Digital Commons Network^™

Explorer: Muheb Esmat Sees Museum Open Doors To History, Pat Sims

Colby Magazine

Muheb Esmat ’17 made a significant discovery when he came to Colby. Actually, he made more than one.

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Vernon Lee Materials, Violet Paget, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The Vernon Lee Collection at Colby College contains over 1000 letters, 136 manuscripts and articles, 117 photographs, and a small number of personal documents and artifacts, spanning the years 1866-1960. First and subsequent editions of Vernon Lee titles are described in the Colby Libraries web catalog. Materials arranged in seven series: Correspondence from Vernon Lee, Correspondence to Vernon Lee, Manuscripts, Published Writings, Photographs, Personal Items and Artifacts, and Clippings.

Illusion Of Control: The Struggle For History And Humanity, Samantha R. Nystrom

Honors Theses

Through the increased amount of documentation occurring in the individual’s everyday life, through the government, through social media, etc., the question of history’s place in contemporary culture arises—who is the author of history, how is the struggle over authorship played out within contemporary literature, and where does humanity fit within this struggle? I argue that the struggle for authorship within contemporary society has suspended history. Contending authors constantly rewrite the pre-narrative, the event history records, prohibiting society from moving forward. Whoever gains the ultimate authorial role, whoever becomes the author of history, controls humanity. To examine this occurrence within contemporary …

"System Of Silence": Philadelphia Orphanages And The Limits Of Benevolence, 1780s-1830s, Brian Sweeney

Honors Theses

In 1831, Mathew Carey, a well-known Philadelphia economist, wrote a city official describing the situation of black children in the city. He called for the creation of an orphanage to aid these children and described the motives for this action as not only the “humanity and benevolence” of Philadelphians, but also “personal interest”, as this class could otherwise turn “lawless”. Unknown to Carey, the Association for the Care of Coloured Orphans had been established in 1822 by a group of benevolent Quaker women dedicated to aiding this destitute class in an effort to promote compensatory justice for generations of oppression …

The Bird And Its Flight: A Struggle For Freedom In Bulgakov's Master And Margarita, Nicole Crocker

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

The Russian senior seminar this semester focused on Bulgakov’s famous novel, Master and Margarita. This presentation focuses on one of the themes of the novel, specifically Bulgakov’s use of birds in his work. Birds appear numerous times in Master and Margarita, and it always has a connotation of either a lack of freedom or a recent achievement of this goal. There are even instances in which characters themselves, as they seek freedom from their former oppressive lives, become the “birds” in the novel. This paper is an exploration of bird imagery in the novel.

Obstacles And Stepping Stones To The Hero’S Pedestal: Reunified Germany’S Selective Commemoration Of Resisters To National Socialism, Suzanne J. Swartz

Honors Theses

Bombs, propaganda, graffiti, espionage, murder. Normally these words carry a negative connotation, unless used with regard to German resistance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The resistance, which included groups and individuals from all areas of German society but failed to produce a single mass anti-Hitler movement, has gained little recognition outside of Germany but much within, particularly during the past thirty years. Germany has taken the one positive light from that dark time period and used it as a tool of legitimization for the government and other institutions, and as a source for heroic figures of whom Germans can …

Religion And Renunciation In Wordsworth: The Progression Of Natural Individualism To Christian Stoicism, Geoffrey L. Meldahl

Honors Theses

William Wordsworth was twenty-three when the French National Convention condemned the deposed Louis XVI to death, and France, under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, dissolved into abject violence. The disappointing results of the Revolution and the subsequent events in European politics began to work a change in Wordsworth’s personal political and ethical views that would greatly affect not only his own poetry but the entire Romantic Movement. Even still, his eventual apostasy from the radical republicanism of his youth affects the way in which people read Wordsworth’s work, igniting both sympathy and resentment. The Ode to Duty is …

Short History Of Waterville, Maine, Stephen Plocher

Honors Theses

If we were to simplify the story of Waterville to the lightest exploration possible, a good strategy might be to look at the city’s names. True, a good number of important events might be overlooked, but examining the names and name changes in the city’s history offers a unique view into the essence of its identity. Waterville has a rich history when it comes to names. The city itself went through a number of them in its early days, and these changes reflect the city’s continual reinvention of itself. The first people we know about who lived here, the Canibas …

Man-Made Menopause, Madeline Horwitz

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

In this study I suggest that there are three distinct time periods mark new developments in society’s understanding of menopause, Victorian America in the mid and late nineteenth century, mid-twentieth century America, and contemporary America. This is the case not only in terms of advances in biological science, but also the ways in which the medical establishment has viewed menopause has also changed, and in terms of changes in prevalent gender assumptions. In this paper I hope to expose the ways science, history, and society has medicalized menopause, and the ways in which menopause has been viewed by individual women, …

