History Commons^™

The Black Press And Late Imperial Russia, Benjamin Pierce

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

For centuries, western observers had looked to Russia and seen a place fundamentally different from their home countries. In their accounts, Russia was distinctly oppressive, a state characterized by tyranny, barbarism, and Mongolian influence. But these accounts were faulty. They were written by merchants, diplomats, and explorers, wealthy white men who had never experienced the kind of repression they witnessed in Russia. When Black Americans looked to Russia, however, they saw a place fundamentally similar to the United States. Both countries were large, multiethnic empires driven by territorial acquisition and fueled by forced labor. By tracing the coverage of Russia …

This Is A Man’S World: The Lived Gendered Experiences Of Blues People., Anthony Christopher Brown

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

American Blues is known for playing a role in the foundation of the country’s music. The ingredient of the musical tradition has roots going back to West Africa and was brought to the United States through the of transatlantic slave trade. During the period of slavery, it formally developed with plantation work songs which later continued after emancipation with sharecropping until the early to mid-twentieth century. During the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy in Tutwiler, Mississippi, and musicians formally popularized Blues music were being recorded. The first Blues superstars were women such as Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey …

Studies In The Ancient Israelite Cult Of Dead Kin, Joshua Jacobs

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 1986, Klaas Spronk published a monograph titled, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East. Although many have criticized Spronk’s central thesis, his study began a new era in biblical scholarship on death and the afterlife in ancient Israel. More specifically, it sparked renewed interest in the study of the relationship between the living and the dead. Just three years after Spronk’s work, Theodore J. Lewis published his own study, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (1989). Lewis affirmed and developed evidence for one of the foundational aspects of Spronk’s book: in …

Military Cooperation And The Relocation Of Quapaw And French Settlements In Colonial Arkansas: A Case Study In Colonial International Relations, Morris S. Arnold

Academic Papers

A previous article made the case that the Quapaw Indians had played a role in the defense of Arkansas Post, and had entered several colonial wars on the side of the French, during the time that France had claimed sovereignty over the Arkansas country.

The purpose of the present effort is to describe and explain the origin and nature of the alliance between the Quapaws and the French, and to identify the considerations that led the tribe to conclude that it was often in its national interest to collaborate with the French in their defensive and offensive military operations. The …

Food Law & Policy: An Essay, Peter Barton Hutt

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Food has been the driving preoccupation of humans since the dawn of evolution. Exactly when food processing began and when the original hunter-gatherers settled down to develop agriculture-or even the question of which of these occurred first-remain issues of scholarly pursuit and debate. It is clear, however, that these events occurred millennia before the advent of recorded history; therefore, we must rely on largely adventitious discoveries of archeological artifacts to advance our developing knowledge of these events.

We, Too, Have Deeds Of Heroism To Tell Our Children: The Role Of The United Daughters Of The Confederacy In The Perpetuation Of The Confederate Lost Cause In Fayetteville, Arkansas, Madison Whipple

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

The conversation surrounding Confederate memorialization has become increasingly relevant, especially as it relates to public monuments. One of the groups that perpetuated Confederate memorialization was the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In the early twentieth century, this organization was prolific in not only memorializing the Old South, but also in seeking to vindicate the Confederacy. While this topic has been discussed and analyzed by scholars on the national level, and even regionally, the conversation skips over Fayetteville. Fayetteville’s history is considered more progressive due to the presence of the University, but there is little coverage of Fayetteville’s memorialization of the …

Ancestral Pursuits: A Multicultural Celebration Of Identity & Race, Charlotte Cates Castro

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Using critical historical rhetorical methods along with critical race and decolonial theory, this project situates ancestral pursuits as a communication-centered discursive formation by investigating the rhetorical strategies modern biotech and genealogy companies utilize to influence contemporary discourse around identity and belonging and narrate ethnicity and genealogy as acts of consumption. Through direct-to-consumer DNA testing and complimentary services, modern day biotech and genealogy companies like Ancestry and 23andMe market personalized insights into ancestry, genealogy, inherited traits, and health data that promise to connect users to their past, as well as to situate them in present-day society, through a deeper understanding of …

The Jordanian Novel In Postmodern Context, Hamed Alalamat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Jordanian culture is gradually impacted by the globalization process of late capitalism, this study argues that many Jordanian novels exhibit a number of postmodern characteristics, such as blurring boundaries and disrupting hierarchies, the use of pastiche as a compositional technique, formal fragmentation, and the weakness of utopian imagination. Adopting Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as a framework, the study explores ten Jordanian novels written between 1986 and 2016 to demonstrate that the modernization process and the cultural changes in the Arab world, in general, and in the Jordanian society, in particular, have increased the density of postmodern features …

