Digital Commons Network^™

Geopolitics In Recent U.S. Professional Military Reading Lists, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Professional military reading lists have existed for a long time in the U.S. military and in other national militaries. They are frequently updated and intended to enhance the professional knowledge of military professionals in areas ranging from cultural awareness, ethics, leadership, international relations, military history and military operations, and areas of expertise considered essential to successfully executing the operations of their military service branch. These lists are prepared by the leadership organizations of these armed services such as the Air Force Chief of Staff, U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, and Marine Corps Commandant. Such readings are …

Translating Diversity From Ralph Ellison To Kenzaburō Ōe, Raphaël Lambert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it endeavors to understand the vagaries of the notion of diversity as it travels from one national and political context to the next; and second, it shows how two major fiction writers and essayists have used that notion in their work and to what ends. The first part focuses on the work of Ralph Ellison, who put diversity at the heart of his reflection on what a truly democratic American society should be. Kenzaburō Ōe initially borrowed the notion of diversity from Ellison himself, but as the second part demonstrates, Ōe did …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

"Exploring The Cuckoo's Nest:" A Study On American Fiction And Mental Health, Emily Smeds

Honors Projects

This is a study on American fiction and mental health. The project discusses the short stories "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, "Careful," and "Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver, and the novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. All of these works are discussed in how they relate to and portray the psychological disorders of schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

Pipestone Books: Indigenous Materialisms And Bibliographical Methods, Daniel Radus

Criticism

This article argues that the methods of bibliographical scholarship would be enriched with further attention to Indigenous ontological traditions. It does so via an analysis of a small tablet of pipestone that in 1957 was carved into the shape of an open book by Ephraim Taylor, a Dakota artist. The article first establishes that, for the Dakotas, pipestone is a vibrant and animate material, a sentient trace of ancestral kin. The article then aligns the pipestone sculpture with an archive of books whose material traits have been altered by Indigenous readers, arguing ultimately that a sophisticated account of these books—and …

Militure, Bingdong Duan

Masters Theses

The aim of this research is to explore how individual soldier equipment can be systematically integrated into everyday life. War, as the epitome of struggle and conflict, stimulates the fundamental human instinct for survival. To achieve this end, various methods involving a wide range of fields such as technology, culture, economy, and politics are utilized. Under the driving force of survival, explorations are conducted in various areas, with individual soldier equipment being notably prominent. Nations spend a substantial amount each year on developing individual soldier equipment, which optimizes functionality to such an extent that it has formed its unique aesthetics …

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

Abolition Ecologies And The Making Of Freedom As A Place In Bayview-Hunters Point, Spencer Daniel O'Hara

Master's Theses

In this paper, I critically explore the subjectivities of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard (HPNS), part of the largest redevelopment project in San Francisco since 1906. Applying an abolition ecologies framework, I ask what explains the duplicity of the Shipyard as a site of radioactive contamination and capital accumulation, and in the same time-space one that creates the conditions for radical place-making. Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is a former commercial and military shipyard located on a peninsula in southeastern San Francisco. Motivated by its desire for a major shipbuilding and repair facility to project maritime power in the Pacific, the Navy …

Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …

The Ambush At Saint Marys River, Micah P. Bellamy

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

At a critical time in the American Civil War, President Lincoln was up for re-election, concerned that he might lose re-election, President Lincoln desired the Union to secure Florida. As Col. Guy Henry led an advancement from Jacksonville, Florida, across the northwest, there came word that the Confederate Army had a significant number of soldiers stationed at Lake City. Col. Henry and his men began to make their way towards Lake City, but on February 10, 1964, they were caught in an ambush as they attempted to cross the St. Marys River. This paper seeks to provide an examination of …

Oo-Mah-Ha Ta-Wa-Tha (Omaha City), Fannie Reed Giffen, Susette La Flesche Tibbles, Judi M. Gaiashkibos

Zea E-Books Collection

“This little book tells many important tribal stories for today and for future generations. These historic vignettes of the Omaha Nation and its leaders are shared so personally by author Fannie Reed Giffen and her col­laborators, Susette and Susan La Flesche. It has been a treasure of mine for 25 years and I hope it becomes one of yours.

The re-publication of the original comes on the 125-year anniversary of the 1898 Omaha Trans-Mississippi Expo­sition and Indian Congress. Its arrival is timely as many of its stories and people are vital to our nation’s history. A sculpture of Omaha Chief …

Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.

