Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Northeastern Pennsylvania's Forgotten Labor Massacre: Analysis Pf The English Language Record Of The Lattimer Massacre, Jamie C. Costello

Graduate Masters Theses

The Lattimer Massacre occurred on September 10, 1897, in a small anthracite mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania. The bloody conflict erupted when an unarmed group of mostly Eastern European immigrant mine workers lethally clashed with militantly armed sheriff’s deputies who acted on behalf of private coal companies. Nineteen strikers died at the scene and dozens more were horrifically wounded. Despite the outraged shock of the community clamoring for justice which led to a murder trial that made international headlines, the Lattimer Massacre faded from local and national memory in the following decades. A combination of lingering nativist prejudice curated by …

Violent Or Non-Violent? What Difference Does It Make In 1960’S Civil Rights Activism And The State?, Jada A. Commodore

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this essay, I research the differences between violent and non-violent actors during the civil rights movement and how their methods changed their interactions with the state. For my case study, I chose two violent and two non-violent subjects, as well as two individuals, and two organizations. Those being Martin Luther King Jr. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for my nonviolent actors, and Malcolm X and The Black Panther Party as my violent actors. I examine how their methods as individuals and groups changed the way they interacted with Police, The FBI, and the Federal Government such as presidents …

In A Country Obsessed With Mexican Food And Culture, Why Do Mexican People Not Receive The Same Reverence?, Elba T. Rodriguez

Capstones

For centuries, the U.S. has had a complicated relationship with immigration policies and people of color. And the U.S./Mexican border has long been a source of contention. From Operation Wetback to Trump’s “Build the Wall” campaign, Mexicans have faced outright prejudice and hate. This work will delve into the contradictory policies of the U.S. using Mexicans for physical labor while simultaneously deporting them back to Mexico. It will investigate the experiences of Mexicans in this country and the incongruity of many Americans that maintain anti-Mexican sentiments while also celebrating Mexican holidays, such as Dia de los Muertos or Cinco de …

The Dixie Mission, Patrick J. Hurley, And America's Diplomatic Failure In China, 1944-45, Sarah Moody

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper examines the American diplomatic effort in China in 1944-45 including the attempts at military coordination with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government as well as the "Dixie Mission," which was the first official American contact with the Chinese Communist Party. I argue that the personalities of the American diplomats, the structural issues endemic to the China-Burma-India Theater, the fractured and complex Chinese political situation, and the lack of clear and rational foreign policy on China all culminated in the diplomatic efforts failing. While acknowledging the numerous contributing factors that led to diplomatic failure, this paper also suggests ways in which …

The Ongoing Search For Democracy: A Comparative Analysis Of Racial Equality In Cuba And The United States, Michael T. Siderio Jr.

Honors Student Research

This Capstone Project is structured as a comparative analysis of the fight for racial equality for Afro-Cubans in Cuba and how it compares to racial equality for African Americans in the United States, specifically focusing on contemporary issues relating to employment and economic opportunities, as well as police brutality. Historical background will be given on each topic within the scope of racial equality, and a comparative analysis on how they are similar and how they differ will also be provided. The overarching goal of the research on historical background and doing the comparative analysis is to synthesize both respective movements …

Militant Maids: Domestic Workers’ Participation In Bus Boycotts, Voter Registration, And Head Start Programs In The Deep South, Brittany Ann Carey

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the participation of domestic workers in the Civil Rights Movement, specifically in Gulf South bus boycotts in Baton Rouge, Montgomery, and Tallahassee; voter registration efforts in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida; and Head Start work in those same Deep South states. Domestic workers engaged in activism by joining unions, women's movements, and the Communist Party to improve their treatment in Northern and Southern cities. Modern historians have expanded their research to explore the participation of domestic workers in the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In some cases, researchers also have explored the complicated …

A United Failure: The Failure Of The United Nations, United States, And Global Community In Preventing And Responding To The 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Josh Ratsch

Honors College Theses

The Rwandan Genocide represents a glaring failure of the global community to provide humanitarian protection to targets of ethnic violence and slaughter. The complete indifference displayed by the United Nations provided extremist Hutu leaders with an environment for killing without a threat of foreign intervention. Calls by the leader of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Roméo Dallaire to reinforce the mission both before and during the slaughter fell upon deaf ears as UN leaders attempted to justify their inaction. Accounts from Rwandan representatives, who at the start of the genocide held a position on the UN Security …

Common Ground Over Common Water: Defining The Public Interest In The Milwaukee Watershed, Thomas Anthony Gentine

