Social History Commons^™

Blackness And Nineteenth-Century Art In The Atlantic World, Rachel Hooper

Curatorial Publications

No abstract provided.

The Martyrdom Of Nadezhda Kurchenko: Soviet Hero Cults And The Spiritual Turn In Late Socialism, Steven E. Harris

History and American Studies Articles

This article argues that the spiritual turn in Soviet atheism under Brezhnev provided a meaningful solution to the problems of producing heroes when self-sacrificing martyrs were losing their appeal. To support this claim, I examine the story of Nadezhda Kurchenko, a nineteen-year-old flight attendant killed by two hijackers on an Aeroflot plane in October 1970. This article traces the heroic and spiritual dynamics of Kurchenko’s martyrdom through her funeral, hagiographies, iconic photograph, and sacred spaces. The spiritual turn enabled the authors of her story to free it from the shadows of wartime youth martyrs and ground it in the conservative …

“Off To Greek Camp”: A History And Examination Of Greek America And Its Adaptation Of American Summer Camp Culture, Julia J. Walsh

Honors Theses

Camps are one of the most distinct institutions of American childhood, offering children a place to socialize and explore their identities. Since the late 19th century, camps have been used to inspire religious, social, and ethnic identity. Extensive research has been done into some kinds of summer camps, this thesis attempts to add to this literature through analysis of Greek Orthodox Summer Camp programs run under the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (The Metropolis of Boston Camp and Ionian Village). This dissertation examines the role of the modern religious summer camp in building and maintaining Greek American and Greek Orthodox …

‘An Intriguing But Ambiguous Privilege’: Adventures In Franco-Irish Relations Through The Prism Of The Diplomatic Meal, Elaine Mahon

Books/Book Chapters

This essay discusses the welcome banquet held in February 1945 in honour of the newly appointed French diplomatic envoy to Ireland, Jean Rivière, hosted by Éamon de Valera at Iveagh House, the headquarters of the Irish Department of External Affairs. The banquet took place at a moment when ‘an intriguing but ambiguous privilege’ had been granted by Charles de Gaulle’s Provisional Government to Ireland as the only country permitted to retain its diplomatic representative to France in the post-liberation period. Following the fall of the Vichy regime and the liberation of France in August 1944, de Gaulle’s government de- manded …

Reconceptualizing Madness: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Autobiography And The Cultural Landscape Of Insanity, Gender, And The Illness Experience, Claire Paley

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Fermented Resistance: The Role Of Kimchi In Preserving Korean Identity Through Colonialism And Modernization, Francis M. Ferreira

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis began with a simple observation during my year abroad in Seoul: kimchi was everywhere. It appeared at every table, in every household, and soon, in every question I had about Korean identity. What started as a personal curiosity evolved into a deep historical inquiry into how this single dish — made of fermented cabbage, radish, and spices — came to represent the soul of a nation. This thesis traces kimchi’s journey from a humble survival food in agrarian Korea to a symbol of resistance during Japanese colonization, a tool for reclaiming identity after liberation, and ultimately, a globally …

Establishing The Narrative – A Comparative Analysis Of Nashville Newspaper Reporting During The Civil Rights Era, Katherine E. Cannon

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Public memory serves as the collective public consciousness – how a group of people remember a historical narrative and thus how they interpret and interact with their current environment. Journalism and news reporting plays a pivotal role in the creation of public memory. This study will analyze the differences in reporting between two Nashville-based newspapers, The Nashville Banner and The Tennessean, and how their reporting shaped public memory in Nashville. These publications are crucial to the Nashville community and how the public is informed. To properly conduct this research with narrow enough scope to get accurate results, this study will …

Healing Communities With Police Divestment: Seeking Abolition Through Transformative Reform And Community-Government Collaboration, Jessica E. Gillson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Concerns about the efficacy and sustainability of the U.S. carceral system have persisted throughout the country’s history, recently fueling renewed activism and bipartisan calls for reform. However, proposed solutions remain divisive. This thesis first defines the current status of our prison systems, then explores collaborative alternatives to incarceration and policing that support communities and break cycles of incarceration.

