American Studies Commons^™

Private Equity Success: High Returns In A Risky World, Ross Corey

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will be covering how a private equity firm, despite the firm’s investment preferences, can lessen their risk without negatively affecting the potential gains in their assets and capital by making the right considerations. Investing in platforms such as stocks, bonds, and real estate may offer good long term returns. A small percentage of people look to invest in private equity markets. A reason for this is because funds have high minimum investments which makes private equity more exclusive compared to many public markets. A private equity investment, in most cases, is an opportunity for higher returns, with the …

Streaming Services, Binging, And Cultural Consequences, Sean Flanagan

Pop Culture Intersections

This article discusses how streaming services such as Netflix are affecting cultural ideas and attitudes towards media.

Rap Music As A Positive Influence On Black Youth And American Politics, Natalie Wilson

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will examine the impact of rap music on Black American youth as well as contemporary American politics with an emphasis on police brutality.

Social Media And Consumer Culture: Addicted To The Idealized Consumer, James Laeder

Pop Culture Intersections

For better or for worse, social media has become party of the fabric of society. As technology and social networking sites increasingly affect the behavior and culture around us, signs of digital addiction are on the rise. This article discusses the connection between consumer culture and social networking site addiction.

The Effect Of Cws On Adolescent Health, Mitchell Shi

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will be covering the problem of celebrity worship. Celebrity worship has been in debate over the past few years regarding whether it is a harmful activity or not among adolescents, but with the recent established psychological disorder of Celebrity Worship Syndrome, it can be shown that it has become a serious health issue. One side argues that celebrity worship is harmless, even a helpful practice to pursue. The other side, however, argues that celebrity worship is detrimental to the mental and physical wellbeing of the adolescents. It is important to understand what celebrity worship entails, the different tests …

City Backdrop: Television And Its Gentrifying Influence On A City's Black Community, Ana Hoshovsky

Pop Culture Intersections

This paper will focus on the issue of race representation in television and its implications to real life communities in the cities featured in television. Scenes from the comedy show Portlandia will be examined to determine the effects the show has on the black community of Northeast Portland, Oregon. Characters from HBO’s Treme will also be analyzed to assess the show’s claim of representing the struggles of locals in a post-Katrina New Orleans. The lack of diverse representation throughout Portlandia’s eight seasons has caused the show to help to fuel the gentrification in the city. Viewers of the show are …

Social Impacts Of Popular Culture During The Vietnam War, Chris Ashton

Pop Culture Intersections

In this paper, I will argue that popular culture is imperative to a population overcoming and learning from a time of economical, political, and social turmoil. Focusing on the Vietnam War, I will demonstrate how common it is for people to rely on popular culture for hope and education during times of crises and it is often that music, movies, or artwork are those outlets.

By dissecting the messages of other popular songs recorded during the Vietnam War while also examining books like The Vietnam War and American Music written by David James and Songs of the Vietnam Conflict by …

The Effects Of Social Media And Apps On Exercise And Health Habits Of Millennial Women, Sarah Mason

Pop Culture Intersections

Exercise and eating healthy have become the next big trends, with new technology and social media allowing them to flourish. It is difficult to avoid this trend when “#fitspiration” is the caption of over 15 million instagram posts and there are hundreds of smartphone applications (apps) focused on health and fitness, that function to track your goals, provide tips or even include full workouts and healthy recipes.

The Missing “X” In Ethnic And Cultural Acceptance, Sofia Michelle Sandoval Larco

Pop Culture Intersections

In our modern world of heightened wall building, we are confident more separates us than brings us together. Added to our intrinsic differences, we find distinctions amongst people of our same gender, ethnicity, and race. These separations, in the long run, can turn into acts of miscommunication, create discomfort and animosity; and thus begins a tragic cycle of thinking in binaries. In this article I will argue that by reclaiming rhetoric traditions Latinx creators have continued a hesitant social move to refashion the aggregate memory of bondage and discrimination that began in colonial times. These creators are not blaming a …

Social Media’S Effect On Mental Health: How America’S Youth Are More Vulnerable To Its Negative Implications, Melissa Magner

Pop Culture Intersections

This article explores the potentially negative psychological effects social media photo-sharing platforms have on America’s adolescents. While most studies on mental health effects related to social media use have focused on Facebook and the young adult age group 18-35, this article focuses on users under the age of 18 with an emphasis on Instagram and Snapchat – the two most rapidly growing social networking sites for adolescents. Photo-sharing sites have characteristics different than other social media sites, specifically the ability to alter photos and to communicate live time through videos and photos, which may have different mental health consequences on …

