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Reading The Room: Memory, Dwelling, And The Everyday, Sara R. Hardin

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In any space, there is a residue that coats the present with a patina of memory. Creating layered imagery in dream-like paintings and prints, I use the domestic realm as a metaphor for the internal world of the mind, memories, and private thoughts, including them in compositions with symbols like the boundaries of windows, doors, and gates. These metaphorical structures also portray outward identities, which guard inner emotions. The conceptual aspects of these compositional elements weave together memories of the past and places of the present into a unified whole.

I began graduate school at the beginning of the COVID-19 …

Memory Of Wernher Von Braun In Rocket City: The Historians’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung Challenge In Huntsville, Alabama, 1998-2010, Susan Lloyd Mcclamroch

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the conflict that often develops between historians who aim to reveal difficult history or correct a biased view of history and influential stakeholders who possess the agency to maintain historic silences or a skewed version of history. It examines the case in Huntsville, Alabama, when historians at the University of Alabama Huntsville mounted a campaign to inform the community of World War II events in Europe that preceded the immigration and relocation of a team of German rocketeers to establish a missile development program at the US Army’s Redstone Arsenal facility in 1950. Cold War successes made …

An American Ambulance Driver In France During The Great War: The Lasting Memory And Relationship Between Harry N. Deyo, The Men Of Section 591, And French Civilians, Melanie S. Gaumond

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the experiences of Harry N. Deyo, a graduate of the University of Michigan, who volunteered to serve in the United States Army Ambulance Service in France during the Great War. The friendship between Deyo and the drivers of Section 591 lasted throughout his lifetime. These friendships were important to his life; they were a way to share common bonds and to remember the war in the context of camaraderie and affection between themselves and the French civilians who cared for them. The role of rural French civilians and the relationships formed with the American ambulance drivers is …

Amalgamations, Brennan Probst

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

I explore time, memory, and the artist’s ability to convey experience through autobiographical photographs and drawings. In my compositions, I provide an intimate look into my life, while making wider observations about how my mind processes the world. My work is concerned with circumventing the objective, static qualities of photography. I attempt to create images that convey how experiences feel, instead of how they look through the lens of an optical apparatus. With my work, I do not wish to take from the world around me, but rather to create from the world within me. By utilizing multiple exposures and …

Manipulated Museum History And Silenced Memories Of Aggression: Historical Revisionism And Japanese Government Censorship Of Peace Museums, Benjamin P. Birdwhistell

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Japanese government has a vested interest in either avoiding discussion of its war-torn past or arguing for a revisionist take. The need to play up Japanese victimization over Japanese aggression during World War II has led to many museums having their exhibits censored or revised to fit this narrative goal. During the 1990’s, Japan’s national discourse was more open to discussions of war crimes and the damage caused by their aggression. This in turn led to the creation of many “peace museums” that are intended to discuss and confront this history as frankly as possible. At the beginning of …

Remembering Vietnam War Veterans: Interpreting History Through New Orleans Monuments And Memorials, Catherine Bourg Haws

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This thesis is concerned with the question of how America’s citizen soldiers are remembered and how their services can be interpreted through monuments and memorials. The paper discusses the concept of memory and the functions of memorialization. It explores whether and how monuments and memorials portray the difficulties, hardships, horror, costs, and consequences of armed combat. The political motivations behind the design, formation and establishment of the edifices are also probed. The paper considers the Vietnam War monuments and memorials erected by Americans and Vietnam expatriates in New Orleans, Louisiana, and examines their illustrative and educational usefulness. Results reflect …

Broad Shoulders, Hidden Voices: The Legacy Of Integration At New Orleans' Benjamin Franklin High School, Graham S. Cooper

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to insert the voices of students into the historical discussion of public school integration in New Orleans. While history tends to ignore the memories of children that experienced integration firsthand, this paper argues that those memories can alter our understanding of that history. In 1963, Benjamin Franklin High School was the first public high school in New Orleans to integrate. Black students knowingly made sacrifices to transfer to Ben Franklin, as they were socially and politically conscious teenagers. Black students formed alliances with some white teachers and students to help combat the racist environment that still dominated …

“'They Was Things Past The Tellin’: A Reconsideration Of Sexuality And Memory In The Ex-Slave Narratives Of The Federal Writers’ Project", Lynn Cowles Wartberg

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1936, Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) employees began interviewing formerly enslaved men and women, allowing them to speak publicly of their experiences under slavery. Defying racism and the repressions of Jim Crow, ex-slaves discussed intimate details of their lives. Many researchers considered these interviews unreliable, but if viewed through the lens of gender and analyzed using recent scholarship on slavery and sexuality, FWP interviews offer new insights into the lives of enslaved men and women. Using a small number of ex-slave interviews, most of them drawn from Louisiana, this thesis demonstrates the value of these oral histories for understanding the …

The Interaction Of Pain And Morphine On Analgesia, Locomotion, And Cognitive Functioning, Brandon Baiamonte

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Opioid medications are medicine's best weapon against severe intractable pain, but prolonged use of these medications can be complicated by side effects like tolerance and mental clouding which, themselves, can be disabling. The present study examined the independent and combined effects of inflammatory pain and opioid medication on spatial memory for a well learned task in Sprague-Dawley rats. The Hargreaves method was used to verify the pain state of the animals after complete Freund's adjuvant injection and morphine treatment. Whereas pain had little effect on spatial memory, morphine had profound detrimental effects that persisted beyond the analgesic effectiveness of the …

The Embedded American Artist, Jason Edward Chaffin

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As our world ramps up the speed of its connections, our identities merge with increasing speed and angles of confluence. Not only are new identities created, but also the more fringe social and cultural elements of our world are exposed to mainstream consciousness. My work is a product of my own fringe background (namely its sheer breadth of experiences not normally visited upon a single person's life). My aim is to add variables to our social and cultural speed of combination and new variety by creating work that is derived from my own experiences to speak to those who are …

A Bruised Sky Falling, Holly Dotson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis is a memoir in essays. The narrative is a reflection of memory as a chaotic system. Each essay stands alone as a single memory but also is part of the larger story of the writer's life. The fragmentation of the story lends itself to what Roland Barthes called a readerly text. That is, a reader may enter the text at any point and read the chapters in an order, and by doing this, the reader creates his/her own version of the author's life. The overall narrative arch is one of self-discovery and self-destruction.

Auto Biography: A Daughter's Story Told In Cars, Lynda Routledge Stephenson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Auto Biography is a creative nonfiction memoir: A daughter, forced to move her unlovable, ever-combustible, wheelchairbound mother cross-country in an RV, attempts to come to terms with her via the automobiles of their lives. The story explores: 1) the universal dilemma of caring for aged parents––its stress, its pain, its sacrifice, and its dark humor; 2) memory––the "peeling back" narrative style working in the same layer upon layer way of memory, its non-linearity creating not so much a one-piece narrative but essay snapshots forming a family photo album view of this thing we call memory and this thing we call …

In The Dead Season, Sonja Hansard-Weiner

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In the Dead Season is a manuscript of poetry that explores, through family narrative, the tensions between ignorance and truth, between honor and mendacity, between violation and veneration, between love and loss, between grief and transcendence. Set in rural Texas, the poems in this collection describe a harsh and unforgiving landscape seen largely, though not exclusively, through the eyes of a central child narrator. Rattlesnakes, tarantulas, drought, flood, birth, death, the poems present everyday occurrences and suggest that we often experience events before we have the context, knowledge, or emotional maturity to make sense of them in any reasonable manner. …