American Studies Commons^™

From "Our Poor" To "Personal Responsibility": Changing Welfare Rhetoric In Political Party Platforms Of The Carolinas And The Nation, 1950-2005, Felicity N. Ropp

Senior Theses

In this thesis, I track political rhetoric surrounding poverty and welfare from 1950-2005. I first provide thorough context on the history of welfare policy in the United States and the way these issues were framed by politicians leading up to the period my data covers. My analysis centers on 108 political party platforms from the national Republican and Democratic parties and from state parties in North and South Carolina, ranging from 1950 to 2005 (31 of which I located in archives and manually digitized for the first time ever). I explain the significance of party platforms and review the literature …

The Word According To Flannery O'Connor, Eamon Maher

Articles

In her relatively short life (1925-1964), one that was greatly curtailed as a result of being diagnosed with lupus (a disease from which her father also died in 1952), Flannery O’Connor managed to leave behind a literary legacy that continues to fascinate scholars and general readers alike. This is all the more surprising when one considers that the work consists of just two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), along with 31 short stories.

N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, And The American Imagination: Medieval Myth In 19th- And 20th- Century Children’S Literature, Alyssa Kowalick

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis attempts to elucidate how the illustrated images and text of the medieval myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood were translated from an English national epic to an American classic and used, I argue, to construct a new American identity. My analysis looks at both the written word and illustrated images in Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur written by Sidney Lanier and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, and Robin Hood written by Paul Creswick and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. …

Contesting Slavery In The Global Market: John Brown’S Slave Life In Georgia, Michael Drexler, Stephanie Scherer

Faculty Journal Articles

John Brown, author of Slave Life in Georgia, published in London in 1854, proffered a radical approach to ending slavery in the USA in step with Marxian economics. In this paper, we will explain how Brown’s representation of subjectivity may have caused critics to neglect it. Brown treats freedom as something foreign and external. He has to learn what freedom means, first through exposure to a model of liberal citizenship and then through the experience of several modulations of fugitive liberty. Brown’s social world is wholly determined by external forces. Whether slave or freeman, he faces ambiguous situations. Is …

Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.

Sites Of Historical Amusement: Tourism And The Recontextualization Of American History, Brendan Murphy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through the analysis of a theatrical event staged in Brooklyn, New York, entitled Black America (1895), this thesis interrogates cultural heritage tourism of the past and present and introduces a new classification of tourist site, “site of historical amusement.” In this current political moment, one during which regional pride and latent racism are bubbling to the surface, this study advocates for the continued interrogation of how the American story is bought and sold.

Sites of historical amusement are historically themed spaces that sell a recontextualized narrative that strips complexity from history, effectively flattening the past in order to create a …

Heavy South: Identity, Performance, And Heavy Music In The Southern Metal Scene, Michael A. Mcdowell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Southern Metal scene depends heavily on the performance of a Southern Identity. While considerable research has been done on other musical genres and scenes from the American South (country music, blues, gospel music), less attention has been given to the extreme metal scene of Southern Metal. Using scholarship of Nadine Hubbs, Philip Auslander, Jefferey C. Alexander, and Keith Kahn Harris, among others, I analyze two films, Slow Southern Steel (2010) and NOLA: Life, Death, and Heavy Blues from the Bayou (2014), and one song, Down’s “Eyes of the South” as cultural productions of this Southern Metal scene. In …

Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …

Furling The South Carolina Confederate Flag: Political Expediency Or Cultural Change?, Grant Burnette Lefever

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Until July 2000, three Confederate battle flags flew at the South Carolina State House—one in each Legislative chamber and a third on top of the State House dome, on the same pole and just below the U.S. flag and the state’s Palmetto flag. A legislative compromise that year removed the flags from the State House to a prominent site 100 yards away in front of the building, next to a memorial to South Carolina’s Confederate dead. Though it only moved the flag a short distance and to an arguably more visible location, the 2000 compromise was the culmination of over …

Southern Families, Jennifer Burkett Pittman

Articles

The emphasis on family unity that is characteristic of the southern family has its roots in the traditional values of the agrarian upper class. The English, Scottish-Irish, and African immigrants to the south, who arrived in the 1600 and 1700s, instituted the basics of southern culture, though these patterns continued to develop and progress, as they do today. The basis of the southern lifestyle was farming and rural living, which lingered well into the 20th century, at least in certain parts of the south. Even today, agrarian traditions continue to influence southern culture. Because of the influential governing classes, family …

Southern Bestsellers In The Twenty-First Century, Jodie Free

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the concept of bestsellers in the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on six novels written by contemporary southern authors. These novels are analyzed through the lens of social consciousness, with attention to how they reflect current social issues, and how they engage with and subvert cultural and literary stereotypes. Bestsellers are books that are widely read, shared and discussed, often because they connect to concerns about identity; this study speculates on the influence of bestsellers on national and regional reader identity, specifically race, gender and class. Chapter I explores feminine roles in Lee Smith's The Last …

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

[Introduction To] What Caused The Civil War? Reflections On The South And Southern History, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians.

Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, …

[Introduction To] The Oxford Book Of The American South: Testimony, Memory, And Fiction, Edward L. Ayers, Bradley C. Mittendorf

Bookshelf

Resonating with the testimony of slaves and slaveholders, the powerful and the powerless, women and men, black people and white, The Oxford Book of the American South combines the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present. The first anthology to put short stories, novels, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and journalism together, this collection is a rich and varied record of life below the Mason Dixon line. We see the antebellum period both from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand, such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Jacobs, as well as …

[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …

You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin And The South, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

James Baldwin, like innumerable other Black artists, has found that in his efforts to express the plight of the Black man in America, he has been forced to deal over and over again with that inescapable dilemma of the Black American - the lack of sense of a positive self-identity. Time after time in his writings he has shown an awareness of the fact that identity contains, as Erik Erikson so accurately indicates, "a complementarity of past and future both in the individual and in society." Baldwin wrote in "Many Thousands Gone," "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we …

[Introduction To] Vengeance And Justice: Crime And Punishment In The 19th Century American South, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

Exploring the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race, Edward L. Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime.