Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Internet Memes: Leaflet Propaganda Of The Digital Age, Joshua Troy Nieubuurt

English Faculty Publications

Internet memes are one of the latest evolutions of “leaflet” propaganda and an effective tool in the arsenal of digital persuasion. In the past such items were dropped from planes, now they find their way into social media across multiple platforms and their territory is global. Internet memes can be used to target specific groups to help build and solidify tribal bonds. Due to the ease of creation, and their ability to constantly reaffirm axiomatic tribal ideas, they have become an adroit tool allowing for mass influence across international borders. This text explores the link between internet memes and their …

Cocaine + Surfing: Reviewed By Jack Ryan, Gettysburg College, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

If you seek a conclusive answer to the question that seems to anchor Chas Smith's Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair, "Did surfing and cocaine start together in Peru and never leave each other's embrace?," you will be disappointed. In his preface, Smith discusses the death of Andy Irons, the three-time world surfing champion from Hawaii who died November 2, 2010, alone in a Dallas hotel room of cardiac arrest brought on by cocaine abuse. Irons was thirty-two years old. According to Smith, no one in the cosseted surfing world was surprised: "Drugs and …

The Black Bruins: Reviewed By Jack Ryan, Gettysburg College, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West opens with a nearly wordless fifteen-minute sequence in which three gunmen do nothing more than wait for the arrival of a train at a remote frontier station. Leone, Dario Argento, and Bernardo Bertolucci constructed the film's screenplay out of portions of their favorite classic westerns, and the opening is a homage to High Noon; however, Leone's three gunmen look nothing like the actors in High Noon. Jack Elam and Al Mulock look like they emerged directly from the desiccated landscape surrounding them, and Woody Strode emits a dusty elegance. …

Twisting Facts To Suit Theories: In Defense Of Sherlock, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

In August 2011, the Albemarle County school board unanimously voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet from the sixth-grade curricula. Over twenty students beseeched the board for the book to remain, and they were ignored. Teachers were afraid to voice their opinions on the matter. The novel has not been taught since in Albemarle, on any grade level, nor any other Sherlock Holmes texts.

When Basketball Was Jewish, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, describes Barney "Tiny" Sedran, born Bernard Sedransky on the Lower East Side of New York, as a quintessential Jewish basketball player: "manically energetic, compulsively alert, upending expectations, and compensating for short—really short—comings" (17). Sedransky was the "shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame," she writes, who excelled at a time "when Jews ruled basketball — and lest you think those last three words are a misprint, let me repeat: Jews ruled basketball" (17). Indeed, in the modern era it is easy to forget …

Review Of "Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies And Baseball's Unwritten Code", Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

This is a review of William C. Kashatus's Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies and Baseball's Unwritten Code, an account of the misfit bunch that almost returned World Series glory to the City of Brotherly Love.

Review Of "Masters Of The Games", Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

A review of Joseph Epstein's Masters of the Games, a collection of essays, profiles, short stories, and opinion pieces about sports.

Aging Athletes, Broken Bodies, And Disability In Jack London's Prizefighting Prose, Cara E. Kilgallen

English Faculty Publications

Jack London's name often conjures up images of dogs plowing through Alaska's desolate wilderness, or of robust men journeying into the wild; however, pictures of broken bodies struggling for survival in a boxing ring less readily come to mind. Few think of London as a sports writer, yet his illustrations of prizefighting reveal an author interested not only in able bodied athletes but in disabled and weakened ones as well. Although he is best known for his Klondike stories, nautical adventures, and socialist sentiments, the author's fascination with fitness shows that sport and the body are just as central to …

‘How Little I Cared For Fame’: T. Sparrow And Women’S Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the work of an overlooked female journalist, T. Sparrow, arguing that her career reveals the difficulties female journalists faced when negotiating between the expectations of middle-class gentility and the demands of investigative journalism.

