Digital Commons Network^™

Black On Red: A Search For African American Rights In Soviet Russia, Stephanie D. Sellers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Party sought to export Marxist-Leninism abroad to foster a global communist revolution. They called upon the world’s oppressed and exploited to join their cause. In the United States, a small group of African Americans answered this call and began to travel to the new socialist empire in the 1920s in search of a remedy to Jim Crow segregation that dictated every facet of black life in America. This handful of African Americans proved instrumental in establishing the Soviet position on American racism and were vital to the rise of the Communist Party …

Word Made Flesh: Biblicality In Cormac Mccarthy's Appalacian Novels, Brett Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

McCarthy’s Appalachian novels in particular, beginning with his first novel The Orchard Keeper in 1965, show the outline of biblicality, a concept which entails the use of religious imagery, the employment of biblical language, the interplay between religious and secular elements, the profound impact of Appalachian landscapes, along with the thematic exploration of faith, morality, and the human condition. Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1972), Suttree (1979), and The Road (2005), expound, in more detail, upon these ideas through the use of the themes of darkness, light, and objects of divinity, outsiders, and suicide. McCarthy’s Appalachian novels, showcase biblicality …

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …

The Trouble Department: May Brotherton And The Agency Of Women Cutters In The Early Film Industry, Rachael Camp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the pioneering film editor May Brotherton as a case study to explore how studio industrialization in pre and early Hollywood influenced the contributions of women post-production workers. It considers why film editing, once categorized as a feminized sector, was recategorized after its creative power and financial implications were realized. As a result, we may become aware of the systematic gender discrimination in studio film, as well as an extremely important but unrecognized editor. Incorporating evidence from primary and secondary sources on early film industry development, including testimony, archival artifacts, and interviews with Brotherton’s descendants. The methodology is …

Bloom: A 21st Century Mandolin Concerto, Ashley Hoyer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I have created a career performing various types of music on the mandolin. Very little of the concert repertoire, however, includes music originally written for the mandolin with most of it consisting of rearrangements of violin, cello, or piano music. This observation has led me down a path to learn why there is a lack of mandolin concert repertoire as well as to create new music specifically written for the instrument. In this thesis, an original mandolin concerto, Bloom, aims not only to add to the instrument’s repertoire, but bring it into the twenty-first century using contemporary compositional techniques. I …

Houses That Try To Be Haunted: A Look At Ursuline Convent And The Lalaurie Mansion, Kallye Virginia Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

New Orleans, Louisiana, has a reputation for being one of the most haunted cities in America. Two of the most supposedly “haunted” buildings in the city are the Ursuline Convent, said to be home to vampires, and the Lalaurie mansion, said to be home to ghosts. Whether or not these spaces qualify as “haunted” is irrelevant; what this thesis concerns itself with is why these spaces are still being discussed today. Both contain a long and storied past that date back to the early days of New Orleans, with the convent being around as early as the 1730s and the …

The Champion Of "The Permanent Things:" The Imaginative Conservatism Of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, And Richard Weaver, Xiang Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation deals with the intellectual thought of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and Richard Weaver. Renowned today as the prominent thinkers who inaugurated the postwar American conservative intellectual movement, these three thinkers by far have not received enough attention among historians as they deserved.

In my dissertation, by unpacking the central tenets of the conservative thought of the three thinkers, I try to demonstrate that their ideas were not just pertinent to the nascent American conservative movement emerging after the postwar decade, but their intellectual thought are in many ways enduring and timeless, transcending the barren limitations of their own …

The Art Of Surviving: Alchemy Of Healing Trauma In Relation To Identity: A Self Study., Rebecca Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis explores trauma’s physical and psychological aspects concerning identity as an artistic practice. Through exploring materials, subject matter, and media, my approach to trauma is based on personal and socially engaged experiences and my attempt to re-conceptualize that experience through the language of contemporary art. Extensively this work is governed by childhood memories and the critical aspect of being raised as a female in a patriarchal society. Being raised female comes with a certain number of expectations and requirements. This work creates a physical and spiritual connection between trauma and the identity of what is female. Discussing these …