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines government and nongovernment entities’ attempts to restore and protect the use and health of the Milwaukee River and its watershed from 1960 to 2000. Under Mayor Henry Maier’s leadership, Milwaukee worked to reclaim the urban riverway to stimulate economic growth. However, state and federal representatives, after the passage of the 1965 Water Quality Act, demanded that the city government prioritize updating the combined storm and sewer system to lessen pollution in the Milwaukee River. At the same time, other groups worked to save rural areas from unplanned development and further degradation of the waterway. Influential groups included …

Power In Portrayal: An Exploration Of The Evolving Cold War Relationship Between Germany And America Through Film, Kaleb Wentz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The end of the Second World War brought many questions to the United States. One of the greatest among these was what to do with defeated Germany. Many clamored for the dissolution of the former Nazi State and the shameful humbling of its people while others recognized the value of a revitalized Germany as an ally against the looming threat of an emboldened and empowered postwar Soviet Union. Though retribution held sway immediately following the war, the Cold War consensus of an alliance with West Germany and a reimagining of the German people as victims rather than perpetrators won out …

An Analysis Of Reconstruction Era Policies As Partially Extending The Rights Of Citizenship To Freedmen, Jonathan Tise

University Honors Program Senior Projects

The purpose of this study is to examine the policies enacted during the Reconstruction Era of the United States with regards to their effectiveness at promoting and protecting the civil liberties of the newly freed population. Examining federal and local policies and statutes, along with a detailed examination of United States v. Cruikshank, will provide much insight into whether or not the newly freed black population was actually granted the rights and liberties they were owed and promised. The research will consist of a synthesis of existing literature surrounding local and federal policies and statutes such as the 13th 14th …

U.S. Hegemonic Control In Latin America: The 1973 Coup In Chile, Seth Wilbur

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean armed forces staged a coup d’état against their democratically elected and first socialist president, Salvador Allende. The coup ended in Allende’s death and seventeen years of military dictatorship under the auspices of General Augusto Pinochet. Although seemingly a domestic affair, the United States executive branch under the leadership of President Richard Nixon played a significant role in facilitating the coup and it is unlikely the coup would have occurred without U.S. support. While contemporary sources still point to American fears over communist incursion in the western hemisphere as the principal reason for U.S. involvement …

Around The World In Two Days: Walt Disney's Epcot Center And The World's Fair Tradition, Annie Davis

Student Scholarship & Creative Works

This work views the performative and consumerist traditions of the World's Fair and how Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center was essentially created to exist as a "permanent World's Fair" in theme park form. From viewing the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair alongside Epcot Center (1982) the similarities in the visitor experience are analyzed. Walt Disney's presence at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair seems to work as testing grounds for ideas with lower stakes than presenting permanent attractions, some of which would later be moved to the parks. Epcot Center offered …

“An Exercise In International Extortion”: Operation “Intercept” And Nixon’S 1969 War On Drugs, Justin M. Reid

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

When the former senator and vice president assumed the Oval Office in January 1969, President Richard M. Nixon inherited a nation in crisis with drugs playing a central role. At a campaign stop a few months earlier, Nixon announced to a packed convention center in Anaheim, CA, that if elected president he would end the flow of the illicit drugs coming into the United States “decimating a generation of young Americans.”

True to his word, Nixon moved aggressively after his election victory to refocus the federal drug enforcement bureaucracy on drug source control, blaming Mexico as the main culprit. On …

Acadian In The Southern Imagination: Race And Identity In Reconstruction Louisiana Newspapers 1862-1877, Jessica Dejohn Bergen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The emergence of Acadian identity as a reaction to Southern imagining has received little attention from historians of Louisiana Acadian history. Many scholars align with a narrative that centers American cultural adaptation which describe a process that begins with a split along class, not race lines, to form a Cajun identity which becomes, like other American immigrant stories, an element of American identity. The dominant historical narrative suggests that all elements of Acadian are incorporated into the overarching American identity. The Acadian-to-Cajun-qua-American-assimilation narrative implies and reinforces that the Cajun-American identity is superior and more socially acceptable than the Acadian identity. …

Ocon At War: The Oconomowoc Home Front During The Second World War, Erika L. Laabs

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

OCON AT WAR:THE OCONOMOWOC HOME FRONT DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

This thesis will examine the local home front propaganda in and around Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (Waukesha County) during the Second World War and compare the Oconomowoc area propaganda to Wisconsin overall and to the national experience. Enlistments, war bond sales, USO events, parades, radio programs/speeches, films, music, popular books/comic books, and images, are the main types of “cultural locations” that I am using as propaganda. I have found solid examples of posters and advertisement images from local newspapers that provide a wealth of information about the way fear, love, …

