Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Bear/People Conflicts In Gatlinburg, Tennessee: An Analysis Of The Social, Political, And Ecological Elements, Kate Mitchell Newton

Masters Theses

Nuisance black bears cause property damage, threaten public safety, and heighten wildlife use conflicts among people across the United States. Wildlife managers have solutions to control nuisance black bear behavior and the accompanying conflicts that occur. The solutions are to require bear-proof garbage disposal, to prohibit intentional feeding, and to educate the public about black bear behavior. However, these solutions are either slow to be adopted or are ignored by local legislative bodies.

In 1999, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, adopted a local ordinance mandating bear-proof garbage containers. This thesis will explain why the city of Gatlinburg adopted the ordinance by documenting the …

Coming Clean: The Health Revolution Of 1890-1920 And Its Impact On Infant Mortality, April D.J. Garwin

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to document the change in attitudes and behaviors pertaining to public and personal hygiene habits at the turn of the nineteenth century. Public utilities, such as municipal water supplies, sanitary sewage systems, and refuse disposal reduced the incidence of communicable diseases. Access to potable water and sewage disposal encouraged a Health Revolution in the United States and the United Kingdom during the era 1890-1920.

Advertisers began (in 1890 and continuing into the 1920s) to employ the fear of contagious diseases, as well as the virtue of beauty, to target consumers and to promote the …

White-Tailed Deer Utility Indices: Development And Application Of An Analytical Method, Jodi A. Jacobson

Masters Theses

Full and partial carcass utility indices have been determined for many animals. The most widely utilized animal in eastern prehistoric North America is the white-tailed deer. However, whole carcass utility indices for this animal have not been investigated. In this thesis meat, marrow, and general utility indices are developed for Odocoileus virginianus. These indices are inspected for variation due to sex, age, and season. In addition, marrow fat percentages which may affect the accuracy of marrow utility indices, are investigated. Five deer have been collected from the ridge and valley region of East Tennessee. Four deer were acquired between …

Joint Surface Area Proportions And Articular Curvature In Al 288-1: A Functional Interpretation, Adam David Sylvester

Masters Theses

Body size has been recognized by several authors as one of the most important parameters affecting the biology of an organism. It has been argued that body size plays roles in metabolic cost, mobility, thermoregulation, and foraging strategy. For extinct species body masses can only be estimated using fossil remains and extant reference samples. To accurately estimate body mass the reference sample must have the same relationship between body mass and skeletal elements. Establishing a reference sample with similar body proportions as the fossil species is imperative.

The purpose of this study is to investigate forelimb to hindlimb joint surface …

On The Hallowed Hill: An Analysis Of The Historic Cemeteries Within The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Jacqueline Lott

Masters Theses

Though a number of authors have stressed the importance of using cemetery data to study culture change through time, most of the available studies in this regard have been general in nature and completed without statistical analysis. Few studies have concentrated specifically on small, rural cemeteries, and fewer still have concentrated on regions outside of New England. The southern Appalachian Mountains are but one of the many regions that has yet to be studied in-depth. This thesis is an attempt to bridge some of the aforementioned gaps. Historic cemetery data collected in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will be …

Marketing Gullah: Identity, Cultural Politics, And Tourism, Melissa D. Hargrove

Masters Theses

This thesis represents an ethnographic study of the current situation of the South Carolina Gullah. Research was conducted during the summer of 1998 and 1999, in the Sea Island communities of Mt. Pleasant and St. Helena Island, to determine the ways in which local grassroots organizations are combating increased tourism, resort and retirement development, and the commoditization of their cultural heritage as a boost to state revenue. The sweetgrass basket weavers of Mt. Pleasant are situated within this struggle as the living legacy to their Gullah ancestry. Their insight is particularly enlightening concerning the current predicament of native Sea Islanders …

Debunking The Spontaneous Human Combustion Myth: Experiments In The Combustibility Of The Human Body, Angi M. Christensen

Masters Theses

Human combustion has been described as "the nearly complete combustion of living human beings in the apparent absence of sufficient external fuel" and it has been inferred from this that either the "human body is unexpectedly combustible of itself or, more controversially, some unrecognized external energy source is acting on the body" (Corliss 1993). Advocates of the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, have hypothesized everything from potables to poltergeists to pyrotrons to account for the unusual circumstances surrounding these deaths.

Mainstream science, however, contends that although strange, a scientific explanation for the phenomenon does exist. Several studies have …