Mississippi Modernism: The River Valley And Race In American Culture, 1892-1945, William C. Palmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mississippi Modernism looks to the Mississippi River Valley of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century to analyze the ways individuals expressed and determined their experience in the changing world. By engaging with theories of modernity from Marshall Berman and the Black modernism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. this work proposes the Mississippi watershed as a region where individuals indulge in the processes of modernism remaking the environments, both urban and rural, surrounding them. By thinking about the “dry” and “wet” valleys envisioned by European settlers as Christopher Morris terms it, …

The City With A Bathtub Ring: A Century Of Shared Industrial Identity In Belfast, Maine, Michael Munson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Belfast, Maine, is a small, visitor-friendly city of approximately 6,700 residents located on that state’s picturesque mid-coast. Founded by Ulster Scots descendants in 1770, Belfast’s rich history has allowed its sense of place to evolve as the community’s identity changed from a frontier settlement to a commercial seaport, then an industrial city, and currently a host city for several prominent customer call centers. While now charming, increasingly gentrified and popular with tourists, the city earlier prospered for more than a century as a blue-collar industrial community, which eschewed tourism well into the 1980s. This paper addresses Belfast’s sense of place …

Hidden Amongst People: Experiences Fo Black White Biracial Individuals With Microaggressions, Horizontal Hostilities, And Identity Denial In Educational Settings, Deborah Luckett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative dissertation explores the dissonance between critical race theory and culturally relevant pedagogical practices in the context of non-binary identity formation and identity denial for Black White Biracial (BWBR) individuals. This positioned subject study examines stories of five adult female members of this population. Utilizing Bell’s Storytelling for Social Justice Model (2020) the study reveals the stock, concealed, resistance and, emerging/transforming stories of participants as they recall experiences with monoracially instigated microaggressions and horizontal hostilities. The model provides analytic themes to examine the dissonance. The following questions will be explored:

Primary Question: What socio/cultural interactions influence BWBR racial identity …

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

Down The Stream: The Evolution Of Queer Stream-Of-Consciousness Novels Through The Works Of Virginia Woolf And Ali Smith, Turner Nat Byrd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to understand the evolution of the stream-of-consciousness genre as it applies to, is written by, or centers queer people. Through generous Marxist-feminist readings of the works of Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith—used in this project as exemplars of the genre—it attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two authors. Specifically looking at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Smith’s Hotel World, The Accidental, and Girl Meets Boy, this project posits that Smith, intentionally or not, has effectively re-written the basic narratives and re-visited the same themes as Woolf, …

David Dinkins And New York City, 1989-1993: Political Coalition Building And Governance At The Dawn Of The Age Of Identity Politics, James J. Barney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Charting the rise and fall of New York City’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, this study provides insight into the complexities of governing and coalition-building in New York City during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of both identity and conservative politics shaped New York City during Dinkins’s 1989–1993 administration. Dinkins skillfully built a diverse and multiracial political coalition that first unseated three-term mayor Ed Koch in a Democratic primary and then beat Rudy Giuliani in the general election of 1989, only to see the coalition disintegrate in the following years. Dinkins’s rise and fall …

The Tragedy Of Caspian: C. S. Lewis And His Trauma, Chandler Hanton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reconsiders C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as a type of scriptotherapy that enabled Lewis to process and come to terms with a life full of serious and significant traumatic events. Trauma theory offers a vehicle for us to consider the alignments and connections between Lewis himself and his fictional creation, Caspian. In the specifics of both characterization and incident, Lewis mirrors the events and relationships that instilled and healed the trauma in his own life. In situating Caspian as his alter-ego, Lewis allowed his writing to function as a gender-specific therapeutic process for addressing the effects of his …

