Cultural History Commons^™

Sport, Kul’Turnost, And Physical Culture In The Khrushchev Era Soviet Union, 1953-1964, James Henry Jennings

All Master's Theses

Sport served many purposes in the Soviet Union, as it has in most modern societies. This study examines the relationship between state-sponsored imperatives for citizens to engage in sport and exercise and cultural norms in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev years, 1953-1964. It also examines the attempted creation of a class of people who exhibited proletarian engagement with work, but also possessed bourgeois cultural tastes. A variety of visual and text-based primary sources from Russian-language magazines and poster campaigns were analyzed for their tone, content, and cultural signifiers. The sources yielded a view of Soviet society in which the …

Transformation Of The Relationship Between Neighborhood & Sociality Space And Land Use In Tripoli Lebanon, Noha Kassab

Journal of Urban Culture Research

Prior to the technological breakthroughs of the past two decades, the relationship between neighborhood and sociality had long remained relatively stable. However, Social media and technological innovations have occasioned changes in both lifestyles and urban forms. This research takes a social perspective to analyze the urban space of the city of Tripoli across three main stages. Tripoli has been chosen because the city includes a variety of urban structures and a variety of lifestyles. This study investigates how space affects culture and culture affects spaces in urban design. First, I present three parts of Tripoli’s urban fabric, then provide an …

Hindu Music In Bangkok : The Om Uma Devi Shiva Band, Kumkom Pornprasit

Journal of Urban Culture Research

This research focuses on the Om Uma Devi Shiva, a Hindu band in Bangkok, which was founded by a group of acquainted Hindu Indian musicians living in Thailand. The band of seven musicians earns a living by performing ritual music in Bangkok and other provinces. Ram Kumar acts as the band’s manager, instructor and song composer. The instruments utilized in the band are the dholak drum, tabla drum, harmonium and cymbals. The members of Om Uma Devi Shiva band learned their musical knowledge from their ancestors along with music gurus in India. In order to pass on this knowledge to …

Modern Meals And Mythology: The Los Angeles Culinary Field, Lindsay Megumi Chu

Pomona Senior Theses

Throughout history, food and our relationship with it has had numerous implications. Indeed, humans have consumed food not only as sustenance, but also as ritual and as a marker of status and social hierarchy. Though food and the dissemination of culinary practices have greatly diversified in the past century, food and the culinary methods required to make it remain relevant to our understanding of contemporary society, as popular culinary practices and trends reveal our preferences, beliefs, ideals, and aspirations. While there are numerous ways to analyze the cultural impact of food in the current era, this work focuses on food …

The Nana Yaa Asantewaa War: Analysis Of The Political Institutions Of The Asante During The War Of The Golden Stool And The Existing Narratives, Angela Danso Gyane

Senior Independent Study Theses

The War of the Golden Stool was the last in the Anglo-Asante Wars, where the Asante fought against the British colonial agenda. According to the Asante oral history, Nana Yaa Asantewaa was at the forefront of this war. She was the commander, but most of the literature to not reflect this oral history. Therefore, this study seeks to address two essential questions: how did gender dynamics in the Asante Kingdom's political system shape their Resistance against the British in 1900- 01? Moreover, how does the analysis of oral histories from the matrilineal culture of the Asante decenter Western narratives of …

The Birth Of Exceptionalism: American Newspaper Coverage In The Revolutionary Era, Benjamin R. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores American exceptionalism through the lens of American newspapers during the Revolutionary era. As American newspapers covered the revolutions in France, Haiti, and Latin America, unique narratives developed around controversial leaders like Thomas Paine, Toussaint Louverture, and Simón Bolívar. Although at first newspapers covered the events in France and Latin America with glee, their coverage gradually began to change over time, increasingly finding flaws large and small in revolutions other than their own—chaos and violence in France and Haiti, and failures in the realization of republicanism in Latin America. If Americans initially believed their revolution was responsible for …

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

The Jamaican Maroons Of The 17th And 18th Centuries: Survivalists Of The New World, Lance J. Parker Jr

Dissertations and Theses

The Jamaican Maroons, in the beginning, served as fugitive slaves avoiding captivity and liberating other enslaved people. To stop the Maroons from liberating other enslaved people, the British granting them freedom on the condition that they stop freeing slaves and even return runaways. Historians portray the Maroons as either freedom fighters or collaborators, sometimes even both. I argue that both narratives were a part of Maroon history, but I want to introduce them as survivalists. My research's significance is that I am exploring how the Maroons transitioned from freedom fighters to collaborators through notions of cultural identity. This project aims …

"Savage And Bloody Footsteps Through The Valley" : The Wyoming Massacre In The American Imagination, William R. Tharp

Theses and Dissertations

Along the banks of the Susquehanna River in early July 1778, a force of about 600 Loyalist and Native American raiders won a lopsided victory against 400 overwhelmed Patriot militiamen and regulars in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. While not well-known today, this battle—the Battle of Wyoming—had profound effects on the Revolutionary War and American culture and politics. Quite familiar to early Americans, this battle’s remembrance influenced the formation of national identity and informed Americans’ perceptions of their past and present over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From the beginning, however, Americans’ understanding of what occurred in …

Whose Line Is It Anyway? Rhetoric, Pathology, And The Jewish Race In Late Victorian England, Stephanie G. Pokras

