American Studies Commons^™

“Ever Since The Hanging Of Oliphant” Lynching And The Suppression Of Mob Violence In Topeka, Kansas, Brent M.S. Campney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

“The most remarkable scene ever enacted in the heart of a great city was witnessed in Topeka last night, in the final act of the tragedy on which the curtain rose with the sunrise yesterday,” reported the Topeka Daily Capital on June 5, 1889. “Twelve hours after the spirit of Alonzo T. Rodgers had taken its flight, his murderer was hung in the very center of the capital city, under the broad glare of the electric light and by a body of ‘vigilantes’ which in its composition was equalled by no other in all the history of the western world.” …

“How Badly Can Cattle And Land Sales Suffer From This?” Drought And Cattle Sickness On The Ja Ranch, 1910–1918, Matthew M. Day

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Timothy Dwight Hobart, general manager of the JA Ranch in northwestern Texas, had a problem on his hands. Trying to sell his cattle in 1918, he had helped transport hundreds of head of cattle within the ranch. However, J. W. Kent, who was with the JA Ranch for a substantial portion of its history to date, noticed that the cattle were not feeling well. Anthrax had poisoned the cattle, and it was spreading quickly. “We are burning the carcasses,” Hobart wrote, “and not leaving a stone unturned to stamp out the disease.” What was he to do?

In this study …

Zora Neale Hurston As Womanist, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Zora Neale Hurston is today recognized as an American and African American literary great. What Hurston has come to mean for black women writers such as Alice Walker can be gleaned from an assertion made by Walker in her canonical essay, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View” (1979), included in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Walker writes, “I became aware of my need of Zora Neale Hurston’s work some time before I knew her work existed” (83). Alice Walker is greatly responsible for the resurgence of interest in, and the creative and critical reassessment of, …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 34 (2013), Lynne Zacek Bassett, Hallie E. Bond, Cheryl Cheek, Sharon Fulton Pinka, Merikay Waldvogel, Sarah Bliss Wright

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Lynne Zacek Bassett

Adirondack Quilts and Comforters: A Regional Study by Hallie E. Bond

The "Cooish" Rescue of the Quilt in Harry Kelly's Cottage by Cheryl Cheek

Lowcountry Chintz: The Townsend/Pope Quilt Legacy by Sharon Fulton Pinka

Printed Panels for Chintz Quilts: Their Origin and Use by Merikay Waldvogel

Alabama Cotton and Bemis Bags: Pieced into Quilt History by Sarah Bliss Wright

Contributors

Index

Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence

Publications and Research

After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people’s will in the face of globalization—is also a border- …

Post-9/11 Sf Films: Terrorism, Warfare, And Dystopia, Jacob Herrmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 9/11 event has had a profound impact on all forms of contemporary narratives. After 9/11, the Bush Administration waged The War on Terror as a way to bring about the imperialist pride that the United States once maintained before Vietnam and to restore what Tom Englehardt refers to as “victory culture.” The United States government and its military have utilized the media to construct a national purpose since 9/11: a purpose largely understood as a mission to combat and eradicate terrorism as well as to police third world nations. This thesis examines post-9/11 SF films, such as The Dark …

Married, With Children And An Xbox: Compromise In Video Games Play, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In a home with two children under six, managing to find the time and the games that allow for play with a partner who has completely different tastes and capabilities produces compromises both inside and outside the game, as well as a hybrid form that spans the two. This last point highlights the fact that compromise remains a popularly studied topic in considerations of games, but only within very discrete boundaries that do not necessarily have anything to do with play or with players. Said another way, compromise appears in studies that foreground games as promoting aggression and …

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Actors, J. Michael Hunter

Faculty Publications

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Actors” provides brief profiles of over 80 Mormon actors and actresses, including some biographical information and career highlights. This chapter appears in the first volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.

Review Of Digital Detroit: Rhetoric And Space In The Age Of The Network, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In 1971, rogue Wayne State geographer William Bunge (placed on a federal list of dangerous intellectuals) published Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, a radical polemic about how everyday citizens of a Detroit ghetto could challenge oppression and become geographers of their own neighborhoods. Forty years later, Jeff Rice (formerly a Wayne State professor himself) revisits Detroit geography, but this time largely from his laptop (and without, I hope, the same kind of federal harassment). For while Bunge’s Fitzgerald and Jeff Rice’s Digital Detroit share similar terrain, as well as a love for the city in all its contradictions, …

Speaking Silence Fluently: Encouraging Student Understanding Of Counterhegemonic Strategies In African American Literature, Kathleen S. Decker

Masters Theses

This thesis suggests that while mainstream multicultural education claims to promote both diversity and equality, it fails to adequately address, let alone improve, the living conditions of minority students. It further suggests that when teachers help students read through the lenses of critical multiculturalism and critical whiteness studies, students can better see that both canonical and non-canonical African American authors deliberately employ nuanced strategies to resist white supremacy. Specifically through the use of purposeful and discreet silences, these authors serve to promote new and actively counterhegemonic ways of thinking in the classroom.

