History Commons^™

“Tell Me, Bambi Or Yogi Ever Hunt You Back?” The Windigo Myth: A Metaphor For Imperialism And Mental Illness, Christine Carlough

Senior Capstone Theses

The Canadian indigenous myth of the windigo, originating from Algonquian-speaking tribes of the subarctic Northeast like Ojibwe and Cree, is a manifestation for a multitude of fears. This myth originated hundreds of years ago in order to explain the horror and lack of understanding of a mental illness, which would later be known as Windigo Psychosis. Windigo Psychosis is a culture-bound syndrome for an insatiable desire to consume human flesh. A culture-bound syndrome is recognizable and unique only within a specific society or culture, so in other words, Windigo Psychosis is specific to this area in Canada due to a …

Queen Nanny, A Case Study For Cultural Heritage Tourism: The Archaeology Of Memory And Identity, Lacy Risner

Liberal Arts Capstones

This research project is intended to provide a foundation of knowledge of the Maroon culture in Jamaica, through the legends of one of their most prominent founders, Queen Nanny, as an aid for those who want to educate themselves before approaching community leaders about tourism development. Documentation of Queen Nanny’s life is contested and shrouded in mystery. Yet, that is part of what makes her memory so powerful. The various roles that Queen Nanny is associated with feature her adamant pursuit of an independent life for herself and her Maroons. Whether she is catching bullets or teaching the Maroons how …

Narratives Of Canadian Identity At The Ultimate Fighting Championship, Jared V. Walters

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the use of representations and symbols of Canadian identity within the event coverage produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship Corporation, in the context of its two key events, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Fight Night, produced in Canada. To establish the historical context in which the sport developed in Canada, a narrative historiography of the political and legal struggles that led to the legalization and increasing popularity of Mixed Martial Arts, and the UFCC’s version of the sport, in particular. This first major part of the dissertation is contained in Study 1. The …

Heirloom And Hybrid Corn In The American Corn Belt: An Ethnography Of Seed Saving Practices, Rachelle Halaska

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnographic study examines the practices and context of contemporary heirloom corn seed saving practices and projects in the American Corn Belt. It examines heirloom corn conservation and hand pollination practices at Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa in 2015. From there the study extends to interviews with heirloom farmers, breeders and gardeners in Wisconsin and Illinois. The findings indicate that the lines between the mainstream and the margins of corn production are highly blurred, and that there is a considerable amount of cross-pollination of ideas and practices between alternative corn farming and dominant industrial hybrid production in the American …

Grassroots And Professional Volunteers: Hunger Task Force Of Milwaukee 1982-1994, Cortney Dunklin

Theses and Dissertations

The issue of food insecurity is a growing problem. Multiple studies and organizations have examined and attempted to solve the issue of hunger. The Hunger Task Force was founded in Milwaukee in 1974 and influenced by grassroots organizing of concerned Milwaukee residents’ efforts to help alleviate hunger in Milwaukee. I examine the historical context of the city of Milwaukee that led to the inception of the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee. This thesis delves deeper into the origins of the Hunger Task Force and how those origins related to its operations in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I utilize archival …

A Power Man’S Theology: Marvel’S Luke Cage And Black Liberation Theology, Diarron B. Morrison

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Netflix released Marvel’s Luke Cage in 2016 to critical acclaim. Born from a 1970s comic book, the series features Luke Cage, an African-American superhero. Cage is a big, bald, bulletproof black man. Instead of tights and a cape, Cage wears a hoodie calling the audience to remember Trayvon Martin and other victims of white racism. Theologian James Cone created Black Liberation Theology in the 1970s. As a result of Cone’s work, Black Liberation Theology addresses the issue of white racism from a theological standpoint. In this thesis I present a close reading of Marvel’s Luke Cage using Black Liberation Theology …

Looking For Group: Sociality, Embodiment, And Institutions In World Of Warcraft, Christopher J. Cooley

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography examines the varying degrees of conflict between multiple stakeholders involved in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). The game’s designers, like many software developers in the contemporary world, tend to be guided by an ideology influenced by classical liberalism, but also inspired by a utopian view of technology in general. That ideological position has directly affected many aspects of the game, from the largely unregulated in-game economy, to the strong emphasis on individual mastery of the game’s systems to progress through the complete content of the game world. World of Warcraft advertises itself not …

Special Relationships: Anglo-American Latin America Policy And The Redefining Of National Security, 1969-1982, Benjamin Jared Pack

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From 1969–82, the United States and Great Britain redefined national security in a distinctive way, separating the notion of national security from its traditional foundations in realist thought. The way the two powers come to define national security was the result of more than a century of historical interaction with Latin America and their own historical experience with ideology, imperialism, and colonialism. As such, the way the United States and Great Britain perceived their respective special relationships influenced the way they chose to intervene in matters of national security, particularly in Latin America’s Southern Cone countries of Chile and Argentina. …

