Digital Commons Network^™

Human Sacrifice And Propaganda In Popular Media: More Than Morbid Curiosity, Jason Tatlock

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Representations of human sacrifice, whether based upon real or fictitious events, powerfully demonstrate societal norms and fascinations related to the acceptability of slaying humans for religious or national interests, particularly given the divisive and bloody nature of the topic. Readers of eye-witness accounts, newspaper reports, and historical narratives, and viewers of cinematic productions, war posters, and political cartoons come face to face with the beliefs and agendas of the creators of popular media. Such sources represent the slaying of victims in sacred rituals, as individuals attempt to demarcate societal boundaries along the etic/ emic spectrum, be they commentaries on their …

Social Justice From The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling As Human Rights Activist, Hugh A. D. Spencer

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Rod Serling achieved critical acclaim in the First Golden Age of Television writing realist teleplays that express a strong moral sense and social consciousness. With the decline of anthology drama at the close of the 1950s, Serling created The Twilight Zone, which would become a forum for telling relevant stories while circumventing commercial and bureaucratic interference. As a means of exploring Serling’s use of drama as a tool for social justice, this paper compares themes from The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery with charter and constitutional statements of human rights. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is …

Eastern Imaginaries, Erika Quinn

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Orientalist tropes shaped Western ideas about the East in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through travelogues and fiction, and have persisted into the twenty-first. One central set -piece of these stereotypes is the imaginary Eastern European country, “Ruritania.” The advantages and drawbacks of such an imagined place are explored more thoroughly through two recent pieces of pop culture, Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, and China Miéville’s novel The City and the City. While Anderson’s film entertains and sustains Orientalist stereotypes, Miéville’s novel demands the reader go deeper to empathize with characters and grapple with key issues about …

Reflection: The Twenty-Line Trap? Shakespeare Enacted By Young Women, Shannon Reed

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Professional actors assemble a toolkit of monologues with an obligatory “Shakespearean monologue” of around 20 lines. But female actors are at a disadvantage, with less than 150 women in a repertoire of over 1,100 characters in Shakespeare’s 37 or more plays. Young female actors (18-22 years old) are even more at a loss, if the powerful and complex older female roles are removed, leaving only a few dozen appropriate speeches. What effect does this limited canon have on such actors? Here, I reflect upon my own participant observer experience as a young woman actor, who received the bulk of my …

Jewish Worship, Music, And Technology During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Jeffrey A. Summit

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Jewish worship and considers a range of worshippers’ reactions to livestreamed and Zoom prayer services. Focusing on the Jewish Emergent Network, innovative communities who are known for cultivating vibrant, participatory music in worship, leaders discuss the challenges of not being able to sing together online, the Jewish legal ramifications of using technology on the Sabbath and the on-going changes they believe could occur as virtual worship returns to in-person prayer. These leaders also discuss surprisingly positive developments in online prayer, as congregants deepened interpersonal relationships in discussion breakout rooms, discovered …

Archetypal Energies And Global Mental Health, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

As a keynote speaker at the Global Mental Health Conference 2024, held at Sophia University, Costa Mesa, CA, in-person and virtually, August 16-18, 2024, my topic was "Archetypal Energies As A Framework for Self-Empowerment and Well Being". The theme of this 2024 global conference was: Enlightened Minds, Compassionate Hearts, and Embodied Wisdom. To supplement my keynote address, I wrote this blog article titled "Archetypal Energies and Global Mental Health".

Place And Placelessness: An Ecocritical Approach Towards The Mountain Imagery In Country Music, Siyuan Ma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing upon cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s frame of place and placelessness, this ecocritical project explores how the mountain landscapes serve to construct regional, national, cultural, spiritual, religious, even racialized identities in various human societies. Using the U.S. country music as a primary example, I argue that what country music fundamentally draws from the imagery of the Appalachian Mountains is not the Anglo-Saxon ballad music or pastoral lifestyle of/from the mountains, but the powerful sense of place and placelessness (arguably only) the mountainous scenes are capable to provoke. This exploration serves to illuminate the commonalties between humanities of different cultures and …

The Memory-Keeping Daughter: Exploring Object Stories And Family Legacies From America's Modern Wars, Susan R. Grayzel

History Faculty Publications

This essay demonstrates how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families as keepers of memory, and it especially explores the role of daughters of military participants in preserving the artifacts of their veteran fathers. Using several case studies from a recent public history project collecting objects and object stories in the American southwest, it argues that a focus on daughters as caretakers of family military history offers a new way to engage with descendants' histories by showing how the work of such women can contribute to our understanding of modern war and its legacies.