Predictive Effects Of (Neo)Colonialism And Other Forms Of Structural Violence On Involuntary Contacts With The Criminal Justice System In Canada: A Statistical Analysis With An Autoethnographic Perspective, Amy M. Alberton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social work, since its inception, has been premised on the value of social justice. At its core, social justice is about the elimination of structural violence. Thus, social work practitioners, educators, and researchers must be acutely aware of what structural violence is, how it is perpetuated, and what can be done to work towards its reduction and ultimate elimination. However, little social work research has been dedicated to quantitatively assessing the impacts of structural violence, especially as they relate to the criminal justice system. The current study, using autoethnographic narratives and statistical analyses, contributes to important dialogues related to structural …

"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the …

The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …

Two Hundred Years Of Grit And Grind: A Mythological Geography In The Literary Landscape Of Memphis, Tennessee, Meredith Heath Boulden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two Hundred Years of Grit and Grind explores literary texts that are set in Memphis and authored by native Memphians which offer scholars unique insight into the city of Memphis, Tennessee. While not intended as essentialized representations of an authentic Memphis, the texts in this dissertation provide an insiders view to Memphians perceptions of their local identity, one that Yi-Fu Tuan argues is but one of several much-needed perspectives into our understanding of a given place. As an entry point into a more comprehensive understanding of the South, Memphians ambivalence toward their status as residents of the Bluff City reflects …

Power And Control: An Exploration Of Health And Medicine At Camp Lawton (9js1), Emily L. Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In late 1864, as the American Civil War was entering its final stages, the Confederacy built a prison to ease the overcrowding at the infamous Andersonville prison. This prison, located in Millen, Georgia, would be known as Camp Lawton. Camp Lawton was abandoned in November of 1864 but has recently been the site of ongoing archaeological investigation. Despite this, little research has been done focusing specifically on health and medicine at Camp Lawton. In this thesis, I use qualitative analysis of Civil War prisoner and guard accounts and analysis of artifacts from Camp Lawton to understand the nature of access …

(Un)Qualified Immunity: An Analysis On Qualified Immunity And Civilian Sentiments, Guy Hodge Ii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent events involving the deaths of unarmed, African American citizens have brought forth an increased attention to the application of qualified immunity to law enforcement. This study aims to gain a civilian perspective on qualified immunity. Qualified immunity, as defined by the Supreme Court case Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982), grants government officials performing discretionary functions immunity from civil suits unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Through a national-level survey, this study captures an overall favorability of qualified immunity as well as …

Ways To Peace: Case Studies In Peace And Diplomacy. A Reader For High School & College Students, Darren Wallach

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of my thesis project is to write a booklet of case studies in Peace and Diplomacy in order to teach my students that throughout history there have been and continue to be effective non-violent methods to solving conflict. For my thesis project I will be providing an introduction to non-violent change commenting on some prominent and interesting examples. I will then analyze 2 case studies from history - Northern Ireland's peace process and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. Finally, I will analyze a recent case study of a peace that could have been (the Iraq War). All sections …

Orange Riots, Party Processions Acts, And The Control Of Public Space In Ireland And British North America, 1796-1851, Annie E. Tock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the state’s effort to control public space by passing legislation to suppress Orange Order processions in Ireland and British North America between 1814 and 1851. By the early nineteenth century, annual July Twelfth parades commemorating William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 became occasions for violent sectarian clashes in the streets of Ireland, New Brunswick, and Canada as celebratory Protestant Orangemen clashed with resentful Catholic opponents. In 1832 the British Parliament sought to put an end to these riots by passing the Party Processions Act, which prohibited Orange processions in Ireland. The Legislative …

