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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Uniting Interests: The Economic Functions Of Marriage In America, 1750-1860, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter
Uniting Interests: The Economic Functions Of Marriage In America, 1750-1860, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation, "Uniting Interests: Money, Property, and Marriage in America, 1750-1860," examines how marriage was an essential economic transaction that responded to the development of capitalism in early America. Drawing on scholarship on the history of economic development, household organization, law, and gender, I argue that families actively distributed resources at marriage as part of larger wealth management strategies that were sensitive to regional and national economic growth. I focus particularly on women's property holding and how families deployed the legal protection of women's property as bulwarks against financial disaster. This project restores the family and women to the narrative …
Cherries From The Tree: National Identity And The Hero Construction Of George Washington, 1799-1829, Jack Thomas Masterson
Cherries From The Tree: National Identity And The Hero Construction Of George Washington, 1799-1829, Jack Thomas Masterson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach
The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation recovers the life of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent and the Atlantic World she inhabited. Born in Africa around 1757, she was enslaved as a child and shipped to Saint-Domingue through the Bight of Benin in the 1760s. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution, Couvent fled the island, along with tens of thousands of Saint-Domingue inhabitants. She resettled in New Orleans where she eventually died a free and wealthy slaveholder in 1837. Although illiterate, Couvent left property to establish a free black school in her will. L'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was founded on her land in 1847 …
Liberty's Kids: Toys, Children's Literature, And The Promotion Of Nationalism In The Early Nineteenth-Century United States, August M. Butler
Liberty's Kids: Toys, Children's Literature, And The Promotion Of Nationalism In The Early Nineteenth-Century United States, August M. Butler
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
"Strength For The Journey": Feminist Theology And Baptist Women Pastors, Judith Anne Bledsoe Bailey
"Strength For The Journey": Feminist Theology And Baptist Women Pastors, Judith Anne Bledsoe Bailey
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation grows out of an interest in the women who are pastors in formerly Southern Baptist churches. Because they continue to face opposition to their role as pastors I wanted to know the sources of their strength and determination. Specifically, how did feminism and feminist theology influence their decision to be pastors and their continuing ministry?;I interviewed twenty woman pastors in five different states representing two generations of pastors. These women are among the very few who grew up in Southern Baptist churches and are now pastors, since the Southern Baptist denomination has officially banned women from the pulpit …
'I Get A Kick Out Of You': Cinematic Revisions Of The History Of The African American Cowboy In The American West, Stephanie Anne Maguire
'I Get A Kick Out Of You': Cinematic Revisions Of The History Of The African American Cowboy In The American West, Stephanie Anne Maguire
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Thoroughly Modern: African American Women's Dress And The Culture Of Consumption In Cleveland, Ohio 1890-1940, Deanda Marie Johnson
Thoroughly Modern: African American Women's Dress And The Culture Of Consumption In Cleveland, Ohio 1890-1940, Deanda Marie Johnson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
African American women have been absent from much of the writing on consumption and the making of modernity. This dissertation responds to these absences, using dress, a highly visible form of consumption, to examine how African American women in Cleveland, Ohio experienced modernity through the culture of consumption from 1890-1940, in the context of urbanization, migration, and the Great Depression.;In looking at African American women's dress during this period, this dissertation will explore the clothed body not simply as a theoretical abstraction, but part of a lived experience in which production and consumption are not mutually exclusive. This will help …
Deviants Of Great Potential: Images Of The Leopold-Loeb Case, John Carl Fiorini
Deviants Of Great Potential: Images Of The Leopold-Loeb Case, John Carl Fiorini
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Deviants of Great Potential analyzes the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case as a cultural narrative with important effects on the marginalization of same-sex sexuality in men throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. After Chicago teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were arrested for the United States' first nationally recognized "thrill killing," the apparently motiveless murder of fourteen-year-old Robert Franks, the Leopold-Loeb case became an instant cause celebre. The popular fixation on the case continued in the decades after 1924, as journalists and behavioral scientists treated it as a precedent for understanding a certain type of crime and criminal. Meanwhile---especially after …
"History Written With Lightning": Religion, White Supremacy, And The Rise And Fall Of Thomas Dixon, Jr, David Michael Kidd
"History Written With Lightning": Religion, White Supremacy, And The Rise And Fall Of Thomas Dixon, Jr, David Michael Kidd
