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"Troublesome Medicine Man": Representations Of The Sword Bearer Incident In Newspaper Coverage, Cara Sue Swaim

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

Newspaper coverage of Native Americans during the nineteenth century had an “artistic bias,” or a tendency to emphasize action, danger, and treachery as a part of the “Indian formula.” This meant that vast amounts of journalistic zeal was spent on instances of conflict and tension between tribes, within tribes, between tribes and white settlers, or between tribes and the U.S. military, while times of peace and instances of cooperation received miniscule amounts of attention. This was largely motivated by a desire to justify American western expansion and the need to “civilize” Native groups. This “Indian formula” was also applied in …

The Adirondack Frontier: Reclaiming A Vital Role In Shaping The Nation, Peter Nelson

Master's Theses

The traditional version of Adirondack history from the revolutionary period to the middle of the nineteenth century, which portrays the region as unexplored primeval wilderness, is nineteenth-century romantic mythology. It ignores thousands of years of Indigenous habitation and misrepresents early Euro-American activity in the region as well. In fact, from the earliest days of colonial exploration of North America until the middle of the 19th-Century, New York's Adirondack region was a dynamic American frontier, as important in shaping the destiny of the nation as the Northwest Territory or, later, the West. Activities in the Adirondack frontier contributed to the decimation …

The Hodgepodge Creation: Amalgamated Adaptation In Video Games, Tom Chen, Tom Chen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Amalgamated adaptation is a concept that involves blending multiple sources into a hodgepodge creation. This practice has become commonplace among game creators in recent years, yet it is neither readily covered nor explicitly mentioned in current video game scholarship. My previous research highlights the profound application of amalgamated adaptation to older texts, particularly myths and sacred texts from various cultures or communities. This method grants creators the autonomy to reinvent these texts in bold and extreme ways, achieved by melding borrowed ideas that complement and, at times, synergize with one another. I argue that single-source adaptations of myths, when reshaped …

Thompson’S Rifle Battalion: The Original Unit Of The Army Of The United Colonies (Now The United States Regular Army), John A. Bonin

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

©2025 John A. Bonin

Although 1775 is indisputably the birth year of the US Army, two events occurred on June 14 of that year to which the Army can credit its birthday. One is the adoption by the Continental Congress of the collective militia forces from several colonies outside Boston to form a Continental Army, of which Congress appointed George Washington the commander in chief on June 15, 1775. In addition, the US Regular Army officially dates its beginning to June 14, 1775, when the Second Continental Congress directed 10 companies of expert riflemen to be raised immediately in Pennsylvania, …

The Curse Of El Dorado: How The Californnia Gold Rush Shaped The History Of Hawai'i, Ernesto Coronado

Theses and Dissertations

In the discourse of Western historiography, we fail to account for the importance of the Hawai’ian Islands. American imperialism did not stop with the occupation of the Pacific Coast but continued into the Pacific. In the mid-nineteenth century, Hawai’i and its monarch, King Kamehameha III, stood at the center of a dispute between Britain, France, and the United States. King Kamehameha III used the California Gold Rush and Hawai’i’s location to his advantage to garner capital and prevent the imperial powers from annexing his kingdom. However, even he knew he could not stop the mass wave of Hawai’ians leaving the …

Repositioning North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato): The New Security Dilemma On Trans–Atlantic Relations Amid Shifting Global Geopolitics, Daniel C. George, Indra Alverdian

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

The shifting global geopolitics have led to a new security dilemma in Europe, especially in trans–Atlantic relations. NATO as the vanguard of the trans–Atlantic defense pact is faced with transitional conditions of non-conventional threats that return to conventional threats. Due to the shift in the new global order, these threats require a repositioning for NATO to counter the new security dilemma amidst shifting global geopolitics. By referring to the three asserted pillars–the return of conventional warfare on the European continent; a more assertive Russia in the European continent under Vladimir Putin; and the geopolitical of China's rise impacted trans–-Atlantic …

Cather, Silko, Hunt: Rethinking Prosperity Twentieth-Century Explorations Of Interiority, Materiality, And Transcendence, Aileen Montoya

Dissertations and Theses

• Interiority
• Materiality
• Transcendence
• Prosperity
• Modernism
• Subjectivity
• Narrative Identity
• Spiritual Landscapes

Operation Dumbo Drop: Cultural Memory, And Representations Of The Vietnam War In The 1990s, Sylvie Kromer

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1995, the film Operation Dumbo Drop was released by Walt Disney Pictures. This film, based on a true story of elephants being airlifted across Vietnam in 1968 by the American military, holds a unique position as a rare family-friendly comedy about the Vietnam War. As a reflection of 1990s-era cultural memory of the Vietnam War, the film rehistoricizes and sanitizes the war, following a similar trend in other pieces of media from the same era. Operation Dumbo Drop must be seen in this context and as a product of the moment in which it was made. In taking a …

