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From Death, Life: An Economic And Demographic History Of Civil War Era Knoxville And East Tennessee, Steven Bradley Davis

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the economic/demographic impact of the American Civil War on Knoxville, Tennessee and the greater East Tennessee region. It is the contention of this work that the Civil War served as an economic/demographic catalyst, accelerating (although certainly not completing) the process by which both city and region were transformed from a rural, pre-modem economy based predominantly on subsistence agriculture to a more modem, industrializing economy based on manufacturing, resource extraction, and limited commercial farming.

Unholstered And Unquestioned: The Rise Of Post-World War Ii American Gun Cultures, Angela Frye Keaton

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the historical roots of America's contemporary fascination with firearms. America's gun cultures reached new heights in the era after World War II due to a renewed focus on the family and national heritage and a growing preoccupation with defending traditional gender roles. In addition, the research reveals that America does not have a monolithic gun culture. Instead, multiple subcultures that flourished in the Cold War era, including one stemming from childhood play, one among recreational gunners and sport hunters, and one that flourished as a result of civil and military defense efforts. …

White Collar Radicals: New Deal Labor And Red Scare Communists In The Tennessee Valley Authority, 1935-1955, Aaron D. Purcell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation follows the lives of fifteen former TV A employees, focusing on their 1930s activities and the subsequent 1940s and 1950s investigations into their perceived radical deeds. Collectively referred to in this dissertation as the "Knoxville Fifteen," this group includes Mabel Abercrombie, Forrest Benson, Bernard "Buck" Borah, Howard Bridgman, Katherine "Kit" Buckles, Christine Eversole, John Frantz, Howard Frazier, Henry Hart, Elizabeth Winston McConnell, David Stone Martin, William Remington, Muriel Speare, Merwin Todd, and Burton Zien. As binding criteria for the group, these fifteen individuals worked for TV A during the 1930s, had not reached 35 years of age, held …

Gender, Power, And The January-May Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Esther Liu Godfrey

Doctoral Dissertations

In Charlotte Brontë’s 1848 Jane Eyre, Rochester’s housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax responds to Jane with certain dismay at the thought of her forty-year-old master marrying the twenty-five-year-old Blanche Ingram: “I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea of the sort” (163). Yet to Mrs. Fairfax’s great surprise,Rochester later makes an “unequal match” with an even greater disparity in age to Jane, ultimately bringing the novel to a sentimental close. Marriages with large age differences form an important narrative frame in nineteenth-century British literature, and they conveniently merge disruptive and conservative forces. Although they play with normative codes of …

Cultural Consensus, Political Conflict: The Problem Of Unity Among German Intellectuals During World War I, Benjamin Taylor Shannon

Masters Theses

When World War I erupted in 1914, German artists, writers, and academics seemed to be united behind a shared belief that the military struggle of World War I was actually the manifestation of a deeper and more ferocious spiritual or cultural war (Kulturkrieg). Using propagandistic wartime writings, they invoked the idea that Germany’s unique spirit of community and idealism (Kultur) was under assault by Allied individualism and materialism (Zivilisation). Many were convinced that defeat in this conflict meant the total destruction of the German way of life, while victory would propel the German nation …

Angelo Soliman Then And Now: A Historical And Psychoanalytical Interpretation Of Soliman Depictions In Modern German Literature, Erin Elizabeth Read

Masters Theses

This paper explores the general historical context and one particular theoretical context of modern depictions of Angelo Soliman, a court moor who lived in Vienna from 1755 to 1796. The historical context encompasses what we know of Soliman’s biography, his biographers and their research processes. The theoretical context encompasses Frantz Fanon’s application of psychoanalysis to the black man in his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952). These contexts inform an analysis of two modern theatrical depictions of Soliman: Ludwig Fels’ play Soliman (1991) and Andreas Pflüger and Lukas Holliger’s comic opera Der schwarze Mozart (2005). The changes these two authors …

The Transformation Of The King's Mountain Victors, Michael Lynch

Masters Theses

Hank Messick’s 1976 book on the backwoods militia’s victory over a large Tory force at King’s Mountain is not what most historians would consider to be a full-scale, academic treatment. Lightly documented but vibrantly written, King’s Moutain: The Epic of the Blue Ridge “Mountain Men” in the American Revolution falls squarely in the category of popular narrative. But Messick’s account is as firmly situated in a particular body of interpretation as the most rigorous historiographical work. The most interesting portion of King’s Mountain is the introduction, in which Messick explains his motives in devoting an entire volume to the Whig …

What Is Left, Andrew Michael Najberg

Masters Theses

The purpose of this project was to create a collection of poetry that examines the self as a muted element in foreign environments. When placed in a foreign culture, our roles as observers are enhanced due to our limited inclusion within the perceptual frame of references of the cultures and people we observe. Ultimately, the foreigner becomes a parallel sub-system of the dominant foreign culture until such time that he or she makes a direct intrusion into that culture. This level of mutability allows the observer access to cultural elements and interactions inaccessible from within the cultural identity.

