Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Words Without Faces: Anonymous Social Media On Campus, Evelyn Kelly

Language, Literature & Writing Student Scholarship

"A new anonymous social media app, Fizz, has announced intentions to launch on Messiah University’s campus. Anonymous social media apps allow users to post within a set community without their comments being traced back to them. One such popular app around campus is Yik Yak..."

Law And Literature In Pennsylvania: A Changing Landscape, Juliette Gaggini

Honors Theses

This thesis examines themes of American national identity perpetuated in Pennsylvania surrounding private property through historical, literary and legal analysis. Ideals of private property and land ownership are broken into three transitions throughout Pennsylvania history: the American frontier and initial land claiming by settlers, mass-deforestation and the introduction of widespread agriculture, and finally industrialization and the introduction of mining and fracking. Each of these transitions highlights the physical changes to the region and how they were influenced by American ideals of private property, productivity, and profitability.

Throughout this thesis, I analyze both literary and legal texts to examine societal beliefs …

2023 Sacs Symposium Schedule, Jennifer L. Thomson

2023 SACS Symposium

Thank you for joining us as we celebrate the excellent research that has been conducted by the students of the School of Arts, Culture and Society. The week will kick-off with a research symposium on:

Monday, April 24th in Hostetter Chapel from 8 am - 8 pm

Student researchers will presenting their data in both poster and oral presentation formats.

At Messiah, we believe in educating "men and women toward maturity of intellect, character and Christian faith". Through inquiry and scholarship, our students and faculty seek to glorify God and grow in wisdom and understanding of His creation.

Dr. Peter …

Sacramental Ethnicity: Women’S Culture And Vernacular Religion In Twentieth-Century America, Aaron J. Rovan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This project examines the reciprocal and evolving relationship between American women’s culture, vernacular religion, and the social development of American ethnicity. This project focuses on the roles of white ethnic women, both literary and real, in the construction, maintenance, and transmission of ethnic identity. The project highlights the connections between the folkloric performances of vernacular religion and the discursive articulation of ethnicity by focusing on two women writers and two groups of Slovak American women. The fiction of Kate Chopin and Anzia Yezierska illustrates how literary authors bring their contemporary concepts of folklore into their writing. The writings of these …

Hablar En Dos Mundos: Explorando Los Papeles Del Bilingüismo Español-Inglés En Las Vidas De Los Adultos Bilingües En Español E Inglés En La Región Sur Central De Pensilvania, Amalia Robinson

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Speaking in Two Worlds: Exploring the Roles of Spanish-English Bilingualism in the Lives of Adults Bilingual in Spanish and English in South Central Pennsylvania

Spanish-English bilingualism is an established and growing phenomenon in South Central Pennsylvania in the United States. But, there is a lack of linguistic studies on Spanish-English bilingualism in this geographic area. This essay attempts to explore the different roles that Spanish-English bilingualism occupies in the lives of bilingual adults who speak Spanish and English in South Central Pennsylvania. Using the qualitative semi-structured interview method, I interviewed twenty bilingual participants in South Central Pennsylvania who are native …

"Savage And Bloody Footsteps Through The Valley" : The Wyoming Massacre In The American Imagination, William R. Tharp

Theses and Dissertations

Along the banks of the Susquehanna River in early July 1778, a force of about 600 Loyalist and Native American raiders won a lopsided victory against 400 overwhelmed Patriot militiamen and regulars in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. While not well-known today, this battle—the Battle of Wyoming—had profound effects on the Revolutionary War and American culture and politics. Quite familiar to early Americans, this battle’s remembrance influenced the formation of national identity and informed Americans’ perceptions of their past and present over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From the beginning, however, Americans’ understanding of what occurred in …

Sustainable Community In Literature And Lancaster County: Finding A Way Forward On Small Farms, Christine Bye

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

"There are very few things that will motivate a thirteen-year-old child who has grown up comfortably and surrounded by supermarkets to pick green beans and to pick them joyfully. Dusty bean plants covered in yellow beetle larvae and located beneath a glaring sun do not exactly inspire an adolescent (or any sane person, really) to caper and sing. Neither do interestingly mottled rashes on the forearms - which appear after extensive rummaging through bean leaves - encourage the picker to return readily to the task. When my parents bought the family farm from my grandparents, they had some idea (as …

Divorce As Liberation: Marital Expectations Among The Working-Class In The 1950s, Kristin M. Catrone

Theses and Dissertations

Divorce was a remedy employed by working-class Americans in the 1950s when their marital expectations went unmet. Spouses left emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive marriages. Expectations for marriage also centered around assumptions based on gender. Working-class women showed how divorce could be used as a tool of liberation and empowerment.

