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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
"Summer's Gone:" Rethinking The History Of The Beach Boys, 1961-1998, Grant Wong
"Summer's Gone:" Rethinking The History Of The Beach Boys, 1961-1998, Grant Wong
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This thesis rethinks the history of American rock band The Beach Boys from 1961-1998 in terms of how its members tapped into the zeitgeists of the sixties, seventies, and eighties to create successful music and branding. In its analysis, it draws upon methods of cultural history, business history, and biography in order to dispel popular myths surrounding the band and consider the meaning of its impact within United States history and American popular culture as a whole. The Beach Boys, in recording innovative music and marketing a winning brand, created a durable pop cultural institution that defined its times just …
“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks
“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks
Undergraduate Honors Theses
I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …
"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks
"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Scholars of the American South generally end their studies of Confederate memorization just before World War 1. Because of a decline in the number of physical monuments and memorials to the Confederacy dedicated in the years immediately following the war, scholars appear to regard the interwar era as a period separate from the Lost Cause movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to fully understand the complexity of developing Southern identities in the modern age, it is essential to expand traditional definitions of Confederate memorialization and the time period in which it is studied. This paper explores …