American Studies Commons^™

Thirty-Six-Point Perpetua: John Updike's Personal Essays In The Later Years, Laurence W. Mazzeno, Sue Norton

Articles

This article considers the central preoccupations and modus operandi of the American writer John Updike as an essayist with personal, autobiographical intent. Best known in the American canon for his many works of fiction, he produced nonfiction in equal measure over the course of his lengthy career. His far-ranging critical reviews and topical, discursive writings have occupied pride of place in the most prominent periodicals of our times and have garnered much critical and popular attention. Yet his specifically self-referential essays, especially those composed in the final years of his life, deserve closer notice for the ways in which they …

La Voz, Spring 2016, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

La Voz is the official newsletter of the El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. The newsletter provides a sampling of graduate, undergraduate and faculty initiatives across the campus and the hemisphere.

Counterculture: The Generational Gap And Reaction To The 1950s, Michelle Desjardins

American Studies Forum

This work focuses on the causes of the 1960s counterculture in relation to the conservative 1950s. The piece provides a wide survey of what the counterculture truly entailed- through music, movies, and social movements- and the wide range of this movement from teenage rebellion to hippie communes. The paper concludes by taking a close look at the ways that counterculture was manifested at Providence College through an examination of two decades of yearbooks, from 1950s-1970s.

Archaeological Investigation Of The Drive Circle And West Hyphen At Gore Place Waltham, Massachusetts, Christa M. Beranek, Alexandra Crowder

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

In July of 2015, the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston conducted test excavations at Gore Place, the 1806 mansion house of Christopher and Rebecca Gore in Waltham, Massachusetts, to answer questions about changes in the landscape on the north side of the house. The excavations focused on areas of interest within the drive circle and against the west hyphen of the house. The project was carried out under State Archaeologist Permit #3559. The main results in the oval were the discovery of a Gore-period driveway under the grassy oval, indicating that the driveway was broader in front …

Enhancing The Campus Experience: Helping International Students To Adapt To North American Campus Life, Qiaoying Wang

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates how culture adaption topic can be applied to a design solution by enhancing international students experience on North American campus. Each year more than half a million international students enroll in American colleges and universities. Many will spend several years on a campus working toward their degree. Most of them arrive with clear academic goals, but they may have no clue what their social lives will be like. In that case, a common phenomenon that most of the international students need to get along with is called “Culture Shock”, which involves culture and academic adapting difficulties, limited …

Art Aids America: Expressions From An Epidemic, Rebecca Holbrook, Lu Freitas, April Lammers, Rebecca Acree, Jamie Hollis, Holly Martin

P-12 Lesson Plans

This series of lessons for K-12 Art classrooms emerged from the spring 2016 ZMA exhibition, Art AIDS America. This groundbreaking exhibition underscored the deep and unforgettable presence of HIV in American art. It introduced and explored a wide spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, surveying works from the early 1980s to the present. Art AIDS America was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and co-curated by Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, Director, Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo (The State University of …

Ernest Hemingway: The Modern Transcendentalist, Camryn Scott

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

When thinking about Transcendentalism, most of us look solely to the 19^th Century writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In this paper I reject this static treatment of the movement by exploring Ernest Hemingway’s connection to nature both in his life and in his writings, and claim that he created a modern version of Transcendentalism in the early 20^th Century.

Flannery O'Connor's Protestant Grace, Emily Strong

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Flannery O’Connor has long been known for the didactic Catholic message in her literature. However, upon closer study we may find that there are Protestant themes in O’Connor’s portrayal of grace. This paper explores the differences between Catholic and Protestant grace, examines the Protestant themes that can be found in her texts “Greenleaf,” “Revelation,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” and offers possible explanations as to why these Protestant themes exist in her literature.

Usc South Campus: A Last Look At Modernism, Lydia M. Brandt, Paul Haynes, Andrew Nester, Robert Wertz, Ana Gibson, Margaret Mcelveen, John Benton, Adam Bradway, Hatara Tyson, Caley Pennington, Carly Simendinger

Faculty Publications

This is a class project from ARTH 542: American Architecture taught at the University of South Carolina by Lydia Mattice Brandt in Spring 2016.

With more Americans attending college than ever before; urban renewal; racial integration; the expansion of coeducation; and the architecture community’s advocacy for holistic relationship between planning, architecture, and landscape architecture, the American college campus developed rapidly and dramatically in the mid twentieth century. Using the University of South Carolina’s Columbia Campus as a case study, this project explores the history of American architecture in the mid-twentieth century.

