American Studies Commons^™

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

The Evolution Of Defining Rape In The United States, Sophia Rhoades

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

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 …

Secrets On Morgan Hill: A Story Of An Unlikely Friendship Amid An Apartheid South, Camille Kleidysz-Ferreira

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Introduction

The Burden of History and Fiction

“How much of the burden of history can fiction bear?” – Margaret Walker

Comprehensive historical research can often become the inspiration for art. The greatest pieces of historical fiction, are a result of years of historic scholarship before the creation of a compelling historical narrative or fiction piece. Through my two-year ethnographic study and collection of oral histories of the black community, surrounding the historic Bethel A.M.E. church in Acworth, Georgia, I was told a story about a friendship between two little girls who remained friends until the end of their lives. What …

Flannery O'Connor's Protestant Grace, Emily Strong

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Flannery O’Connor has long been known for the didactic Catholic message in her literature. However, upon closer study we may find that there are Protestant themes in O’Connor’s portrayal of grace. This paper explores the differences between Catholic and Protestant grace, examines the Protestant themes that can be found in her texts “Greenleaf,” “Revelation,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” and offers possible explanations as to why these Protestant themes exist in her literature.

The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who …

Building Within Our Borders: Black Women Reformers In The South From 1890 To 1920, Tonya D. Blair

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the reform work of four unsung black women reformers in Virginia from the post-Reconstruction period into the early twentieth century. The four women all spearheaded social reformist institutions and organizations such as industrial training schools, a settlement house, an orphanage, a home for the elderly, a girl’s reformatory/industrial school and a state federation of black women’s clubs. One of the selected women includes Jennie Dean, a former slave from northern Virginia, who founded an industrial training school for African-Americans in post-Civil War Manassas. Dean’s industrial school resulted from her tenacious drive to imbue former slaves with literacy …

Architectures For A Future South: Posthumanism And Ruin In The Novels Of Cormac Mccarthy, Joshua Ryan Jackson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reads the novels of Cormac McCarthy as posthuman southern literature to explain why fiction from the South after World War II could no longer convey a sense of place during postmodernity: that is, because the region's culture and economy were transitioning from predominantly humanistic thinking (i.e., believing that humans [and especially southern humans] are supreme beings) to predominantly posthumanistic thinking (i.e., believing that humans are not as supreme as they think they are). It argues that we can trace this ideological change over time via structural shifts in the South’s architectural record, which we see in the ruins …

"Era(C)Ing The South: Modern Popular Culture Depictions Of Southern History", Bryan Jack

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

There has been significant research on various interpretations of the American South, and the relationship between Southern and American identity. However, there has been little investigation into how modern popular culture depicts and constructs the Southern past and how this shapes Southern identity. This article interrogates the relationship between modern films, race, and Southern history to ask, has the challenge to codified Jim Crow segregation changed filmic portrayals of Southern history? How do these portrayals affect both Southern and American identity? Using race as a lens, the article argues that the end of the Civil Rights Movement has created a …

Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thin Bodies, is a fictional thriller revolving around a retrospective, female voice. It is a short novel-length view into the insular community of the sorority, specifically in the U.S. Deep South. The town and university are both fictional, as are the characters, sororities, and events, but they are based in realistic institutions of socialization and community. Sarah Beth, our protagonist and narrator, considers her coming-of-age through her recruitment, initiation, ensuing leadership, and eventual fall from grace in her sorority, Theta Kappa. The group of women that this novel intends to characterize struggle with identity and how they are perceived against …

Shaping Presence: Ida B. Wells’ 1892 Testimony Of The ‘Untold Story’ At New York’S Lyric Hall, Anita August

Anita August

I will examine Wells’ 1892 testimony at Lyric Hall using an interdisciplinary reading from rhetorical theory, legal brief writing, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and historical criticism to illustrate how these bodies of knowledge discursively intersect and interact in articulating the shaping presence of the agent. I will distinguish my notion of a shaping presence in five ways in which it acts as a rhetorical framing of both the agent and her visual and verbal discourse.

