Intellectual History Commons^™

Samuel Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations And Its Allure For The Past Thirty Years, Michaela Munda

Departmental Honors Projects

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote, taught, and advised on United States defense and foreign policy for over fifty years. The 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is by far the most prominent of Huntington’s works. Though the work pertained to the world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union, his urging to understand factors that would set up the next stages of world conflict seem to hold truth throughout the last thirty years, and even in the present. Huntington argues that culture and identity will be at the forefront of global conflict. …

The State And War On Poverty: British Welfare Development And Its Legacies For Malawi, 1930s-1983, Gift Wasambo Kayira

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation documents the struggles and dilemmas that the Malawian state endured as it attempted to achieve its developmental goals from the 1930s to 1983. It contributes to histories of development by focusing on the interventions both the colonial and postcolonial states made to improve the living standards of African rural communities, the ideas which shaped state programs, and the behavior of the state which such interventions reveal. Scholars typically argue that state policy in Malawi was necessarily destructive and limited the economic progress of the local communities. The state deliberately pursued land, market, and other agricultural policies that constrained …

Tolerance, Prejudice, And The Ornament Of The World, Elijah Zane

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay…………………………....3

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes…….32

III. Textbook Critique………………………....38

IV. New Textbook Entry………………………42

V. Bibliography………………………………..52

"Black Colorism And White Racism: Discourse On The Politics Of White Supremacy, Black Equality, And Racial Identity, 1915-1930", Hannah Paige Mcdonald

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The following study unravels how Garveyite black nationalists, black integrationists, and Virginian white supremacists understood the race problem and its solution between 1915 and 1930. The racial identity and experiences of these three distinct groups, each informed how they understood the race problem and its solution. The divergent notions about the source of and solution to the race problem coalesced with colorism, sowing seeds of intraracial and interracial conflict and cooperation between the Garveyite black nationalists, black integrationists, and Virginian white supremacists as they navigated how to redress white supremacy and black equality. According to black integrationists and Garveyite black …

Kent Philpott And The Charismatic Roots Of Contemporary Conversion Therapy, Chris Babits

The Journal of Faith, Education, and Community

Second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution changed Americans’ relationship with not only sex and gender but also religion. In the late 1960s, Kent Philpott, a seminary student in San Francisco, experienced these changes first-hand. After feeling a calling to minister in Haight-Ashbury, Philpott increasingly devoted himself to one cause—remedying homosexual men and women. Philpott’s story, however, remains an underreported part of the history of contemporary conversion therapy. More specifically, Philpott’s charismatic beliefs have been lost in the expansive scholarship on sexual reorientation change therapies. The erasure of charismatic beliefs and healing practices from contemporary conversion therapy’s history only underscores the …

Has American Exceptionalism Made The United States An Outlier On The Global Academic Stage?, Michèle V. Cloonan

Charleston Library Conference

This paper considers whether American exceptionalism has reduced the standing of the United States in the world—and whether it has impacted our ability to remain innovative. The paper is based on my presentation on a panel on this theme at the Charleston Conference 2018. The panel considered key international social issues in which Americans have become outliers, such as climate change, health care, and gun control. It also focused on research in the cultural heritage sector. Here I expand on my remarks about the origins of exceptionalism and its possible impact on libraries, archives, and museums. This issue is not …

The Value Of Benevolence: Wealth, Philanthropy, And Police Power Before The Civil War, Thomas Ewing Barber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Americans before the Civil War (regardless of race, creed, class, or gender) were not strangers to the complexities involved with charitable giving, and the obligations they entailed. They, like other societies over time and space, sought charitable actions that enhanced corporate identity in public or private life, or as Benjamin Franklin later identified those gifts that enhanced the “public good.” Pursuit of the public good, however, resulted in a myriad of negative outcomes that constrained personal liberty through institutional confinement, degrading labor, and physical punishment. By the eve of the Civil War many Americans were just as divided about the …

Nationalism And Montesquieu’S Lettres Persanes, Tristan Murray

History in the Making

Nationalism as a subject has a long and convoluted history. Many historians and scholars of other fields have tried to explore and understand the arrival and evolution of nationalism. While the subject of how it arrived is under heavy debate, the clarity of its implications remains clear. Nationalism is a long standing and strong force in the modern world. This paper attempts to capture a specific moment in time when nationalism would be beginning its powerful ascent into the world. Through one of France’s most prominent intellectuals, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, this paper analyzes …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Men Set On Fire. Algernon Sidney & John Adams: Remodeling Anglo-American Republicanism, Deborah B. Charnoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation systematically examines the republican political ideas of the relatively unknown seventeenth-century English aristocratic Algernon Sidney, a passionate author and political activist who was executed for his ideas, and the famous but generally misunderstood eighteenth-century American revolutionary, Founder, and second President of the United States, John Adams. Republicanism is an entangled field of intellectual history in which historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and others have grappled for years, often without regard to the work of those in disciplines other than their own; yet we have consistently failed to take into account critical elements that inform the tradition, indeed, one …

