American Studies Commons^™

It's Good Business: Regulation Models In The 1911 Closure Of Butte Montanas Red Light District, Anne Marie Johnson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This work examines the regulation of prostitution in Butte, Montana during the 1910-1911. Butte, in particular, stands out in terms of researching how the regulation of prostitution worked to support the economic structure of a mining town in the American West because it offered a different response to Progressive Era regulation of red light districts during the early twentieth century. While there was an attempt to implement the eradication model of regulation sweeping the rest of the nation, Butte rejected this model in favor of tolerating prostitution's involvement in its mining culture and economic structure. Examining the social and economic …

Phenomenology Of Visual Arts In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Zeinab Zamani

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The early decades of the 20th century marked drastic changes in philosophy, science, visual arts, literature, and music. In philosophy, this change occurred in the work of Edmund Husserl whose Phenomenology introduced a new “way of knowing” or epistemology. In art, the exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), given its rebellious nature, began an innovative artistic tradition which called for a new “way of seeing.” Phenomenology as theory and Cubism as practice shared a common aim: to re-vision the world—an aim of many Modernist movements. Modernism is an umbrella term for a mélange of artistic schools and …

The Same Ten People (Stps) Of Rockville: Volunteerism, Preservation, And Sense Of Community In Small-Town Southern Utah, Tori Edwards

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis examines the central role that volunteerism plays in creating a strong sense of sense of place and community within the town of Rockville, Utah, located 4.7 miles from Zion National Park. Rockville has no commercial businesses within its boundaries and relies heavily upon the volunteer efforts of its residents to carry out the majority of civil services within the town. Drawing from interviews of the STP’s (a group of Rockville residents who volunteer on a regular basis), this thesis highlights how the act of volunteerism helps residents feel membership within their community. This thesis also looks at how …

Mormons And Youtube, Ryan Reeder

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

As the internet’s second-most trafficked site, behind only Google in both the United States and globally, and with 600,000 hours of content uploaded and one billion hours viewed daily by more than one billion monthly users, YouTube’s reach and scope is vast. Growing out of a need to better facilitate the production and distribution of online video, YouTube was able to become dominant through a combination of factors including the implementation of innovative features, an ability to capitalize on popular videos hosted on its site, and good timing in managing to become a key component of the social media revolution. …

The Saleing Subculture, Hayli M. Cox

All NMU Master's Theses

The Saleing Subculture is a collection of short and flash creative nonfiction essays with influences including travel writing, cultural studies, lyric essays, and memoir. Each essay attempts to contribute to a larger understanding of a unique subculture of yard salers as well as a single woman’s family dynamic within the culture. The collection also endeavors to interrogate relationships between people and the meanings they give to the objects they engage with or choose to cast away.

Persistence Of Memory: Revision, Nostalgia, And Resistance In Contemporary American Drama, Sinan Gul

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the usages of memory in contemporary American drama. Analyzing selected mainstream and alternative dramatic texts, The Persistence of Memory is a study of personal and communal reflections of the past within contemporary plays. The introduction provides examples from modern plays, major terms, and vital concepts for memory studies and locates their merits in dramatic texts. The first chapter makes a critique of family plays, which uses historical elements to indicate a revisionist yearning for the past as well as the American Dream. Similarly, the second chapter contains business plays, which implement a heavy feeling of nostalgia …

The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project presses to include popular fiction, television, and film for serious critical consideration. To contextualize my research, I use theories that critically examine popular literature, connecting to the work of Janice Radway and Keenan Norris, and I study the African-American focus on class as explored by E. Franklin Frazier. In focusing on the popular, I highlight the everydayness of class and race anxieties. I build on Gwendolyn Foster’s work on class passing but stress racial intersections with identity performance. I rely on New Historicism and Critical Race Theory to substantiate my examination of the literature. I look at specific …

Design Plan For The Sawmill Town History Wing At The Texas Forestry Museum, Kendall D. Gay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Texas Forestry Museum in Lufkin, Texas is the only forestry museum in the state. It preserves artifacts and educates visitors about Texas’ forest industry history. The museum has a Sawmill Town History Wing that is outdated and in need of a refreshing exhibit design based on current best practices. Using a previous museum audit as a guide, the new exhibit will have better flow, panel aesthetics, content, and interactive elements. By creating a new exhibit, the museum is better able to educate and entertain the visitors about Texas’ forest industry history.