The Black Freedom Struggle And Civil Rights Labor Organizing In The Piedmont And Eastern North Carolina Tobacco Industry, Jennifer Wells

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines labor organizing in the U.S. South, specifically the Piedmont and eastern regions of North Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. It aims to uncover an often overlooked local history of civil rights labor organizing which challenged the southern status quo before America's 'mainstream' civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. This study argues that through labor organizing, African American tobacco workers challenged the class, gender, and race hierarchy of North Carolina's very profitable tobacco industry during the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, the thesis contributes to the historiography of black working class protest, …

The Truth Shall Set You Free: The Bible, The Revolution, And The Debate Over Slavery In The American South, Kevin Simon

Masters Theses

Before the slavery debate pushed a divided American nation to the brink of civil war, the argument divided the family of God. By the time cannon fire erupted at Fort Sumter, Christians had already staked out positions based on sophisticated lines of argument they used to justify or condemn chattel slavery. The generation coming of age during the Civil War era witnessed a debate more intense and contentious than their ancestors had seen, but in terms of the arguments employed, it broke very little fresh ground. Contrary to the assumption that antebellum apologists in the South invented the defense of …

Place, Race, And Religion In The Local Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community And Movement Of Memphis, Tennessee, Amy Catherine Ulmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study observes the role of place in the local LGBT community and movement of Memphis, Tennessee. I gathered information from fifteen interviews, including LGBT Memphians, activists, preachers, and public figures to show what aspects of place have been the most significant in shaping the nature of the local movement, which has been growing since the early 2000s. I suggest that the conservatism, race, and religiosity of Memphis have played the most significant role. The first chapter demonstrates how LGBTs operate within a city that maintains pockets of openness, but remains largely LGBT-unfriendly according to interviewees. The second chapter observes …

The Crescent And The Cross: Islamic Influence In Southern Culture, Jesse Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To a large degree, America has adopted African American culture as its own. One may hear and see African American influence in popular music, grammar, fashion and art, but rarely are the sources of these influences divined, in no small part to difficulties inherent in interdisciplinary studies. This thesis will examine the Islamic aesthetics in African American quilts. This work focuses on design and color elements and I trace Islamic influence from West Africa to the U.S. South by way of the slave trade. The original scholarship comes from in the Mississippi Delta, although this thesis also uses quilt books …

The Abyss In Allen Tate’S The Fathers: What Can Be Seen In The Darkness Of American Literature?, Barry T. Wireman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a thread of darkness that seems to run through much of the canon of U.S. authors. There are, at the heart of us all, the questions we ask ourselves about who we are and what we mean to ourselves and others and to the places where we have lived. I believe that most of the body of writings produced in this country attempt to answer these questions in some form. Allen Tate wrote The Fathers in 1932, nearly seventy years after the Civil War, or the War Between the States. Perhaps one of the most critical moments in …

Viva Wallace Tampa Latins, The Politics Of Americanization, And The Progressive Party Campaign Of 1948, Jared G. Toney

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research deals with the presidential election of 1948 and the questions it

raises concerning issues of ethnic identity and the experiences of working-class migrants

in the U.S. South. Central to the discussion is the unprecedented success of third-party

challenger Henry Wallace and his Progressive campaign in the immigrant enclaves of

Tampa, Florida. Stigmatized by controversial foreign and domestic programs which drew

disabling connections between Wallace and the Communist Party, the Progressive Party

campaign hardly got its proverbial feet off the ground before falling victim to virulent

criticism and widespread opposition. Carrying just over two percent of the votes

nationwide, …

[Introduction To] Growing Up In The South: An Anthology Of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a …

The Rhetorical Effectiveness Of Black Like Me, Hugh Rank

English Faculty Publications

In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white Southern novelist, disguised himself as a Negro and traveled through the South to experience "what it is like to be a Negro in a land where we keep the Negro down." The brief narrative account of this experience is recorded in Black Like Me, a book which wom the Saturday Review's Anisfield-Wolf award in 1962 for its contribution toward race relations. In brief, why is Black Like Me rhetorically effective?

James Barron Hope : Virginia's Poet-Laureate, Cullen S. Pitt

Master's Theses

Previous to the Civil War comparatively little literary work had been done in the south. Of course if we take into consideration all kinds of composition, such as narratives of adventure, diaries, histories, speeches, sermons and the like, we are forced to admit that the total amount was very large. But when we speak of literature in the higher and more restricted sense, we mean that which stimulates the imagination, awakens thought and aims to please as well as to instruct. And, using the word in this narrow and more restricted sense, it is quite evident that there had been …