American Studies Commons^™

Sexual Surveillance: Morality Policing Of Greeks And Italians In The Early 20th Century, Isabella Ferrell

Digital Legal Research Lab

The Petitioning for Freedom Project under Dr. Jagodinsky is a database of habeas corpus use in the West. It examines legal action by marginalized individuals. This project focuses on how Greek and Italian petitioners used habeas to challenge sexual policing in a xenophobic context.

Research poster titled Sexual Surveillance: Morality Policing of Greeks and Italians in the Early 20th Century; presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2024.

Advisors: Katrina Jagodinsky and William Thomas

The Harding Brothers And Underage Enlistment In The Age Of American Expansion, 1851–1857, Ryan Minton

Digital Legal Research Lab

The Petitioning for Freedom Project is an NSF funded database project that seeks to collect and encode carceral, institutional, and interpersonal habeas corpus petitions from county, state, and federal courts all throughout the American West.

This research project explores and analyzes the twenty-four habeas corpus petitions that were submitted between 1851 and 1857 to the Saint Louis County Law Commissioners Office to challenge the enlistment of underage recruits stationed at Jefferson Barracks.

Research poster titled The Harding Brothers and Underage Enlistment in the Age of American Expansion, 1851–1857; presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of …

Maternal Chains: Black Women's Legal Battles For Freedom In Pre-Emancipation America, Roshawnna Brinkley

Digital Legal Research Lab

This research examines the use of habeas corpus petitions by Black Women in antebellum America to secure freedom for themselves and their children. Given that slave status was inherited matrilineally, these legal actions had implications for generational freedom. In Dr. Jagodinsky’s Petitioning for Freedom project there are numerous cases of Black Women utilizing Habeas Corpus. This study focuses on these Women's agency in navigating a hostile legal system.

Research poster titled Maternal Chains: Black Women's Legal Battles for Freedom in Pre-Emancipation America; via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2024.

Advisors: Katrina Jagodinsky and …

To Have And To Hold: Habeas Corpus And The Mobilization Of Female Petitioners, 1832–1924, Miranda Martinez

Digital Legal Research Lab

Dr. Jagodinsky’s Petitioning For Freedom (PFF) is an open-access database of habeas corpus petitions from the American West. It aims to further our understanding of the United States legal landscape in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Research poster titled To Have and To Hold: Habeas Corpus & the Mobilization of Female Petitioners, 1832–1924; presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2024.

Advisors: Katrina Jagodinsky and William Thomas

Profiled Pickpockets: Seattle's Black Community & 1890s Habeas Mobilization, Zoë Williams

Digital Legal Research Lab

The Petitioning for Freedom project examines habeas corpus in the American West, 1812–1924 to highlight the legal mobilization of marginalized people. This study uses habeas petitions to identify Black people's response to racial profiling in Seattle.

Research poster titled Profiled Pickpockets: Seattle's Black Community & 1890s Habeas Mobilization; presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2024.

Advisors: Katrina Jagodinsky and William Thomas

Legal Proxies And Advocates: Exploring Inter-Case Relationships In 19th- And 20th-Century Habeas Corpus, Ethan Reiter

Digital Legal Research Lab

• The Petitioning for Freedom Project (PFF) is an open access database that details the use of habeas corpus in legal proceedings in the American West from 1812 to 1924.

• A writ of habeas Corpus is a challenge by a petitioner that alleges that someone is detained unlawfully.

• In certain instances. a petitioner is petitioning on behalf of someone who is held illegally. This study examines the nature of the relationships between petitioner and bound party and how those relationships reflect historical and legal developments over time.

Research poster titled Legal Proxies and Advocates: Exploring Inter-Case Relationships in 19th- and 20th-Century …

Equal Protection Of Life, Liberty, And Labor: Habeas Corpus & The 14th Amendment, 1901–1904, Madison Mendiola

Digital Legal Research Lab

Presents and synthesizes three cases demonstrating the use of habeas corpus in the contect of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution between 1901 and 1904.

Research poster titled Equal Protection of Life, Liberty, and Labor Habeas Corpus & the 14th Amendment, 1901–1904, presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2024.

Advisors: Katrina Jagodinsky and William Thomas

Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick

All Theses

This project focuses on the negative affect of shame in Nella Larsen’s 1920s American novel, Passing. While shame is a universal feeling everyone feels, the project argues that Larsen’s two main characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, feel a specific type of invisible shame that pulls on them differently. For Irene, this shame is reactive and aggressive, but for Clare, this shame is passive and often ignored. The project details where and how the shame manifests for each character, particularly focusing on how shame can be seen visibly and invisibly in and on the body. Because no other character recognizes …

"I Will Write Mad Stories": The Hysterical "I" In The Diaries Of George Eliot, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Virginia Woolf, And Sylvia Plath, Jaclyn Marie Swiderski

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation focuses on the long history of hysteria and the ways in which it has been used to denigrate and silence disabled women. Women diagnosed as hysterical, by either the medical establishment or the court of public opinion, are denied the right to generate knowledge about and for themselves – they are epistemologically disabled. The author argues that hysterical women have unique ways of looking at and understanding the world which push back against their epistemological disablement. In order to uncover some of this history of hysterical women, this dissertation uses the diaries of four “hysterical” women over the …

We're Swarming Again! Swarming, Collectivity, And Trope: The Case Of Extinction Rebellion, Tyler J. Behymer

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the rhetoric of the eco-movement Extinction Rebellion, focusing on the use of swarming and nature tropes to mobilize collective action and revivify contemporary notions of collectivity. Drawing on rhetoric of social movement scholarship, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, this essay theorizes swarming as a tropological economy that expands the conditions of propriety in the context of collectivity. Through an analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s discourse, this study demonstrates how the naturalization of swarming tropes works in various ways to rewild conventional political discourse, galvanize disruptive collective assembly, and challenge green neoliberalism.