Social Media & Political Engagement: Environmental Organizations, Social Media And Political Engagement, Tyler Cate

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Social media is becoming more important in today’s digital society, but how effective is the use of social media when it comes to political engagement? How do environmental organizations use social media and is it effective in encouraging their “followers” to engage in online and/or offline political activity? I collected Facebook and Twitter data from ten environmental organizations to assess the effectiveness of each posting. I hypothesize that the groups making direct calls for action via social media receive a greater response – beyond “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” – than the groups that do not. The data includes the number of …

The Bannock Street Project And Midterm Voting, Sean Murphy

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The Bannock Street Project was an effort by the Democratic Party during the 2014 congressional elections, to offset the Midterm Dilemma. The Midterm Dilemma is the focus of many theories trying to assess why the president's party tends to do poorly during the midterms. The Bannock Street project failed and as a result the Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2014. I attempt to discover why the Democrat's project failed, and if its failure can be attributed to either The Surge and Decline Theory or The Negative Voting Theory. I use 2014 Pew Center election data to analyze the …

The Cyber-Industrial Complex, Connor O’Malley

Political Science Theses and Capstones

When Edward Snowden released a massive trove of classified files from the National Security Agency, the world became aware of numerous global surveillance systems. As Snowden hoped, a global dialogue began concerning surveillance, privacy, and government transparency. While there was a lively discourse surrounding the leak and Snowden, another story was missed. Snowden was not an employee of the NSA; rather he was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private contractor maintaining computer systems for the NSA. The deeper story here is the emerging relationship between government agencies and technology companies. This paper discusses the theory of iron triangles …

Ad Hoc American Studies: Michigan And The Hidden History Of A Movement, Alexander I. Olson, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay uses the history of the American Culture program at the University of Michigan as an occasion for rethinking the early years of American Studies more generally. Our archival research has found that the program was founded in 1935—seventeen years earlier than previously thought—making it the oldest American Studies degree program in the world. These forgotten years challenge conventional genealogies tracing the field’s origins to the “myth and symbol” school at Harvard. Instead, Michigan’s history reveals a deep engagement with interdisciplinary movements in the 1930s that shared an interest in critiquing American democracy, particularly human ecology, institutionalist economics, and …

Morality And Pleasure In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Sarah Bonney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In “Morality and Pleasure in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” I examine how representations of pleasure in O’Brien’s novel indicate how the soldiers establish a new code of morality during their military service in Vietnam. Although civilians live with a binary understanding of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, the soldiers must commit immoral acts in order to serve honorably, thereby conflicting with this previous understanding. Western ideology asserts that pleasure accompanies moral behavior; because the soldiers perform violent acts, they must ascertain a new understanding of morality in order to continue to feel pleasure throughout and in spite of …

The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …

The Pastor's Theology Of Uncertainty In Lila, Ben Lehnardt

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Marillynne Robinson’s most recent novel Lila depicts a preacher, John Ames, whose personal theology is studded with uncertainty. Rather than being a weakness to his faith, however, his insecurity is actually his greatest strength. This unusual theological trait becomes especially applicable when placed in the context of the philosophical struggle between scientific positivism and humanistic reasoning. This article explores the nuances of Ames’ theology of uncertainty and expands its philosophical importance in a greater context.

A Tourist Performance: Redefining The Tourist Attraction, Brandy Lee Kinkade

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to examine the intersection of tourism and memoirs in the United States specifically how specific travel memoirs function as tourist attractions. This investigation employs performer-centered analysis as a method of inquiry in order to gain insight on tourist experience as well as concepts of travel, imagination and embodiment. The paper also employs MacCannell’s Semiotics of Attraction as a framework to illustrate the presence of the following categories: tourist, sight, and marker. The presence and the relationships established between these categories establish Into Thin Air and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-eight Days on the John Muir Trail …

To Utopianize The Mundane: Sound And Image In Country Musicals, Siyuan Ma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider music, songs, and dance performance as utopian signifiers for cinema, but few has entered the utopian discourse of country musicals, a small genre of cinema usually known as country music films. By closely scrutinizing Pure Country (1992), this thesis aims to reveal how country music—as music numbers and as background cues— integrate and connect the fragmented on-screen world for the country musicals so as to offer audiences a fullness of utopian experience, and how this utopian effect are culturally significant for American audiences due to country music’s unique mechanism of constructing utopia and nostalgia in its past-orientations, sentimentalities, …

Constructing The West: The Hired Hand And Mccabe & Mrs. Miller And The Challenge Of Public Space, Eric Ward Ross

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Western has been an important and iconic part of American culture since the opening of the frontier. However, very few scholars have looked closely at the way the genre constructs the past through public and private spaces like frontier towns and settlements.

The 1971 films, The Hired Hand and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are two texts that revitalized, and in the process revised, the Western genre in the early 1970s. My paper examines the ways in which conflicts between public and private spaces in the films reflect the social and cultural conflicts in America at the time. Both films …

Oral History Of Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. (Part 1 Of 2), Eddie Lee Webster Jr., Chet Bush

Oral History Interviews

Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. is a resident of Marks, MS in Quitman County who participated in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.