Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Baby Names As A Determinant Of Cultural Assimilation In The Continental And Non-Continental United States, Paige M. Harrison

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Using baby names a signal for cultural attitudes has been studied before several times. This paper looks at trends in baby names across the United States over five decades, and then uses these trends to look at the quasi-natural experiment of Alaska and Hawaii becoming states and accepting the dominant United States culture as their own. Both Alaska and Hawaii have their own indigenous cultures which could influence their cultural assimilation to the United States, this paper uses baby names to measure this assimilation. By using vector auto-regressions and the time period between 1960 and 2013 this paper determines the …

Gather, Katie M. Meek

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Food is both basic and multifaceted. It nourishes satisfies, levels, defines and gathers us. Food unifies and brings people together as part of the human experience. When people embrace food and make it their own, it can shape and define their lives in big ways.

Food can cultivate a lifestyle, preserve cultural identity, foster a small business, nurture relationships and serve a community.

This project is a documentation of five different groups of people that experience food in uniquely different ways. Through photo essays and written stories I strive to capture what how food brings people together in specific ways …