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Created In The Image Of: Mormonism And The Rhetorical Production Of Identity In Privately-Published Family Histories, Michael K. Peterson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a qualitative study of seven privately-published family histories written by descendants of Mormon polygamists. Using methods of discourse and rhetorical analysis, these texts and various interviews are analyzed with the contention that identity is a rhetorical production and that the authors (either intentionally or unwittingly) fictionalize each of the identities involved---their own, their readers', and their ancestors'---to bring them together in moments of Burkean identification. These moments of identification are also analyzed in terms of communal and generational memory, temporal proximity, and communal discourses. An important conclusion in this study is that this rhetorical production of identity …

Inventing George Whitefield: Celebrity And The Making Of A Religious Icon, Jessica M. Parr

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the making of the public image of eighteenth-century Anglican missionary George Whitefield through his use of trans-Atlantic public print networks. Whitefield, who was a consummate self-promoter and publisher of his own work, played a central role in the development of his image. The success of his publishing campaign meant that he reached iconic status, his every move seemingly documented in newspapers and pamphlets around Great Britain and its American dominions.

Owing to Whitefield's successful use of the trans-Atlantic public print networks and his itinerant preaching, Whitefield's influence extended well beyond national, denominational, racial and ethnic boundaries. The …

Writing For Numbers: The Cultural Production Of Good Writers In The Time Of High Stakes Writing Assessments, Barbara W. Tindall

Doctoral Dissertations

Few studies have looked at the consequences of standardized writing tests to students' understanding of what it means to be a competent writer. Using research techniques drawn from performance studies and art therapy, this qualitative study of middle class, honors students invited them to explore their understanding of what it means to be a high scoring writer on the SAT.

The theoretical framework of the study is situated at the intersection of three fields: cultural production theory, New Literacy Studies and object relations theory. The study has two related strands. In the first, I perform a socio-historical analysis of the …

Watching Children: A History Of America's Race To Educate Kids And The Creation Of The 'Slow-Learner' Subject, Jeffrey C. Frenkiewich

Doctoral Dissertations

On January 25, 2011, United States President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address to Congress and to the nation. As part of that address, President Obama articulated his vision for American education and stated that America had "to win the race to educate our kids" (Obama, 2011, state of the union). Mr. Obama's speech and his "Race to the Top" policy stand as statements in a discourse that expects fast-paced education based on universal standards and quantitative measures. Tracing a history of American schooling, one sees that this discourse has been dominant in this society for most …

Archiving The Sacred: Austin Phelps And The Adaptation Of Nineteenth-Century Rhetorical Education At Andover Theological Seminary, Michael-John Depalma

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation project expands the canon of nineteenth-century rhetorical history by providing a broadened understanding of how professional rhetoric was taught, learned, and practiced in nineteenth-century America. To do so, I examine the rhetorical theory, writing pedagogy, and pulpit oratory of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In drawing from the archival materials at the first graduate seminary in the United States and Phelps's published preaching manuals, I highlight the ways that Phelps's civic-minded rhetorical theory and pragmatic methods of instruction depart from documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges …

Bridging Cultures: American Indian Students At The Northfield Mount Hermon School, Kathryn A. Askins

Doctoral Dissertations

University of New Hampshire, May, 2009 In 1879, two very different types of boarding schools opened their doors: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, headed by Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt, and the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, founded by evangelist D. L. Moody. While Captain Pratt was dedicated to the assimilation and acculturation of Native children into the dominant culture, D. L. Moody was determined to offer affordable education to financially disadvantaged young women. In the fall of 1880 the Seminary welcomed sixteen Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek students, and, in 1881, the newly opened Mount Hermon Boys' School accepted four …

Prodigal Sons: Indigenous Missionaries In The British Atlantic World, 1640--1780, Edward E. Andrews

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the hundreds of black and Native American preachers who worked as Christian missionaries in the early modern British Atlantic world. While scholars have generally accepted the convention that most missionaries were white Europeans who knew little about the native peoples they were trying to convert, there were practical and theological explanations for why native preachers not only became ubiquitous, but often outnumbered their white counterparts in Protestant missions. The language barrier, the opportunity to tap into extensive kinship networks, and early modern interpretations of black and Indian bodies all catalyzed the formation of an indigenous evangelical corps …

Writing American Subjects: Race, Composition, And The Daily Themes Assignment For English 12 At Harvard, 1886--1887, Amy A. Zenger

Doctoral Dissertations

This study works to develop a way of reading the functions of race in classroom contexts---specifically in the predominantly white contexts in which composition was formed as a university subject. The model of race chosen for this study is based on critical race theories that conceive of race as being socially constructed, but also a force that organizes identity and experience in powerful ways, even when (or perhaps especially when) its presence is apparently silent---or is, in the terminology of Charles Mills, "normalized."

Primary data for the study is drawn from materials related to the daily theme assignment designed by …

In The Name Of The Father: The Continuity And Paradox Of Puritan Theology And Pastoral Authority, Patricia J. Hill-Zeigler

Doctoral Dissertations

American scholars have long been interested in the intellectual and social impact of the eighteenth-century religious revival, the Great Awakening. This dissertation uses a colonial family as a case study of the significance of this major colonial event. It traces and compares the intellectual and theological development of Michael Wigglesworth, and his two sons, Samuel and Edward. The Wigglesworth family represents both the foundation of Puritan thought in the seventeenth century and the transformation of that thought in the eighteenth century. Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705), a tutor and Fellow at Harvard College and pastor of the church in Malden, Massachusetts, was …

Preparing The Way Of The Lord: Three Case Studies Of Ministerial Preconditioning In Congregations Before The Great Awakening, 1675-1750, Douglas Kevin Fidler

Doctoral Dissertations

This study demonstrates that ministerial predecessors in three northern New England communities actually preconditioned community reactions to the Great Awakening during the years preceding the revival itself. "Preconditioning" is not the ordinary "influence" of pastors within their churches and professional circles suggested in other works. This kind of influence might cause parishioners to consider various behavioral alternatives when confronted by spiritual circumstances. Preconditioned congregations would already have established paradigms for responding to spiritual stimulus. While individual parishioners might act in ways consistent with their own personalities, psychological needs, and spiritual sensitivities, congregations as a whole would apply a predetermined set …

"There Is No School Like The Family School": Literacy, Motherteaching, And The Alcott Family, Lisa Margaret Stepanski

Doctoral Dissertations

By the mid nineteenth century, Americans were increasingly recognizing the need for public education and literacy for all citizens if the United States was to survive, if not thrive. In addition, new industries and technologies were developed that would slowly transform the agrarian New England landscape into a terrain of mill towns and manufacturing sites. The industrialization of New England altered family life, as well, and lead to the rise of the "motherteacher" ideology, a cultural paradigm that profoundly influenced discussions of childrearing and public education in the United States.

This dissertation examines the motherteaching of three famous nineteenth-century figures, …

Bodies Of Life: Shaker Literacies And Literature, Etta Maureen Madden

Doctoral Dissertations

I examine the roles of literacy and literature among the Shakers from the opening of "Mother" Ann Lee's testimony in 1780 through the early twentieth century to propose that the sect persistently resisted and revised "the world's" literacies. I assert that multiple kinds of reading and writing acts reinforce the beliefs of individuals and the church as a whole, and I argue that the increase in literary acts which appear to contribute to individualism and fragmentation of the institution actually allows Believers to revise their theology so that they see their sect as continuing to grow rather than declining.

In …

Emerging From The Chrysalis: Isolation And Publication In Nineteenth-Century Literacy Narratives, Lisa Ann Sisco

Doctoral Dissertations

"Emerging From the Chrysalis" begins with the words of Frederick Douglass, who explains in his 1845 slave narrative that learning to read was a conflicted experience, simultaneously enabling and painful. Douglass writes, "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing." These powerful words reveal a paradoxical "double-consciousness" inherent in nineteenth-century narratives about literacy: literacy's capacity to simultaneously imprison and empower. Douglass's relationship to literacy, both as a character within his narrative and as an author in a historical context, exemplifies the focus of this dissertation.

I borrow my central metaphor from …

Education, Class And Gender In George Eliot And Thomas Hardy, Keith Ronald Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between education, class and gender in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) by George Eliot; and in The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1896) by Thomas Hardy. The Introduction discusses how, in nineteenth-century Britain, education was intended to "improve" individuals and society. The Introduction establishes the Marxist and feminist critical background of the study, and briefly surveys the nineteenth-century debates on "The Education Question," and on education for women.

The novels examined show education failing to 'improve.' Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, and Jude Fawley in Jude …

A Thorn In The Text: Shakerism And The Marriage Narrative, Robert Michael Pugh

Doctoral Dissertations

Since 1824, fiction writers have attempted to treat the celibate communalist life of the American Shakers within narrative plot patterns that privilege marriage. The resulting stories and novels show Shakerism continually resisting this appropriation. Nevertheless, unable or unwilling to accept Shakerism's subversion of the necessary centrality of marriage, most of these writers have struggled to contain Shakerism's counter-structures of family and of narrative by reducing Shakerism's complexity. Shakerism, however, remains irreducible--a thorn in the text.

This study focuses on fifteen fictions in which well-known and lesser-known writers try to bring Shakerism and marriage together.

The Preface summarizes the Shakers' history …