American Studies Commons^™

Orphan Hermeneutics: Refashioning Archetypes In 19th-Century Epic Prose Fiction, John David Sieker

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Celebrated authors of the 19th century, Herman Melville and Charles Dickens are frequently critiqued within specifically national parameters, regarded as authors whose literary concerns reflect their respective countries and cultures. From that premise, there seems little if any connective thread to link Bleak House, the quintessential "stay-at-home" novel, and Moby-Dick, the epic, sea-faring adventure spanning nearly the entire globe. However, certain parallels between these novels in both form and content prove quite striking and reveal a transatlantic connection worthy of sustained critical attention. Both Melville and Dickens gesture to biblical and Classical antiquity in order to weave their respective narratives. …

The Fight For Equality: African American Seabees During World War Ii, Victoria Castillo

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis outlines the Navy’s movement towards black inclusion from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II through the lens of African American Seabees as well as the two integrated Seabee Battalions, 34^th and 80^th. While examining African American Seabees during World War II, one can see the injustices they were facing in the Navy. Seabees are one of the forgotten branches during World War II, but while examining the history of African Americans serving in the U.S. Navy and the Seabees, we start to understand how they were able to …

Bibliography, Kristi Branham

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Kristi Branham.

Strange Creature, Dagny Walton

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Strange Creature is an exploration and renovation of the myth of the American West. I extract elements from the known and recognizable myth of the West and create my own rendition, focusing in particular on themes of transformation and violence. Here in this black mirror world, animals speak out loud, cowboys face down a wildland with eyes, and two suns light up the lonely sky. There is no continuous narrative thread, but each piece is a vignette that takes place in a single shared world. This world is at once familiar and completely alien. I intend to surprise the viewer …

Re-Curation And Recognition: Addressing The Curation Crisis Through The Garnet Ghost Town, Jocelyn A. Palombo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As universities, federal curation facilities, public museums, and private collections struggle to create space on their shelves curators and archaeologists continuously evaluate what must continue to be stored and what needs to be deaccessioned. Utilizing a collection housed at the University of Montana I explore strategies for combating this issue. The collection originates from the Garnet Ghost Town and has been in the university’s care since its excavation. The objectives of this project are to obtain new information and incorporate innovative techniques to learn more about the collection itself and provide an updated analysis to one of Montana’s most complete …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

Internal Control Strategies To Limit Nonprofit Organization Fraud And Embezzlement Costs., Ralston K. Tracey

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractEmployee intent to commit fraud and embezzlement costs has the potential for adverse business outcomes. Nonprofit leaders are concerned with employee fraud and embezzlement costs as it is the main predictor of employee wrongdoing and increase the chances of their organization's failure. Grounded in fraud triangle theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore internal control strategies nonprofit leaders use to limit fraud and embezzlement costs. The participants were eight leaders from four nonprofit organizations in the Southeastern United States who successfully used strategies to prevent fraudulent financial losses in their organizations. Data were collected from semistructured …

Rural Black Masculinity And The Blues In Not Without Laughter, Andy Oler

Publications

In the 1930 novel Not without Laughter, Langston Hughes represents a wide range of Black experience in the Midwest – the “picturesque” alongside the horrific, the old-fashioned, as well as the modern.Hughes uses the novel’s setting, the small town of Stanton, Kansas, to determine some of the limits placed on protagonist Sandy Rodgers and his family, and their attempts to work through them.

Black Elk Faces East: Beb Vuyk, Cultural Translation, And John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay examines the work of the Dutch-Indonesian author Beb Vuyk in producing one of the first foreign-language translations of John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks: the 1964 Dutch edition Zwarte Eland spreekt. Published in the Netherlands, Vuyk’s translation connects the 1932 as-told-to autobiography of the Oglala Lakota heyoka Black Elk to the career of one of the most important Dutch-Indonesian authors after World War II, who had a prominent voice in debates on Indonesian decolonization. Linking the literary history of two different colonial contexts, Vuyk’s edition also connects Black Elk Speaks to a Cold War-era history of …

The Iconography Of An All-American Icon: Sailors, Homoeroticism, And Mid-Century Queer Cultural Politics, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

Through a new critical reading of the relevant images found in The Young Physique and Physique Pictorial, I explore how the sailor has become a homoerotic icon and how the sailor has become an object of gay fetishization and fantasy. Through media (in this instance: magazines), I focus on the time period between World War II through Gay Liberation in the 1970s, showing how the culture of the port cities of New York City and Los Angeles helped to create this homoerotic image of the sailor. Through a reading of three images that demonstrate the homoeroticism of sailor imagery from …