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Baptist minister and author of novels, plays, sermons, and essays, Thomas Dixon, Jr. today remains most known as the storyteller behind the 1915 D. W. Griffith Film The Birth of a Nation. I argue that Thomas Dixon crafted a white supremacist rhetoric and narrative of modern whiteness indebted to the structures of Fundamentalist Christianity. With varying degrees of success, later writers struggled with the legacy the Dixonian cultural narrative bequeathed them.;Fundamentalist theology offered a whole host of tropes, metaphors, and arguments to its users. In short, Fundamentalism presented a rhetorical stance that was, in the hands of an ambitious and …
"To Draw Pleasure And Instruction": Robert Gilmor, Jr And Collecting The Early Republic, Janine M. Yorimoto
"To Draw Pleasure And Instruction": Robert Gilmor, Jr And Collecting The Early Republic, Janine M. Yorimoto
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
"You Can't Say 'No' To A Soldier": Sexual Violence In The United States During World War Ii, Michaele Katherine Smith
"You Can't Say 'No' To A Soldier": Sexual Violence In The United States During World War Ii, Michaele Katherine Smith
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Between 1939 and 1946 the number of rapes in the United States increased approximately 45 percent. This project strives to explain the cultural factors the fueled this increase. Existing societal beliefs and the legal system of this period held rape victims responsible for their own victimization. Additionally, the wartime mobilization of the 1940s liberated millions of young men from community and family moral surveillance. Some men experienced this liberation as license to coerce sex from women. Popular culture accepted and even praised sexual aggressiveness in men, especially military men, and linked women's sexuality to their patriotism. The combination of all …
Gone To The Dogs: Inter-Species Bonds And The Building Of Bio-Cultural Capital In America, 1835--Present, Merit Elfi Anglin
Gone To The Dogs: Inter-Species Bonds And The Building Of Bio-Cultural Capital In America, 1835--Present, Merit Elfi Anglin
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In following the rise of canis lupus familiaris from America's pet dog to dogmestic partner and ontological metaphor for capital unseen and humanly unseeable this dissertation hopes to reveal the 'spirit of calculation' that undergirds the nation's seemingly disinterested love for their four-legged others and demonstrate how cultural politics affect and are in turn affected by bio-politics and bio-power.;It argues that in response to the deflation of prevalent signifiers of social standing and sexual or matrimonial desirability during the financial and ontological crises of the 1830s, Jacksonians turned to the dog as an incorruptible sign of invisible individual substance. In …
Strange Fruit: Images Of African Americans In Advertising Cards And Postcards, 1860-1930, Meghan Brooke Holder
Strange Fruit: Images Of African Americans In Advertising Cards And Postcards, 1860-1930, Meghan Brooke Holder
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Storyville: Discourses In Southern Musicians' Autobiographies, Matthew Daniel Sutton
Storyville: Discourses In Southern Musicians' Autobiographies, Matthew Daniel Sutton
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This study utilizes many of the tools of the literary critic to identify and analyze the discursive conventions in autobiographies by American vernacular musicians who came of age in the American South during the era of enforced racial segregation. Through this textual analysis, we can appreciate this seemingly amorphous collection of books as a continuing conversation, where descriptions of the South and its music by turns confirm, contradict, and complicate each other. Ultimately, the dozens of southern musician autobiographies published in the last fifty years engage in a valuable and revealing dialogue, creating a virtual "Storyville"; ostensibly disparate works share …
Building And Planting: The Material World, Memory, And The Making Of William Penn's Pennsylvania, 1681--1726, Catharine Christie Dann Roeber
Building And Planting: The Material World, Memory, And The Making Of William Penn's Pennsylvania, 1681--1726, Catharine Christie Dann Roeber
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The process of creating the colony of Pennsylvania began with the granting of a charter by King Charles II to William Penn in 1681. However the formation of Pennsylvania was not limited to the words of this or other official documents. Many people formed the province through both everyday actions and extraordinary events. and importantly, people involved in the Pennsyvlania project employed both material "toolkits" and language about the material world to stake a place for the new territory within the Americas, Britain, and the world in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.;This dissertation examines how William Penn and his contemporaries …
The Colonial History Of Wye Plantation, The Lloyd Family, And Their Slaves On Maryland's Eastern Shore: Family, Property, And Power, Amy Speckart
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The history of the Lloyd family at Wye Plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, from the 1650s to the early 1770s refines and complicates the dominant historical narrative of the rise of a native-born Protestant planter elite in colonial Chesapeake scholarship. First, the Lloyds were a wealthy and politically prominent Protestant family that benefited from close ties to Catholics up to the end of the colonial period. Second, in contrast to traditional histories of the colonial Chesapeake that emphasize the raising and marketing of tobacco, Wye Plantation's history attests to the importance of grain and livestock farming on a commercial scale, …
Determining Reliability In Indian Captivity Narratives, Heather Nicole Diangelis
Determining Reliability In Indian Captivity Narratives, Heather Nicole Diangelis
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