Growing Up Deaf In Appalachia: An Oral History Of My Mother, Elizabeth Shelton Tipton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the life experiences of a rural, Deaf Appalachian woman, Jane Ann Shelton, a second generation Deaf child born to Deaf parents from the communities of Devil’s Fork (Flag Pond, Tennessee) and Shelton Laurel (Madison County, North Carolina). Over two hours of videotaped interviews were interpreted and transcribed, followed by various other communications to describe the life of a rural, Deaf Appalachian woman without a formal high school degree. As an advocate and a political lobbyist in Tennessee during the 1980s and 90s, she was unparalleled by her peers (deaf or hearing) in her efforts to “enhance …

Social Movements And Charitable Dress: An Examination Of 19th Century Adornment At The Industrial School For Girls In Dorchester, Massachusetts, Madelaine A. Penney

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis is an examination of the 19th century adornment assemblage recovered from the archaeological excavation of two features (1859-1884) at the Industrial School for Girls in Dorchester located at 232 Centre Street in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The school was administered by middle class Bostonian women that wished to train working class girls from broken, abusive, or unfit homes in professionalized domestic work. This thesis is a rare examination of a site that is single-gendered, and predominantly single-classed and aged with a large collection of documented activity. This investigation was conducted in order to question the values that the administration of …

El Hip-Hop Cubano: An Agent Of Social And Political Change In Cuba?, Margaree Jackson

Honors Theses

Cuba experienced two distinct periods during which Afro-Cubans encountered various constraints and opportunities. During the Revolutionary Period, the Cuban government outlawed all forms of discrimination and created many opportunities for Afro-Cubans to participate in society. However, these new opportunities came with the price of outlawing discussion of racial discrimination and political and social organization along racial lines. Afro-Cubans who still experienced racial inequality faced the threat of political imprisonment if they spoke out against discrimination. In contrast, during the Special Period, Cuban experienced a devastating economic collapse in 1991. Government policies created in response to the collapse removed many of …

Analysis Of Nation-Building During Insurgency In U.S. Defense Policy Strategy, Joseph Valles

MSU Graduate Theses

U.S. defense policy has often relied on a strategy of nation-building to reform the local government and address the root causes of the instability in a given nation or region. This strategy has, in recent years, been criticized for being ineffective and a wasteful drain on American resources. This paper will determine if such criticism is valid by analyzing the performance of four security environments where such a strategy was used: Vietnam, El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The paper will determine if such a strategy was effective in these conflicts by analyzing the progress of reforms and, when possible, the …

Seventeenth-Century Spanish Colonial Identity In New Mexico: A Study Of Identity Practices Through Material Culture, Caroline M. Gabe

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation explores how seventeenth-century Spanish colonial households expressed their group identity at a regional level in New Mexico. Through the material remains of daily practice and repetitive actions, identity markers tied to adornment, technological traditions, and culinary practices are compared between 14 assemblages to test four identity models. Seventeenth-century colonists were eating a combination of Old World domesticates and wild game on colonoware and majolica serving vessels, cooking using Indigenous pottery, grinding with Puebloan style tools, and conducting household scale production and prospecting. While assemblages are consistent in basic composition, variations are present tied to socioeconomic status. This blending …

Andrew T. Hatcher: Press, Public Information & Perception For A Nation In Transition Historical Content Analysis On The First African American To Serve As A White House Associate Press Secretary, Nayita Wilson

LSU Master's Theses

Andrew T. Hatcher rose to one of the highest positions in U.S. government when he became the first African American to serve as associate White House press secretary in 1960 under the administration of President John F. Kennedy and during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. This is a historical content analysis that analyzes Hatcher’s role through primary sources, presidential archives, and select national, local, and minority newspapers.

The overarching purpose of this study was to ascertain Hatcher’s role as associate White House press secretary during civil rights. This study provides further insight into: 1) to what extent did …

The Cosmological Empire Of Pliny The Elder: An Examination Of Political Themes In The Second Book Of The Historia Naturalis, Kevin Alan Mccormick

Dissertations and Theses

Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis, written in the 70s CE and perhaps left unfinished at its author's death in 79, is among the largest documents to have survived down to us from antiquity. It comprises some thirty-seven books on a breadth of topics about the natural world, and man's interaction with the world and marshalling of its resources. The work has often been referred to as the world's first encyclopedia. Recent scholarship has rescued Pliny's reputation from its degradation among the scholars of the early twentieth century, and modern scholars have approached the document via several analytical avenues, including …

Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Claiming The Remains Of The Past: The Return Of Cultural Heritage Objects To Colombia, Mexico, And Peru, Pierre Losson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My research explores the reasons why three Latin American states (Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) claim the return of cultural heritage objects from holding institutions in the Western World, such as museums and universities. The literature on returns and restitutions, which focuses on questions of ownership and possession of objects, opposes two conceptions of cultural heritage: on the one hand, the internationalists argue that the location of a cultural object must be decided according to the interests of science and education, for the benefit and in the name of humankind; on the other hand, the nationalists consider that cultural heritage is …