Focusing on partnerships among local governments, community organizations, justice-involved individuals, and law enforcement, this study examines holistic approaches to crime prevention, reentry, and reintegration. Using an interdisciplinary framework incorporating restorative justice, community resilience, and systems theory, it investigates how community-based strategies can …

“A True And Broad Sympathy:” Thomas Hughes, Medievalism, And Social Justice In The Nineteenth Century, Sarah E. Stapleton

Theses and Dissertations--History

Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), used medievalism to help solve social problems of the Nineteenth Century. This contravenes the traditional view of medievalism, especially Anglo-Saxonism, since others have used it to justify the subjugation of people of lower social status, namely the poor in England, enslaved African Americans in the United States, and Indians under British rule.

While the use of medievalism is veiled in Hughes’ work, the subtext of Tom Brown’s Schooldays demonstrated Hughes’ Anglo-Saxonism. Tom Brown and the intertextual material surrounding his narrative exhibit the characteristics of Anglo-Saxonism through cultural primitivism, the concept of allodial, …

Defining ‘Un-Americanism’ In Culture And Art: The Dies Committee’S Investigation Of The Federal Theatre Project, Matthew G. Summers

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) expansive definition of ‘Un-Americanism’ through the body’s 1938 investigation of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). The committee, then known as the Dies Committee after its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX), publicly presented the hearings as an attempt to root out communism in a deeply compromised government program. And indeed the FTP, an ambitious New Deal Program to provide work for unemployed professionals in the theatre, had an undoubtedly leftist bent. However, the hearings were consistently focused on the project's progressive stances on issues of race and gender, and effectively exposed the underlying …

Writing Back To Empire: Anticolonial Petitioning And Decolonisation In Postwar British West Africa, 1945–1960, Bright Alozie

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article reexamines petition writing as a strategic form of anticolonial resistance and negotiation in British West Africa between 1945 and 1960. Focusing on Nigeria and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), it argues that petitions – often regarded as apolitical or ineffective – were in fact deeply political texts through which colonised individuals asserted rights, challenged imperial authority, and participated in shaping decolonisation discourse. Drawing on new archival petitions, colonial correspondence, and administrative records, the study analyzes how a wide range of African actors – including trade unions, veterans, women’s organisations, and youth groups – appropriated colonial bureaucratic norms to …

Advocacy Across Divides: Attorney Aaron L. Buchsbaum In Savannah, Georgia, 1963-1969, Sydney Jolene Kelly

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the early life and career of Aaron Levy Buchsbaum, a Jewish lawyer from Savannah, Georgia. Buchsbaum's Jewish family upbringing, Southern childhood, and legal education all combined to mold him into an individual who used the profession to support those facing unjust treatment by the Savannah-Chatham County court system. By focusing on three of Buchsbaum's legal cases involving the Civil Rights Movement and his partnership with humanitarian organizations, this thesis contextualizes local conflicts in Savannah in the 1960s. Rather than safeguard the civil rights of all citizens, these cases demonstrate that the authorities, including judges, district attorneys, and …

Consumptive Femininity: (De)Constructions Of Gender And Colonization In Korean Diaspora Literature, Jack Kelly

Honors Program Theses

This paper explores how two authors with Korean heritage use similar metaphors to write about the same historical traumas. I engage close readings of two novels—Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Yu Miri’s The End of August—to interrogate how each author uses images of food/food preparation as well as images of sexual encounters to draw links between exploited bodies and exploited land. Ultimately, I find that the differences in these two authors’ approaches reflect their distance from modern centers of empire. This reminds us of the importance of having a diverse literary and historical canon that centers on authors who have …

“We Aren’T Dying Yet, But We’Re On The Hospital Bed.” An Analysis Of Scottish Culture And Desire For Independence, Emma Walker

Honors Papers and Posters

Scottish culture has long often been associated with barbaric clans and whiskey; however, there is much more to this culture than meets the eye. After centuries of oppression and pushback on expressing cultural aspects of Scottish identity post the Union of the Crowns in 1603, Scotland has now emerged as a leader in re-establishing its culture and protecting it as well. This paper will aim to analyze how Scotland's cultural pride over time has changed and how this uptick in pride has also led to a political movement for independence. I argue that the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, …

