American Material Culture Commons^™

De Enredos, Tocados Y Telas: Algunos Apuntes De La Litoescultura Antropomorfa Teotihuacana Bajo La Óptica De Su Indumentaria, Annabel Villalonga

Tejiendo imágenes. Homenaje a Victòria Solanilla Demestre

En la litoescultura antropomorfa teotihuacana la mayor parte de los ejemplares se presentan desnudos y asexuados. Al intentar definir el género, no contamos con muchos elementos, ya que los rasgos faciales inexpresivos y despersonalizados, así como los cuerpos anatómicamente poco diferenciados, no son atributos diagnósticos del género. La indumentaria es, para el caso de la escultura antropomorfa teotihuacana, un aspecto que contribuye a dilucidar el género de dichas esculturas. En este artículo proponemos una revisión de la indumentaria, los peinados y los tocados de las litoesculturas antropomofas teotihuacanas con el propósito de definir su grado de intervención en la asignación …

Bibliography, Print Culture, And What To Do With Comics In A Rare Books Library, Michael C. Weisenburg

Faculty and Staff Publications

Comic books are among the rare books of the future. In fact, some comic books are scarcer and more valuable than many of the “old books” that fill special collections stacks. This essay proposes to answer the questions of “What do we do with comics in an academic library?” by analyzing comics as a popular phenomenon that is deeply rooted in book history and the developing print culture of the past 100 years. Using the traditional methods of bibliographic analysis, we might better situate comics within the mission of academic libraries as we work to foster learning, discovery, and inclusivity …

Topographies And Counter-Topographies Of Social Reproduction At People’S Park, Sarah Weaver

Scripps Senior Theses

Created at a key moment in New Left political rebellion and organizing in 1969, the mythic People’s Park still stands today between Dwight and Haste St. in Berkeley as open multi-use green space made of and for community development on lawful University of California Regent property. Despite repeated attempts by UC to take back the land, the insurgent space continues to pull defense from various parts of the local community, students and not, have accessed forms of self-determined social reproduction and created material critiques of UC as a vehicle for capital. For 54 years, the park was maintained significance as …

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group - Volume 44 (2023), Joanna E. Evans, Lenna Demarco, Kathy Metelica Cray, Susan Price Miller, Katy Williams-O'Donnell, Marsha Macdowell, Berkley Sorrells, Marsha Music, Terry Tickhill Terrell

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Joanna E. Evans

Cherry Tree and Birds Quilt Tracing the Roots of a Pattern by Lenna DeMarco

"Playthings by the Yard" Cut and Sew Doll and Toy Panels of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Kathleen Metelica Cray

Amana Calico and Amana Quilts by Susan Price Miller

The 1697 Coverlet Tracing the Origin of an Early Patchwork Coverlet by Katy Williams-O'Donnell

The History and Meaning of an Inscribed Quilt from an African American Community in Detroit, Michigan by Marsha MacDowell, Berkley Sorrells, and Marsha Music

Peacock among the Ruins: The Evolution of a Textile Design by …

Re-Curation And Recognition: Addressing The Curation Crisis Through The Garnet Ghost Town, Jocelyn A. Palombo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As universities, federal curation facilities, public museums, and private collections struggle to create space on their shelves curators and archaeologists continuously evaluate what must continue to be stored and what needs to be deaccessioned. Utilizing a collection housed at the University of Montana I explore strategies for combating this issue. The collection originates from the Garnet Ghost Town and has been in the university’s care since its excavation. The objectives of this project are to obtain new information and incorporate innovative techniques to learn more about the collection itself and provide an updated analysis to one of Montana’s most complete …

Sconce Upon A Time: Evaluating Multimodal Methods Of Researching Period Lighting Technology, A Case Study Of Drayton Hall, Neale Elizabeth Grisham

All Theses

This thesis reviews several methods of researching light sources and lighting schemes from the “long eighteenth century,”[1] on a historical site. Despite the period’s cultural reliance on lighting as well as technological advancement in this era, there has yet to be published documentation on how to engage with evidence of lighting technology on historic sites for better understanding of the site’s relationship with lighting.

Using Drayton Hall in Charleston, South Carolina as a case study, this thesis outlines and demonstrates the process of five methods of investigating period lighting technology. These methods are: wall investigation, anchorage points comparison and …

A 14,100 Cal B. P. Rocky Mountain Locust Cache From Winnemucca Lake, Pershing County, Nevada, Evan J. Pellegrini, Eugene M. Hattori, Larry Benson, John Southon, Hojun Song, Derek A. Woller

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

The remains of approximately 1000 (MNI) Rocky Mountain locusts (Melanoplus spretus) from an archaeological cache pit in Crypt Cave, Winnemucca (dry) Lake, Nevada, date to between 14,305–14,067 calendar years before present (95.4 % confidence; 12,238 ± 18 ¹⁴C yrs. B.P.). The age of this western Great Basin occupation along the shoreline of Lake Lahontan is consistent with occupation of several other Western North American terminal Pleistocene sites dating prior to 14,000 cal. B.P., including distinctive petroglyphs on the western shore of Winnemucca Lake dating as early as 14,800–13,200 cal. B.P.

Signs: Savannah To Key West, Laura Madeline Wiseman

Zea E-Books Collection

Signs: Savannah to Key West documents an 800-mile, 13-day bicycle ride in 2018-2019. It starts fifty miles outside Savannah, Georgia, and follows the Atlantic coastline to Key West, Florida. The trip culminates in Niceville to visit a grandparent, a military veteran and an engineer born in 1924. A bicycle carries a rider through place. The voices of family carry us back and forth through time. The best journeys end with welcome visits with friends, family, and stories, those memories that hold us together, the signs that we belong.

