American Studies Commons^™

Heroes In A Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut As Cultural Icon, Roger D. Launius

Florida Historical Quarterly

No one could have predicted the public fascination with astronauts from the first unveiling of the Mercury Seven in 1959 through Project Apollo until the present. The astronaut as celebrity and what that has meant in American life never dawned on anyone beforehand. To the surprise and ultimately consternation of some NASA leaders, they immediately became national heroes and the leading symbols of the fledgling space program.1 Even so, both NASA and the press contrived to present the astronauts as embodiments of the leading virtues of American culture and this has continued from the 1950s to the new millennium. Both …

Nasa In Florida: A Journalist's View, Pat Duggins

Florida Historical Quarterly

Apollo and Walt Disney. Those were two of the names making newspaper headlines when my family and I arrived in Florida in 1971. My father was an Air Force Chief Master Sergeant, and his last tour of duty would be at Patrick Air Force Base in Brevard County. The primary rocket launch site for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA), and Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom theme park made indelible impacts on Central Florida. It is also interesting to note how both projects almost by-passed Florida in favor of other locations.

Nasa's 50th Anniversary, Bill Nelson

Florida Historical Quarterly

It was Ronald Reagan who, in his 1986 Challenger address to a mourning nation, noted that we are accustomed to wonders in this country. He rightly observed: "It's hard to dazzle us." But America's space program has been doing just that - and, for 50 years now; even in times of loss, even in times of tragedy.

Title Page, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Title page for Volume 87, Number 2. Includes the Table of Contents

End Notes, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

In Memorium; Florida Southern College's Center for Florida History Presents Florida Lecture Series (2008-2009); Guidelines for Submission to the Florida Historical Quarterly

Florida Classroom: Designing History: An Interactive Exploration Of The 1930s Florida Ship Canal, Chris Beckmann

Florida Historical Quarterly

Typically the study of Florida history in the state's schools begins and ends in the fourth grade. Students learn that St. Augustine predates Jamestown, the Seminole Wars were the deadliest and costliest Indian conflicts in American history, Olustee was the only major Civil War battle fought on Florida soil, and 1920's Miami was the center of the first Florida land boom. Unfortunately most high school curricula do not build upon that base and place little emphasis upon the important place of Florida history within the larger national historical narrative. Discussions of race often ignore Rosewood and the significance of Harry …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Lipscomb, ed. The Letters of Pierce Butler, 1790-1794: Nation Building and Enterprise in the New American Republic. by Rusty Bouseman; Buker. The Metal Life Car: The Inventor, the Impostor, and the Business of Lifesaving. by John Missall; Winsboro. Florida's Civil War: Explorations into Conflict, Interpretations and Memory. by Daniel R. Lewis; Snay. Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction. by David T. Gleeson; Crawford, Jr. Florida Big Dig: The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami, 1881-1935. by Steven Noll; Warren. If It Takes All Summer: Martin Luther King, the KKK and States' Rights …

Doing The Job: The 1964 Desgregation Of The Florida Army National Guard, Thomas P. Honsa

Florida Historical Quarterly

The American civil rights movement usually brings to mind cities such as Montgomery, Birmingham, Memphis and Washington, D.C. In Florida, however, one of the most significant events of the civil rights era occurred without fanfare in the small, west coast town of Palmetto. It was here in 1964 that the color barrier was broken in one of the state's largest whites-only organizations, The Florida Army National Guard. For the first time in post-colonial history, African-Americans were enlisted into the state's military. Prior to American control, African Americans did play a military role in Florida. State guard officials claim that the …

The Pioneer African American Jurist Who Almost Became A Bishop: Florida's Judge James Dean 1858-1914, Canter Brown, Jr.

Florida Historical Quarterly

For a brief time the life and legacy of pioneering African American and Republican jurist James Dean returned to focus for Floridians in 2002 when Governor Jeb Bush posthumously reinstated the judge to the bench one hundred thirteen years after Governor Francis P. Fleming had removed him from his Monroe County office. Dean's reputation for integrity and probity found itself refurbished, although published accounts provided only sparse details to shed light on the years prior to Dean's election, on his legal or African Methodist Episcopal (AME) ministerial careers after the controversy, and, for that matter, on the circumstances of the …

The Cross-Florida Canal And The Politics Of Interest-Group Democracy Caherine Prescott Lecture, 2008, Wayne Flynt

Florida Historical Quarterly

Polluted water. Hurricanes. Shipwrecks. Drowning sailors. Land developers. Cheap transportation. U.S. presidents willing to invest federal funds in order to court Florida voters. Presidential advisors who attempt to clear the minefields of conflicting local interests in order to implement presidential policy. Public expectation that powerful congressional leaders will bring home the bacon. The ever escalating tension between economic developers/civic boosters on one hand and environmentalists on the other. Typical Florida boondoggles and screwups. If the cast of characters and issues sounds familiar, it is because few patterns of human conduct are entirely new, nor are our current debates entirely foreign …

Title Page, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Title page for Volume 87, Number 1. Includes the Table of Contents

Rebranding The Native: Selling The ‘Ideal’ Indigenous Worker At The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918, Luke Prior

History & Classics Student Scholarship

Luke Prior ’22
Major: History/Secondary Education
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Alexander Orquiza, History and Classics

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School sought to recreate the image of the Native American from the savage brute of the past and the lazy free-loader who lived off the government ration to an ‘ideal’ worker who was a productive member of the American economy. In doing so, the school stripped students of their cultures and replaced them with American ideals. A very small minority of those at Carlisle used what they learned to fight against the assimilationist mission of the school.