Exploring Opportunity In America: Immigrant Entrepreneurship And Rags To Riches Success, Anna Erdheim

Honors Theses

The United States is, indeed, a land of vast opportunity. A diverse group of individuals continually benefit from the prospects provided by this inherently free nation. Although some constraints in America have prevented people from realizing their ultimate potentials, this nation offers immense possibilities overall to progress socially, economically, and culturally. America allows for people of all socioeconomic, religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds to take full advantage of the various opportunities offered by this mainly egalitarian land. I will demonstrate how various people have emerged from disadvantaged circumstances to succeed in the United States. In America, the majority of successful …

Racism As Subtext: The Contemporary School Desegregation Controversy, Heather Beth Johnson

Senior Scholar Papers

This paper examines the contemporary school desegregation controversy from a sociological perspective. Sheff v. O'Neill, a contemporary school desegregation case, is used as a context in which to study the opposition to racial integration. Through close examination of the arguments people use to frame their resistance, the racist subtext of contemporary school desegregation opposition is exposed. The data for this analysis come from legal briefs, newspaper accounts, and in-depth personal interviews with Connecticut citizens and various key actors in the Sheff case collected between January, 1993 and March, 1994. This paper looks at each of the major arguments people use …

Did She Donkeystone Her Doorstep?: The Victorian Ideal Of Domesticity And The Reality Of Working Class Women's Lives, Rebecca Binder

Senior Scholar Papers

My Senior Scholars is an investigation of the ideology of domesticity and behavior of married working class women in specific textile districts in England between 1851 and 1881. In particular, I examined which working class women the ideology encompassed, and to what extent these women followed the ideology. In order to understand the ideology of domesticity, certain aspects of working class life have to be taken into consideration. The changing economic and social spheres of married women, divisions within the working class, which separate the average worker from the elite segments of the working class (hereafter referred to as the …

Images Of Women In American Popular Culture: The Post-World War Ii Legacy, Jennifer Beever

Senior Scholar Papers

"Images of Women in American Popular Culture: The Post-World War II Legacy" examines popular images of women in light of American social, political, and economic history after World War II. The paper is structured not as a mere catalogue of the postwar images of women but in terms of significant themes that affected those images. The first chapter presents ideas and attitudes about American women and their role as evidenced in speeches given by American social and political leaders in the post-World War II years. The significance of these speeches is not only in the ideas and attitudes about women …

The Political Manifestations Of Ethnocentrism: The French-Canadians In Waterville, Maine, Stuart H. Rakoff

Senior Scholar Papers

The process of acculturation, seen clearly in the development of the French-Canadians in New England, provides that as contacts to the homeland and ethnic group become more distant and weak with the successive generations, tile individual v1ill become more open to social pressures of the American genre. Politically this means that the ethnic pressures and views which may be prevalent early in the group's American history, will gradually weaken and disappear, being replaced by the traditional appeals of American politics. This ability of the political system to break down and destroy foreign ties has been the central reason for the …

The Changed Position Of Scientists In The Atomic Age, Mary Ranlett

Senior Scholar Papers

The basis for this Senior Scholar paper is the secondary power of atomic energy- its interweaving effects in government policy and in the attitudes of the government and society toward the scientist. Throughout the paper I have presented a picture of the meaning of science, the scientific personality, the changes in science which are linked with social and governmental changes, and the clash of the government with science, as exemplified by the security hearing of the leading atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The political aspects of the secondary power of atomic energy are shown directly in the Oppenheimer hearing, while …

Political Behavior In A Time Of Crisis, 1865-1905, John Cameron

Senior Scholar Papers

This study has attenpted to explain the nature of the institutions from 1865-1905 that made it inevitable that manipulators of persons on the grand scale should emerge to take control where there was, temporarily, a political-sccial vacuum to be filled. A nation of individuals., accustomed to the idea that each person must fend for himself as an independent unit, moved into an age of interdependence. The people, however. were slow to recognize this fact and slow to organize the institutions which such an era required. Ray Stannard Baker in his American Chronicle has caught the feelings of the average man …

Remembered Maine, Ernest Cummings Marriner

Colby Books

No abstract provided.

Kennebec Yesterdays, Ernest Cummings Marriner

Colby Books

A “social history of the Pine Tree State…especially…the Kennebec Valley” inspired by Marriner’s long-running Sunday evening radio program “Little Talks on Common Things,” broadcast by Waterville’s WTVL beginning in 1948.

From the foreword:

To my amazement I found hundreds of people interested in the social history of the Pine Tree State. Material has always poured in faster than I could use it. Out of trunks and boxes stored away in attics, came letters and diaries, account books and legal documents. Scrap books prepared by patient hands many decades ago were opened for my inspection. Yellowed newspapers, tied in neat bundles …