Rendering Documentary Portraiture: An Interrogation Of Archival Discourse Through A Critical Exploration Of Nineteenth Century Stage Actress Charlotte Cushman’S Material Memory, Skyler Sunday

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visual depictions of nineteenth century stage actress Charlotte Cushman, such as photographs, engravings, and painted portraits assist researchers in re-envisioning her both as an actress and as a person, but what do her remaining archival possessions further reveal to researchers about her memory? How do different objects operate as portraits that allow the researcher to tap into and remember specific moments and memory? How does the effort to preserve memory take different forms? This project argues that, when viewing the archive through its stored objects, our collective notion of portraiture can be expanded and used to interrogate existing methods of …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Because Potato, Candice Evers

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This thesis project explores the phenomenological qualities of the internet; asking, since the internet is difficult to grasp, what other modes of investigation might we have available? Using an investigative framework set forth by Jack Halberstam, this thesis declines to come to knowledge solely through understanding the formal, the structural, the highly visible and mainstream. The literature that I have gathered provides a range of modes for interrogating the simultaneously central and inconsequential subject of my thesis itself: the potato. Juxtaposing the physical, political and material conditions of the potato the internet’s least academic mode of knowing: the meme. Analyzing …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

The Precarity Of Images: Sci-Fi Worldbuilding And Its Uses In Agitprop, Noah Jodice

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

“The Precarity of Images” examines how theories of worldbuilding common to the science fiction genre are applied to the making of agitational propaganda for liberation movements. In doing so, it questions how both explicit and implicit political images—posters, games, comics, illustrations, social media posts—either light a pathway for making a more just world or limit our ability to imagine alternate futures.

Following the ethos of Steven Jackson’s essay “Rethinking Repair,” the paper takes the “breakdown, erosion, and decay” of images as a starting point. Images change meaning over time as our cultural connections to them shift. Strategies of decoding and …

Achakali Chickasha Holbachi Italatalit Ithana: Continuation Of Chickasaw Design Practices, Lily Shore

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

The project aims to create an accessible tool to document, preserve, and honor Chickasaw design techniques by creating interactive 3D models replicating ancestral structures available through an online gallery. A virtual exhibition focuses on structures commonly found in a traditional Chickasaw village. The constructions represented include a traditional council house, summer house, winter house, and corn crib. Each is accompanied by contextual information, including a collection of historical photographs, information concerning use, and conventional architectural drawings such as plans, sections, and isometric views. In fruition, the project aims to function as a resource to commemorate the history of traditional Chickasaw …

"Shakedown Street: The Grateful Dead And The Commodification Of Hippie Culture", Zachary A. Graham

Honors College Theses

The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful and enduring bands to come out of the original hippie counterculture of the late 1960’s. Beginning as a small, experimental blues-rock group with no desire to pursue commercial success, fame and fortune nonetheless found the Dead over the course of their three decades on the road. Through constant touring, a consistent level of apathy towards business and making money, and with the help of arguably the most dedicated fanbase in music history, the Grateful Dead became more than just a band, they were the face of a new cultural phenomenon that …

Paper Sons And Chosen Families: Blurry Archives And Non-Biological Kinship In The Chong Family Album, Sam Battles

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

In the face of Chinese exclusion and Victorian-era morality, this project presents a family photo album as a counter-narrative to racialized and gendered immigration policies. The photo album is from the Chong family who were part of a Chinese American community living in San Francisco around 1915. The paper follows the fluctuating and non-chronological layout of the album and the uncertainties within to analyze Chinese Americans family formations in the context of state control of Asian migrants, including hyper-policing and surveillance around immigration status, queerness, and class. The Chong family album demonstrates how Chinese Americans employed flexible definitions of family …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 43 (2022), Joanna E. Evans, Kristin Barrus, Xenia E. Cord, Mary Bywater Cross, Mary Jane Eichacker-Kaufman, Alice M. Hines, Laurel Horton, Colleen Gelhaus Pokorny

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Joanna E. Evans

The Landscape of the Modern Quilt Movement, 1995–2020 by Kristin Barrus

Jelly Rolls and Layer Cakes: The Rise of Pre-cut Fabrics by Colleen Gelhaus Pokorny

Influence and Inspiration: The Indianapolis Star Quilt Contests by Xenia E. Cord and Mary Jane Eichacker-Kaufman

Women Stitching Identity: Two White Counterpanes by Laurel Horton

Beyond Borrowing: Japanese Infl uence on Northern California’s Bay Area Quilt World During the Late Twentieth Century by Alice M. Hines

Exploring Regionalism: The Quilts of Grant Wood’s Family and Paintings (An Update) by Mary Bywater Cross

Contributors

Index

Conceptualizations Of A Flea Market Space, Tyler D. Curran

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The ubiquitous presence of flea markets is emblematic of midwestern life. They illustrate common consumption practices and distinct modes of entertainment. This study investigates how vendors within a large, midwestern flea market conceptualize and utilize the space. Additionally, this study reveals the relationship between variant conceptualizations of the market and the merchandise sold by individual vendors. Existing research identifies a tension between social and economic dimensions within flea markets. This study extends prior research by examining the specific social fulfillments vendors garner and identifying other non-economic rationalizations for participation within the market. The results are derived from ethnographic observations and …