Representations Of Violence Against Native American Women, Christine York

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

It is the aim of this study to provide detailed attention to the representation of violence against Native American women throughout American films and literature. Native American women have been persecuted against since the times of colonization; however, there has been a recent uptake in this crime. This crime has been seen throughout many forms of art, but has not often been a focal point to these artforms. In order to argue that the violence these women experience needs to be central to the texts they are seen in, a comparison between three different texts is imperative. These texts are …

Mother Machines: Deified Domesticity And American Misogyny In Ira Levin’S The Stepford Wives, Emmaline R. Williams

Student Theses and Dissertations

Despite an increased awareness of human rights issues and more interest in intersectional feminist practices in post-postmodern culture, the imprint of the repressed housewife lingers. My research for this work is driven by two central questions: What themes connect the emergence of this image in nineteenth century literature and art to the current social conception of women? What role do men play in maintaining these conceptions and how do they benefit? As such, this thesis examines the last 150 years of women’s social progress and regress. In this analysis centered on Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives, I seek to …

Vitalidad Etnolingüística Del Español En Lincoln, Nebraska: Actitudes Y Creencias Lingüísticas De Un Grupo De Hispanohablantes, Josefa M. Samper Suárez

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation investigates the perceptions of a group of Latinx Spanish speakers regarding the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Spanish language in Lincoln, Nebraska. The goal was to analyze their linguistic attitudes toward the Spanish language in several contexts and to explore the communicative, social, economic, and religious motivations for using or not using Spanish in the city. Additionally, this study examined how speakers conceptualize the relationship between language and ethnicity. Data was collected through sociolinguistic interviews from a sample of twenty-one native Spanish speakers, from three generations. Participants were recruited through a snowball sampling technique. The results indicate that participants …

Lost But Not Found: Southern Appalachia, Migration Patterns, And Culinary Tourism, Ashli Q. Stokes, Wendy Atkins-Sayre

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Despite growing acknowledgement of the variety of cultures that developed Southern Appalachia’s cuisine, some popular food writing continues to highlight the so-called insular nature of its food, drink, and culinary festivals. Regional tourists, especially those visiting its Blue Ridge or Smoky mountains, also remain likely to experience a delimited, often problematic Scots-Irish or white-European pioneer past, including when they eat and drink. Billboards advertise the outlaw Hatfield and McCoy Dinner Show, visitors choose from moonshine tastings in dilapidated looking but new distilleries, and diners enjoy gourmet biscuits alongside gravy “flights” at trendy restaurants in Asheville, North Carolina. Appalachian Studies and …

Forbidden Fruit: Mary Cassatt’S Mural Of “Modern Woman” At The World’S Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893, Tricia Cusack

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper considers a large mural of “The Modern Woman” painted in France by the American artist Mary Cassatt for the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It focuses in particular on the large central panel of the mural titled Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science that depicts women and girls apple-picking. Cassatt’s mural drew on various traditions and myths. Apple harvesting was a common sight in America. Cassatt’s title though points to the story of Eve and forbidden fruit, in which Eve seeks knowledge, but is severely punished for it. Cassatt …

Shut Up And Dribble: The Political Contradictions Of Black Masculinity In Sports, Isaiah Rogers

Master's Theses

"Shut Up and Dribble: The Political Contradictions of Black Masculinity in Sports" is a comprehensive analysis of literature and case studies that explore the regulation and representation of the black masculine body within sports. This thesis investigates three primary themes—sport, protest, and black masculinity—and seeks to uncover the evolution of various black masculine figures and their endeavors toward racial inclusivity. By analyzing sports literature, this work examines the experiences of five significant black athletes, including Jack Johnson, Ron Artest, and Colin Kaepernick, to illustrate how sports environments police the black body. Additionally, this thesis emphasizes two archetypes of black masculinity: …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Numerical Variations In The Thoracic And Lumbar Vertebrae Within The John A. Williams Skeletal Collection, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, Nc (Usa), Leanna Annette Sanford

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

This research is on how human variation can lead to the identification of remains based on skeletal variation. The data were collected by performing a morphoscopic trait study of the John A. Williams (J.A.W.) Documented Human Skeletal Collection at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC (USA). Morphoscopic traits are nonmetric traits, visually identified using the knowledge of osteology. The study was performed to study variation of the vertebral column, specifically focusing on morphoscopic traits of the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. The focus of this research is centralized on the presence of numerical variations in the vertebral column such as eleven …

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Charge The Cockpit Or Die: An Anatomy Of Fear-Driven Political Rhetoric In American Conservatism, Daniel Hostetter

Senior Honors Theses

Subthreshold negative emotions have superseded conscious reason as the initial and strongest motivators of political behavior. Political neuroscience uses the concepts of negativity bias and terror management theory to explore why fear-driven rhetoric plays such an outsized role in determining human political actions. These mechanisms of human anthropology are explored by competing explanations from biblical and evolutionary scholars who attempt to understand their contribution to human vulnerabilities to fear. When these mechanisms are observed in fear-driven political rhetoric, three common characteristics emerge: exaggerated threat, tribal combat, and religious apocalypse, which provide a new framework for explaining how modern populist leaders …

Georgia's Deportation Of Creeks And Cherokees: A Prelude To The Trail Of Tears, Sean Ahearn '24

History & Classics Student Scholarship

Sean Ahearn ’24, History major
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Edward Andrews, History and Classics

Strategic Plan For The Flannery O'Connor Institute For The Humanities, Dan Lavery

Graduate Research Showcase

Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925-1963) is the most prestigious alumna of Georgia College and State University (GCSU). On March 25, 2025, GCSU will celebrate the Centenary of her birth. In the period leading up to that time there are many activities and events to commemorate this significant occasion. One of the most significant is the renaming of the now Andalusia Institute at GCSU to the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities with a new mission, vision and goals. My proposed Capstone Project is to create a new strategic plan for the rebranded Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities so that it …

The Breakbeat Poets: Translocal Placemaking In The Contemporary Midwestern Lyric, Andy Oler

Publications

In the introduction to the Haymarket Books collection The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), co-editor Kevin Coval asserts that the anthologized poems are not simply influenced by hip-hop; “these poems are hip-hop.”¹ The anthology’s focus on a genre, a cultural phenomenon, might seem like an odd fit for a special issue on placemaking. Its national frame might seem too expansive for the study of regionalism (though there is a history, established by James Shortridge, of conflating the Midwest with the nation).² But The BreakBeat Poets is also attentive to more precise versions …

Hidden In The Shadows Of Florida's Seminole History: Charlotte L. Conrad, The First United States Indian Service Field Nurse From 1934 To 1946, Christine Ardalan

Florida Historical Quarterly

On August 31, 1934, three months after the Bureau ofIndian Affairs (BIA) assigned Charlotte Lillian Conrad (1892-1980) to become the first Indian Service Field Nurse for the Seminoles of Florida, she typed up the report to her federal employer vividly illustrating her introduction to her public health work. Her narrative "A Novice Penetrates the Glades," captured her first battle within the unique location to seive the indigenous people at that time known as the "Florida Seminoles" but consisting of two linguistically diverse groups of Creek speakers and Mikasuki speakers. On this occasion Conrad's journey to reach an ill man of …

Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol 100, No. 4, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Hidden in the Shadows of Florida's Seminole History: Charlotte L. Conrad, the First United States Indian Service Field Nurse from 1934 to 1946 by Christine Ardalan
"Orange Lake Village (Pinellas County) and the Origins of the "Florida Retirement Village" by Anna Verner Andrzejewski
Rock You Like a Hurricane: A State of the Field in Hurricane Historiography by Ian Seavey
Book Reviews
End Notes
Florida History in Publications
Cumulative Index for Volume 100