Senior Independent Study Theses

This thesis examines how both late Victorian Anglo-Jews and Gentiles used rhetoric of race science and Jewish pathology to encode lines of difference, as well as the relationship between these discourses. My first chapter analyzes the role of Gentile discourse of disease and disability as the foundation of late Victorian anti-Semitism. My second chapter focuses on Jewish ‘expert’ engagement with race science. In this chapter, I argue that contrary to the dominant historical narrative, not only was the Jewish community engaged with race science, but their scholarly conversations were dynamic and diverse. Ideas about race and pathology became central to …

Helen Of Troy? A Reexamination Of Helen's Speech In The Iliad, Erin A. Robichaud

Senior Independent Study Theses

In most interpretations, Helen of Troy’s beauty makes her a vain, promiscuous, and dangerous woman. This is the Helen that patriarchal societies have written into existence and passed on to later generations, but it is not the Helen that appears in the Iliad. This thesis argues that Helen’s voice makes her a perceptive and powerful strategist. On different occasions, Helen adopts the speech patterns of various social groups represented in Homeric society in order to assume their identity. She builds a Trojan and a Greek persona as a means to protect herself from the trauma she experiences during the …

Women In British Window Display During The 1920s And 1930s, Kerry Meakin

Academic Articles

This paper examines the role of women in window display in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Window display in 1920s Britain was very much men’s work. Even when women were encouraged by those outside the profession, they were not necessarily encouraged by those within it. In 1923 the daily press and women’s journals devoted space to the debate on window dressing as an ideal and suitable profession for women. However, the editorial of Display, the official organ of the British Association of Display Men, disagreed. Display believed that women were unsuccessful at window dressing, justified by claiming they …

Toyon: Seven Decades Of Student Driven Publishing, Erika Andrews, Asha Galindo, Sarah Godlin

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

This book is meant to capture the history and spirit of Toyon literary journal from its origin in 1954 to the future that surely will exist beyond these pages. The aim of this book is to inform future Toyon staffers of the unique history of the publication, to stress the importance of maintaining archives, and to provide insight into the inner workings of book/magazine production over the last 60+ years.

This book is also a place to tell the story of a student-run publication from the perspective of the student. We, Erika and Asha, are two former Toyon staff members …

Strange Fruit: The Forgotten Lynchings Of Northwest Tennessee And Southwestern Kentucky, 1869-1931, Melinda Meador

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

In the 50 years between 1869 and 1918, 50 African Americans were lynched in a sparsely populated three-county area, far removed from the Cotton Belt and outside the ambit of the Tobacco Black Patch, along the state line in northwest Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. The characteristics of lynchings identified in previous studies have little relevance to the lynchings carried out in this three-county area where the African American population seldom exceeded twenty percent of the overall population. Unlike the Deep South, the practice appears not to have been driven by socio-economic and political factors but primarily by a lust for …

Issue No. 114: Spring 2021

La Crónica de Nuevo México

2 A Letter From the President

3 The Memory of their Magic: Dance Halls of the Rio Abajo and Beyond by Richard Melzer and Matt Baca

11 The 1899 Attempt to Form the New State of El Paso, USA by John E. Ramsay

18 Despedidas del Mundo: Death Songs by Robert J. Tórrez

30 HSNM Award Winners

32 New Books

Issue No. 115: Fall 2021

La Crónica de Nuevo México

2 A Letter From the President

3 Clyde Tingley and the Rerouting of Route 66 by Roger M. Zimmerman

7 Navajo Indian Scouts and Veterans' Pensions by John Lewis Taylor

13 The HSNM Symbols And Capt. Robert Wainwright by John B Ramsay and Michael Stevenson

17 Rudy Laumbach at 90, A Quintessential New Mexican by Doyle Daves

24 Juan Bautista Vigil y Alarid and the Occupation of New Mexico, 1846 by Robert J. Torrez

Shakespeare’S Deviation From His Predecessors: Aligning "Romeo And Juliet" With Italian Renaissance Marriage Culture, Tara Lynn Hohn

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Negro Leagues And College Football Playoff, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

Last week, the Commissioner of Baseball announced that from this point on the Negro Leagues that were operating between 1920 and 1948 would be “elevated” to “Major League status” by Major League Baseball. He added that “MLB is proud to highlight the contributions of the pioneers who played from 1920-1948.” The action was presented as a culmination of the centennial celebration of the founding of the Negro Leagues in 1920. The statistics from those leagues now become a part of the official records.

Religion And Rural Internationalism In The Nineteenth-Century Middle West: The Global Consciousness Of Rural Dutch Middle Westerners,1865–1901, Andrew Klumpp

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

This project asks: How did underlying religious worldviews inform the local, national, and global engagement of rural middle western Dutch communities in the nineteenth century, which are often characterized as isolated and provincial? More broadly, it queries, if the local, national, and global are united by this broad religious worldview, how does that transform our understandings of rural middle western ethnic enclaves and who contributed to the rich internationalism of the nineteenth century and from where?

Close examination of these rural middle western ethnic enclaves reveals not only an ambitious vision for building local institutions but also for extending Dutch …

How Palestinian Aid Organizations Adapt To The Possibility Of Further Annexation And Rights Abuses In The Wake Of "The Deal Of The Century", Nadia L. Wiggins

Capstone Collection

This research explores the question, “To what extent has the ‘Deal of the Century’ impacted Palestinian aid organizations, and how might it impact them in the future?” The significance of this question lies in the fact that the “Deal of the Century” claims to solve one of the longest and most complex conflicts, yet it has not been sufficiently analyzed from a Palestinian perspective nor a humanitarian perspective. Furthermore, by presenting scholarly critiques of the deal and aid worker’s concerns, my hope is that an American audience may be convinced of the complicity of our government in devising a failed …