Digital Commons Network^™

October 2023, Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly Manuscripts

No abstract provided.

Housing Displacement In Corlears Hook: From Naghtongh To One Manhattan Square, Don Macleod

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The displacement of residents from their homes in New York City began with the European settlement of New Amsterdam and continues to this day. This paper focuses on displacement in Corlears Hook, part of Manhattan’s Lower East Side from the violent extirpation of a Lenape settlement in 1643 New Amsterdam to the gentrification of a traditional working-class neighborhood along the East River propelled by the influx of luxury housing development. Throughout Corlears Hook’s long history, displacement has been caused by violence, well-meaning efforts to improve slum conditions, ham-fisted “urban renewal” projects that favored the wealthy and civic improvements that used …

Full Issue

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 …

The Perpetual Progression In The Schleswig-Holstein Duchy: History, Politics, And Religion, 1460-1864, Christian Anthony Ahlers

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

German nationalism in the Schleswig and Holstein duchies that predates the German Unification Wars of the Nineteenth Century continuously transformed in response to Danish encroachment, civic disputes regarding treaty legitimacy, and war. The Germans in the duchies fought to retain their ancestral homelands and, in doing so, embraced a pan-Germanic consciousness that is the foundation for early modern nationalism. This consciousness dates back hundreds of years. This case study examines the Germans of Schleswig and Holstein and their experiences with the consistent and pressing Danish encroachment. Despite the encroachment, the Germans remained connected with their culture, traditions, religion, and their …

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.

Preserving The Dignity Of The Irish In "Translations", Diana J. Schoder

The Downtown Review

Focusing on the Anglicization of town names in Brian Friel’s Translations, this article analyzes the significance of translation, beyond names as agents of linguistic imperialism and functions or symbols of identity. Using a Christian lens to demonstrate the intrinsic dignity signified in a name combined with a colonization case study in the Danish West Indies attesting to the injuries of denying a given name, the irreversible damage of translating names into a non-native language is clear. At the same time, imposing Anglicized names on the Irish community allows opportunities for resistance, such as continuing the private use of the …

“Unnatural, Filthy, Unclean And Positively Dangerous To Health And Life.”: Smallpox Vaccine Refusal And Sectional Violence In Montréal 1885, Mary M. Horman

Major Papers

Montreal was stricken by an epidemic of smallpox in the year 1885 which resulted in over 3,000 deaths and which lasted 15 months. The disease was brought into the city by a pullman conductor arriving on a train from Chicago. The city of Montréal Health Department was confident that they would be able to manage the initial outbreak easily because by 1885 smallpox was considered to be a vaccine preventable disease. Unfortunately, many errors were made by the Health Department in the initial outbreak that allowed the disease to escape into the city of Montreal, where it was greatly aided …

One Ring To Rule Them All: Connecting Johann Herder's Romantic Nationalism & Richard Wagner's "The Ring", Eliana Scheele

Young Historians Conference

In the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany, a new craze was emerging, one that would forever change Germany. The ideas of Nationalism, popularized by Johann Gottfried Herder, revolutionized the way that Germans thought about their country. Through this new kind of "Romantic" Nationalism, an importance was placed on "volksongs," or folksongs and stories as a means to take pride in one’s culture. The massively popular opera epic "The Ring of Nibelung" was written by Richard Wagner over fifty years after Herder's death, but it holds the values that Herder developed in it. In many ways, the Opera is the …

"Most Catholic Spain": British Evangelical Protestant Views Of The Spanish Civil War And Its Legacy, Chloe Kinderman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

"Most Catholic Spain": British Evangelical Protestant Views of the Spanish Civil War and its Legacy presents a case study of The Churchman’s Magazine and Wickliffe Preachers’ Messenger (CMWPM), a publication of the Protestant Truth Society, between 1930 and 1945. The Protestant Truth Society was a British Evangelical organization that was dedicated to opposing the influence of Catholicism within Britain. This thesis explores how the CMWPM discussed Spain during the interwar and World War II period, especially its coverage of the Second Spanish Republic, the Spanish Civil War, and the early Franco Regime. Ultimately, the CMWPM latched on to Spain as …

Defining Elegant Taste In Emma And The British Housewife, Genevieve Brewer

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Between Tourist And Traveller; The Reverend Marius Buys In The Preanger (1887-1890), Achmad Sunjayadi

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This article presents the postcolonial analysis of the travel account and guidebook of Marius Buys (1837-1906), a Dutch clergyman. He not only devoted himself as a priest but also travelled in several parts of the Dutch East Indies, such as Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi in the years 1878-1885. After returning to the Netherlands due to illness in 1885, he returned to the Indies in 1886 and was assigned to Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Java. In May 1887 he posted in Bandung West Java (the Preanger regencies), where he remained until his return to the Netherlands in 1890. As a result of …

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

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, …

Rewrite The Past And Remember The Future: How Expatriates Built An Independent Ireland, Morgan Grabowski

English Honors Papers

This paper seeks to answer the question “How did Ireland create a unique identity after gaining independence from England?” In order to answer that question, I analyzed five different Irish authors who wrote in a timeframe spanning the first half of the twentieth century. These authors are W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. These authors, at one point or another, wrote texts which are considered Irish, while living abroad. Because of this, this paper focuses on their status as expatriates, and how that influenced their contributions to the Irish Literary Revival, which is the literary …

"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.