From The Battlefield To The Asylum: The Social Construction Of Disability In Italy, 1900 - 1950, Brandie Crisp Robb

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The Italian social construction of disability reflects a complex interplay between social, religious, political, and religious influences present during the first half of the twentieth century. While Western European and American disability discourse remained similar, those influences unique to Italy resulted in the formation of two distinct disability discourses during the early twentieth century: that of the heroic physically disabled veteran who sacrificed everything for the good of Italy, and the eugenically unfit Italian associated with dependency and uselessness. By combining a theoretical framework that includes critical disability theory with historical methodology, the following thesis demonstrates how the emerging disability …

Love Is Dead In The Restless West: Hippies, Manson, And California Culture, 1966-1970, Rebecca Allen

Scripps Senior Theses

Though an extreme aberration from most of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, Charles Manson’s ultimately murderous cult arguably represents something particular about American culture in the late sixties, in which youthful hostility towards the status quo sometimes grew radical, and in the case of the Manson Family cult, extremely violent. By the mid-sixties, more and more young people began to feel alienated by a culture they felt no longer embodied their larger aspirations, and as a result, were drawn to the emerging counterculture that embraced alternative lifestyles that frequently clashed with the traditional sensibilities of their parents’ generation. After …

Campesino World-Building: Stories Of Migration, Memory, And Care In The Tension Of The Colonial Frame, Chelsea Ríos Gómez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Campesinos, often reduced to the label of “farmworkers”, are too often seen only through the lens of their labor within profit-driven systems. This thesis disrupts that limited narrative by illuminating the rich, expansive nature of vivencias campesinas, ways of being that transcend capitalist measures of value. These vivencias are lived, embodied experiences rooted in campesino lifeways, encompassing cultural, spiritual, and relational practices that nurture and sustain life.

My research is guided by four central questions: (1) In what ways have campesinos in pixley resisted exploitative labor systems, and how can this resistance be understood as a form of care labor? …

Muharram, Milad And The Memons: The Commemoration Of Muharram And Celebration Of Milad Within The Memon Community, Ashkan Fayyaz

SSLA Culminating Experience

This thesis is a documentation of the Oral History of the commemoration of Muharram and celebration of Eid Milad-un-Nabi (ﷺ) within the Memon community residing in Karachi. The thesis traces a shift in scale from Muharram commemorations to Eid Milad-un-Nabi (ﷺ) celebrations. Using seven oral-history interviews from Kharadar and Hussainabad, it reconstructs the rituals affiliated with Muharram and Rabi-ul-Awal and analyses their meanings through hermeneutic phenomenology. It then analyzes transformation via Van Manen’s four lifeworld existentials: spatiality, corporeality, temporality and relationality. To complement the findings of this thesis, a historical analysis of Memon community’s practices in colonial Natal and colonial …

Infinite Finite: A View On Human Progression Through Emergent Generative Systems, Fatima Abbas

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary crises reveal an imbalance in human progression, prioritizing material advancement while neglecting ethical, compassionate, and spiritual dimensions. This thesis examines natural progression through the lens of emergence, where simple interactions produce complex outcomes. Analyzing natural patterns across different scales, from cosmic formations to neural interactions, underscores emergence's universal nature.

Within this context, Infinite Finite introduces a generative digital tool simulating emergence through iterative cycles of construction and deconstruction. Depicting a century of human progression informed by historical behaviors via simulated cellular interactions, the tool visually differentiates ethical from unethical progression. This is represented through ten data visualization tiles composed …

Hutchison Family Papers - Accession 19, Hutchison Family

Manuscript Collection

This collection is a valuable source on colonial life in the Carolinas, the southern antebellum plantation system, early relations with the Catawba Indians, post Civil War cotton manufacturing, especially in relation to the Rock Hill Cotton Mill established by Captain A. E. Hutchison, and the World War I era in Rock Hill. While the papers range from 1785 to 1968, the greatest part of the collection extends from the late 1780s to the early twentieth century. In addition to genealogical information, diaries, speeches, financial records, etc., located in a separate series, there are also included in the “General Correspondence and …