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"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker Jan 2021

"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 Jan 2021

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 …


Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek Jan 2017

Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Book of Empire” reveals that contrary to what is often suggested by scholars, modernism is not a moment of secularization and declining faith and that the Bible is actually a resource for mounting a radical critique of empire, nation-building, and racial oppression that defies conservative notions supporting those undertakings. For Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston, the Bible is a source of moral authority they use to challenge the imperialist, colonialist, and nativist projects of the twentieth-century U.S. In rebranding the Bible as politically radical, these writers are not denying the authority of the Bible, but are re-appropriating …


Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill Jan 2016

Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …


Neither Slave Nor Free... : Interracial Ecclesiastical Interaction In Presbyterian Mission Churches From South Carolina To Mississippi, 1818-1877., Otis Westbrook Pickett Jan 2013

Neither Slave Nor Free... : Interracial Ecclesiastical Interaction In Presbyterian Mission Churches From South Carolina To Mississippi, 1818-1877., Otis Westbrook Pickett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the efforts of a variety of missionary agencies, organizations, Presbyteries, synods and congregations who pursued domestic missionary efforts and established mission churches among enslaved Africans and Native Americans from South Carolina to Mississippi from 1818-1877. The dissertation begins with a historiographical overview of southern religion among whites, enslaved Africans and Native Americans. It then follows the work of the Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury among the Choctaw, the Rev. T.C. Stuart among the Chickasaw, the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones among enslaved Africans in Georgia and investigates the work of the Rev. John Adger and John Lafayette Girardeau among …


Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom And Nationhood In Seventeenth-Century Drama, Kelley Kay Hogue Jan 2011

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom And Nationhood In Seventeenth-Century Drama, Kelley Kay Hogue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century Drama posits that the importance of sixteenth-century martyrologies in defining England's national identity extends to the seventeenth century through popular representations of martyrdom on the page and stage. I argue that drama functions as a gateway between religious and secular conceptions of martyrdom; thus, this dissertation charts the transformation of martyrological narratives from early modern editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments to the execution of the Royal Martyr, Charles I. Specifically, I contend that seventeenth-century plays shaped the secularization of martyrdom in profound ways by staging the sacrificial suffering and deaths of …


Gravesend, William Boyle Jan 2011

Gravesend, William Boyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gravesend, a novel, is set predominantly in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, though there are several scenes that take place in a fictional upstate town called Hawk's Nest. The novel centers around three characters: Conway D'Innocenzio, Alessandra Biagini, and Eugene Calabrese. These characters are tied together by Ray Boy Calabrese, who has recently been released from prison for his role in the brutal death of Duncan D'Innocenzio, Conway's brother, sixteen years before. Ray Boy returns and Conway, twenty-nine and working at Rite Aid, seeks revenge. Alessandra, a failed actress who has been in Los Angeles for a decade and has …


Midwives Of Mississippi, Lane Noel Jan 2011

Midwives Of Mississippi, Lane Noel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Across the United States as late as 1910, midwives delivered half of all babies. Their practice was primarily among women of white European descent and African American women of the South. The practice of midwifery was commonplace in Mississippi. Together, black midwives and white nurses would help to implement a new public healthcare structure in Mississippi during the 1920s. Records of the Mississippi State Board of Health together with letters from midwives and public health nurses' reports put midwives at the heart of the story of public health reform. Already held in high esteem by their own communities, midwives came …