American Studies Commons^™

Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards, Lucas Hardy

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation studies the many ways in which physical pain produces instances of personal piety in poems, narratives, and theological tracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Puritan New England. Specifically, the project revises the idea that spiritual regeneration happened only through Puritan contacts with established liturgical means and precast homiletics; it contends instead that conversion occurred because of bodily pain. Analyzing four canonical Puritan writers--Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards--Theologies of Pain demonstrates that texts of even the most historically mainstream Puritans contend with the disruptive force of pain. Anne Bradstreet sees pain as an …

Citizen Bunker: Archie Bunker As Working-Class Icon., Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Archie Bunker, the central character and patriarch of Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” (1971-1979) has been referred to as an “everyman” and an “angry-man prototype” with “hard had prejudice.” The name Archie Bunker itself has become synonymous with a blue-collar, racially chauvinistic mentality. The title of the show’s pilot and theme song, “Those Were the Days,” emphasized Archie’s dream of a simpler (though idealized) time, a world that he could understand and upon which he could exert some control. In 1970s America, Archie seemed to feel that the world was against him – economically, socially, politically and culturally – …

Nonviolent Bodies And The Experience Of Breakdown In The American Movement For Civil Rights, Danielle Andersen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the experience of personal breakdown in the American Civil Rights Movement. It proposes that breakdown was triggered in individuals by the practice of nonviolence and contends that breakdown precipitated the Movement's shift away from nonviolence toward the more self-protective tactic of black power.

The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine, Joshua Sean Lundy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the thematic role of families and the familial in the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Whereas a number of scholars have come at this matter from a strictly cultural perspective, this analysis utilizes an economic framework. Following the example set by Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, I attempt to formulate an understanding of the southern family not as an independent and singular social organism, but, rather, as a mechanism for the distribution of capital, firmly embedded within modern capitalism's expansive network of production, consumption, and exchange. My argument …

From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy, Joyce Garrett Butterworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Walker Percy emerged on the literary scene in 1961, the American landscape had begun to transform in new and dramatic ways. As more and more Americans moved from city centers to suburban developments, Percy found that, in more ways than one, the center would not hold. This American cultural transformation was well underway when Percy wrote The Moviegoer, perhaps the first novel from the American South to have as its subject matter a suburban dilemma. Challenging, as Percy does, traditional notions of southern place and community, this thesis seeks to discover in Percy's body of work whether the rise …

Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …

Place, Race, And Religion In The Local Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community And Movement Of Memphis, Tennessee, Amy Catherine Ulmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study observes the role of place in the local LGBT community and movement of Memphis, Tennessee. I gathered information from fifteen interviews, including LGBT Memphians, activists, preachers, and public figures to show what aspects of place have been the most significant in shaping the nature of the local movement, which has been growing since the early 2000s. I suggest that the conservatism, race, and religiosity of Memphis have played the most significant role. The first chapter demonstrates how LGBTs operate within a city that maintains pockets of openness, but remains largely LGBT-unfriendly according to interviewees. The second chapter observes …

The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction, Correna Catlett Merricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In many ways, the plantation defined the U.S. South because it was the primary site of production, and therefore income, for prominent southerners. In addition to being a site of production, the plantation created a complex series of connected relationships that was imagined by the plantocracy to be a large family unit. It functioned according to a specific hierarchical model that was primarily based on a patriarchal understanding of genealogy. Yet Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and "La Belle Zoraïde," Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, …

Athenaïse, Calixta, And Creole Constraints: An In Depth Look At Chopin's Portrayal Of Women, Nicole Reichert

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Infinite Intrusions: Solipsism And David Foster Wallace's Authorial Objectivity, Jacob Daniel Smith

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Influence Of Stress And Cytokinic Profiles On Cognitive Performance In Older Adults, Kerri S. Rawson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

With aging, changes in the immune system, makes cognitive performance, and the prevalence of stressors can lead to poorer overall functioning. Within the immune system, a balance should exist between cytokines regulating Th1 and Th2 immune responses; however, age-related declines in the endocrine and immune systems can disrupt this equilibrium. Several studies report higher levels of Th1 associated cytokines in inflammatory conditions of the brain, whereas fewer studies remark on Th2 associated cytokines and cognitive functioning. Declining cognitive abilities are a common concern that accompanies advancing age and some research has suggested the prevalence and impact of stressors lead …