Forging Community In The Ouachita Foothills Of Southwest Arkansas: Duckett Township, Homesteading, Distilling And Race, Lisa C. Childs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Community was key to successful subsistence agriculture in Arkansas, especially in the Ouachita foothills in southwest Arkansas (including Polk, Howard, Montgomery, Pike, Garland Counties) and Oklahoma (McCurtain, Pittsburgh, LeFlore Counties) until the 1940s. Nearly a quarter of Arkansas’s land remained in the federal government’s name twenty years after statehood, and even more of the land in the western Ouachita foothills. Much remains unknown about how farming communities were formed in this area from the end of the Civil War until approximately World War II. As seen in the Duckett community in northern Howard County, while family connections were important to …

Schools Of Rivals: Physicians, Fights, And Reform In Nineteenth-Century, Southern Medical Education, Laura Elizabeth Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century hinged on community trust, faculty at Southern medical schools hurt their own reputations with their proprietary schools, their public rivalries, and their competition for clinical material and cadavers. Attempts to regulate medical schools also became fodder for doctors to slander each other, all arguing that their methodologies and their schools were superior. This fierce competition resulted from the constant need to lure in more students to ensure these schools’ survival, but it hurt the reputation of doctors as a whole, convincing the public that one doctor seemed just as incompetent and …

La Casita Center: An Accompaniment Based Approach To Social Justice And Social Service., Ben Harlan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

La Casita Center is a Louisville based nonprofit organization that accompanies Latinx immigrants in the Louisville Metro area. and that is led and staffed by Latina immigrants. In this thesis, I investigate how employees of this Latinx-immigrant led nonprofit organization, navigate challenges to both administer service and build community using the model of accompaniment. Organizations like La Casita are critically important for Latinx newcomer communities in the United States and as neoliberal and nativist-inspired policiescontinue to oppress and marginalize, La Casita provides a model for what it means to center inclusion, belonging, community, and solidarity. In a global landscape of …

A Deep Voice: How Newspapers Talk About Harry Allen, 1900 - 1923., Oryan Widdowson

History Undergraduate Theses

Looking at a variety of newspaper articles published in Seattle, Tacoma, other Washington cities, and a few published sparsely across the rest of the country, I examined how these texts represented Harry Allen: his crimes, his character, and his gender expression and presentation. Reporters were fascinated with Allen’s deviancy from gender norms. Over years of culminated exaggerations and false details, they weaponized Allen’s life as a man against him. Contradictions and manipulations in reporting help to show how Allen’s dangerous persona was crafted over the course of his life. Harry Allen’s closeness, or perceived closeness, to the criminal underworld was …

Becoming Camilla Urso: A Female Celebrity Violinist And The Transformation Of American Musical Culture, Maeve Nagel-Frazel

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

Camilla Urso (1840-1902) was the first nationally famous female violinist in the United States. Between 1852-1902, Urso gave over a thousand concerts in the United States, becoming a musical celebrity on par with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. Through her public visibility, Urso transformed nineteenth-century American violin playing from a male-dominated field into an acceptable and even fashionable field for women. Despite her nineteenth-century fame, today Urso is mostly forgotten. Over the course of six chronological chapters, this thesis presents a contextual biography of Urso’s American concert career. Utilizing archival sources, digitized newspapers, and digital mapping methodologies, I argue Urso’s …

Simeon Hart, The "Milmo Affair," And The Confederate Cotton Trade On The Rio Grande, 1861-65, Leonel Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

The cotton trade on the Rio Grande played a crucial role in the transnational history of Confederate-Mexican diplomacy as well as the history of the American Civil War and the Second French Intervention in Mexico. The renowned merchant from El Paso, Simeon Hart, was an important figure in the cotton trade since he helped facilitate diplomatic and commercial relations between Mexico and the Confederacy. Due to his reputation as an emissary and supplier for the Confederate Army of New Mexico, Hart was appointed quartermaster of the Trans-Mississippi Department. During the winter of 1863-64, the son-in-law of the Governor of Nuevo …

The Limits Of Financial Equity: The Federal Reserve, The Depression Of 1921, And The End Of Wilsonian Progressivism, Terril Hebert

LSU Master's Theses

The Limits of Financial Equity: The Federal Reserve, the Depression of 1921, and the End of Wilsonian Progressivism is an examination of monetary policy and centralized macroeconomic planning in the American economy during the inflationary spiral of the 1910s that culminated in the Depression of 1921. Put forward for consideration is the successful populist campaign for agricultural credit equity by the burgeoning Federal Reserve System; set against a backdrop of intentional inflation, world and domestic citizens competed against as the price and supply chain distortions perpetuated by the policing of American commerce by the Food Administration, A. Mitchell Palmer’s Department …