Cyborgs For Environmental Justice: East Asian American Stories From The 1991 People Of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Lisa Ng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this paper is threefold: to serve as an oral history archive of the East Asian American experience at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to analyze the role of East Asian Americans in the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM), and to fill an ideological and political vacuum that exists in East Asian American communities. This work analyses the experiences of East Asian Americans who were present at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit--an event scholars have attributed to igniting the EJM. The paper argues that East Asian Americans act as “Cyborgs”—both as their ascribed …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

The Afterlife Of Corpses: A Social History Of Unburied Dead Bodies In Qing China (1644-1911), Joohee Suh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation began with the reading of numerous Qing-dynasty records pertaining to dead bodies that remained on the ground without proper burial. These bodies were not necessarily the victims of extraordinary events such as wars or natural disasters, but the remains of ordinary people whose families failed to arrange a burial site. A wide range of historical materials recorded the presence of these bodies, such as commentaries and critiques on popular burial customs written by the imperial government and literati elites, and Qing popular tales where these bodies were described as man-hunting zombies (jiangshi 僵屍). These sources demonstrate unburied dead …

Living In This World: A Social History Of Buddhist Monks And Nuns In Nineteenth-Century Western China, Gilbert Zhe Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation relies on about 600 legal cases from the Ba County Archive that survive from the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century to investigate the social life of ordinary Buddhist monks and nuns. Although they played a crucial in maintaining the survival and proper functioning of Buddhism at the local level, they have remained significantly understudied. This dissertation adopts a bottom-up approach to investigate ordinary monastics’ involvement in various socioeconomic activities. By shifting the analytical focus from elite monks to their more mundane counterparts, this study illuminates how deeply ordinary monastics were embedded in their communities. The shift also …

Words As Weapons And Wisdom, Barbara Paige

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement were two seminal eras in American history. The Renaissance also referred to as the New Negro Movement was a literary artistic, and cultural movement, centered in Harlem in which writers produced large bastions of literary works. African descended people began to identify with their African past and intellectuals adopted Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist methodologies to overcome oppression. Their efforts laid a foundation for the Civil Rights movement. The Black Arts Movement, an era of intense literary artistic activism begun with the assassination of Malcolm X. Artist/intellectuals responded to a more hostile environment …

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, Sarah Adcock

Graduate School of Art Theses

I view my creative process as alchemy, the transformation of materials through experimentation. I use wax as a material that transcends its historical use as a sculptural process for casting and instead, use it for its transmutable qualities to inform content. Because of its plasticity and duality as fragile and resilient, wax is symbolically submissive and assertive. By applying heat, wax can be molded and formed into new shapes. Once it cools, wax reverts back to its natural state; solid and impermeable. I use objects to explore desires of origin and life. Transitional objects, the first “me not me” possession …

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 South African Women's Movement: The Roles Of Feminism And Multiracial Cooperation In The Struggle For Women's Rights, Amber Michelle Lenser

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the historiography of South Africa’s recent past, focus has been most heavily placed on apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement, with much emphasis placed on male involvement and men as the primary agents of change in the country. Women are largely viewed as playing a supportive role to male activists throughout the movement, and far less has been written on female involvement or women’s activism in its own right. Running parallel to the anti-apartheid movement, however, was a women’s movement characterized by women across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum struggling to secure their own rights in a very hostile and …

Everyday Perseverance & Meaningful Toil: Mapping The (In)Distinguishable Process Of Recovery Post-Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Louisiana, Monique Hassman

Theses and Dissertations

For nearly a century, anthropological scholarship on disaster has contributed to advancing emergency preparation and management, however examination focusing on survivors’ return and responses in the aftermath of catastrophe, specifically the ways in which residents work to recover—if at all—remains far from comprehensive, especially in urban, post-industrial settings.

Following calamity, what remains? What is disturbed? What becomes reconstructed? Who repairs the tattered social fabric or restores the built environment? And how do these processes transpire? These questions summarize the research interests of this dissertation, which examines the place-making practices not of experts or administrators, but, rather, those enacted by (extra) …

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 …

Female Experience Of Trauma And Mourning In Two Postconflict Novels Of El Salvador And Peru: Roza, Tumba, Quema By Claudia Hernández, And La Sangre De La Aurora By Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how literature approaches the Salvadoran and Peruvian armed conflicts and contributes with perspectives of the female experience while offering illustrations of mourning processes. It is based on a close analysis of two postconflict novels that emerged after the publication of the corresponding truth commissions final reports. These novels are Roza, tumba, quema (2017) by Claudia Hernández from El Salvador, and La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar from Peru. The contributions studied in this analysis focus on two areas: (1) a problematization of the female experience of the armed conflicts, and (2) a focus …