American Studies Commons^™

Rhetoric In Mormon Female Healing Rituals During The Nineteenth Century, Carrie Ann King Johnson

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

Using the minutes of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, journals and diaries kept by early Mormon women, and letters written about healing blessings, this thesis looks at how nineteenth-century Mormon women used rhetoric in healing rituals to build community, claim power, and comfort one another thorough illness, death, and birth. Claudia L. Bushman points out that “Mormon women were much like other American women of their day, but their allegiance to the faith led them in some new directions.” Instead of retreating to acceptable standards of femininity, Mormon women claimed and used godly power and authority.

The women who …

Gi Jane Versus Sergeant Jane Doe: How Women’S Images In War Movies Contribute To Conflicting Expectations Of Women In Combat, Sawyer Marie L. Alberi

All Theses And Dissertations

Research on women’s portrayal in media generally suggests that women continue to be sexualized and objectified as war trophies in the classic Hollywood warrior culture film. The age old question of whether life imitates art or vice versa is important to consider when examining the question of how this popular culture medium contributes to the conflicting expectations of today’s women in combat roles. What is the reality of women’s roles in the US Military compared to the roles portrayed by warrior film media? History tells us that women have been on the battlefield in one way or another since there …

Transforming The Mundane: Juxtaposing Maria Friedman’S "High Society" With George Cukor’S "The Philadelphia Story" As An Emphasis On The Importance Of Theatre, Dana T. Speight Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The subjects of film and theatre belong to an extensive hierarchical debate that has remained prominent within the realm of performing arts since the introduction of cinema in the late nineteenth century. A plethora of scholars choose to argue in favor of the former, suggesting that film surpasses theatre as superior in both aesthetics and overall execution of naturalism; however, the argument is purely subjective and cannot be applied to all films and their corresponding plays. As a counterclaim, theatre continues to thrive as a prominent source of artistic entertainment globally, not only offering a contemporary twist to preexisting texts, …

William Faulkner's Southern Landscape, Rachel V. Ford

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

The American South is a region full of rich and complicated history, undergoing slavery, war, poverty, ecological devastation, and racial violence. One of the most famous and distinctly southern writers of the twentieth century is William Faulkner, whose works challenge the idealistic Lost Cause mentality of white supremacy and highlight major issues within southern society. Faulkner’s writings are set in Mississippi, grounded with a distinct sense of place. The southern landscape provides more than simply a backdrop to the stories, but plays an active role in plot and character development. This thesis examines three of Faulkner’s novels, discussing their historical …

West Point Of The West: A History Of The Department Of Military Science At Utah State University, Camon Davison

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Department of the Military Science at Utah State University was created in 1898 and is the oldest department at USU. Until the mid-1950s it was mandatory that all male students be enrolled in Military training at the school and, if they so decided, would finish up the last two years of military training to become officers in the United States Military. This program is known as ROTC. Fully implemented at USU in 1916 the ROTC program continued to grow and would help fund the growth of campus during the 1920’s and 30’s. Following World War II the program became …

Beyond "Main Street": Small Towns In Post-"Revolt" American Literature, Rachael Price

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Beyond Main Street” examines the impact and legacy of the literary movement that Carl Van Doren, in an infamous 1920 article from The Nation, referred to as the “revolt from the village.” This movement, which is widely acknowledged to encompass such writers as Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, pushed back against the primacy of the heretofore-dominant pastoral tradition when it came to depictions of rural America. These authors sought to create a more accurate portrayal of the small town, one that, while not completely eschewing the pastoral, also exposed the more seedy side of village life. Critics …

Movements, Music, And Meaning: A Comparative Analysis Of Cultural Narratives In Vietnam Era And Post-9/11 Anti-War Music, Jonathan Nathaniel Redman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of widely circulating cultural narratives in the lyrics of approximately eighty anti-war songs from the Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. Unlike prior movements and music research, this thesis privileges culture over movements and views movements as cultural antennae both picking up on trends and cultural narratives, and broadcasting their own altered cultural meanings back into the “cultural airways.” It sees music as a cultural medium which acquires cultural meanings from its surroundings, alters those meanings, synthesizes new ones, and perpetuates old ones. Drawing on comparative and narrative analysis approaches informed by grounded theory techniques, this thesis …

The Stories Of Junot Díaz: Genre And Narrative In Drown And This Is How You Lose Her, Luis Fernando Marin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Junot Díaz creates and constructs his literary alter-ego and narrator, Yunior de las Casas, and examines the Social and cultural aspects, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, that condition or influence Yunior’s construction. I argue that Díaz uses the short story as a subversive genre and modernist narrative techniques, such as shifts in space-time and focalization, to reflect Yunior’s diasporic, fragmented subjectivity. My analysis includes narratological and generic readings of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, with a brief look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, paying particular attention to Yunior as …

Walking In American History: How Long Distance Foot Travel Shaped Views Of Nature And Society In Early Modern America, Brian Christopher Hurley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The industrialization of transportation, first with railroads, and then with automobiles, took Americans away from foot transport, changing how Americans interacted with one another and viewed their surroundings. The dissertation traces the walking trips of five central figures in this era of mechanized transport, the personal impact of their experiences while walking through a land they were accustomed to skimming across, and the ways in which these personal revelations led to changes in the national consciousness. Walking upright was central to the development of homo sapiens as a species, and shaped the way they interacted with their environment. Certain aspects …

Divining The Southwest: Liminality, Pragmatism, And Regionalism In "Death Comes For The Archbishop", Alex C. Blomstedt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work aims to explore the themes of pragmatism and liminality, particularly as they pertain to spirituality, in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. By taking an interdisciplinary critical approach to the novel, I will synthesize its spiritual affect into a sensibility called “pragmatic liminality.” Finally, I will connect this sensibility to other works in the Southwestern literary canon and elucidate the foundational importance that pragmatic liminality has to the Southwestern “sense of place” and its role in the larger narratives of regionalism in American literature.