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 …

The Great Wizarding Duel: Tolkien’S Possible Influence On Rowling, Anna Jarrell

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

Embracing The Unmanageable: The Critique Of The Everyday And The Postwar Condition In Wallace Stevens’ And Robert Duncan’S Works Circa 1950, Kazuma Morita

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

My thesis is designed as an investigation of the ethical and political implications of the everyday in postwar American poetry. While recent scholarship of everyday life studies has clarified the centrality of the everyday or the ordinary to modernism and postwar literature, it does not elaborate enough on the impact of the political condition on literary expressions of everyday life in post-1945 period. Given U.S. military’s infiltration into everyday life of people living inside and outside the country after World War II, it is an important task to spotlight the way American postwar poets tackled U.S. war culture through their …

The Vietnam War And The Regional Context, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This chapter traces Southeast Asia’s overall pro-U.S. trajectory from before and through the American war in Vietnam, a process in which the region’s anticommunist nationalists collaborated with the United States and Britain to gain, and remain in, power. Between the late 1940s through the early 1960s, indigenous anticommunist elites in Thailand and the Philippines rose to political dominance with U.S. assistance; in Malaya and Singapore they did so with British support. The United States and Britain, with their Malayan and Singaporean allies, would influence developments within Indonesia that precipitated the Indonesian Army’s rightwing coup of 1965, a transformative event that …

Hidden Wounds And Secret Scars: The Post-World War Ii Western As A Cinema Of Trauma, Maggie Sue Scanlan

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this project, I consider the post-WWII Western film as a site that represents and navigates war traumatized American masculinity. Through a discussion of the significance of the Western as a national myth that speaks directly to American masculinity and nation-building through individual violence, I situate the genre as an ideal vehicle to reframe war traumatized masculinity and analyze seven Westerns through a threefold analysis: metaphoric (a cinema of trauma), psychoanalytic (the traumatic gaze), and therapeutic (recovery and reintegration). In Chapter One, I track anxieties and preoccupations signaling the cultural concern with war trauma in genres more routinely associated with …

Rifles And Riflemen: Material Culture, Violence, And Early American Identity, 1720 -- 1820, John Bradstreet Weaver

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The rifle was one of many material objects which colonists of British North America brought with them from Europe. Starting in the early eighteenth century, German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania began to manufacture rifles from locally made and imported parts. These rifles became associated with other material objects – namely a system of dress, which included wearing a whitetail deer’s tail in the hat, the hunting shirt, and forms of Native American dress – which became emblematic of some British colonists who used rifles in hunting and war. Rifles became militarily important in the Seven Years’ War, where Native American warriors, …

Building Transferable Skills In An Interdisciplinary Science And Science Fiction Capstone Course, John D. Carrell, Robert G. Weiner, Alexandria Prather

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

College graduates are entering an ever-competitive workforce. Interdisciplinary course experiences are critical for developing analytical abilities and learning and these courses can provide valuable skills that will aid students beyond the classroom. These transferable skills include communication, teamwork, analytical and critical thinking, and creativity. To provide a unique learning experience and, through it, the development of transferable skills, the Honors College at Texas Tech University created an upper-level Capstone course titled “Superheroes, Super Villains, AI, Time Travel, and Film in Science and Popular Culture.” The class is an interdisciplinary look at science and science fiction taught by an engineering faculty …

Re-Indigenizing And Collaboratively Tending Urban Greenspaces, Divinity Nnenne Adewale

University Honors Theses

This work details the active process of land tending with the intention of re-Indigenization in the Pacific Northwest at several Portland sites; The Native American Student Community Center, PSU Oak Savanna, and the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Land tending is an intuitive process, one rooted in love and respect for life of all forms as well as becoming the perpetual student; land tending is not a skill to be mastered, only practiced. Unlike environmental management, tending cannot be done separate from the earth, in a classroom or otherwise. Connections are what tending is built on top of: the foundation; effort …

The Social Matter Of Opioids: Glitches In Immunity Beyond The Human, Nathan A. Leach

American Studies ETDs

The Social Matter of Opioids: Glitches in Immunity Beyond the Human examines the contemporary opioid crisis and its relationship to capitalism, imperialism, and biomedicine. This dissertation also considers how the twin processes of crisis and racialization relate to how human-opioid entanglements perform and transgress normative anthropological assumptions of difference. Through theories of biopolitics, Black feminism, queer of color critique, and psychoanalytic insight, I argue for a more critical account of the entanglement of humans with opioids where processes of capitalist and imperial crisis produce novel forms of social ontology. I substantiate this by examining speculative tissue economies, interspecies relationality, draconian …

The Odyssey And Its Odyssey In Contemporary Texts: Re-Visions In Star Trek, The Time Traveler’S Wife, And The Penelopiad, Mary Economou Bailey Green