Memory And Rememory: Critically Cultivating An Appropriate Response Through A Storied Approach To Listening, Katie W. Powell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues for a storied approach to listening from the perspective of a white Southern woman. To do this, I carefully followed the work of two community groups. One, the Washington County Community Remembrance Project, is working to install a marker venerating Aaron, Anthony, and Randall, three enslaved people who were lynched in our area in 1856. The other, the James H. Berry United Daughters of the Confederacy, is responsible for installing a Confederate statue on the Bentonville Square in 1908 that was removed in 2020. As illustrated by the use of archival research and embedded participation in interracial …

Still Dreaming Of You: Selena's Discourse With And Continuing Impact On American Musical Culture, Hannah Lastra

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Selena Quintanilla Perez continues to circulate in popular culture, including MAC cosmetic lines, a Netflix series, and podcasts. As a result, her cultural influence continues to be passed on and shared with future generations. This thesis focuses on three aspects of Selena and Selena y Los Dinos: Selena’s music, Selena’s performance aesthetic, and Selena’s fandom today. Chapter 1 focuses on Selena y Los Dinos’ American musical influences, particularly studying the songs “Enamorada de ti,” “Missing my Baby,” and “Fotos y Recuerdos” and the presence of American genres of new jack swing, R&B, and rock within them. Chapter 2 focuses on …

Community And Idolatry: San Francisco Cajonos, Yalalag, And Betaza Through The Criminal Court Of Villa Alta, 1700-1704, Jessica Mitchell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The trials of San Francisco Cajonos and Betaza and Yalálag heard in Villa Alta’s criminal court depict many important facets of life in Colonial Oaxaca, and they especially paint the picture of community, how it was defined and how it operated in reality. Looking specifically at these two rich examples in Villa Alta’s criminal court, at the time, idolatry – native religion, rituals, and devotions defined by Catholics as idolatrous -- helped shape the lines of community and defined who belonged in which space. It also highlights how betrayal and revenge were construed by a community and the response for …

"A Glass Of Milk Strengthens A Nation." Law Development, And China's Dairy Tale, Xiaoqian Hu

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Historically, China was a soybean nation and not a dairy nation. Today, China has become the world’s largest dairy importer and third largest dairy producer, and dairy has surpassed soybeans in both consumption volume and sales revenue. This article investigates the legal, political, and socioeconomic factors that drove this transformation, and building upon fieldwork in two Chinese counties, examines the transformation’s socioeconomic impact on China’s several hundred million farmers and ex-farmers and political impact on the Chinese regime. The article makes two arguments. First, despite changes of times and political regimes, China’s dairy tale is a tale about chasing the …

Milk And Law In The Anthropocene: Colonialism's Dietary Interventions, Kelly Struthers Montford

Journal of Food Law & Policy

It is widely accepted that we are living in the Anthropocene: the age in which human activity has fundamentally altered earth systems and processes. Decolonial scholars have argued that colonialism’s shaping of the earth’s ecologies and severing of Indigenous relations to animals have provided the conditions of possibility for the Anthropocene. With this, colonialism has irreversibly altered diets on a global scale. I argue that dairy in the settler contexts of Canada and the United States remains possible because of colonialism’s severing of Indigenous relations of interrelatedness with the more-than-human world. I discuss how colonialism—which has included the institution of …

Dairy Tales: Global Portraits Of Milk And Law, Jessica Eisen, Xiaoqian Hu, Erum Sattar

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Cow’s milk has enjoyed a widespread cultural signification in many parts of the world as “nature’s perfect food.”1 A growing body of scholarship, however, has challenged the image of cow’s milk in human diets and polities as a product of “nature,” and has instead sought to illuminate the political, scientific, colonial and postcolonial, economic, and social forces that have in fact defined the production, consumption, and cultural signification of cow’s milk in human societies. This emerging attention to the social, legal, and political significance of milk sits at the intersection of several fields of academic inquiry: anthropology, history, animal studies, …

'The Once Peaceful Little Town:' Edmondson, Arkansas, And The Decline Of African American Landownership, Samuel Morris Ownbey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the systematic dispossession of African American property by white planters in the Arkansas Delta. It argues white planters, backed by a legal system favorable to their interests, expropriated the black land in the once flourishing community of Edmondson, Arkansas. Founded in 1902 by African American business and political leaders, the Edmondson Home and Improvement Company purchased farmland and town lots and began to sell or rent the land to African Americans coming to the area. Located in Crittenden County, Edmondson represented black defiance in the face of Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. The town consisted of …

(In)Equality., Jongin Choi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

(in)Equality. centers around my experiences as a transnational person and those around me who have affected my current concept of equality and cultural histories. My visual methodologies cover digital photography and editing, inkjet printing, and laser engraving: multimedia in a process of new discovery, translation between analog and digital, and rearticulation. The exhibition includes portraits peering down from above, illuminated by projected patterns and manipulated messages from Nike’s “Equality.” (2017). The purpose of this thesis paper is to describe the elements of identity, marginalization, and personal reaction to advertising, as well as the and theories which have shaped this project. …