In Whitman's Wake, Kacie Megan Fodness

Dissertations and Theses

In Whitman’s Wake argues that nineteenth-century American writing includes a living invitation for its future readers. The kind of invitational writing prioritized in this work has not yet been fully accounted for in literary criticism. What’s more, even when we as readers have experienced such an invitation (one we feel is for us) we have not followed the feeling far enough. As a result, scholarship has largely neglected, and perhaps has consciously rejected, the intentional action of a writer that creates an encounter with their future reader. My project contributes to the ongoing critical conversation around the relationship of readers …

Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer …

Extranormal Sorcery In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Harleyquinn Wahl

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

The Portrayal Of Disability In 19th And 20th Century American Novels, Taylor Whittington

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the treatment of disabled characters by their family and communities in 19^th and 20^th - century American literature. The three works being evaluated are, The Monster (1898) by Stephen Crane, The Sound and The Fury (1928) by William Faulkner, and Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck. Although The Sound and The Fury and Of Mice and Men contain a white disabled character, The Monster details the disfiguration of an African American man. In The Monster, race exacerbates the community’s response to the disfigured Henry Johnson, compared to Lennie in Of Mice and Men, …

Nice Girls, Wild Women: The Call Of The American Wilderness And Feminine Rejection Of The American Dream, Alice Paige Dillard

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Reflecting the inherently patriarchal nature of the colonization that birthed America as a nation, the American landscape English settlers sought to subjugate became connotated with the female gender through English colonial writing. American westward expansion gained greater allure than the overt appeal of conquest and agrarian industry when her untamed western landscape was likened to images of an unspent virginal bride or the breast of a nurturing mother. Thomas Morton likens the colonies of Maryland and Virginia to the Biblical figures of Leah and Rachel in his poem “New English Canaan” to demonstrate their equal worth as English colonies, though …

Teaching Shante Curtelia Dominique Ophelia Brown Johnson : An Autoethnography Of A Black Male, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jazz Avant-Garde Artist, Michael Gayle

Dissertations

Leadership is part and parcel of societies and cultures. Leadership research can provide understanding that in turn provides knowledge, resources and growth opportunities for leaders. Leadership may be understood from a personal perspective as being bound up with identity. As I examine myself as a person and as a leader, I realize that several identities are prominent: Black male identity, Christian identity, jazz avant-garde artistic identity. Each of those identities have features that contribute to leadership.

The purpose of this study is to describe and explore leadership experiences of a Black male, from the Seventh-day Adventist Christian tradition who is …

Cultural Profile As Determinant Of Work Outcomes In A Collectivist Context, Edward Akoto, Emmanuel Owusu, Prince Gyimah, Augustine Acheampong, Veronica Adu-Brobbey

Journal of Global Awareness

Extant research evidence shows that interpersonal bonds—the bond to the immediate supervisor and work team—have an incremental predictive effect in western settings, neglecting emerging economic and cultural environments. This study, thus, examines the impact of cultural profiles on interpersonal bonds and related performance in an emerging market context. Specifically, the study examines the emergence of profiles based on micro-level psychological collectivism (individualism) and power distance orientations. The study further examines the effect of the emerged profiles on interpersonal bonds and the performance of activities related to the targets of the bonds. A survey questionnaire was used to collect data from …

Stories, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Roxanne Harde , Editor

Zea E-Books Collection

Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This …

A Higher Synthesis: The Problem Of The Monument And A Radical Dr. King, A. E. Thibus

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This paper attempts to tackle state revisionism of monumental figures in American history through the case of Martin Luther King Jr., a radical who has been reimagined and whitewashed through conservative efforts for political purposes. I use examples of other historically revised prominent figures by the state to demonstrate the phenomenon. King's case can be connected to Derrick Bell and Critical Race Theory (CRT), an obscure legal study and fellow victim of conservative revisionism. I explore the history of CRT and show how the backsliding of the United States government coincides with a factitious honoring of diversity through cleansed figures …

Football Can Save America, Francisco Attie

Capstones

Looking to cure the malaise of our day, I went to the football game, and, in the dying breaths of the match, found something much greater. https://medium.com/@Fran_Attie/football-can-save-america-2bb918f19a97