The Anti-Black Hero: Black Masculinity Media Representation As Seen In Netflix Series Luke Cage And Fox Series Empire, Meya Joyell Hemphill

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

The reoccurrence of the Black Brute, the Thug, and the modern day Coon stereotypical images on current television narrowly defines Black masculinity as a monolithic experience. Young Black boys, are often unable to see themselves as those who are portrayed on television. The images they see on screen are sometimes not realistic. Unfortunately, for some young Black boys, these stereotypical images may heavily influence their own behavior. Society often criminalizes and demonizes young Black men as angry, violent, and dangerous. They pose as a supposed threat to society and are thought to be even more problematic as they age. Currently, …

[Review Of] Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity, Anne Fountain

Faculty Publications

[Review of] Cuba - Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity. By Tanya L. Saunders . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. 390. $90.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Our Christian Nation: White Supremacy And The Making Of An American Theology, Sophia Driscoll Gamber

Religious Studies Summer Fellows

What does it mean to be a “Christian nation,” a nation which is blessed by God above other nations? This moniker of divinity and chosen-ness has been in some way attached to the American project since its conception, though many in the ensuing years have criticized American life and culture as distinctly un-Christian. Furthermore, what does it mean to be American? To trace citizenship back to the origins of the nation reveals a sense of American-ness which is bound to whiteness. Since our earliest foundations, white supremacy has been in a close symbiotic relationship with our structures of government and …

Music And Race In The American West, William Steven Schneider

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the complexities of race relations in the nineteenth century American West. The groups considered here are African Americans, Anglo Americans, Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. In recent decades historians of the West have begun to tell the narratives of racial minorities. This study adopts the aims of these scholars through a new lens--music. Ultimately, this thesis argues that historians can use music, both individual songs and broader conceptions about music, to understand the complex and contradictory race relations of the nineteenth century west.

Proceeding thematically, the first chapter explores the ways Anglo Americans used music to …

War For The Planet Of The Apes (Movie Review), Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"This movie asks us to side with the apes, to root against the human army that they face, and to feel elated at the prospect of a planet full of sentient apes, without sentient humans."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­a review of the movie War for the Planet of the Apes from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

http://inallthings.org/war-for-the-planet-of-the-apes/

Medicine Through Comics: Wheels Are Turning On The Road To Healing. Native Americans Through The Lens Of Francophone Graphic Novels., Nathalie C. Bléser

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This work analyzes the evolution of the depiction of Native Americans in Francophone graphic novels from Belgium, Switzerland and France, from the 1930s to our present era. The axis around which the comics are organized is the Lakota Medicine Wheel, which, along with works by N.A. scholars, constitutes the basis of the theoretical framework. In this way, the work is guided by a truly multicultural and interethnic approach. The deliberate choice of a span of more than 80 years wishes to show how such depiction evolved and how its observation can bring healing from the mistreatment and misrepresentation experienced by …

Texas-Mexico Border Cultural Production: Ethnographic Aesthetics And Modernity In Folklore, Literature, And Film, Margie Montañez

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation develops the trope of an ethnographic aesthetic to dissect the cultural production of Jovita González, Américo Paredes, and more recent works by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Lourdes Portillo. The dissertation argues that Texas-Mexican cultural production actively produces knowledge. In other words, when understood within the framework of ethnographic aesthetics, Texas-Mexican border cultural anticipates and imagines local futures in a constant shifting colonial space. Texas-Mexico border cultural production is not passive or residual but is in fact active and emergent.

The dissertation situates Texas-Mexico border cultural production as responding to and within post-national American Studies discourse that “stresses …

"The New Millennium's Passion For Standing Live Witness To Things:” The Epidemiology Of Isolation, Addiction And Redemption In David Foster Wallace’S Infinite Jest, Natalie C. Helberg

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Infinite Jest is a one-thousand, seventy-nine page novel and it weighs almost three pounds; it is heavy in a literal and a spiritual sense. The novel is David Foster Wallace’s greatest achievement. It portrays characters who are dramatically isolated from one another and who cannot cope without some form of addiction. This addiction manifests itself in the form of an extreme dependence on drugs and/or technology to escape reality. This thesis first discusses the effects of technology on a society that is lonely and isolated. Then, two major characters with substance abuse issues are analyzed in an effort to understand …

Beninger, John, 1850-1922 (Sc 3133), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3133. Notebook containing original and copied poetry by John Beninger, a native of Ohio County, Kentucky. Beninger resided in Versailles, Kentucky, for a number of years, and several of the poems refer to people or places in that community. Beninger often mentions the source of his poem’s inspiration and the date he penned it. Mr. Beninger is buried in the McCord Cemetery in Ohio County, Kentucky.

Importance Of Seeing The Trauma: The Video Of Diamond Reynolds And Daughter In The Back Of A Police Car, Wendy Kozol

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Saturnalia Of Bunk : Selections From The Free Lance, 1911–1915, H. L. Mencken, S. T. Joshi

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

H. L. Mencken’s reputation as a journalist and cultural critic of the twentieth century has endured well into the twenty-first. His early contributions as a writer, however, are not very well known. He began his journalistic career as early as 1899 and in 1910 cofounded the Baltimore Evening Sun. The next year he initiated a column—The Free Lance—that ran six days a week for four and a half years, until the Sun discontinued it, partially in response to Mencken’s controversial defense of Germany during World War One.

In this early forum for his renowned wit, Mencken broached many of the …

The Papers Of Norman Rosten, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It

Finding Aids

This collection contains items such as original drafts of published works, photographs, playbills, interviews, reviews, correspondences, and scripts. There is also some publicity material for his screenplay A View From the Bridge, an original radio script for Death of a King, as well as final revisions. In addition, there are newspaper clippings, magazine articles and some interviews Mr. Rosten gave during his term as Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate.