect Of Movement In The Elementary Classroom, Caroline L. Rhett

Honors Theses

The main purpose of this thesis project was to examine the incorporation of movement in preschool and elementary classrooms and identify its effects. A review of methodology from musicians/educators such as Zoltán Kodály, Carl Orff, and Emile Jacques-Dalcroze provided a foundation for the research topic. Other factors surrounding music and movement included the physical, mental, and developmental aspects. These factors were studied through the lens of authors and researchers such as Howard Gardner.

The practice used was primarily observation, which took place in local music classrooms as well as at a Carl Orff Workshop. Observation led to the conclusion that …

The Pain In Beauty, Kededra C. Brown

Honors Theses

Conducting research in a creative field is different from that of an academic field such as a biological science or history. Instead of constructing a thesis topic and question, then conducting research to answer said question, one has to come up with a concept and then expound upon that basic idea. This is done through the use of information on the subject and the setting of the given idea. This thesis is a production book for a screenplay titled The Pain in Beauty (2020). A production book is a series of documents that contain all the details of the pre-production …

A Survey Of Modern Companion Pieces Outlining Specific Compositional Similarities Between Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem And Mack Wilberg's Requiem Aeternam And Let Peace Then Still The Strife, Joel Dunlap

Dissertations

Companion compositions can best be described as musical works composed to specifically coordinate in conjunction with a preexisting musical work. For the sole purpose and intention of complementing or coalescing with another work, the two companion compositions could share similar subject matter, choral/vocal or orchestral themes, and motifs, length, text treatment, context. Evidence in this survey will expound upon various examples of companion compositions from prominent modern-day composers.

The primary objective of this research is to study specific compositional characteristics, correlations, and relationships between Mack Wilberg’s two original compositions – Requiem aeternam and Let peace then still the strife with …

The Face Of Intervention: Military Humanitarianism During The 1965 Dominican Crisis, Wesley Hazzard

Dissertations

On April 28, 1965 the US military intervened in the Dominican Republic’s civil war. This dissertation argues that the military did not deploy to fight a war but to create a favorable environment for the establishment of a pro-US government. The US military relied on humanitarian aid through civic action programs and civil affairs operations to diminish the Dominican populations’ interest in leftist political organizations and platforms. The civil affairs and civic action programs served to both alleviate the hardships of the Dominican people, turn them away from leftist policies, and build support for a US friendly government. The US …

Nadia Boulanger’S Fantaisie Variée Pour Piano Et Orchestre A Study Of A Significant Unpublished Piece, Sarah Elias

Dissertations

The research consists of a brief historical and biographical overview of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), a main focus of a thematic and motivic analysis of her work Fantaisie variée pour piano et orchestre, along with touching upon the influences of Fauré, Debussy, Widor, Reger, and Franck on its composition, and a mention of the process of obtaining the Fantaisie from the Centre international Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Boulanger produced works in a variety of genres, including: a fugue; more than thirty songs for voice and piano; two completed works for solo piano; three works for organ; several chamber works; three works …