Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- American Literature (67)
- History (10)
- Other American Studies (5)
- Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies (5)
- African American Studies (4)
-
- American Film Studies (4)
- United States History (4)
- Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (3)
- Oral History (3)
- Social and Behavioral Sciences (3)
- American Art and Architecture (2)
- American Popular Culture (2)
- Cultural History (2)
- History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology (2)
- Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration (2)
- Public Policy (2)
- Sociology (2)
- Women's Studies (2)
- Architecture (1)
- Behavioral Economics (1)
- Civic and Community Engagement (1)
- Contemporary Art (1)
- Creative Writing (1)
- Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis (1)
- Diplomatic History (1)
- Economic Policy (1)
- Economics (1)
- English Language and Literature (1)
- Keyword
-
- Faulkner (5)
- Race (5)
- American literature (4)
- History (4)
- Mississippi (4)
-
- Modernism (4)
- South (4)
- Southern (4)
- Southern Literature (4)
- Southern Studies (4)
- American (3)
- American Literature (3)
- American South (3)
- American studies (3)
- Gender (3)
- Regionalism (3)
- Tourism (3)
- U.S. South (3)
- Violence (3)
- American history (2)
- Blues (2)
- Civil Rights (2)
- Class (2)
- Cold War (2)
- Cormac Mccarthy (2)
- Elvis Presley (2)
- Eudora Welty (2)
- Femininity (2)
- Florida (2)
- Foodways (2)
- Publication Year
Articles 1 - 30 of 124
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Preservation And Public History In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Walker Bray
Preservation And Public History In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Walker Bray
Honors Theses
This paper is an exploration of the history of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all Black community in the Mississippi Delta formed by freedmen in the wake of Reconstruction. This paper also discusses the ways in which Mound Bayou citizens are working to preserve their history and make it known to a wider audience. In particular, this work discusses the recently opened Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History and related efforts to restore and preserve historic structures in Mound Bayou. In addition, this work also seeks to explore ways in which the University of Mississippi can effectively supplement …
Women Without Bodies: Autonomy, Empowerment, And Embodiment In Southern Women, Martha Peyton Ford
Women Without Bodies: Autonomy, Empowerment, And Embodiment In Southern Women, Martha Peyton Ford
Honors Theses
This thesis explores the relationship between rural, upper-class, Southern, white women and their bodies. In my attempts to understand this relationship, I analyze sources from the fields of gender studies, philosophy, and psychology, utilizing concepts such as the Cult of True Womanhood, the newly-emerging field of body memoirs, and the long-lasting but elusive idea of Southern ladyhood to make sense of cultural expectations of Southern women and their bodies. This research, alongside my use of autoethnography and oral history, serve as an anchor for my analysis of women’s relationships to their bodies, in which I use myself, my mother, and …
Brain Drain In Mississippi, Clifford Adam Conner
Brain Drain In Mississippi, Clifford Adam Conner
Honors Theses
Brain drain is the out-migration of educated individuals from an area. It is a problem with which Mississippi is overly familiar. This thesis uses data gathered from a survey of 965 respondents to identify who is leaving the state and for what reasons. The data gathered suggest confirmation that brain drain is an issue for the state, with roughly two-thirds of respondents having left the state or seriously considering doing so. The impetus for this varies with each individual, but respondents underscore economic and societal factors within Mississippi as pushing them away from the state. Quality of life factors are …
The Iran Hostage Crisis: A Media Narrative, Catherine Claire Hausman
The Iran Hostage Crisis: A Media Narrative, Catherine Claire Hausman
Honors Theses
The Iran Hostage Crisis, from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, was a defining moment in American foreign policy and US – Iranian relations. The news media – local and national newspapers and television – was saturated with coverage of the situation in Tehran and the subsequent US reaction. Americans watched the news over the 444 days, feeling sympathy and forging a collective national bond with the hostages; the international conflict was deeply personal for many Americans. The media played a central role in the establishment of the narrative of the hostage crisis, developing specific roles and personas of …
Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow
Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow
Honors Theses
“Art & AIDS: Viral Strategies for Visibility” examines the complex relationships between social stigma, healthcare, homophobia, and mortality, and how these impacted the lives of Western artists and manifested in their works. Most of the art discussed in this thesis was produced during the height of the AIDS crisis (late-1980s to mid-1990s). During this period, gay artists and their allies employed new strategies in their work to inspire activism, and convey intense emotions –– predominantly frustration, grief, and anxiety –– associated with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., the inaction of the Reagan administration was largely due to widespread homophobia kindled by …
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project explores Southern women writers during the latter half of the nineteenth-century who asserted and crafted a modernized identity by turning to various modes of transgressive performance and performance spaces. For women of the nineteenth-century, this meant extricating themselves from a domestic, sentimental identity and apprehending a more fluid, dynamic type of being. The modes of performance, such as spectatorship, orality, and gesture, allowed these women to express and articulate an alternative feminine identity while also engaging with an embodied epistemology. This thesis looks at three Southern women writers: Sherwood Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like and her travel letters …
"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker
"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the …
The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge
The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis situates Zora Neale Hurston and the folk communities in her oeuvre within the context of modernity’s dependencies on fossil fuels. Such a disciplinary context provides an energy footing for our understandings of African American migrations in the twentieth century—which radically transformed the nation on multiple levels—and it illuminates the communal values that undergird Black approaches to petromodern forms of mobility. Furthermore, by engaging the Black spaces of the South, my argument begins filling a gap in the energy humanities. Few scholars in this field engage deeply those populations and regions that disproportionately experience the underbelly of petromodernity and …
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel …
An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush
An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In late spring of 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched a nationwide demonstration known as the Poor People’s Campaign in an effort to overcome poverty. Nine caravans representing people from around the country converged in the Capitol to petition Congress for programs that would broaden opportunities for poor Americans. This work examines the Mississippi contingent of the campaign, the Mule Train caravan, that consisted of roughly 150 people who traveled in 15 covered wagons pulled by about 40 mules. The Mule Train left Marks, Mississippi on May 13 and arrived in Washington, D.C. in time for a June …
A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson
A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study seeks to explore how Black Arkansans on college campuses in rural towns navigated their local circumstances while embracing tenets of Black Power. By 1968, public PWIs in Arkansas were contending with an influx of Black students due to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Even though many of the universities had been integrated years and even decades earlier, they were still ill-equipped for the number of Black students that would enroll and descend upon the towns during this period.