Local, Jane Barnes

English Honors Theses

"Local" is a collection of poems broken into five sections: Locale, Catholicism, Maman, Death & Ghosts, and an epilogue. This collection explores the particular milieu of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and focuses on my experiences attending a Catholic school there and the deaths and losses I dealt with during that time. A number of these poems follow a long, narrative style and employ a confessional tone; the locale of rural Pennsylvania is present, either directly or indirectly as an undercurrent, in every piece. It was heavily influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks' work cultivating a poetic locale in her works, such as "A Street …

Georgic Rhetoric, Virtue And The Commercialization Of Agriculture In Pennsylvania From 1785 To 1870, Naomi Ulmer

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This research examines how farmers in Pennsylvania between 1785 and 1870 were persuaded by georgic agrarianism to take social, economic and even moral risks to abandon a semi-subsistence mode of production in favor of commercial production. The georgic rhetoric is derived from Virgil’s poem “The Georgics.” It discusses agriculture and man’s labor in nature. Virgil discusses the relationship between man, nature and his ability, or inability, to control nature to ensure his own survival. Beginning in the late 18^th century, supporters of improved agriculture, mostly wealthy and upper-class gentlemen, tried to persuade common yeomen farmers to produce for the …

From Mourning To Monuments: How American Society Memorialized The Dead After 1945, Eugenia M. Wolovich

Theses and Dissertations

The following four memorials — the World War II Memorial in The Fens in Boston, the Brooklyn War Memorial in Cadman Plaza Park, the Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial in the 30th Street Station, and the East Coast War Memorial in Battery Park — suggest that mid-twentieth century commemorative architecture possessed defining characteristics that differentiated them from monuments of the previous era and from each other. These unique qualities make it difficult to define this architectural period in a unified way because multiple forms of memorials arose in the wake of World War II.

Referendum On The Revolution: The Pennsylvania Constitutional Debate, 1776-1784, Tristan James New

Online Theses and Dissertations

The Pennsylvania constitution of 1776 ignited an extensive and intractable debate that remained at the center of the state’s politics throughout the Revolutionary period. This debate encompassed disagreement over a broad range of questions relating to the relationship between government and society, many of which brought into question the implications of the concept of popular sovereignty for governmental structure and popular political agency. Competing notions regarding these issues, while expressed within a general framework of consensus concerning the source of political authority [the people], revealed fundamentally different visions of governmental order. Partisans presented these visions as inextricably connected to their …

Free French "Gentlemen Of Couleur” : Reconsidering Race, Ethnicity, And Migration In Philadelphia's Catering Industry, 1870-1930, Elena G. Palazzolo

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the story of Philadelphia’s elite French West Indian catering families. It takes into consideration multiple perspectives to supplement scholarship that focuses on the families solely as West Indian refugees, Creole elites, or exceptional caterers. The history of the Augustin, Baptiste, and Dutrieuille families nuances previous works on West Indian immigrants, racial hierarchies, and foodways in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Philadelphia and builds on scholarship about people of mixed racial origins in the Atlantic world. I contend that these families carefully navigated their liminal position in segregated Philadelphia as mixed-race French Creoles to the effect that they …

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers …

Yellowing The Logarithm: How Money Solved The Problem Of Freedom, Neil S. Agarwal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on the historical development of a co-constitutive relationship between money as the form of appearance of value and race as the form of appearance of human difference. It demonstrates this relationship through a study of experiments with monetary value in eighteenth-century British America. At a time when Bank of England notes circulated primarily among merchants and within London, colonial freeholders issued paper currencies through representative assemblies and posited a link between this enterprise and the well-being of a larger provincial community within which their bills would circulate. I show how their experiments provided a means for creole …