Advisor: Casey Ryan Kelly

"Huddled Masses:" The Immigration Act Of 1917 In Habeas Corpus, Chikamso Chijioke

Digital Legal Research Lab

Research poster titled "Huddled Masses:" The Immigration Act of 1917 in Habeas Corpus; presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2024.

Introduction

Dr. Jagodinsky's Petitioning for Freedom is a collection of habeas corpus petitions in the American West and examines marginalized peoples’ use of habeas to challenge detention. This project explores the role of the Immigration Act of 1917 in these cases. The Immigration Act of 1917, passed due to xenophobic tensions surrounding WWI, restricted immigration of people from Asia and the Pacific while implementing an English literacy test for those over 16 …

An Emerging Voice In United States Literature: 19th-Century Poetry In Los Angeles, Savannah Salazar

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The 19^th century was a time when British and American literatures

flourished greatly. This period is a favorite among students of English

studies and it has produced works that instill a great sense of pride in

British and American readers. However, in the realm of American

literature, there exists an entire body of literature that has been forgotten

to time and archived away. 19^th-century Los Angeles was occupied by

Spanish-language newspapers that produced a body of poetry that has

rarely been researched or discussed.

This thesis will be close-reading poetry from 19^th-century Angeleno

newspapers, such …

Book Review: Why Any Woman: Feminism And Popular Culture In The Late Twentieth-Century South, Alexandra Beswick

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

The Memory-Keeping Daughter: Exploring Object Stories And Family Legacies From America's Modern Wars, Susan R. Grayzel

History Faculty Publications

This essay demonstrates how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families as keepers of memory, and it especially explores the role of daughters of military participants in preserving the artifacts of their veteran fathers. Using several case studies from a recent public history project collecting objects and object stories in the American southwest, it argues that a focus on daughters as caretakers of family military history offers a new way to engage with descendants' histories by showing how the work of such women can contribute to our understanding of modern war and its legacies.

Trauma, Memory, Imagination, And Survivance: Uncovering Haunting Stories Within The Southwest Borderlands, Tania Paloma García

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation project explores hidden histories of the García/Espinosa/Sargent/Burns family in northern New Mexico/southern Colorado during the middle-to-late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, and continuing into the present. The project, in part, focuses on prominent rancher, lawyer, landowner, and territorial representative of New Mexico and Colorado, José Victór García. García’s life and legacy is examined regarding the lesser-known story of his “ownership” of several enslaved Indigenous youths on his property in Conejos County, Colorado. The methodology of haunting is employed to expose complex histories of Indigenous peoples in the Southwest borderlands, and within a broader context of colonialism. Indigenous enslavement is considered …

Wildcat, Karl Martin

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Wildcat (2023), directed by Ethan Hawke.

Poles And Puerto Ricans: Immigration And Assimilation In The Pioneer Valley, Gabriel S. Proia

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper attempts to explain why Polish immigrant farmers who came to the Pioneer Valley around the turn of the century assimilated more fully into the dominant culture and achieved on average greater economic success than Puerto Rican immigrant farmers who engaged in similar work in the same region roughly fifty years later. I begin by reviewing American Studies literature on assimilation dynamics to develop a framework for qualitatively evaluating how both groups changed over time. The evaluation is thereafter based on local newspaper articles and secondary ethnographic and historical literature from throughout the twentieth century, as well as interviews …

“Students Find Corporate Reforms Absurd”: Bryn Mawr Student’S Mobilization For Divestment From Apartheid South Africa, Madeline Rose Kessler

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

In 1986, Bryn Mawr College’s endowment held $8 million or 8.33% of its $96 million endowment in investments tied to Apartheid in South Africa. In line with other major US institutions who believed they must act moral in the face of violent and exploitative system of racial discrimination, the Board of Trustees, the governing body that oversees college operations and finances, proposed a plan in 1985 to divest from subsidiaries of their stock in South Africa if Apartheid was still in place 24 months later in 1987. This came at the tail end of the international movement to oppose and …

Podcasts Reclaim Literature By Women: A Comparative Study, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation samples some prominent podcasts which highlight my longtime academic specialty, literature by women. At least three podcasts on Individual writers, Emily Dickinson, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Robins receive attention. At least two podcast series that examine collections of women writers deserve acknowledgment. These are: Lost Ladies of Lit hosted by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew in Los Angeles and one sponsored by Women's Fiction Writers Association, the Debut Author Podcast hosted by novelist Maggie Smith, "Hear Us Roar." I am interested in not only the content and how it is presented, but the ease of use and reach …

African American Women’S Writing: A Critical Edition Of A Narrative Of The Life And Travels Of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1856), Susan E. Landwer

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation expands on current knowledge of how Black women of the early nineteenth century not only participated in political and social movements within the United States but were instrumental in effecting fundamental social and economic progress both domestically and abroad. They did this while grappling with what their US citizenship meant to them within a gendered and race-based hierarchy. In the process, they had their own labor to sustain their livelihood and apprenticed the future labor of others. Centering on Nancy Gardner Prince (1799-1859), a Black activist born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, I explore how Prince was not an exception …