Small Houses, Big Ideas, Caroline Jean Winn

Student Scholarship

Architecture is the unavoidable art form.It permeates everyday life and wholly shapes lifestyle; it reflects culture and location as well as the economic power of a region. At its core, architecture is a testament to its surroundings, its design naturally requiring a series of decisions regarding space, form, and use – decisions born within a crucial and telling social context, decisions that quickly reveal the social climate of an era. Indisputably, architecture serves as a lens through which scholars can peer into a time past.

In the course of this thesis, I will examine how the designs of half …

Do-It-Yourself Girl Power: An Examination Of The Riot Grrrl Subculture, Lindsay Wright

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, Erich M. Huhn

Madison Historical Review

No abstract provided.

Abraham Lincoln And The Dakota War In Academic And Popular Literature, Larry D. Mansch

Madison Historical Review

While the Civil War all but consumed Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, at least one other military matter caught his attention. The 1862 Dakota War in Minnesota resulted in the deaths of 358 white settlers, 106 United States soldiers, and 29 Dakota warriors. When the fighting ended hundreds of Indians were placed in prisoner camps, and after sham trials nearly 400 warriors were sentenced to death. Military leaders, politicians, and an enraged citizenry demanded that Lincoln order swift executions. Seeking to balance a sense of justice against the public’s insistence for revenge, Lincoln examined the trial records of each of the defendants, …

Racial Uplift In A Jim Crow Local: Black Union Organizing In Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940, Luke Mielke

American Studies Honors Projects

In the 1930s and 1940s, Minneapolis hotels employed two-thirds of all African-Americans working in the city. For black workers in Minneapolis, hotels were a site rife with contradictions: while these jobs offered prestige and union wages, they simultaneously drew upon hotel’s appeal to white customers’ slavery fantasy by promoting an atmosphere of racialized luxury. My research examines how narratives of respectability and racial uplift—generally at odds with the militant working-class politics of unions—became important for black hotel workers in Minneapolis, whose ability to conform to middle-class patriarchal norms was jeopardized by the submissive stereotypes promoted by hotels. Despite its status …

The Scientific Conquest Of New Mexico: Local Legacies Of The Manhattan Project 1942-2015, Lucie Anne Genay

American Studies ETDs

In the initial scoping phase of this research project, the main question I used for guidance was "to what extent and how did the Manhattan Project impact New Mexico and New Mexicans?" My first objective was to assess the magnitude of the state's transformation before addressing the other questions that soon ensued from this original reflection. A brief historical review of the state's transformation will introduce these questions, and comparing pre-World War II and post-Cold War New Mexico will justify the term "revolutionized" I used above. This dissertation retraces the story of this scientific colonization from the point of view …

David Roediger Interview, Jennifer Thomson, Mohammed Elnaiem

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University and Mohammed Elnaiem, student at Bucknell University, interview David Roediger, professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. Thomson and Roediger discuss self-emancipation of enslaved peoples as a catalyst for liberation movements in the United States. Elnaiem draws parallels between the 19th century activism inspired by emancipation and the social movements inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Thomson asks Roediger about his next book and the discussion centers around the American middle class, class consciousness, and the rhetoric used by politicians to appeal to the middle …

“In The End We All Come To Be Cured Of Our Sentiments”: Violence And Cultural Anxiety In Cormac Mccarthy’S Border Trilogy, Stephen Michael Turner

Student Theses and Dissertations

Each of Cormac McCarthy’s works contain unflinching violence and gore. A majority of McCarthy critics agree that the presence of violence within his work remain disconnected from each novel's plot and theme. This examination of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" illustrates the political and historical relationship between the United States and Mexico, as represented through various characters within the trilogy, and also explores the role that cultural anxiety plays as a primary motivator for violence. The loss of a certain way of life is a major concept found within McCarthy’s work, and the “Border Trilogy” serves as a meditation on this …

Passing For Power: A Literary Look At Passing As A Means Of Determining Identity And Claiming Agency, Jeanna Leah Mason

Student Theses and Dissertations

Historically, passing has been associated with race, such as when a black man or woman with light-colored skin would assume a white identity for a specific purpose. In early incarnations, passing was generally temporary and was used as an escape from the degradations of slavery or the economic and legal restrictions under Jim Crow laws. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain uses Tom Driscoll’s passing to illustrate identity formation and the illogic of using legal definitions to determine race. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner uses the Bon family’s experiences to explore society’s influence on each one’s experience with passing. Finally, in Passing, Larsen …

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …