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The Octofoil, April/May/June 2011, Ninth Infantry Division Association

The Octofoil

The Octofoil is the offical publication of the Ninth Infantry Division Association, Inc., an organization formed by the officers and men of the 9th Infantry Division in order to perpetuate the memory of fallen comrades, preserve the esprit de corps of the Division, promote peace and serve as an information bureau about the 9th Infantry Division. The Association is made up of 9th Infantry veterans from WWII and Vietnam, spouses, widows and lineal descendants.

The Question Of Slavery, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ursinus Magazine, Spring 2011, Wendy Greenberg, Kathryn Campbell, Ellen Labrecque, John E. F. Corson, David Reich, Kaitlyn Ott, John P. Spencer, Elisa Diprinzio

Ursinus Magazine, 1995–Present

Summer bridge program renamed for Dr. Robert Crigler 1956 • Dr. Fong receives national student life award • In tune with poet Robert Pinsky • Mobilizing for human rights • A rock legend's view on art and American culture • Ursinus in the news • New class joins the ranks of Ursinus alumni • Ursinus unites for aid to Japan • The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art upcoming exhibitions • The road to the Rhodes • A field for all seasons • Love is in the air • The new work of public education • Teach for America: …

White And Everything Else: Promotion The 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act, J. Casey Gilliam

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

During the early twentieth century, a movement influenced by the tenets of Social Darwinism took root in the United States. Members of the movement used its principles to “improve the American race” through selective breeding. The leaders of the movement adopted the name eugenics and the participants worked at strengthening genetics in two major ways: the sterilization of persons with so-called genetic defects and an effort to eliminate miscegenation. The Commonwealth of Virginia pursued both aspects of eugenics with great fervor. Under the leadership of Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia took a radical stance against racial amalgamation through legislation defining …

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

Networks Of Resistance : Black Virginians Remember Civil War Loyalties, Amanda Kleintop

Honors Theses

On June 22, 1877, William Charity explained his neighborhood’s Civil War loyalties to special commissioner Isaac Baldwin of the Southern Claims Commission (SCC): “The colored people were mostly all for the union.” Charity, a free black Virginian, recognized that “mostly” did not mean all. He went on to suggest: “some of them were blind.” As a self-identified Unionist, Charity had difficulty envisioning a black man who was not loyal to the Union cause and emancipation during the Civil War. Current debates, however, have seized on those black Virginians Charity called “blind,” taking the “mostly” Unionist majority for granted. Like Charity, …

The Death Of Jefferson Davis, Kasey J. Dell

History Theses & Dissertations

Although there are numerous studies of Jefferson Davis and countless more of the Civil War and its consequences, little work has been done to study what the death of Jefferson Davis revealed in terms of the United States' reunification. A political nonperson in the nation's capital, Davis was never fully pardoned and did not receive full rights of citizenship in his lifetime, giving him a unique position in society. Moreover, as the former president of the Confederacy, he was a polarizing figure whose death elicited strong emotions.

The response to Davis's death, almost twenty-five years after the Civil War ended, …

The Bound "Giddy Multitude": Runaway Indentured Servants Convicts And Slaves In Colonial Virginia, Nicole K. Dressler

History Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the social, political, and cultural significance of escaped indentured servants, convict servants, and slaves in colonial Virginia. By analyzing judicial records, letters, diaries, independent documents, and particularly, runaway advertisements, researchers can develop a clearer understanding of bondsmen's activities and identities while gaining valuable insight into the relationship between masters and laborers. As a key group of defiant laborers, runaway servants and slaves engaged in powerful acts of resistance that exposed the precarious nature of the colony's social order and added to planters' worries over labor management and colonial affairs, facilitating Virginia elite's participation in the movement for …

Review Of The Seminole Nation Of Oklahoma: A Legal History. By L. Susan Work. Foreword By Lindsay G. Robertson., Andrew K. Frank

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In this fascinating and well-documented account, L. Susan Work illustrates how a myriad of federal laws and legal rulings limited tribal self-government and otherwise sought to dissolve the modern Seminole Nation. Along the way, the former attorney general of the Seminole Nation and a member of the Choctaw Nation explores the legal peculiarities of Seminole history and the ways that the federal government frequently chose to homogenize the Five Tribes into a single legal standard. Dissolution, of course, did not occur, and Work carefully reconstructs the process by which the Seminole Nation capitalized on changes in federal policies and various …

A Memory Forgotten: Representation Of Women And The Washington D.C. Arsenal Monument, Melissa Sheets

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The Arsenal Monument in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C. commemorates the twenty-one women who died while working as cartridge makers in the Washington Arsenal on June 17th, 1864. It utilizes both traditional and idealized memorial imagery, represented by an allegorical figure of Grief who stands atop the Monument’s shaft, as well as a realistic representation of the Arsenal explosion carved into the base. Erected only a year after the incident, the Monument can be interpreted as commemorating all twenty-one women by the inclusion of their names on the sides of the base. From this listing of names and the …

Review Of The Frontier Newspapers And The Coverage Of The Plains Indian Wars By Hugh J. Reilly, Kyle Carsten Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a community of scholars, we need to ask more from books like this. Despite a topic ripe with fruitful and compelling potential, Reilly's approach to newspaper coverage of the Plains Indian Wars lacks rigor, nuance, and engagement with contemporary critical conversations.

Reilly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses eight "watershed events," from the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1891. Newspapers throughout the United States, indeed the world, reported on these conflicts. The coverage that appeared in national publications, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune …

Review Of Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective By Christy Stanlake, Julie Pearson-Little Thunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Understanding Native American drama requires a critical perspective often lacking in theater and academia. Christy Stanlake's book helps remedy this problem with a two-fold strategy. First, she identifies four Native-authored discourses generated in part by the study of American Indian fiction and poetry. Then she applies these discourses to readings from nine Native plays, showing how Native philosophies shape Native drama on the page and in performance. Stanlake explains that place, or "platiality," in western theater assumes new dimensions in Native drama, expressing complex relationships among character, language, and landscape. She examines the historical and political aspects of Native storytelling …

Review Of Playing In Shadows: Texas And Negro League Baseball By Rob Fink, Pellom Mcdaniels Iii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most underappreciated aspects of American life and history is that of black baseball. Shortly after the invention of the game, African American men began playing as an expression of their status as middle-class professionals. These particular black men had access to leisure time and the disposable income necessary to acquire the proper equipment and pay the necessary fees to participate in organized play. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved African American men who had been introduced to the game by Union soldiers used their ability to play the game as an expression of their independence, as well as a …

Review Of Clearing A Path: New Ways Of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art Edited By Carmen Robertson And Sherry Farrell Racette, Mary Longman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This exhibition catalogue celebrates the rich and diverse traditional art works made by Aboriginal and Metis artists living in Saskatchewan. These works reveal the seamless historical continuum of art practice on the Plains, from antler and bone carvings and porcupine quill work to beadwork in both oldstyle geometric and abstracted symbolism and to Metis floral designs.

Review Of The Death Of Meriwether Lewis: A Historical Crime Scene Investigation By James E. Starrs And Kira Gale, James J. Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Was the death of Meriwether Lewis at a backwoods inn on the Natchez Trace on October 11, 1809, suicide or murder? Those on the scene as well as those who knew him best, including Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, all pronounced it a suicide. But was it? Suicide stood as the accepted verdict until the 18408 when the report of the Lewis Monument Committee suggested it was murder. No evidence was given, but once the possibility was raised it grew in popularity and acceptance. Relying on evidence and emotion to reach a conclusion, the two sides in the suicide vs. …

Review Of Julius Seyler And The Blackfeet: An Impressionist At Glacier National Park By William E. Farr, Alexandra Ganser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century saw the conclusion of the Great Northern Railway (1893) and the birth of Glacier National Park in Montana (1910), two events so tightly interrelated through the family of railroad tycoon James J. Hill and his son Louis W. Hill that they would come to be automatically associated in the minds of many twentieth-century Americans-especially the prospective middle-class tourists from the metropolitan East who were following the Hills' promotional exhortation to "See America First" and experience a tamed version of western wilderness at Glacier Park: outdoor adventure and close contact with what …

Review Of Spirit Matters: Ron [Gyo-Zo] Spickett, Artist, Poet, Lay-Priest By Geoffrey Simmins, Leslie Dawn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most surveys of modernist art in the Canadian prairie provinces in the 1960s focus on the annual Emma Lake Workshops. These gatherings brought prominent avant-garde artists such as Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland to Saskatchewan and introduced the controversial American critic Clement Greenberg and his ideas on the development of purity, abstraction, and flatness in painting. Yet not all prairie artists who thought of themselves as modernist followed this path. Many of them have been excluded from published histories.

One such artist is Ron Spickett, the subject of a recent retrospective exhibition curated by Geoffrey Simmins. Simmins's complementary book covers …

Review Of Historic Photos Of Nebraska Text And Captions By Ted Stryker, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the salient features of Great Plains Quarterly is its inclusion of an extensive array of illustrations, maps, and photographs along with most articles. These images are meant to enhance their essays and enrich the reader's understanding of their contexts. Occasionally, pictures say so much that one wishes for more photographs and less text. That's not a weakness of Historic Photos of Nebraska, which contains 192 photographs in its 216 pages.

This is Turner Publishing's second book focused on the region's photographs; the first was Jeffrey Spencer's Historic Photos of Omaha (2007). Using images selected from the Boys …

Review Of Hancock's War: Conflict On The Southern Plains By William Y. Chalfant, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Major General Winfield Scott Hancock headed west from Fort Riley in late March of 1867, well prepared to engage the Cheyennes in western Kansas. Seven companies of infantry, eight of cavalry, and an artillery battery accompanied him. A man with political ambitions, he also brought the press along to publicize his efforts. Hancock had neither knowledge nor curiosity about the culture of the people he sought. He wanted to fight them. "I think it would be to our advantage to have these Indians refuse the demands I intend to make, a war with the Cheyennes would answer our purpose."

Traveling …

Review Of Native American Performance And Representation Edited By S. E. Wilmer, T. Christopher Aplin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Modern Native American artistic performances originated in the widespread North American ceremonial complexes that combined community-based oral tradition and musical practice with the visual performative arts. Growing out of a 2002 "Ritual and Performance" workshop hosted by editor S. E. Wilmer, Native American Performance and Representation illuminates the links that bind American and Canadian Indigenous traditions to their correlate modernities, their diverse ceremonial rituals to expressive artistic performances. This edited volume casts its net broadly, attempting to "review and assess the changing nature of Native performance strategies in a multicultural society." But it essentially focuses on post-1960s theatrical performances and …