Each chapter pairs two texts--one canonical and one …

The End Of The Billy Goat Curse: Why Cubs Fans Should Let It Go, Jack Bales

Administrative / Professional Faculty Articles

The Friendly Confines have been decidedly unfriendly, lately. After Cubs owner Tom Ricketts unveiled his plans to renovate the 99-year-old Wrigley Field, few observers of the national pastime were surprised when die-hard fans objected. Ricketts in turn threatened to move the Cubs if his proposals were blocked, adding that “all we really need is to be able to run our business like a business and not a museum.”

Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …

How The Other Half Lives, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

This chapter from The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth describes the evolution of the culture that, today, is known as that of the Trump supporter, the red-state American culture descended from that of the Scots-Irish Borderers who came to the British colonies, primarily from Ulster Plantation, in the 18th century.

"Refuge Of The Frivolous And Thirsty": Pleasure Seeking And Barbarian Virtue In The U.S. Laboratory For Empire, Rachel Christine Steely

Open Access Theses

Scholars have frequently referred to Latin America, and to Cuba in particular, as a "laboratory for empire" for the United States in reference to the experimentation with military occupation, political intervention, and financial manipulation that American actors practiced in this region during the early twentieth century. This thesis stretches the laboratory motif to include pleasure seeking as an additional channel through which American actors exerted influence on Cuba and as a critical driving force of U.S. imperial projects. Americans made use of their Cuban "laboratory for pleasure" as an uncivilized space in which they could evade the moral rubric of …

Injurious Benevolence : How Washington Irving's "The Sketchbook" And "A Tour On The Prairies" Illuminates Nineteenth Century Us-Indian Policy, Ashley Tanzillo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The most common narratives of encounters with the indigenous race are from the early colonial period of American history. Indian relations were central to the struggle of early American settlers to tame the American wilderness and flourish as colonies under the Crown. After the Revolution, however, it seems that the Indian position in history has been thought of as a side story to the main event of American Independence. In this thesis I explore an alternate perspective, a reading of history which promotes the idea that after the American Revolution, the fate of the new nation was irrevocably defined by …

Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is concerned with how language mediates the relationship between self and other, and in particular, mythopoetic language. The political potential of myth has long been condemned, so much so that the word "myth" is now synonymous with "false." I argue that this is a result of what I term as heroic mythopoesis wherein the relationship between self and other is predicated on a violent separation that reinforces conceptions of identity. In contrast, in what I term as trans-relational mythopoesis this relationship is contingent on an embodied exposure between self and other that reciprocally translates and transforms conceptions of …

The Subject As Subjective : Benjamin Franklin's Biographers, Alex Starr-Baier

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This Thesis is a case study in biographical subjectivity. We are taught in primary school to trust biographies, as they are meant to objective. However, the truth is each biographer brings with them their own bias, and thus leaves with their own perception of their subject. I chose to focus on Benjamin Franklin because a good example of this phenomenon. Franklin's fascinating and full life brings with it a treasure trove of biographical speculation. Each Biographer, in constructing their own version of Franklin, manipulates the facts of Franklin's life. I traced Franklin's biographical legacy through time, from the 1800's to …

Literary Know-How : Restructuring Creative Writing And Literary Studies, Jonas Casey-Williams

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The emerging field of creative writing studies has provided new conceptions of creative writing's role within the English discipline. These conceptions focus on the relation of creative writing to composition studies, and there remains a need to reconsider creative writing's relation to literary studies.

Faulkner And "The Football", Jason Joseph Zerbe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine William Faulkner's career-long engagement with popular discourses surrounding collegiate football, and American sports more generally. Although Faulkner is often vieas a paragon of American high modernism, his development as a fiction writer during the "Gold Age of Sports" which spanned the 1920s fostered an attentiveness to popular sports writing that had a marked influence on several of his novels. More importantly, as much of writing about college football began to center on the South after the Southeastern Conference became the first collegiate organization to offer open athletic subsidies in 1935, Faulkner's concern with the sport becomes …

Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores four contemporary novels set in the American South and analyzes the understandings of American pasts, perceptions of current social and political crises, and projections of possible future paths they contain. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tell stories of disasters the natures of which reflect prominent anxieties concerning the twenty-first century position of the United States as a global power. The total destruction leaving behind an unrecognizable nation that McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic novel suggests the viewpoint that the degree to which the U.S. is indicted in the use of unethical practices …