What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus
What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This written thesis serves as a companion piece to What Remains, a six-part audio podcast telling the story of Irene Taylor, a 19-year-old sharecropper’s daughter who was murdered in Altheimer, Arkansas, in 1939. The investigation of the murder, which garnered national press attention, ended with the conviction and execution of Sylvester Williams, a 22-year-old Black man also from Altheimer. This paper expands on the contextual research done in support of the podcast, including close readings of newspaper coverage and fictionalized magazine reports of the case; an examination of the Delta environment’s racialized history and its impact on the lives of …
Country Fun: A Cultural History Of Opryland Usa, Nashville, And The Suburban South, William C. Nieman
Country Fun: A Cultural History Of Opryland Usa, Nashville, And The Suburban South, William C. Nieman
Honors Theses
This thesis centers around the history of Opryland USA, a theme park and “musical showplace” that existed from 1972 to 1997 in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee. Using a variety of primary sources including park ephemera, newspaper articles, and songs, I show how, over its twenty-five years, Opryland became a country music theme park after initially presenting a seemingly diverse picture of American popular music. I reveal that, despite local businessowners’ and musicians’ reluctance to embrace Opryland at first, the park was accepted by many Nashvillians to the point where it is now nostalgically mourned. Then, putting those primary materials …
Who Has A Voice: Issues Of Free Speech At The University Of Mississippi From 1955-1970, Neale Grisham
Who Has A Voice: Issues Of Free Speech At The University Of Mississippi From 1955-1970, Neale Grisham
Honors Theses
Amidst the upheaval of American society in the 1960s, the University of Mississippi’s administration found itself in a precarious position. A long-standing institution that prided itself on its ties to the Old South, the university was being challenged by integrationists and liberal notions of equality and social justice. The university was forced to decide between abetting the alumni that padded university pockets and the tides of change that were rippling through the university campus. Their main way of combatting this was through the surveilling of students and the vetting of potential guest speakers who may spread “controversial ideas.” While students …
“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager
“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager
Honors Theses
This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. …
Pecking The Hands That Feed Them: How Society And Government Have Allowed The Poultry Industry To Exploit Labor And The Environment In The American South, Sophie M. Kline
Pecking The Hands That Feed Them: How Society And Government Have Allowed The Poultry Industry To Exploit Labor And The Environment In The American South, Sophie M. Kline
Honors Theses
Americans eat an average of ninety pounds of chicken in one year, but where does that chicken come from? Immigrants and African Americans are the majority of the labor population in poultry processing plants located in the American South. In an effort to highlight the racism, sexism, insecurity, and environmental degradation in the poultry industry, I analyze a variety of ethnographies, articles, and science journals as well as U.S Supreme Court decisions and policies enacted by the U.S federal government in this thesis. Upon examination, I answer why society is pecking the hands that feed them. The analysis concludes that …
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …
Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey
Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My documentary project focuses on the group of students who planned this event and why they invited Kennedy. The thesis project consists of two parts: a film and a paper. This paper accompanies the documentary thesis film Truth Marching On: Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Mississippi. In this paper, I attempt to do the following: 1) summarize the necessary backstory of Kennedy’s 1966 visit to the university that is central to my film and paper; 2) provide information and analysis of the components that make up the short film, which include interviews, archival materials, and additional film …
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection begins with the premise that colonial relationships manifest in ways beyond exploitation of one nation by another. It relies on the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo in its assumption that imbalances of power in the realms of race gender sexuality and class are fundamentally colonial. With this more expansive understanding of coloniality in mind I examine resistance to colonial exploitation in a range of texts from across the Americas. The first essay in this collection explores the role of the guinea pig in Andean food culture arguing that the continued consumption of guinea pig represents a form …
A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett
A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Dollar General Corporation has grown into a retail titan with more than 15 000 stores across the continental United States. The first chapter of this thesis traces the history of this multibillion-dollar firm since its founding as a family-run business in Scottsville Kentucky in the late 1930s. Situating Dollar General’s history within the evolving contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries illustrates that Dollar General Stores succeed when the economy staggers. Neoliberalism and global finance capitalism have only exacerbated the geographic expansion and profitability of the company as the second chapter begins to explore. Although Dollar General Stores open at …