Coming Out Of The Coffin: The History And Present Of Queerness In The Vampire Genre., Bailey Drummond

Honors Projects

This essay delves into the captivating and lasting influence of vampires on popular culture since their creation. The fascination with vampires can be traced back to literary works such as John Polidori's "The Vampyre" and Bram Stoker's classic "Dracula," which have served as foundations for vampire mythology across different media platforms. Despite the evolution of media and cultural contexts, certain themes surrounding vampires have persisted throughout history. Notably, vampires have been portrayed as symbols of sexuality and queerness, reflecting societal fears and desires from past eras to the present day. These themes have been critically analyzed and dissected in various …

The "Indian" Alexander: Reworking Nationalism, Myth, And Sikandar, John Sexton

Madison Historical Review

This article seeks to expand scholarly inquiry regarding the Alexander Romance into twentieth century India and away the Near East of Antiquity and the Europe of the Middle Ages where it is usually confined. In particular this article will discuss the Alexander Romance’s impact upon and connection with the modern invention of the cinema. Besides the usual cinematic culprit of analysis, Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004), there is another less-discussed cinematic work regarding Alexander the Great. That being Sohrab Modi's Hindustani historical epic Sikandar (1941) from British colonial India. Regarding the Macedonian conqueror and his reputation among Indian scholars such as …

Rest, Rhetoric, And Suffering In The Letter To The Hebrews: How The Author Of Hebrews Uses Classical Rhetoric To Resolve Tension Between Invitation To God's Rest And Present Suffering, Dickson Kûng’Û Ngama

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The Epistle to the Hebrews invites the followers of Jesus to enter God’s promised rest. Unlike the Israelites of the wilderness generation who failed to enter God’s promised rest, the followers of Jesus can enter that rest now and more fully in the future by obedience to God. This is possible because of God’s most recent intervention. God has sent his own son to become a sacrifice for their sins and a high priest for their intercession. Because the way to God is now open, the followers of Jesus can boldly approach God in prayer, gather regularly in worship, and …

Milton Holland: An Enslaved Texan Who Earned The Nation's Highest Military Honor, Patrick Coan

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

Texans have long contended that slavery in Texas was marginal. Early scholars depicted Texas as a western state rather than a southern state dedicated to slavery. However, slavery was central to Texas from the 1830s-1860s. The story of Milton Holland offers a window into the importance of slavery in Texas and the importance of enslaved Texans in U.S. history. Holland was the first Texan to win the Medal of Honor (not just the first black Texan to win the Medal of Honor). Despite this achievement and Texas’ affinity for military prowess, Holland remains missing in Texas history textbooks, the Bob …

3rd Place Research Paper: Cultural Attitudes Towards Ethnic Cuisine In Italy, Rachel Berns

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

Italy has become a common “landing country” for many European and Asian immigrants, creating a perception of invasion that has led to cultural reactionism masked in the reinforcement of “traditional cuisine.” For so-called traditional foods to endure, they must continually be reinvented, bearing different meanings and social values throughout time and space while accumulating rich, cultural baggage that serves as a powerful marker of identity in a given society. This paper explores the role of traditional cuisine in Italian national identity and pride, and the subsequent historical culinary antagonism maintained in widespread attitudes toward ethnic cuisine in Italy. Through an …

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Le Forum, Vol. 45 #4, Lisa Desjardins Michaud, Rédactrice, Marie Therese Martin, Clifford Chasse, Joan Corbitt, Sandra San Antonio, Jacob Albert, Laurance Côté-Cournoyer, Melody Desjardins, Michael Guignard, Gene Michaud, Xavier De La Prade, David Le Gallant, Juliana L'Heureux, Carl Labbe, Dyke Hendrickson, Denis Ledoux, Marielle Cormier-Boudreau, Michiel Oudemans, Melvin Gallant, Cathie Pelletier, Mark Paul Richard, Felix Gatineau, Elizabeth Blood, Kimberly Lamay Licursi, Celine Racine Paquette, James D. Brangan, Lynn Plourde, Yvon Labbé

Le FORUM Journal

No abstract provided.

Shaping Character: The Role Of Mythology In Society, Jaclyn Weist

Masters Theses

Throughout history, man has told stories. Some stories were written on walls, tablets, or bits of parchment. Others have been passed down to posterity through oral tradition. Every culture worldwide has a rich tapestry of legends and myths. It is my intent to demonstrate that these stories use the tools of character development within their various plot lines to both express and shape beliefs, superstitions, and life lessons. Whether they are religious in nature or simply trying to make sense of the world, these stories, myths, and legends have played a part in shaping society into what it is today.

The Hidden Date In Yeats’S ‘Easter 1916’, Thomas Dilworth

English Publications

[This essay is a revised version of one with the same title published in Explicator 67:4 (Summer 2000), 236-7, copyright T.D]

Lionel Spencer Interview, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

Summarized by Alan C. Ventura

In this heartfelt interview, Carlos Rico of the Bronx COVID-19 Oral History Project meets with Lionel Spencer to discuss the impact that COVID-19 has had on his life as a son and father. Spencer highlights his close relationship with his brothers and the challenges they have faced together, expressing admiration for their bond and hoping to have a similar connection with his own family going forward. Both Rico and Spencer take a deep dive into the challenges people face in adjusting to the lack of social interactions and their interest in understanding the impact of …

The Grizzly, March 14, 2024, Marie Sykes, Sidney Belleroche, Sean Mcginley, Isabel Martinez-Robles, Gregory Dervinis, Nicolas Ungurean, Dominic Minicozzi, Adam Denn

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Librarian Skorina Talks Potential Renovations to Myrin Library • Sodexo Chef Cook-off at Wismer • March Crossword Puzzle • You Like Jazz? • Senior Honors Projects: Featuring Grabowski and Grubb • Where's the Party at? • Winter is the New Spring! • Bears Hard at Work Over Spring Break