The principle …

Zen And The Samurai: Rethinking Ties Between Zen And The Warrior, James Earl Hataway Jr.

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the supposed ties between the samurai warrior of Japan and the Zen school of Buddhism. It has been suggested by numerous authors that Zen served as the foundation of warrior training methods and ethical codes. This study suggests that the relationship between warrior and Zen has been overstated, and the image of the Zen warrior was largely a product of intense nationalism that dominated Japanese political and religious institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Critical Race Theory Of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Corey V. Kittrell

Masters Theses

This essay is a critical exploration of Kwame Anthony Appiah's race theory. I examine the two distinct projects that make up this theory. The first project is an analytical project in which he utilizes methods from the philosophy of language to examine our beliefs about race. Furthermore, he attempts to discover whether there is anything that corresponds to these beliefs about race. The second project is normative. In this project, he asserts based on the analysis from his first project that there are no human races. He offers solutions on how to approach race, racial identity, and racism given the …

Hitlerian Jurisprudence: American Periodical Media Responses To The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945-1948, Mcmillan Houston Johnson

Masters Theses

Since its conclusion, jurists, legal scholars, and historians have heralded the Nuremberg Trial as a landmark in international jurisprudence. Scholars have highlighted Nuremberg’s prosecution of those responsible for the Holocaust, and applauded the trials’ conviction of war criminals. These precedents have continued to inform discussions of war crimes and international law for the last sixty years. More recently, commentators have invoked Nuremberg’s positive legacy in support of the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic and attempts to create an international criminal court.

This paper examines popular periodical responses to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial between 1945 and 1948. It describes the nature …

Living With Curious Pain, Casie Janelle Fedukovich

Masters Theses

"Living with Curious Pain" is a collection of poems written between August 2004 and March 2006. This collection largely focuses on the broad mining history of Southern West Virginia, and some of the pieces closely examine the lineage of the Vances, a mining family still living in the area. "Living with Curious Pain" is divided into two parts, which delineate the poems by their content. "Breathing Lessons" concerns itself with unearthing the hidden histories of mining families, kept silent by cultural constructions. "Body Lessons" shifts the focus away from history and looks deeply at the effects of such history on …

The Propoganda Of Endurance: Identity, Survival, And British Trench Newspapers In The First World War, Neal Alexander Davidson

Masters Theses

This study explores the newspapers produced by British officers and men on the Western Front during the First World War. Although subject to censorship, significant scope was granted to the writers and editors of trench journals to express a seemingly strange combination of piety, humor, anger, and sadness concerning the course of the war. Trench newspapers therefore functioned as a cultural space in which the privations and competing desires of military life could be mediated. Through the juxtaposition of varying tones and views of the war, trench newspapers ultimately served to reinforce the hegemonic culture and values of the British …

Reviving Germany: The Political Discourse Of The German Fatherland Party, 1917-1918, Troy Christopher Dempster

Masters Theses

This study will inspect the propaganda of the German Fatherland Party found in rightist newspapers published in Berlin, the capital of the German Empire. This propaganda explained the goals of the party, which included a desire to win a Siegfrieden (Victory Peace), to increase the Siegeswillen (Will for Victory) within the German population, to annex vast territory in the East and West, and to create a unified block of citizens within Germany by reviving the ancient myth of Deutschtum or an essential "Germanness." In response to this new nationalistic party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (S P D) organized …

The Practicality Of The Abhidhammattha-Sangaha, Jeffrey Wayne Bass

Masters Theses

This study centers on a close analysis of the Abhidhammattha-Sangaha-- a compendium of Abhidhamma philosophy written by a Sri Lankan monk named Acariya Anuruddha Mahathera sometime between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Through a detailed comparison of the Abhidhammattha-Sangaha to its sources, I am able to demonstrate that the text represents an important innovation in the Abhidhamma tradition. First of all, in the Sangaha, the building blocks of its primary source are rearranged by degrees of meditative attainment. We will see that the Sangaha's author systematized the prior material into a clearly stratified map of meditative states. Also, in his …