Tales For Late Night Bonfires, Gordon Arthur Grisenthwaite

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This Creative Writing project explores interfusional storytelling, a blending of oral and written literatures, as defined by Thomas King. The stories and poems in this collection use a number of narrative voices to tell the stories of an nłeʔkepmx world I created/am creating. Even the third person narrators have spoken parts in some of the stories; in "Three Bucks," for example, the narrator interrupts a story another character tells because the narrator thinks the teller is taking too long. Both "Snk̓y̓ép and His Shiny New Choker," and "Little Trees®" attempt Menippean satire. Because I do not want to simply repeat …

Irish Social Mobility: Examining Elite Responses To Crisis In The 17th-Century British Caribbean, Caroline Virginia Reilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the middle seventeenth century, tens of thousands of Irish people came to England’s Caribbean colonies. Cromwell captured and transported most of these individuals to Barbados and Montserrat, and those Irish persons became indentured servants to English masters on the islands. Despite living under English rule and participating in plantation economies in both colonies, the Irish inhabitants of Barbados and Montserrat display stark differences in social mobility toward the end of the seventeenth century. Rather than looking to Irish individuals’ agency in creating social difference or mobility, this research examines the roles crises and elites play in creating these disparate …

Whiskey And Write: How Journalism Shaped The Rise And Fall Of Prohibition, Robert Colby Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

At the dawn of national Prohibition, the movement had large support in national media; by repeal, the media was leading the charge against the Dry movement. This thesis posits that journalism of the age helped shape the narrative around the enactment of the 18th Amendment and was equally culpable in ultimately getting repeal passed. Study of many newspapers of the era reveal a shift in narrative over the course of the early 20th century, as Prohibition went from movement to reality to past in just over three decades. Variables like religious affiliation, views on suffrage, organized crime and even the …

"The Men Were Sick Of The Place" : Soldier Illness And Environment In The War Of 1812, Joseph R. Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

War of 1812 scholarship has focused primarily on classic military studies of decisive battles. Likewise, scholarship on the experience of war essentially concentrates on how killing and combat effected the human psyche. This dissertation pursues a broader perspective. It examines the impact of the environment on the health of soldiers and emphasizes everyday conditions and environmental suffering. Veterans’ accounts typically elevate suffering in camp over combat. A substantive study of soldiers’ responses to daily environmental conditions demonstrates the importance of health management to the outcome of the War of 1812. Through case studies of health measures related to frontier conditions, …

“If I Could Only Win Your Love”: Lyrical Analysis Of The Sacred And Secular Songs Of The Louvin Brothers, Aynsley Porchak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I demonstrate how analysis through literary criticism can provide a commentary on Appalachian song. While literary analysis of both sacred and secular song lyrics is an approach that is largely overlooked in this region’s traditional music, it nonetheless provides insightful perspective on the art form itself. As I argue, one particular duo of Appalachian musicians, the Louvin Brothers, are uniquely suited to this inquiry. I propose that themes that are found in many of the Louvin Brothers’ songs, such as love, acceptance, and rejection, create a bridge between the historically documented theoretical gap between bluegrass and country …

Post-Soul Speculation: An Exploration Of Afro-Southern Speculative Fiction, Hilary Word

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT This thesis is an examination of female authored, post-soul, Afro-Southern speculative fiction. The specific texts being examined are My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due, Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry, and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Through exploration of these texts, I posit two large arguments. First, I posit that this thesis as a collective work illustrates how women-authored Afro-Southern speculative fiction based in the post-soul era embodies and champions womanist politics and praxis critical for liberation through speculative elements. Second, I assert that this thesis is demonstrative of how this particular type of fiction showcases the importance …

Whitewashing Who We Worship: Amelioration And Cultural Imperatives In Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Samantha Bauer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods creates a penetrating and sharp commentary on the state of essentially, every aspect of contemporary American society by populating it with myths that arrives on American shores over countless generations. From the characters to the settings, Gaiman utilizes the often-overlooked fact that myths can be found in every aspect of life. In many ways, Gaiman is building, or perhaps evolving, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to discuss the unique nature of contemporary myths and how ancient myths still play a role in our society. I contend that in …