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The Painted Motifs Of Cypriot Ceramic Art: A Study Of Iconography & Identity, Paige Bockman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The aim of this master’s thesis is to explore the iconography of Chalcolithic (c. 3900-2300 cal. BC) Cyprus using ceramic motifs and identify their potential use in revealing differences between the cultural identity present at archaeological sites, as well as the possible causes of such variation. By exploring the existence and origins of subtle differences between the iconographic repertoires of related sites, the study seeks a better understanding of the movement of both ideas and symbols, and how the meaning of symbols developed within the context of a site.

Currently, Cypriot Chalcolithic sites are believed to be largely homogeneous in …

The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the …

Embattled Communities: Voluntary Action And Identity In Australia, Canada, And New Zealand, 1914-1918, Steve Marti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines voluntary mobilization during the First World War to understand why communities on the social and geographical periphery of the British Empire mobilized themselves so enthusiastically to support a distant war, fought for adistant empire. Lacking a strong state apparatus or a military-industrial complex, the governments of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand relied on voluntary contributions to sustain their war efforts. Community-based voluntary societies knitted socks, raised funds to purchase military equipment, and formed contingents of soldiers. By examining the selective mobilization of voluntary participation, this study will understand how different communities negotiated social and spatial boundaries as …

American Identity Crisis, 1789-1815: Foreign Affairs And The Formation Of American National Identity, George E. Best

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

When the Constitution was drafted in 1789, Americans did not have a sense of national identity. The process toward achieving a national identity was long and fraught with conflict. Some of the most influential events on the United States were foreign affairs. American reactions to these events reveal the gradual coalescence of national identity. The French Revolution was incredibly divisive and Americans defined their political views in relation to it. The wars spawned by it caused Great Britain and France to seize American ships believed to be carrying contraband. The American public took an active role in making its opinions …

Ang Buhay Sa Nayon-Life In The Valley: An Oral History Project With The Shenandoah Living Archive, Hannah Moses

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Ang Buhay sa Nayon/Life in the Valley, is an oral history project consisting of twenty-three interviews with seventeen Filipino Americans from the Shenandoah Valley. These video oral histories, including transcripts and donated photographs, are now part of the Shenandoah Living Archive at James Madison University. This oral history collection is also showcased in a digital exhibit: http://sites.jmu.edu/lifeinthevalley/. The website touches on a myriad of aspects of Filipino American life, but strives overall to put the interviewees’ experiences in historical context and to understand how Filipinos have formed a community in rural Virginia.

Claiming The Best Of Both Worlds: Mixed Heritage Children Of The Pacific Northwest Fur Trade And The Formation Of Identity, Alanna Cameron Beason

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, a region encompassing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, the western half of Montana, and British Columbia, supplied the needed ingredients for the formation of a distinctive identity to form among the mixed heritage children born to indigenous women and men of the fur trade. This thesis examined how this identity formed in some the leading families of the time. The MacDonald’s, McKay’s, and the Tolmie’s all embraced both sides of their parental cultures and used them to create and defend their own sense of identity and community. Language was an important aspect of this new …

Trading Identities: National Identity, Loyalty, And Backcountry Merchants In Revolutionary America, 1740-1816, Timothy Charles Hemmis

Dissertations

This project tracks the lives a select group of Philadelphia frontier merchants such as George Morgan, David Franks, and others from 1754-1811. “Trading Identities” traces the trajectory of each man’s economic and political loyalties during the Revolutionary period. By focusing on the men of trading firms operating in Philadelphia, the borderlands and the wider world, it becomes abundantly clear that their identities were shaped and sustained by their commercial concerns—not by any new political ideology at work in this period. They were members not of a British (or even American) Atlantic World, but a profit-driven Atlantic World. The Seven Years’ …

"Breaking Up, And Moving Westward": The Search For Identity In Post-Colonial America, 1787-1828, Bethany Harding

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation approaches the early national United States as a post-colonial state, and draws new connections between the country’s westward development and Americans’ ability to detach from their colonial past. At the conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783, the new United States became the first nation built on the ruins of a British colonial foundation; its citizens faced the colossal task of forging an independent national consciousness without being able to draw clear racial or ethnic lines of distinction between themselves and the former mother country. White Americans of the founding generation occupied a unique and tenuous position: in …

The Political Pilgrim: William Lithgow Of Lanark On God And Country, Philip Anthony Davis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Travel literature has been understood to comment on the expectations and impressions of the traveler as they encountered foreign spaces, customs, and people. There has been an unspoken understanding, at best, that travelers who wrote their tales used these foreign spaces to engage in debates that were meaningful to their domestic audience. However, the author has been central to much of the analysis, disconnecting travel literature from other linguistic exercises that more directly offered observations that were directly rooted in domestic culture. Author-centered analysis isolates the traveler from the wider world in which they engaged. It also ignores the other …

The Tigua Indians Of Ysleta Del Sur: A Borderlands Community, Scott C. Comar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation offers a broad community history of the Tigua Indians of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo from colonial contact to their federal recognition in 1987. Considering Tigua history in a Borderlands context, it explores the interaction between community and identity. Here I argue that the Tiguas persisted through Spanish, Mexican, and American colonization because various identity markers involving place, interaction, and shared culture enhanced their community identity as an Indigenous people. This Dissertation also examines how social upheaval, migrations, and land dispossession impacted the Tiguas in various contexts, as well as some of the ways in which they adapted to …

Constructing The World's Largest Prison: Understanding Identity By Examining Labor, Hubert J. Gibson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A Civil War prison camp operated by the Confederacy known as Camp Lawton was once considered the largest prison in the world. This label was attributed to the fact that Lawton’s stockade enclosed 42 acres. The historical record does not have a clear picture of who built it. Newspaper interviews claim the construction was carried out by 500 impressed slave laborers and 300 Union POWs, but these lack the credibility of official orders. Unfortunately, many Confederate documents were lost when Sherman’s army came through Millen, GA. This study archaeologically examines construction techniques utilized for building stockades in an effort …

Missouri! Bright Land Of The West: Civil War Memory And Western Identity In Missouri, Amy Fluker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project argues that Missouri’s singular position as a border state not only between the North and South, but also between the East and West shaped the state’s Civil War experience as well as its memory of the conflict. During the Civil War, Missouri was a slaveholding border state on the western frontier and home to a diverse and divided population. Neither wholly Union nor Confederate, Missouri’s Civil War was bitterly divisive. In its aftermath, Missourians struggled to come to terms with what it had been about. They found no place within the national narratives of Civil War commemoration emerging …

Skin Color And Social Practice: The Problem Of Race And Class Among New Orleans Creoles And Across The South, 1718-1862, Andrew N. Wegmann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to uncover the story of the New Orleans Creoles of color—the mixed-race, francophone middle class of New Orleans and the surrounding area before the Civil War. It shows how the people who became the New Orleans Creoles of color worked endlessly, over three colonial and territorial regimes and nearly 150 years, to define themselves according to the ever-changing cultural, social, and racial landscapes before them. It places this local history in the wider context of the North American continent and the Atlantic World—the space within which these people actually lived. In so doing, it …