Other American Studies Commons^™

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

From The Trenches To The Writer’S Desk: Establishing A Collection Of Children’S Books Authored By Military Veterans In An Academic Library, Casey D. Hoeve

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Kansas State University possesses a collection of juvenile literature to aid Education and English Department programs. KState is also the university with the largest military population in the state. It was discovered that several famous children’s authors were military veterans. Building upon this research, over 160 children’s authors who served in the military were identified. K-State Libraries NEH Endowment Committee funded the curation of a military veteran children’s literature collection, the only known academic library to possess such a collection. The collection enabled the libraries to provide outreach through access to the materials, internet resources, and special collections exhibits.

Standardizing America: Why It Should Be A Method Of The Past, Samantha N. Jackson

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper examines, critiques, and suggests improvements on the method of standardized testing in American schools. This paper discusses the history and development of standardized testing and its initial purpose and intentions. Additionally, the effects of standardized testing on students, teachers, and parents are evaluated, with special consideration on how high stakes testing adversely affects disadvantaged student groups such as children in minorities and low-income districts, bilingual students, and children with disabilities. The research suggests that standardized testing is not only damaging to students in these groups, but most likely not the most efficient way of testing student performance in …

The Cottages That Almost Were Not Saved: A Preservation Perspective On Three Newport Mansions, Julia Boron

MA Theses

The Gilded Age in America was a time of swift and extreme economic expansion which caused America’s leading industrial families to become extraordinarily wealthy. Because the introduction of personal income tax had not yet been established, people pocketed every dollar they earned, and the people of the Gilded Age lived and spent lavishly. Having multiple homes was a status symbol, and the wealthy elite flocked to Newport, Rhode Island during the summers building elaborate mansions and sparing no expense. A myriad of economic factors around 1913 greatly changed the general view on wealth and spending. The majority of the summer …

The Museum As A Mirror: Reinterpreting And Delinking American Landscape Art From Colonial Narratives, Blythe C. Romano

Honors Theses

Art museums have recently been looking at their existing collections with heightened scrutiny, revisiting their decision to display colonial works uncritically in their gallery spaces, and reconsidering the idea that there is such a thing as a unified art historical canon. These conversations regarding reinterpretation are necessary for all museums that choose to display art with problematic histories, as this information is owed to visitors -- especially within the settler colonial context. The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine is one site where such collection and gallery “reinterpretation” has begun to be implemented and discussed. For example, in …

History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox As Institutional Practice, Sarah H. Salter

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay connects the reparative assemblages of queer archiving practice to growing conversations in university studies. Tracing the fraught legal history of Penn State University’s first “Homophile” association in the 1970s, this essay theorizes how university records—and the processes of recording they index—participate in the creation of institutional identity and help establish institutional relations with their communities. Ultimately, it suggests that archivists and librarians act as mediators, unintentionally or purposefully, of the relations between vulnerable communities and the structures of power in which they are embedded.

Remembering The Experience Of War: A Sensory Study Of The Vietnam War And Collective Memory, Jacob Randolph

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

The Vietnam War is remembered in a variety of ways. It is remembered as a war against communism, yet one that was also against American ideals of freedom. It is remembered as a war of patriotism, yet one that was also against the numerous military members who fought in it. It is remembered as a war for integration and unity among black and white, yet many African-Americans remember the time period as a war being fought abroad and at home. Memory of the war is obviously contradicting, but then again the 1960s and 1970s oftentimes were.

This thesis examines how …

Non-Indian Reservations, Joshua Matthew Rosenau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis is a skeptical treatment of the logical distinctions presumed to exist between “Indian” and “non-Indian” people. Despite representing 99 percent of the U.S. population, “non-Indians” represent a legal identity which has no explicit definition. The basis for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions regarding non-Indians and Indians rests not on any objective, empirical or logical criterion or proof, but rather on the “assumption of a ‘guardian-ward’ status. This thesis investigates this assumption, and recommends that we suspend judgment on whether the difference between “Indians” and “non-Indians” can be determined either by logical argument or by legal assumption.