September 2018, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Erev Rosh Hashanah Sacred Music Concert; Simchat Torah; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Community Notices

Amjambo Africa! (September 2018), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue... Eid Al-Adha .......................... Page 2

Results Conference ................Page 2

Host Community....................Page 3

World Refugee Day................Page 8

National Night Out ................Page 9

November Elections.............Page 13

Arabic Summer School ........Page 15

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

African American Performers In Stalin’S Soviet Union: Between Political Promise And Racial Propaganda, Christopher E. Silsby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first half of the twentieth century, a significant number of African Americans left the United States for the promise of racial and economic equality in the supposedly class-less society of a post-Revolution Soviet Union. This dissertation uses a series of interrelated case studies to contextualize the theatrical work of Paul Robeson, jazz dancer Henry Scott, actor Wayland Rudd, and the 1955-56 international tour of Porgy and Bess within the overlapping social, political, and aesthetic landscapes of African American and Soviet performance in Moscow during the rise and height of Stalinism.

Starting with an overview of race in the …

Wukongism: Monkey King, Kungfu/Jazz, And Asian/American Performance, Sissi Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wukongism offers one of the first non-western epistemic frameworks to examine theatre and performance that traverse beyond the shifting taxonomies of national, cultural, racial boundaries, and in particular, Asian/American theatre and performance. Wukongism, or shapeshifter consciousness, is built on the narrative of Sun Wukong the Monkey King, a supernatural shapeshifting character from the 16^th century classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Juxtaposing physical shapeshifting (plastic surgery and performing of the racialized face) with institutional shapeshifting (reinventing and eliminating invisible and hypervisible boundaries), this dissertation project posits Wukongism as a means to examine the varying, fluid, and precarious …

The Patterns And Prosecutions Of Media Leakers, Julia M. Lipkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines the cases of government employees who are responsible for the disclosure of confidential information to the press, known as media leakers. I claim that the government and media leaker engage in a series of patterned responses, which leads to both the disclosure of information, and prosecution of the leaker. More specifically, I demonstrate how the government’s executive branch manages a game of leaks, in which ‘illegitimate’ leakers are separated from elite officials who also leak, but are often spared from prosecution because they are considered ‘legitimate’ players of the game. Although the boundaries surrounding ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ …

From Establishment To Final Independence: A Study Of The National Archives Of The United States Of America From 1934–1985, Daniel M. Frett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a study of the National Archives of the United States from the institution’s establishment in 1934 under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt to becoming the National Archives and Record Administration in 1985. The Archives during the 1930’s and 1940’s functioned as an independent agency, until the Archives lost their independence under the Hoover Commission. In 1949 the Archives became part of the newly formed General Services Administration. During the 1950’s and 1960’s National Archives helped change the archival profession. Furthermore, we see how the two independence movements in the 1960’s and 1980’s that were ultimately successful in …

The Distant Early Warning Line: Geographies, Infrastructures, And Environments Of Warning, Jordan Steingard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was a Cold War era project aimed at providing advanced warning of incoming Soviet attack via the northern periphery of Canada and the United States. The Line was comprised of radar stations across the 69th parallel, spanning from Western Alaska to Baffin Island, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Academic institutions and research labs, private corporations, and military entities collaborated to develop the DEW Line.

The domes used to shield the radar from the extreme terrain were designed by architectural icon Buckminster Fuller, who was elaborating upon a symbolic language of security …

Modern Arts And Pueblo Traditions In Santa Fe, 1909–1931, Elizabeth S. Hawley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines art produced in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico during the early twentieth century, putting the works of Pueblo artists who lived in the area into dialogue with the works of Anglo-American modernists who traveled there. I take as case studies three artists whose practices are linked by both circumstance and agenda: Maria Martinez, a famed Pueblo potter; John Sloan, a leading member of The Eight and the Ashcan School; and Tonita Peña, a Pueblo watercolor painter. Weaving together Anglo-American and American Indian art history – which are too often bifurcated into separate accounts, omitting rich histories …

Manifest Density: Decentering The Global Western Film, Michael D. Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Western is often seen as a uniquely American narrative form, one so deeply ingrained as to constitute a national myth. This perception persists despite its inherent shortcomings, among them its inapplicability to the many instances of filmmakers outside the United States appropriating the genre and thus undercutting this view of generic exceptionalism. As the Western has migrated across geographical boundaries, it has accrued potential significations that bring into question its direct alignment with national ideology and history. Rather than attempting to define the Western in terms of nation or myth, we should attend to how each new text reconfigures …