The Dance Of Domesticity: How Gender Constructs Obscure Lived Experience At Museums, Marcy J. Botwick

Museum Studies Theses

My thesis focuses on Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein and Ernest L. Blumenschein, married artists born in the late 1860s. Ernest Blumenschein was an important regional artist and member of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). Paintings by Blumenschein and other TSA members promoted tourism in the Southwestern United States through annual exhibitions and their use in advertising the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF). Mary Greene Blumenschein was an award-winning painter and illustrator whose work focused on images of women at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, she is now a secondary and obscure figure in art history. …

A Persecuted Minority To Wealthy Merchants And Planters: A Study Of A Huguenot Family And Shifts In Identity, Garrett Gay

Honors College Theses

This project takes a look at an interwoven system of familial, religious, social, and economic ties known as the Protestant International. By analyzing genealogies, correspondence, business records, and transactions of the Mazyck Family from the early eighteenth century, it is seen that these international connections often led to the further material success of these families. This project also takes a look at how the Protestant International aided in shifting the vast majority of Huguenots’ identity from being religiously persecuted refugees to being wealthy merchants and planters who formed trade relations both domestically and internationally.

Setting Up Shop Down South: Gay Visibility And Identity Formation At A New Orleans Bookstore, Katelyn N. Spencer

LSU Master's Theses

Looking specifically at the South’s first gay bookstore, Faubourg Marigny (FM) Books, this thesis will connect the existence of gay literature and space as impetuses of gay community identity within New Orleans. It will use the political, social, and cultural histories of the 1970s through the 2010s to contextualize the gay bookstore as a microcosm of its time and location. In doing so, it will examine how FM Books’ New Orleans location affected its function and its relationship with its community. It will also analyze how the bookstore fit into the city’s history of social tradition and aversion to flagrant …

“The Saloon Is Their Palace”: Race, Immigration, And Politics In The Woman’S Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933, Ella Wagner

Dissertations

immigration, prohibition, race, suffrage, temperance, women's history

Is This Your Boy? The Spirit Of The American Doughboy In World War I Memorialization, Michael Leonard Nelson

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Well before the conclusion of World War I, Americans were engaged in finding ways to honor and remember those who served in the conflict. Taking advantage of this heightened interest in memorialization, in 1920 Ernest Moore Viquesney produced a life-sized statue marketed as The Spirit of the American Doughboy. Due to its low cost and savvy marketing, The Spirit of the American Doughboy became one of the most dominant forms of World War I memorialization. However, today many replicas of The Spirit of the American Doughboy have been relegated to obscure locations or subsumed into larger veteran memorials. This thesis …

"Secession's Moving Foundation": Fugitive Slave Rendition And The Politics Of American Slavery, Evan Turiano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the political conflict over fugitive slave rendition from the era of the American Revolution through the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. It pays particular attention to the struggle over the legal rights due to African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves. Slaveholders claimed an absolute property right over accused fugitive slaves and argued that any recognition of legal remedies for accused runaways threatened that right. Free African Americans and their allies in the abolitionist movement asserted that Black people accused of having escaped slavery were due a legal process. This was a vital protection against …

Debt-Driven Settlerism: Small Farmers And Bankers In The Trans-Appalachian South, 1800–1820, Phil Agee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how indebted small farmers contributed to the territorial expansion of the United States into Native lands of the trans-Appalachian South during the formative decades of the US republic. Taking on debt to purchase land and pay for the operating costs of farming, small farmers, the vast majority of whom were white, faced insolvency, land forfeiture, imprisonment, precarity, and poverty. In their struggles to manage debt, they operated under a creditor-friendly regime rooted in monetary and credit innovations of the colonial period. Indebtedness repeatedly compelled many small farmers to reenter the cycle of migration and settlement, serving as …

Decolonizing Genderqueer: An Inquiry Into The Gender Binary, Resistance, And Imperialistic Social Categories, Lauren E. Abruzzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines core metaphysical properties of nonbinary and genderqueer categories in dominant U.S. contexts. I address a prevailing argument that these categories, by definition, resist the gender binary and are therefore radical modes of existing. In response, I put forth a view of ‘nonbinary’ and ‘genderqueer’ that I call the Diachronic Approach, which describes these categories as yet another set of tools within an imperialistic gender system, much like ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ In other words, they are what I refer to as imperialistic social categories. While nonbinary and genderqueer people do not fall perfectly within the U.S. gender …