The Dutch Atlantic And American Life: Beginnings Of America In Colonial New Netherland, Roy J. Geraci

Theses and Dissertations

The Dutch colony of New Netherland was one of the earliest attempts at a non-indigenous life on the east coast of North America. That colony, along with the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Dutch Atlantic as a whole, played crucial roles in the development of what would become the United States. This thesis project examines the significance New Netherland held in American history as well as explores topics which allow for new and inclusive narratives of that history to reach further exploration. Similarly to how individuals from various cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds all come to exist amongst one another …

The Crisis Of Chad: Men’S Rights Movements And Contemporary Anti-Feminism, Kendrick Zapata

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis analyzes the relationship between the modern incel and manosphere movement, and its historical legacies in anti-feminist discourses in late 20th century men's rights movements. The manosphere is a collection of online videos, forums, blogs, and websites dedicated to raising awareness or promoting masculinist philosophies. Incels in particular are individuals that understand their lack of sexual interaction as inherent, and often interact in digital spaces with others. Incel beliefs range from calling for the reversal of women’s rights, to seeking advice on self-improvement forums that offer advice to young men seeking to improve their physique through diet and exercise. …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

In/Visible, Raymond Thompson Jr

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

My MFA thesis and supporting exhibition focus on challenging the United States’ photographic archive that often left out African-American people. The work, through the use of appropriation and alternative photographic processes, disrupts America’s historical visual archive and notions that surround the white gaze. Through the unsettling of this visual space, new speculative narratives can be created to help imagine new futures. This work is the beginning of a process of mourning histories I have never known and reclaiming a place for myself and my family in the American landscape that is free of racial trauma.

A Phenomenological Study Of The Lived Experiences Of African American Women In Undergraduate Stem Degree Programs, Vernon H. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to provide a better understanding of the lived experiences of African American women in STEM undergraduate degree programs at a 4-year degree granting institution in the southernmost part of central Virginia. The central problem is that there is disparity between the number of African American women with STEM degrees and that of other races in the STEM job market. The existing literature has gaps in the research of African American women’s perception of undergraduate STEM programs. Further, the researcher posits there is a lack of consideration for diversity that is detrimental to the United States; …

Railspace: A Geocritical Study Of The Railroad Through American Literature And Culture, Michael A. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses geocriticism to argue that the American railroad is best understood as a set of discursively constructed railspaces formed through a variety of viewpoints, a polysensorial awareness of space, and stratified social relationships and power struggles. This study takes up four railspaces, the constituent texts of which demonstrate how intertextual discourse shapes and is shaped by the railroad. The observation car, charted through California Zephyr advertisements and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Campaign,” is an apparatus that produces perpetual spectacle. Three novels—Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith—and …

Wetland To Wasteland, Plantation To Plant: The Visual Legacy Of Plantations In The South Louisiana Landscape Of Environmental Justice, Ella Mcintire

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Southeast Louisiana landscape sits at the intersection of a number of environmental and humanitarian crises. Violence against man and land endemic to the Plantation Era development of the Lower Mississippi laid the foundation for modern issues of coastal land loss, habitat destruction, pollution, environmental racism, and displacement. Land-use patterns of the Plantation economy made the region optimal for petrochemical processing, turning wetland to wasteland, and plantation to plant. The exhibit Climates of Inequality: Standing Up On River Road uses photography, cinematography, 360-video, and soundscapes to explore the dialogic relationship between fragile natural spaces in southern Louisiana and the historically …

Escrime Americana: The History Of Discrimination In American Fencing From The 1700s-1950, Alyssa J. Hirsch

Honors College Theses

This research paper will focus on the history of discrimination in American fencing from 1700-1950. The time frame covers the colonial origins of the sport in America, through segregation practices up to 1950. This project will analyze the origins of classism, sexism, and racism in American fencing, and how it connects to how racism, sexism, and classism have operated in the United States. There has been no previous research conducted into the history of discrimination in fencing exclusively, so this is new territory.

The research for this paper includes primary sources provided by the head historian of U.S. fencing, Andy …

A Guiding Force, Jessica Palmer

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

In this paper, I will be addressing the main factors which influenced Bruce Springsteen’s career and songwriting, specifically regarding interpersonal relationships the singer has had and how that is evident in his work thus far. I will be relating that concept to his latest album release, “Letter to You” by analyzing track by track and attempting to find that common thread of connection that seems to speak so well to him and his audience.

December 2020, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Mega-Chanukah Party; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Community Notices

Amjambo Africa! (December 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue

Boko Haram .................................2/3

Publisher’s Editorial ........................4

Meet Georges Budagu Makoko .....4

Elections/immigration reform .......5

Translations

French ............................................7

Swahili............................................8

Somali ............................................9

Kinyarwanda...............................20

Portuguese ............................20/21

News from Africa.....................10/11

Piece Together Project .................12

I’m Your Neighbor Books.............13

Pious Ali mourns Rawlings of Ghana ....................14

A Man on the move.......................15

Black Mainer project.....................16

Finance/Business............................19

Auto Insurance ..............................21

Poem by Ekhlas Ahmed................22

Guest columns...............................23

Titi de Baccarat .......................26/27

November 2020, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Temple Shalom Celebrates; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group;Community Notices