A Charitable Scheme: William Smith, Michael Schlatter, And The German Free Schools, Daniel M. Crown

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes William Smith’s development of “German Free Schools” in Pennsylvania between 1753-1755. It argues that these schools, ostensibly meant to acclimatize German immigrants to a British colony, were in fact intended to increase pro-Proprietary sympathy, isolate sectarian preachers, and end Quaker dominance over the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

The Best Poor Man's Country?: William Penn, Quakers, And Unfree Labor In Atlantic Pennsylvania, Peter B. Kotowski

Dissertations

William Penn’s writings famously emphasized notions of egalitarianism, just governance, and moderation in economic pursuits. Twentieth-century scholars took Penn’s rhetoric at his word and interpreted colonial Pennsylvania as nothing less than “the best poor man’s country,” as reflected in the title of one of the most popular histories of the colony. They also imagined a world where all men had access to economic opportunity and lived free from the barbarity endemic to Atlantic world colonies. Despite this halcyon vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, the reality was the opposite: a colony where religious convictions justified what we today (and radicals then) …

Retaliation With Restraint: Destruction Of Private Property In The 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, Jeannie Cummings Harding

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Second Shenandoah Valley Campaign in 1864 created new challenges for commanders, soldiers, and civilians on both sides. Pressure on General Grant and President Lincoln to end the war quickly precipitated an increase in the use and severity of hard war policies in the South. Meanwhile, Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Early worked against his foe, implementing hard war in southern Pennsylvania in a desperate attempt to maintain his supply base in the Shenandoah Valley. Soldiers and civilians found themselves caught in the middle of an increasing cycle of destruction that they seemed to find equally demoralizing. Three towns suffered significant …

Building The Post-Industrial Community: New Urbanist Development In Pittsburgh, Pa, Steven Alexander Niedbala

Honors Papers

The first part will explain the concept of community in the context of postindustrial theory. I will analyze the narrative of postindustrialism to argue that this concept of community constitutes not a reaction to a unique set of historical circumstances but rather a strategical shift in capitalist development. In the second part, I will describe how the perceived failure of architectural modemism inspired the theorization of the city as a phenomenological entity. I will describe how this conception of the city inspired efforts to systematize urban diversity through the development of a visual linguistics. The urban planning movement known as …

From Subject To Citizen: Tarleton Bates And Evolution Of Republican Man On The Pennsylvania Frontier, Leo Jon Grogan

Dissertations (2 year embargo)

This dissertation is written as a microhistory, and it focuses on the life, career, and death of Tarleton Bates, third Prothonotary of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Bates was born in Virginia, but he left in 1794 as a soldier in the Virginia militia to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. Bates decided to remain in Pittsburgh, where he became an influential leader of the local Republican Party. His politics eventually involved him in a number of disputes, and in 1806 he was forced to fight a duel with a local merchant named Thomas Stewart. The microhistory describes Bates life within the context of …

A Curriculum To Equip Lay Pastoral Candidates For Service In The Pennsylvania Conference, James Richard Wibberding

Professional Dissertations DMin

Problem

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pennsylvania Conference leaders nurtured a desire for lay pastoral development. However, a cohesive training program did not emerge. Although lay training programs with other foci and the efforts of some local salaried pastors had produced a few lay pastors, a streamlined, accessible, principle-driven, and competency-based program was needed. With an increase in pastor to member responsibility of 64% from 1970 to 2005 and no growth in the number of churches in the same period, the creation of a training program was deemed to have missional import.

Method

An eleven-month curriculum was …

A Tlapalizquixochitl Tree, Christopher Mahonski

Theses and Dissertations

This writing was done in correlation to my thesis show, The Void, the Coach and the Future.

How To Have A Christ-Centered Youth Ministry In A Small Church Using Mentoring, Missions And Meetings, Kris R. Eckenroth

Professional Dissertations DMin

Problem

As of 2005, there was only one Seventh-day Adventist church within the Pennsylvania Conference that was providing consistent youth ministry. Many of the churches have seemed to have had difficulty finding individuals who have both the experience and the necessary training to lead a local church youth program. Due to the absence of local church youth ministry, the needs of the youth are being unmet and many are leaving the church.

