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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Material Embodiments, Queer Visualities: Presenting Disability In American Public History, Andrew B. Marcum
Material Embodiments, Queer Visualities: Presenting Disability In American Public History, Andrew B. Marcum
American Studies ETDs
This dissertation examines the presentation of disability at three of the most popular sites for the consumption of public history in the United States including the U.S. Capitol, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. I de-construct the cultural and historical narratives and discourses of disability circulating at these sites and offer a visual culture analysis of the images, artifacts, and statuary found at each of them. My study is informed principally by the theories and methods of queer disability studies, visual culture studies, and cultural studies critiques of neoliberalism. I consider how …
Reproducing Prevention: Teen Pregnancy And Intimate Citizenship In The Post-Welfare Era, Clare Daniel
Reproducing Prevention: Teen Pregnancy And Intimate Citizenship In The Post-Welfare Era, Clare Daniel
American Studies ETDs
This dissertation examines the politics of teen pregnancy prevention in the 1990s and early 2000s within public policy, popular culture, and local and national nonprofit advocacy. Widely viewed as a distressing social problem, teenage reproduction has provoked decades of prevention and regulation that pervade across public and private sectors. Teen pregnancy has been associated with, if not fully blamed for, a host of other so-called social problems throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. As scholars such as Kristen Luker and Lisa Arai have labored to illustrate, causal connections between adolescent reproduction and the social ills …
New Mexico's Nuclear Enchantment: Local Politics, National Imperatives, And Radioactive Waste Disposal In The Desert, Jennifer Richter
New Mexico's Nuclear Enchantment: Local Politics, National Imperatives, And Radioactive Waste Disposal In The Desert, Jennifer Richter
American Studies ETDs
The use of nuclear technologies has left an indelible mark on American society. The environmental, political, economic, and social costs of creating, producing, and utilizing technologies such as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have left a legacy of radioactive waste. To date, there is no comprehensive path for disposing of the different kinds of waste produced by the nuclear industry, including spent nuclear fuel that is now held on site at nuclear power plants. The question of how to deal with nuclear waste has plagued the nuclear industry, governmental agencies, and the concerned public for most of the nuclear era. …
Imagining "The Town Too Tough To Die": Tourism, Preservation, And History In Tombstone, Arizona, Kara Mccormack
Imagining "The Town Too Tough To Die": Tourism, Preservation, And History In Tombstone, Arizona, Kara Mccormack
American Studies ETDs
This dissertation looks at the ways popular culture, preservation, and economic exigencies continually circulate and interact in Tombstone, Arizona the ways tourists make meaning from the site the importance of the concepts of history and authenticity and the resonance of the Earp Myth and the Mythic West worldwide. Tombstone's place within that myth cannot be understated, as it has come to signify for many the ideas wrapped up in the myth as a whole. On a more basic level, Tombstone fits within wider trends in historic preservation and heritage sites that are central to an analysis of the power and …
Bio+Terror: Science, Security, Simulation, Melanie Armstrong
Bio+Terror: Science, Security, Simulation, Melanie Armstrong
American Studies ETDs
The United States government has spent more than $125 billion since 2001 to prepare the nation for bioterrorism. This dissertation examines the emergence of bioterrorism as a credible threat in the contemporary moment, considering how the preparedness practices of the security state constitute new biopolitical formations. To explore how changing ways of knowing disease and risk are reshaping communities, this multi-sited study investigates the material outcomes of biosecurity in people's lives. It shows how complex histories of disease and terror are remade in the modern age to bring about new spaces and forms of biological citizenship.Through interview, observation and detailed …