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Homer’s The Odyssey is the archetypal quest story. The dialogue began with Homer, and contemporary texts and popular culture media have continued the tradition of deconstructing and recreating stories, addressing issues related to the human psyche. As Hardwick and Stray note, the relationship between ancient and modern is “not merely inherited but constantly made and remade,” one that we see in the following varied genres and versions that retell the Odyssean myth, relating re-visions of characters, relationships, structures, and themes. The original Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais” is an allegory of the Odyssean quest for human knowledge, while …

O Homer, Where Art Thou?: Teaching The Iliad And The Odyssey Through Popular Culture, Mallory Young

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Like so many of my academic colleagues, I spend an inordinate amount of time lamenting our students’ lack of engagement, discipline, and preparation. The problems are naturally exacerbated when the subject is literature and the literature in question is, by its nature, far removed in time and place from students’ daily lives. At the same time, requirements to study literature have become compressed, if not eliminated entirely. Ancient Greek works, in particular, seem to pose special problems for unmotivated or unprepared students. As our students become less likely to have a prior context from which to approach ancient texts, the …

Ways Of Decoloniality By The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’S Katara Demonstrates How To Revive A Community In Ecological Distress Brought By The Colonial Expansion Of The Fire Nation, Jose Santos P. Ardivilla

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, the “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as …

Crossing Over: The Migrant “Other” In The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Casey Joe Walker, Anthony Ramirez, Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Two mainstream films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) reflect anxiety about the alien (migrant) “other” through difference and crisis. In this article, we explore how refugees and “shithole” planets form a major plot point in Captain Marvel (2019). At the most extreme, alien exclusion is articulated in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), from the villain’s perspective, as a Malthusian need for extermination of lives to preserve environmental balance. Seemingly innocuous, these narratives are symbolic of a creeping right-wing discourse that dehumanizes outsiders, refugees, and migrants in popular culture. Inspired by the call to consider how film and new media …

Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto (GTA): San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine, and simulate as well as prepare. …

Bodies In Motion: Challenging Imagery, Tradition, And Teaching [Dialogue: The The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 1 (February 2020)], Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Bodies in Motion: Challenging Imagery, Tradition, and Teaching [Dialogue: The The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 1 (February 2020)]

Editorial

Challenging the Normative in Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

The Tin Woodman, Captain Fyter, and Chopfyt: L. Frank Baum’s Portrayal of Body image and Prostheses in the Wake of World War I, Marie Gethins

Relandscaping the Rhetorical Tradition through Hip Hop, Robert Tinajero

The Batman Comes to Class: Popular Culture as a Tool for Addressing Reflexive Pain, Kyle Hammonds and Karen Anderson-Lain

Pedagogy, Ideology, & Composition: Is There a Better Way …

The Tin Woodman, Captain Fyter, And Chopfyt: L. Frank Baum’S Portrayal Of Body Image And Prostheses In The Wake Of World War I, Marie Gethins

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s literature frequently depicts characters with disabilities as flat stereotypes — villains or saintly invalids. L. Frank Baum’s The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) provides a sharp contrast to these typical portrayals, as well as contemporary “socio-cultural” beliefs on physical normalcy and sense of self. Written as the U.S. entered World War I and details of trench warfare reached the home-front, it presents an interesting exploration of society’s response to physical disability and prostheses. In addition, it highlights the psychological devastation associated with body changes.

During Baum’s formative years, disabled Civil War veterans returned to New …

Resistance, Race, And Myth: A Critical Survey Of American Popular Music Culture In The 20th Century, Scott Haden Church

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The topic of popular music in the United States has garnered much analysis from scholars, particularly how popular music has created or reflected American myths, collective memory, and racial politics. This essay is a review of select research on the interface between 20th century American popular music, culture, and power. The essay reveals that pop music scholarship is rooted in paradox. Hence, it focuses on three chiastic or antithetical themes permeating scholarship on the topic: Popular music as either cultural hegemony or resistance to that cultural hegemony; Popular music as fundamental to the American myth, or the American myth as …

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 …

More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, And True Detective’S Terrestrial Horror, Jonathan Elmore

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” …

Traversing Realities: Genres, Histories, And Politics In Popular Culture [Dialogue, Volume 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2015)], Lynnea Chapman King, Anna Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial

Examining Perspectives and Applications, Lynnea Chapman King and A.S. CohenMiller

Articles

A Field Guide to Teaching Agency and Ethics: The West Wing and American Foreign Policy, Kayce Mobley and Sarah Fisher

Survivor Skills: Why I Want to Teach Reality TV, May Friedman

Girls, Guns, and Zombies: Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning in The Walking Dead, Anthony Neely

“Can you imagine, a real, live Indian right here in Walnut Grove?”: American Indians in Television Adaptations of Little House on the Prairie, Amy S. Fatzinger

The Gentle Tongue: How Language Affected the World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, …