The Spectacle Of Citizenship: Halftones, Print Media, And Constructing Americanness, 1880--1940, Sarah Lucinda Grunder
The Spectacle Of Citizenship: Halftones, Print Media, And Constructing Americanness, 1880--1940, Sarah Lucinda Grunder
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Advances in photography and conceptions of national identity proceeded side by side during the nineteenth century. The introduction of halftone reproductions marks the beginning of an information revolution and is an important moment not only in media history, but in studies of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history and studies of national identity. Visual representation of differences between people and places was one means by which people identified and validated Americans' belonging because photographs were infused with authority: they seemed to be truthful, to provide infallible evidence of events and of people. as the nineteenth century gave way to the …
Class Act: Negotiating Art And Market In The Career Of Isadora Duncan, Anne Meredith Gittinger
Class Act: Negotiating Art And Market In The Career Of Isadora Duncan, Anne Meredith Gittinger
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
"For All Men Love To See The Country As Well As To Heare Of It": Views Of Unsettled Virginia, 1649-1676, Sarah Zella Bowden Page
"For All Men Love To See The Country As Well As To Heare Of It": Views Of Unsettled Virginia, 1649-1676, Sarah Zella Bowden Page
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
"Let All Things Be Done Decently And In Order": Gender Segregation In The Seating Of Early American Churches, Caroline Everard Athey Warner
"Let All Things Be Done Decently And In Order": Gender Segregation In The Seating Of Early American Churches, Caroline Everard Athey Warner
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Fifty Gentlemen Total Strangers: A Portrait Of The First Continental Congress, Karen Northrop Barzilay
Fifty Gentlemen Total Strangers: A Portrait Of The First Continental Congress, Karen Northrop Barzilay
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
When news of the Coercive Acts reached the mainland colonies of British North America in May 1774, there was no such thing as a Continental Congress. Provincial leaders, agreeing that an intercolonial gathering was necessary to protest recent Parliamentary measures, anticipated only a congress---an isolated diplomatic convention in the tradition of the Stamp Act Congress and the Albany Congress. Although the fifty-six colonial deputies assembling in Philadelphia knew that they attended an historic meeting, none of them foresaw that this conference would turn out to be the genesis of the United States government. Recasting the First Continental Congress as an …
Utopian Spaces: Mormons And Icarians In Nauvoo, Illinois, Sarah Jaggi Lee
Utopian Spaces: Mormons And Icarians In Nauvoo, Illinois, Sarah Jaggi Lee
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Nauvoo, Illinois was the setting for two important social experiments in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons, made this city their headquarters of their rapidly expanding church from 1838 until 1846. Only three years after the departure of the Mormons, a group of Frenchmen calling themselves Icarians came to the same spot to realize a system of communal living and brotherhood that lasted in Nauvoo until 1856. While several studies have been devoted to these groups, as yet none have combined a study of the two communities …
Recipe For Citizenship: Professionalization And Power In World War I Dietetics, Kathleen Marie Scott
Recipe For Citizenship: Professionalization And Power In World War I Dietetics, Kathleen Marie Scott
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation is an analysis of the professionalization tactics of white, native-born, Protestant, middle-class women who served with the U.S. armed forces as dietitians during World War I. Through the overlapping rubrics of maternalism, citizenship, and professionalism, I examine the ways in which dominant race, class, and gender ideologies inflected their quest for professionalization. I specifically examine the way hospital dietitians infused their expertise with rhetoric of race betterment and national security to acquire distinct status and authority in relation to other female medical/health practitioners. In this study, I locate the ideological origins of Public Law 36, 80 th Congress, …
"The Brownies' Book": An Open Window To Early Twentieth-Century African American Childhood, Regina Ann Clark
"The Brownies' Book": An Open Window To Early Twentieth-Century African American Childhood, Regina Ann Clark
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Walk To Freedom: How A Violent Response To The Civil Rights Protest At Alabama's Pettus Bridge Unwillingly Created The Voting Rights Act Of 1965, Brian Clement Rainville
Walk To Freedom: How A Violent Response To The Civil Rights Protest At Alabama's Pettus Bridge Unwillingly Created The Voting Rights Act Of 1965, Brian Clement Rainville
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Bottomless Pits: The Decline Of Subfloor Pits And Rise Of African American Consumerism In Virginia, Danny Brad Hatch
Bottomless Pits: The Decline Of Subfloor Pits And Rise Of African American Consumerism In Virginia, Danny Brad Hatch
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
The Religious Philosophy Of Richard M Nixon, Robert Benjamin Abel
The Religious Philosophy Of Richard M Nixon, Robert Benjamin Abel
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
The Revolutionary Writings Of Mary And Royall Tyler: Marital, Medical, And Political Discourse In An Early-Nineteenth-Century Family, Elizabeth Anne Bond
The Revolutionary Writings Of Mary And Royall Tyler: Marital, Medical, And Political Discourse In An Early-Nineteenth-Century Family, Elizabeth Anne Bond
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
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 …