History Commons^™

A Historical Comparative Analysis Of Executions In The United States From 1608 To 2009, Emily Jean Abili

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The death penalty has been a contested issue throughout American history. The United States has been executing offenders since Jamestown became a colony in 1608 (Allen & Clubb, 2008). Since that time, many issues have been raised about the death penalty including whether or not it is moral, discriminatory, or a deterrent.

This study examines the history of executions, including lynchings, in the United States from 1608 to 2009 using a variety of sociological theories on law and society. Some of the research questions that guide this project are:

* What is the nature of change in the relative prevalence …

The Lost Opportunity For Ethiopia: The Failure To Move Toward Democratic Governance, Theodor Vestal

International Journal of African Development

During the critical five year period leading up to the velvet revolution and the overthrow of Haile Selassie’s regime, there were missed opportunities to bring about peaceful change in Ethiopia’s governance. This paper analyzes the events of this period that led to the rise of the Derg and the revolutionary changes that followed and speculates on when strategic steps could have been taken to avoid the catastrophic events that ensued in 1974.

"Listen To The Wild Discord": Jazz In The Chicago Defender And The Louisiana Weekly, 1925-1929, Sarah A. Waits

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This essay will use the views of two African American newspaper columnists, E. Belfield Spriggins of the Louisiana Weekly and Dave Peyton of the Chicago Defender, to argue that though New Orleans and Chicago both occupied a primary place in the history of jazz, in many ways jazz was initially met with ambivalence and suspicion. The struggle between the desire to highlight black achievement in music and the effort to adhere to tenets of middle class respectability play out in their columns. Despite historiographical writings to the contrary, these issues of the influence of jazz music on society were …

Bowling Green Warren County Bicentennial Commission (Mss 122), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 122. Correspondence, minutes, calendars, financial reports, and promotional material of the Commission which was created to oversee the bicentennial celebrations of Warren County, Kentucky (1 March 1997) and Bowling Green (1 March 1998).

Anabaptist Masculinity In Reformation Europe, Adam Michael Bonikowske

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the connections between the Anabaptist movement during the Protestant Reformation and the alternative masculinities that developed during sixteenth-century Europe. It argues that Anabaptist men challenged traditional gender norms of European society, and through their unique understanding of the Reformation's message of salvation, these men constructed new ideas about masculinity that were at odds with Protestant and Catholic culture. Anabaptist men placed piety and ethics at the center of reform, and argued for the moral improvement of Christians. In separation from Catholics and mainstream Protestants, Anabaptists created a new culture that exhibited behavior often viewed as dangerous. The …

Cultural Identity, Deafness And Sign Language: A Postcolonial Approach, Steven Loughran

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks describes the experience of the recently de-colonized members of the Negro (as he refers to those of African descent) population living in Europe, particularly France, in the 1960s. A little over a decade later, Edward Said published Orientalism, thus adding to a growing discipline of scholarship in the fields of art, literature, and cultural studies called “Postcolonialism.” My essay attempts to show that Deaf persons who communicate with each other using sign language can be viewed as a colonized group, and that applying postcolonial theory to the study of their culture is appropriate.

The Use Of Rhetoric In Anti-Suffrage And Anti-Feminist Publications, Artour Aslanian

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

After decades of struggling to gain the right to vote, women were finally granted that right with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920. While it would seem that most, if not all, women would be in favor of gaining the right to vote, the women’s suffrage movement did not represent the wishes of all women within the United States. Scholarship in this area largely focuses on the historical developments of the suffrage movements, with the presence of female opponents of suffrage and anti-suffragist organizations receiving less attention.1 These anti-suffragists were vocal in their opposition to the …

On Danish-American Cultural Identity, Signe Sloth

The Bridge

In 1967 an article was published which kick-started a discussion that is still going on among sociologists today. The subject of the article is American civil religion and the writer is the American sociologist Robert Bellah who claims that every nation and every people has a religious self-understanding. He advocates an American civil religion that is separated from other denominations and established religious institutions, but just like them demands recognition and understanding. Bellah defines this Civil Religion as " ... A genuine apprehension of universal and transcendental religious reality as seen in or . . . as revealed through the …