Analysis And Optimization Of Broadband Measurement Cells For The Characterization Of Dielectric Polymer Films, Scott Skidmore

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current techniques and methodologies used in the field of material characterization are well documented and widely accepted as reliable and accurate. However, literature describing these techniques focuses on the algorithms used during material characterization; few studies have reposted on the design of, and the selection criteria for, the test fixtures themselves. This research focuses on the measurement cell with the goal of determining the sensitivity of the measurement cell to the addition of a thin film material.

Microstrip and coplanar waveguide were chosen for the analysis, which included three configurations of each transmission line geometry: a reference with no …

The Electronic Structure Of Biomolecular Self-Assembled Monolayers, Matthaeus Anton Wolak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The studies presented here address the characterization of the electronic structure of various self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) and tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP) SAMs and arrays, formed on gold substrates.

PNA is a promising alternative to DNA for bio-sensing applications, as well as for strategies for self-assembly based on nucleic acid hybridization. In recent years charge transfer through PNA molecules was a focus of research due to possible applications in self-assembled molecular circuits and molecular tools. In light of this research it is interesting to investigate the electronic structure of PNA interfaces to gold, a potential electrode material.

TPP …

Extraction Of Text Objects In Image And Video Documents, Jing Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popularity of digital image and video is increasing rapidly. To help users navigate libraries of image and video, Content Based Information Retrieval (CBIR) system that can automatically index image and video documents are needed. However, due to the semantic gap between low-level machine descriptors and high-level semantic descriptors, the existing CBIR systems are still far from perfect. Text embedded in multi-media data, as a well-defined model of concepts for humans' communication, contains much semantic information related to the content. This text information can provide a much truer form of content-based access to the image and video documents if it …

Up In Smoke: The Place Of The Modern American Cigarette, Hannah B. Grose

Student Publications

Since its discovery, the use of tobacco products has acted as a form of meditation, social engagement, and reprieve. In the era following the late 1950’s, designated “smoking areas,” whether sequestered informally by social constraints or formally by the law, have led to a culture of very “implaced” cigarette smoking. These have become places of escape, places of exile, and places of compromise. This paper explores what it means to belong, and not to belong, to these places, and the role of designated smoking areas in the formation of our culture.

How Mormons Became American, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A century ago, it was once a simple matter to assume a norm for American culture and situate the Mormon well outside it. Polygamy was likened to slavery in the nineteenth century (as the first Republican Party platform did in 1856). Brigham Young was compared to an Asian despot. Mormon women were victims in need of mythic frontier heroes like Captain Plum and Buffalo Bill to save them. Even Joseph Smith’s martyrdom could be seen as the penalty for his violation of the right to a free press. Mormonism made available to the playwrights of the Great American Saga the …

Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Robert Berry, research librarian for the social sciences at the Sacred Heart University Library, has written an essay about the role of the American Judiciary in interpreting laws of the United States government. The essay was written for the occasion of Constitution Day 2012 at Sacred Heart University.

The Continuing Exodus: The Synagogue And Jewish Urban Migration, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Catalog essay in Silent Witnesses: Migration Stories Through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned (Farmington Hills, MI, 2012) that deals with Jewish settlement and migration in American cities (especially New York, Boston and Cleveland) and the religious and community buildings erected and left behind in the process.

Television, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

One Time, One Place? Richard Wright And Eudora Welty's Shared Visual Politics In The Depression Era, Mallory Blasingame

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis questions the absence of critical comparative studies of Mississippi-born authors Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. It argues that, though the authors' writing has traditionally been understood as residing on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they share a political vision of the rural South and urban North in the Depression era that is established in their documentary works—Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and Welty's One Time, One Place (1971)—and extends into such fictional works as Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1936) and Native Son (1941) and Welty's "Moon Lake" (1949) and "Flowers for Marjorie" (1941). In chapter …