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …

The Imagined Histories And Futures Of The Past: Wwi And The Cultural Imagination, Kelly Aliano

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In this paper, I look at various modes of imagining the futures incarnated by the First World War, beginning with artists and writers, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Maria Remarque, who experienced and depicted the war from a firsthand point of view. From here, I expand that framework to include J.R.R. Tolkien, whose masterpiece Lord of the Rings may owe no small debt to his wartime experiences. I consider the Doctor Who episodes, “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood,” as contemporary attempts to reinsert WWI into the cultural consciousness. Finally, I look at the two versions of War Horse …

Mourning The Marathon: Black Men Rappers, Homicide Survivorship Bereavement, And The Rap Tribute Of Nipsey Hussle, Melvin L. Williams, Justin K. Winley, Justin Causey

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Eritrean-American rapper Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom’s murder represented a cultural cataclysmic event that startled the hip-hop community and triggered previous memories of Black men’s homicidal deaths in rap and Black American urban communities. Nipsey Hussle’s death inspired touching rap tribute songs by Black men rappers, who sought to commemorate his cultural legacy and express their bereavement pains as homicide survivors. Rap tribute songs occupy a significant history, as rappers historically employed them to honor hip-hop’s fallen soldiers, communicate their homicide survivorship bereavement processes, and speak about social perils in the Black community. Framed by critical race (CRT) and gender role …

“A Meaningless Institution”: Allen Ginsberg And The Struggle To Resist Dehumanization, James Altman

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

This presentation details how in poems such as “A Meaningless Institution,” “Howl,” and “American Change” Allen Ginsberg depicts individuals striving as best they can to maintain their freedom, especially freedom of thought in the face of lockstep conformity. In doing so, they seek to hang onto and reassert their humanity. In virtually every line, Ginsberg’s ideas about free speech, democracy, patriotism, inclusiveness, the environment, and community collided with the dehumanizing ideals of mainstream Cold War America. Ginsberg’s reverence for the United States as celebrated by his artistic “father” Walt Whitman functions as the catalyst for him to protest what the …

Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel, The Giver, the veil of perception— the gap between appearance and reality— is woven into the community as a policy measure meant to establish Sameness—the effort to insure a world without conflict, inequality, difference, pain, or freedom of choice. But a question lingers in the premise of the novel’s community. Given that our options for bridging the gap amount to building a bridge of experience across it or digging a tunnel of existence under it, has the bridge been sabotaged to render perception spurious, or has the tunnel been blocked to alter reality …

Black Culture And Community In Good Times, Angela Nelson

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The situation comedy Good Times broadcast on the CBS network from February 8, 1974 to August 1, 1979, is a television milestone because it was the first series to feature a recurring, intact Black two-parent nuclear family, the Evanses, on American primetime television. In the conventions of seventies “TV World,” the “intact Black nuclear family” is a married, heterosexual, two-parent African American family with children all living in a single dwelling at the same time. David Marc in Demographic Vistas notes the focus of American situation comedies up to 1974: “The sitcom is a representational form, and its subject is …

A Semiotic Analysis Of Community’S “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons”, Marci Mazzarotto

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Unsurprisingly, the use of blackface rightfully remains a controversial topic situated within a remarkedly large sphere of popular culture (spanning nearly 200 years), as its roots stem directly from the systematic oppression of the African American community by silencing their voices and deleting their visibility. Such depictions turned people of color into grotesque and exaggerated caricatures that cemented deeply hurtful, incorrect, and negative stereotypes that continue to live and haunt our society and culture today.

This project addresses the controversial use of blackface in popular media, by briefly contextualizing its history and influence and then situating such context within a …

"Of Backstories And Epiphanies And Such: A Formalist's Analysis Of Dallas Jenkins' Youtube Series 'The Chosen.'", Richard Logsdon

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Of Backstories and Epiphanies: A formalist’s analysis of Dallas Jenkin’s The Chosen

In this essay, I attempt a formalist’s analysis of YouTube sensation The Chosen, so far a two part, sixteen-episode series about Jesus. In taking a formalist’s approach to this series, I seek the unifying principle holding the episodes of The Chosen together and determining the selection and arrangement of parts.

Presented from perspective of Jesus’ followers, the series' episodes make use of backstories and epiphanies to convey the unifying message that Jesus Christ was God and man. Those who experiences the epiphanies, often occurring in backstories intended to …