Sparrow asserted her gentility rhetorically, in part because female reporters who took up investigative reporting were vulnerable to criticism for assaying beyond domestic subjects. Moreover, incognito investigative reporting often brought celebrity to its practitioners, which challenged the convention of middle-class female modesty.

Sparrow, therefore, strove for a delicate balance in her career—assuming the stance of a middle-class woman who lived among the poor, someone …

Entertaining Angels: Homelessness And The Hospitality Of Faith In Adams County, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I first volunteered at a soup kitchen in the frigid depths of winter in very late 1981 or very early 1982, in the heart of the Rust Belt in the midst of a terrible recession. I should emphasize right from the onset that I didn’t want to be there: I was next to useless and very intimidated, forced to be there by the tradition of service at my all-boys Catholic high school. Still, the experience made quite an impression on me, and I tell that story to my students so that they will understand that I know what’s like to …

Access, Oppression, And Social (In)Justice In Epidemic Control: Race, Profession, And Communication In Sars Outbreaks In Canada And Singapore, Huiling Ding, Xiaoli Li, Austin Caldwell Haigler

English Faculty Publications

This article investigates issues of social injustice experienced by various oppressed groups in SARS outbreaks in 2003, paying particular attention to medical care workers in Canada and Singapore, with many of them being immigrants from East Asia and Southeast Asia. It identifies communication strategies employed by civic networks, especially nonprofit organizations, to help marginalized groups acquire institutional and literacy accesses so that they could respond more effectively to such injustices in complicated and multicultural contexts. Through combined use of Jost and Kay’s work on the three types of social justice (2010), oppression (Young, 1990), and access (Porter, 1998), this study …

Opinion: Housing Our Homeless Vets Is A Duty We’Ll Always Owe, Christopher R. Fee, Joshua L. Stewart

English Faculty Publications

As we celebrate Veterans Day across America, we are reminded of President Abraham Lincoln’s powerful admonition in the Gettysburg Address regarding what we owe to those who have sacrificed and given of themselves in the defense of the common good. [excerpt]

Medicare At Fifty Needs To Grow, William H. Lane

English Faculty Publications

In America everybody has a healthcare story. A bill impossible to read, an inscrutable "additional" charge, trouble getting insurance, trouble keeping it, a friend or family member who's fallen between the coverage "cracks." [excerpt]

Opinion: Too Many Veterans With Children Are Still Homeless, Christopher R. Fee, Joshua L. Stewart

English Faculty Publications

Don’t ignore homeless veterans.

As we pause this Veterans Day to reflect on those who have sacrificed in the service of our country, let us not neglect to address the plight of those who have returned to a civilian life with far less promise than they have every right to expect. [excerpt]

Jesus Lives, But Should He Live In My Front Yard?, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

As I drove home from church, I eyed the bright foam sign my 6-year-old daughter held. “Jesus is Alive” it read in kid scrawl. “We’re supposed to put them in our yards!” Noelle beamed, eyeing her creation proudly through pink-rimmed glasses.

I imagined our wide, open yard in Pennsylvania, the green grass stretching without fences from one neighbor to the next. Our best friends in the neighborhood, secular humanists, would easily see it. I cringed. What would they think? [excerpt]

Putting A Human Face On The Minimum Wage, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

What is a “livable wage,” and should we strive to raise wages for American workers?

There are lots of conflicting studies and reports. The Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs while raising the incomes of nearly 17 million Americans.

Even prominent economists like David Card and David Neumark diametrically disagree on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage, and their studies of results in New Jersey have consistently yielded conflicting results for decades. [excerpt]

Appalachian Migrant Stances, Bridget L. Anderson

English Faculty Publications

The article explores the economic and industrial opportunities for Appalachian native speakers in the industrial Midwest countries after the World War I. Topics discussed include the characteristics of migration diaspora in Appalachian migrants, the Southern migrants metropolitan area lifestyle in Detroit, Michigan and the impacts of ethnographic factors to Appalachian migrants. Other topics include the social and identifiable factors for migrants.