Newley Discovered Documents (May-August 1898) Of An American Volunteer Cavalry's Cuban Incursion And The Battle Of Tayacoba (Cuba) In The Spanish-American War, Paul Michael Taylor

Florida Historical Quarterly

This article presents the handwritten correspondence and transcriptions of nine previously unpublished letters to his family by William Louis Abbott (1860-1936), written from May to August of 1898 during his time as a volunteer in the exclusive "irregular" cavalry of volunteers who assembled in Tampa to battle the Spanish during the Spanish-American War. These letters comprise a substantive addition to the corpus of primary data on key historical figures in this Tampa-based effort to aid the Cuban insurgency as part of the Spanish-American War, and also contain first-hand accounts of conditions at Tampa, Florida, where U.S. military soldiers and irregular …

Remembering An Indigenous South: Regional Identity, Vero Beach, And Settler Tourism, Kristalyn Marie Shefveland

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the early twentieth century, city boosters in Vero Beach concocted a mythical tale of its founding that reimagined the region as devoid of Indigenous inhabitants, recently inhabited, dripping with colonial Spanish lore, and otherwise thoroughly transformed by the arrival of white European settlers. Town planners, promoters, and historical societies collectively sold the community with simple stories that obfuscate Vero's, and Florida's, more complex and inclusive history. Despite the presence of Seminoles in the region and extensive physical evidence for the region's long history of Indigenous occupation, the Indian River Farms Company and city boosters Herman J. Zeuch, Waldo Sexton, …

Charting A Path Toward An Indigenous History Of Florida, Denise I. Bossy

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1743, with the naive belief that the Calusas were finally interested in Catholic conversion, two Jesuit missionaries traveled to South Florida from Havana, Cuba. For decades Europeans described the region-in documents and on maps-as all but devoid of human life and, in particular, its Indigenous populations as being virtually extinct. Instead, the Jesuits discovered that South Florida was very much still under Indigenous control. A number of distinct Native confederacies-including one that consisted of Calusas, Bocarratons, and "Key" Indians and another of what one Spaniard called Maymies, Santaluzos, and Mayacas-exerted not only territorial control but also control over the …

Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol 100, No. 1, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Amateur Minstrel Shows And Blackface Amusements At The University Of Florida In The Jim Crow Era, Myles Sullivan

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the spring of 1914, the University of Florida's (UF) studentrun newspaper, The Florida Alligator, heralded "one of the biggest attractions of the spring season" with the front page headline "Heah Dey Kum! Dat Minstrel Show." As a theatrical performance style that had gained widespread popularity in the United States in the early 1800s, minstrel shows were often delivered with this imagined faux speech of rural African Americans. Its defining feature was culturally deemed white individuals "blacking up" their faces with burnt cork in visually cued racial caricatures acted out in music, song, and dance. Indeed, when subsequently reviewing the …

The History Of The Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (Minwr): A Partnership Of Rockets And Wildlife, Charles Venuto

Florida Historical Quarterly

The Christmas season is associated with the creation of many lists such as gifts, groceries and holiday cards. But there is another list citizen scientists assemble this time of year as well. The National Audubon Society (NAS) Christmas Bird Count (CBC), originally established to counter what had turned into an annual Christmas day bird slaughter, began in 1900 and look place at 25 different sites, primarily in the northeast United States although California and the Midwest were also represented.

John Grattan Gamble's Mother And Sisters: Antebellum Aristrocrats And Their Flight From Successful Women, John T. Foster

Florida Historical Quarterly

There were prominent women in Antebellum Richmond whose lives resemble women of today. Catherine Grattan Gamble and her daughter, Elizabeth Gamble Wirt, participated in their husbands' careers and sought places of equality with their spouses long before such behavior became common. Their lives are a dramatic departure from images of the Old South and the heritage claimed by relatives who became prominent in Middle Florida.