Revolutionary Affinities: Democracy And Revolution In Hannah Arendt’S Portrait Of Rosa Luxemburg, Matthew P. Finck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is an exploration of Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Rosa Luxemburg. Beginning with a few minor discussions of Luxemburg in her first major work Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the socialist revolutionary’s place in the constellation of figures that appear in Arendt’s work grew over the course of her career. Arendt’s portrait of Luxemburg culminated in “A Heroine of Revolution,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books, and in Men in Dark Times (1968). Yet Arendt’s portrait of Luxemburg was notable for its excision of her revolutionary Marxism in the process of sculpting Luxemburg into …

Kabbala, Christians, And Jews: An Examination Of The Rise And Fall Of Peculiar Relationships That Developed Between Christian Elites And Jewish Scholars In Renaissance Italy, Glenda Leona Dannenfelser

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Italian Renaissance was to many of its contemporaries a golden age. It was unarguably a phenomenal time in European history. The sharing of intellectual ideas and innovations during this period permanently changed the world. Knowledge was spread across Europe at an unprecedented pace and intellectual minds were greatly expanded from both new and old discoveries. During this period, classical works were fortuitously unearthed and swiftly consumed for their hoary wisdom and guidance. Among these works were found ancient productions related to various occult ideas and practices such as alchemy and magic. A subset of the prominent group of Italian …

Like Father, Like Son: Modelling Masculinity For The Ethical Leadership Of President Theodore Roosevelt, Elizabeth Summerfield

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

President Theodore Roosevelt is frequently portrayed as a rugged, hypermasculine cowboy. But this depiction ignores the powerful modelling for masculine leadership provided by his father, Theodore Roosevelt senior. A closer examination of the private and public spheres that framed the latter’s life offers another route into understanding the ethical and rational motivations that characterised his progressive Presidency, not least in the area of natural resource management, where his policy innovations were both unprecedented and sustained over time. What emerges is a more complex portrait than the above stereotype, a leader who used his heart, head and experience to think and …

Review: Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling The East: The Enlightenment’S Encounter With Asia, James Mark Shields

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Palaces For The People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, And The Decline Of Civic Life, Eric Klinenberg, Georgia Westbrook

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Erotic Devotional Poetry: Resisting Neoplatonism In Protestant Christianity, Sarah M. Pruis

Honors Projects

A genre best known for its appearance in Eastern religions, erotic devotional poetry uses sensual imagery to access an experience of the divine. Historically, many Christian traditions, excluding the mystical ones, have pushed back against such literature, seeing it as an impure model that degrades divinity by association with the physical, especially in the specific physical ritual of sex. This stance is a hallmark of Protestant Christianity. The idea of a dichotomy and hierarchy between soul and body, though, comes not from theology but from the introduction theologians made between Western philosophy, particularly Platonic Dualism, and Christianity, which was then …

The Jeffersonian Huey Long: The Rise Of Southern Socialism, Ali Katherine Nabours

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that there existed in the South between the 1890s and World War II a leftist dissenting tradition which frequently included or had a good deal in common with Socialism. Southern Socialism, broadly defined as a shared set of leftist values among a diverse population, was unique to the region because it was a native-born movement established in response to the region’s unique social, labor, and economic conditions. Huey Long capitalized on this tradition in his rise to power. He went after the voters that political machines and large interests ignored. He echoed the complaints poor Southerners had …

“Of Nobler Song Than Mine”: Social Justice In The Life, Times, And Writings Of Fitz-James O'Brien, John P. Irish

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation will be a detailed study of the life, times, and writings of a mid-nineteenth century Irish-American writer, Fitz-James O’Brien. This will be the first full length study of O’Brien’s thought and writings. O’Brien was known, during his day, for two different types of writing: fiction of the supernatural and his writings on social justice, written in the emerging style of literary realism. It is his writings on social justice which this dissertation will explore. O’Brien’s writings on social justice covered three main topics: children, women, and animals. I look at how the historical context, O’Brien’s life, and his …

The Curious History Of Jeppsons Malört: From The Repeal Of Prohibition To Cult-Status In Chicago, Illinois, Andrew Pothier

The Exposition

This research project explores the curious ascension of Jeppson Malört, a brand of bäsk brännvin - Swedish style wormwood liquor - produced by the Carl Jeppson Company of Chicago, Illinois. This research considers Jeppsons From its earliest production and marketing, by Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to the United States during Prohibition as a legal medicinal beverage during prohibition, and later to its present-day cult-beverage status in Chicago. It is, however, Malörts relative regional-centric acclaim that raises the essential question of this research. First, how is it that Malört became a cultural staple - a Chicagoans right-of-passage beverage, so to …

The United States Print Media And Its War On Psychedelic Research In The 1960s, Jessica M. Bracco

The Exposition

The social climate of the 1960s denied the possible usefulness of psychedelics as drugs that could be considered therapeutic. The government attacked the research of psychedelics by demanding a stricter proof of efficacy, with the 1962 Kefauver Harris Amendments to FDA regulations, in order to conduct research on these drugs. Also, the government moved to classify these drugs as "Dangerous Drugs" making it a felony to manufacture, sell, possess, or consume these class of drugs. Furthermore, propaganda was spread to the American people, via the print media, claiming the proclivity of the drug for recreational use and the dangers this …