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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
"In Praise Of Bishop Valentine": The Creation Of Modern Valentine's Day In Antebellum America, Brian Keith Geiger
"In Praise Of Bishop Valentine": The Creation Of Modern Valentine's Day In Antebellum America, Brian Keith Geiger
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
"In Praise of Bishop Valentine" is a cultural history of Valentine's Day in the American antebellum Northeast. By the middle of the nineteenth century, residents of England and North America had been observing February 14th with various folk customs for centuries. In the early 1840s, however, Northern businessmen and women discovered an enthusiastic and consumptive market for their ready-made valentines. Within a matter of years these merchants' efforts to sell printed cards fundamentally changed the way saint's day was marked. Valentine's Day had become one of the most celebrated holidays of the year and an occasion, specifically, for buying and …
The Art Of The Public Grovel: Sexual Scandal And The Rise Of Public Confession, Susan Wise Bauer
The Art Of The Public Grovel: Sexual Scandal And The Rise Of Public Confession, Susan Wise Bauer
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Between 1969 and 2002, three American politicians (Edward Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton) and three ordained clergymen (Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Cardinal Bernard Law) made public confessions of wrongdoing to national audiences. These public confessions reveal that Protestant religious culture, particularly the neoevangelical culture of the twentieth century, had changed the expectations of many who did not consider themselves within neoevangelicalism's sphere of influence. By tracing the historical development of public confession from its medieval roots to its use in twentieth-century entertainment programming, this dissertation shows that Protestant confessional practice affected both secular American political discourse and American …