Method

The method used to address this problem began in 2005. Training sessions were provided to potential leaders within the churches in the Pennsylvania Conference. There were five …

The Robert W. Ryerss Museum And Library : A Case Study In Upper Class Philanthropy In Late Victorian Philadelphia, Laura L. Keefe

Honors Theses

"The Robert W. Ryerss Museum and Library: A Case Study in Upper Class Philanthropy in Late Victorian Philadelphia" looks at the philanthropy of the Robert W. Ryerss family in Gilded Age Philadelphia. It places the Ryerss family within the spectrum of philanthropic spirit and activity that swept upper class Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century and analyzes the unique act of creating a public library and museum out of a private home within the context of the larger trend of scientific giving and museum foundation that characterized this era. Historical scholarship is extremely limited about this particular class of donor …

The History Of The One Hundred And Thirtieth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, Terrence W. Beltz

Master's Theses

In August 1862, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania quickly responded to President Lincoln's request for more troops. An overwhelming number of Pennsylvania volunteers promptly answered the call that supplied the Union Army eighteen new infantry regiments who were to serve for a period of nine months. This devoted group of central Pennsylvanians, rendezvoused at Camp Simmons, Pennsylvania, in mid-August 1862, was to become soldiers of 130th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers who, with no military experience and little training, would face hardened Confederate veterans at "Bloody Lane" at the Battle of Antietam and "Marye's Heights" at the Battle of Fredericksburg. They were to …

In Defense Of Colonel Richard P. Roberts, Commanding Officer Of The Pennsylvania 140th Regiment, Gregory Jason Bell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Richard P. Roberts was the colonel of the Pennsylvania 140th regiment from its organization in September 1862 until his death at Gettysburg in July 1863. During this time period, Captain David Acheson of Company C fostered a “growing dislike” for the colonel that led him to portray the colonel negatively in his writings. Unfortunately for the colonel’s reputation, Acheson’s letters have been widely published, leading at least one historian to accept Acheson’s poor opinion of the colonel as fact. However, other primary sources exist which collectively demonstrate a positive regimental opinion of the colonel and further suggest that Acheson’s criticisms …

How Do Faculty And Administrators Of Three Historically Black Colleges Perceive The Future Of Their Universities In The Period From 1999-2010, Joseph Henry Gardner Iii

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Improving The Assimilation Of New Members In Small Adventist Churches In Central Pennsylvania, Robert C. Williams

Professional Dissertations DMin

Problem

The failure of many of our small Seventh-day Adventist congregations to fully welcome new members into their midst has been of pastoral concern for many years. This project is an attempt to build awareness among established church members of the need to assimilate and sacrifice for new members.

Method

The first part of the project involved research into the assimilation of new members in ten small Adventist congregations in central Pennsylvania. New members who had joined the church during a six-year interval were studied to see if they had maintained active membership status during that time. Interviews were also …

The History And Use Of The Galesburg Rule In American Lutheranism, William Utech

Master of Sacred Theology Thesis

It is not the aim of this presentation to consider all the ecumenical issues and endeavors these three branches involved themselves in during the years 1875 to the present. Rather, this discussion is limited to only those personalities, documents, and events which had a direct relationship to The Galesburg Rule and the kind of ecclesiastical practice it encouraged. In addition to the standard American Lutheran histories, the primary source materials employed are the official convention proceedings and reports of the various synods and ministeriums under consideration. Also utilized are sources of secondary importance, such as the writings of the theological …

Missionary Activities And Church Organizations In Pennsylvania, 1830-1840, V. Alan Curtis

Theses and Dissertations

During most of the 1830's, the Church was headquartered at Kirtland, Ohio. The thrust of her missionary effort toward the populous east came from that center. The impact of that proselyting work on Ohio's neighboring state, Pennsylvania, is the subject of this thesis. This study is concerned with the background and history of the missionary work in Pennsylvania as a part of the greater history of the Church in the 1830's. This thesis is also concerned with the results of that missionary work. Pennsylvania provided missionaries to teach in New York, New England, Canada and elsewhere and laid the foundation …