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly O. Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

English Faculty Publications

Information about the 79th annual meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) organized by Jennifer Cramer at the University of Kentucky on April 2012 in Lexington, Kentucky. Topics discussed at the meeting includes current state of research studies on linguistic processes in Appalachia, traditional dialectological and ethnographic. The meeting also featured panel experts including Bridget L. Anderson, Michael Montgomery and Walt Wolfram.

Our National Shame, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I spend a lot of time with my students working at soup kitchen and homeless shelters, and each winter, when it gets really cold and dark, my thoughts more often turn back to Dick. Dick died on Jan. 31, 1988. He was a veteran who served in Germany in the 1950s and was a graduate of St. John's University in New York, where his father has been an Engligh professor.

Dick had completed most of the work for his MBA during a career which included positions at Procter & Gamble, Federated Department Stores, and National Cash Register. At the time …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …

Review Of ‘Competitive Irish Dance: Art, Sport, Duty’, Christie L. Fox

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

John Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-6), Francis Place, And The Pragmatics Of The Unstamped Press, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

John Cleave (c.1790-c.1847) was the editor and publisher of, among other works, Cleaves Weekly Police Gazette (1834-6; hereafter WPG), which was by most accounts the best-selling unstamped newspaper of the so-called "War of the Unstamped Press" in the 1830s, one of the first unstamped papers to adopt a broadsheet format like stamped papers, and one of the first to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes and strange occurrences. As Joel Wiener and Patricia Hollis note, less is known about Cleave than about most of the other major figures in the unstamped movement, like William Carpenter, …

Blood Culture And The Problem Of Decadence, Jeffrey P. Cain

English Faculty Publications

This paper examines the commodification of hunting practices via the deterritorializing function of capitalism described by Deleuze and Guattari. It also studies counter trends-- predicted by or consistent with Deleuzean theory--that indicate a subtending authenticity displayed by certain hunting practices apparently resistant to commercial exploitation. "Blood culture" is my term for inauthentic hunting activity--a distinction drawn directly by Deleuze in his televised interviews with Claire Parnet. Aspects of "becoming-animal" and other transversal and cross-disciplinary flows of thought are also of course in play. As in some of my former work, I again argue for a Deleuzean cultural mechanics of the …

The Politicization Of Everyday Life In Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-36), Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

With circulation as high as 40,000, Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette, published 1834–36, was one of the first and most popular unstamped newspapers to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes, strange occurrences, and excerpts from popular fiction. Scholars have differed widely in their interpretations of the fact that the paper's mixture of radical politics and "entertainment" outsold unstamped papers that offered undiluted political news, such as Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian (1831–35), whose circulation peaked at around 16,000. Some, like Louis James and Virginia Berridge, argue that Cleave's helped to co-opt legitimate working-class political discourse by …

Breaking Forms: The Shift To Performance In Late Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, Christie L. Fox

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Distanciation And The Recontextualization Of Space: Finding One’S Way In A Small Western Community, Lisa Gabbert

English Faculty Publications

In the 1990s, the city of McCall, Idaho, and the surrounding region implemented the Rural Addressing System. The system assigned a name to every street and a number to every house and erected visible signage for both. Although a seemingly minor bureaucratic operation, the Rural Addressing System is a concrete example of Anthony Giddens's concept of space distanciation, and as such, it is a significant component of modernity and globalization. By investigating the impact of the Rural Addressing System on this region—particularly on the ways in which people give directions and think about space there—this article sheds light on how …

English Ethnicity And Race In Early Modern Drama, By Mary Floyd-Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (Book Review), Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The article reviews the book "English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama," by Mary Floyd-Wilson.

Review Of Jack Santino’S Signs Of War And Peace, Jeannie Thomas

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Cyberactivism: Online Activism In Theory And Practice, Kevin Eric De Pew

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Transported Traditions: Transatlantic Foundations Of Southern Folk Culture, John Burrison

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.