Horse Racing During The Civil War: The Perseverance Of The Sport During A Time Of National Crisis, Danael Christian Suttle

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Horse racing has a long and uninterrupted history in the United States. The historiography, however, maintains that horse racing went into hiatus during the Civil War. This simply is not true. While it is true that horse racing saw a decline in the beginning of the war, by the time the war ended, the sport had risen to similar heights as seen before the war. During the war, the sport was enjoyed by both soldiers and civilians. In the army, soldiers would often have impromptu camp races. As the war continued on, camp races became frowned upon by officers. The …

Archive And Repertoire Of The Esala Perahera Performance In Sri Lanka, Hashintha Jayasinghe

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the archive and the repertoire of the Esala Perahera in Sri Lanka and charts the ideological and cultural implications of the performance. The archival analysis begins with the interrogation of the historical chronicles and the recorded history of the performance in the Sinhala and English texts. Thereafter, travel literature and the dissemination of cultural knowledge on the Perahera are discussed. The study of the repertoire and the photographic archive explores key performances in the Esala Perahera in 2016 and 2017. Postcolonial theory, theories on cultural anthropology, and performance theory are used to analyze the archive and the …

The Farmers’ Federation: Regional Racial Mythologies As Agricultural Capital, Jama Mcmurtery Grove

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1927, the Farmers’ Federation agricultural cooperative in Western North Carolina launched an organization to solicit funds from wealthy donors. The money raised through philanthropic campaigns enabled the cooperative to fund large-scale agricultural projects, which helped members navigate the dramatic agricultural transformations of the early twentieth century. Although the cooperative advocated a progressive program of business-minded, scientific farming, its leadership modified programs to reflect farmer members’ limited resources and the realities of mountain production. As a result, the co-op provided a crucial bridge between white farmers and new methods of agricultural production that reached deep into peoples’ familial and productive …

A Critical Exploration Of Costume Design Possibilities In Tolkien’S Legendarium, M. Grace Costello

Apparel Merchandising and Product Development Undergraduate Honors Theses

Tolkien’s Legendarium has in many ways codified modern fantasy. Illustrations and film adaptations of it have had far-reaching consequences on popular culture, building an 80-year tradition of visual depictions of Tolkienesque fantasy. Particularly, Elven characters are usually depicted wearing costume inspired by Victorian notions of Western medieval costume. In this paper I seek to approach the design of original costume for the Ñoldor from a different perspective, free from the established traditions of other designers’ and illustrators’ work.

The preliminary research focuses on searching the source materials of the Silmarillion and select texts from the Histories of Middle Earth. I …

The Lives Of The Other(S): The Instability Of Foreignness In Deutschland 83, Phillip J. Jones

University Libraries Faculty Publications and Presentations

Set in Germany at a hot moment in the Cold War, with the Able Archer exercises and downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 etched in sharp relief, Deutschland 83 is an entertaining spy drama—and considerably more. The critical viewer will find surprises in the first Germanophone series on American television. The hero is an East German spy who goes undercover on a West German military base, and his crossings over the iconic border are not the only traversals as he forms relationships and acculturates to a “foreign” land. Deutschland 83 performs a neat trick: while the series powerfully reconstructs a …

Eveleth, Minnesota: A Portrait Of My Home Town, Judith I. Luna

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This 30-minute documentary film provides snapshots of the small northeastern iron mining town of Eveleth, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range. It uses a two-pronged approach: 1) a first-person return to the town by the filmmaker almost 50 years after graduating from high school to see how the town may have changed, 2) a look at some historical and cultural factors which made the town what it was when the filmmaker was growing up and what continues to animate the town in the face of iron mining’s decline and rebirth. The latter include the immigrant experience and influence as the …

Initiating Race: Fraternal Organizations, Racial Identity, And Public Discourse In American Culture, 1865-1917, John D. Treat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on ritual books, organizational records, newspaper accounts, and the data available from cemetery headstones and census records, this work argues that adult fraternal organizations were key to the formation of civic discourse in the United States from the years following the Civil War to World War I. It particularly analyzes the role of working-class white and African-American organizations in framing racial identity, arguing that white organizations gave up older, comprehensive ideas of citizenship for understandings of Americanism rooted in racism and nativism. Counterbalancing this development, now-forgotten African-American fraternal organizations were among the earliest advocates of Afrocentrism. These organizations, form …

Cultural Atrocity Expressed In Cultural Art, Marlie Mcgovern

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

Some of the most horrific chapters in human history have involved an ethnic dimension, notably the centuries-long obliteration of traditional Nigerian cultures by European colonizers, the attempted destruction of European Jews in the Holocaust, and the World War ll decision to assault the Japanese with atomic bombs. The consequences of the above atrocities are not contained within temporal or cultural barriers, but hold profound and pervasive ramifications within contemporary society in its entirety. More recent conflicts in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Balkans reemphasize the horror and suffering brought about by cultural collisions. One of the most potent reactions to …