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …
Tales As Old As Time: The Origins Of Selected Fairy Tales And Their Legacies In Popular Culture, Ann Louise Jackson
Tales As Old As Time: The Origins Of Selected Fairy Tales And Their Legacies In Popular Culture, Ann Louise Jackson
Honors Theses
This thesis seeks to analyze a selection of fairy tales and their film adaptations. The research centers on the origins of these selected stories and their cinematic derivatives, with particular focus given to authorial and cultural influences as well as audience perceptions of these works. The evolution of character through these fairy tales is an area of interest in this thesis, with an emphasis on agency and the depiction of the heroines through the stories and their adaptations. Including two well-known fairy tales and one that is more obscure, this thesis aims to understand how each variation is conceived and …
Freedom At The Freak Show: Carnivalesque Imagery In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor And Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Mccarley
Freedom At The Freak Show: Carnivalesque Imagery In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor And Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Mccarley
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the function of the circus and the sideshow in the work of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, arguing that all of these authors employ Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque as a reaction to and against the expectations put on them as women who are pressured to conform to the Southern ideal. In the first chapter, I argue that Eudora Welty uses the carnivalesque to reveal the performativity of normalcy in both “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” (1937) and “A Memory” (1937). These performances, in the first story particularly, offer a critique of …
How Sweet It Is: Swamp Pop Soda And Modern Day Sugar, Rebecca Lauck Cleary
How Sweet It Is: Swamp Pop Soda And Modern Day Sugar, Rebecca Lauck Cleary
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis accompanies a documentary film about Swamp Pop Premium Sugarcane Sodas, a Louisiana cane sugar beverage created by Collin Cormier and John Petersen, two cousins from Lafayette, Louisiana. The two recognized the long history of sugarcane farming in Louisiana, and were inspired to feature real cane sugar from their home state in their beverages. This paper begins with an overview of research about the historical aspect of sugarcane production and continues with contextualization of the interviews with co-founders Cormier and Petersen, as well as sugarcane farmer Jessie Breaux. The accompanying film contains interviews conducted in the summer and fall …
Small Batch: Women's Positions In Southern Craft Beverages, Victoria De Leone
Small Batch: Women's Positions In Southern Craft Beverages, Victoria De Leone
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores three different forms of narrative in order to understand how and why craft beverage industries, specifically beer and whiskey, have been framed as masculine spaces. Women who seek to work in or around these industries are often sorted into the marketing, sales and service corners of the industry, and the production floor still hosts very few women, and those women must negotiate performing their femininity and the masculinities deemed necessary for the environment simultaneously. I argue that the way that we talk about women who choose to do this work is rooted in a history of domestic …
Reevaluating Religion: A Case For Inclusivity Of Lgbtq Christians In The Church, Amber Erin Dupree
Reevaluating Religion: A Case For Inclusivity Of Lgbtq Christians In The Church, Amber Erin Dupree
Honors Theses
This thesis project is focused on understanding the discrimination that is rampant amongst Southern churches regarding their LGBTQ members and offering solutions to this problem that has occurred throughout the many generations of Christianity. In order to understand this discrimination, three books were consulted for the research aspect of this project. The three books include the following: Sweet Tea by E. Patrick Johnson, Don't Be Afraid Anymore by Troy Perry, and Our Tribe by Nancy Wilson. A Questionnaire was also given to people who identified as Southern, Christian, and LGBTQ in order to gain an understanding of the current sentiments …
Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper
Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper
Honors Theses
This thesis wrestles with the duality of the terms haunting and ghosts in relation to Mississippi and its collective identity and narrative. Ghostlore and haunted tourism provide insight into shared cultural constructs and indicate an absence of certain perspectives from more generally held ideas of identity. Analyses of ghost stories from around the state explore these hauntings of history and ghosted narratives, so it is ghosts v. ghosted and hauntings v. haunted. I use ghost stories from Natchez, MS to explore postsouthern spaces and performances of southernness and the narratives around female apparitions to study the role of southern womanhood …
A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth
A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth
Honors Theses
On the surface, L. Frank Baum's Oz series would appear to merely be fourteen books of inventive children's fantasy, but in truth Baum communicates several personal progressive beliefs to his youthful audience through the use of his fantastical world upon closer examination. For my research, I reread every book in Baum's original Oz series and made note of any potentially relevant allegorical or metaphorical themes. Once I started to notice a trend of themes regarding technology, labor, politics, and gender, I settled on these themes to be the overall focus of my thesis's discussion. I read as many academic essays …