Iconografías Asociadas Al Mono Araña En Las Culturas Del Centro De Veracruz, Chantal Huckert

Tejiendo imágenes. Homenaje a Victòria Solanilla Demestre

Este ensayo analiza el papel protagónico de una diosa representada en una estatua de tipo monumental procedente de la Gran Ofrenda del Montículo 2 del sitio de El Zapotal. La argumentación se funda en los datos arqueológicos, con las interpretaciones de los arqueólogos, en los aspectos señaléticos de la pieza, el tocado «en domo», la diadema con la figura parcial tridimensional –cabeza y busto– del mono araña, el artificio dorsal de cinco ramales, el ceñidor ofidio y la postura sedente, y en fuentes que reportan sobre el mono araña en las culturas prehispánicas, particularmente los referentes a las deidades madres …

Topographies And Counter-Topographies Of Social Reproduction At People’S Park, Sarah Weaver

Scripps Senior Theses

Created at a key moment in New Left political rebellion and organizing in 1969, the mythic People’s Park still stands today between Dwight and Haste St. in Berkeley as open multi-use green space made of and for community development on lawful University of California Regent property. Despite repeated attempts by UC to take back the land, the insurgent space continues to pull defense from various parts of the local community, students and not, have accessed forms of self-determined social reproduction and created material critiques of UC as a vehicle for capital. For 54 years, the park was maintained significance as …

The “Broken Reed Of A Staff”: The Pawnee Agency, Pawnees, And Agent W. De Puy, 1861–1862, R. Paul Collister

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In January 1863 Henry W. De Puy published an open letter to the President. Through the previous year De Puy’s administration at the Pawnee Agency at Genoa, Nebraska Territory (N.T.), had been wrecked and he had been accused of stealing from the Pawnees and his own employees. The Indian Commissioner’s Office had turned him out of office without a hearing. Even President Lincoln had not seen fit to intervene on the agent’s behalf in a department of the President’s own executive branch. De Puy did not want his old job back. He seems to have been sincere in his desire …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer …

Scarico: It’S Only A Movie, Most Of The Time, Thomas Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Exploitation cinema is a domain of motion picture content catering to a viewership interested in imagery that is more provocative than what mainstream audiences desire to see. These types of films are typically considered lowbrow entertainment and have been made in every era, albeit in a limited capacity proportional to the niche audience demand for them. Some time periods see a rise in exploitation film productions in response to a growing demand for such content from a larger share of the broader cinematic audience. This relationship indicates that period-specific cultural factors can cause mainstream audience members to seek out more …

Questions Of Canon In Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" Comics, Martin Dolan

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

While questions of misrepresentation are starting to be addressed in academia — acknowledging racial, cultural, gender, and artistic diversity — there is still much work to be done to close the gap between the literary canon and what contemporary literature actually looks like. These efforts have been a step in the right direction, but representation of unconventional literatures is often spotty, boiling down entire literary scenes into one book. This is especially true for those that offer formal or structural challenges – including multilingual and graphic narratives that don’t easily fit into a canonical “box.”

Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, serialized …

Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony, Jeremy Matthew Glick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for …

Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology, Jj Sylvia Iv, Kyle Moody

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of …

Church, Country, Culture: How Three Aspects Of Authoritarianism Predict Support For Donald Trump, Trenton Leslie

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the American bipartisan system, ideologies and beliefs create political views that sort voters between two groups. Political sorting increases polarization based on cultural preferences for an in-group that become ethnocentric views, which develop into ethnocentric cultural politics. I present an augmented concept of authoritarianism in America that encompasses sorting based on aspects of political belief, encapsulating sources of polarization and cultural attachments to political associations.

I develop the argument that authoritarianism is the result of political attachment to identities that feed off one another as individuals identify with an in-group, such as a party platform. My central theory is …

Eulogy On King Philip, William Apess, Paul Royster (Ed.)

Zea E-Books in American Studies

In the heart of New England, on the doorstep of the Pilgrim founding fathers, William Apess delivered this eulogy honoring their greatest enemy, Metacomet of the Wampanoags, known as King Philip, who led a coalition of Native peoples that came close to destroying the whole English colonial enterprise in 1675–76. In 1836, one hundred sixty years later, Apess chose to re-examine the circumstances of King Philip’s life and death, and pronounced him equal to or even greater than Washington in love for his country, military skill, and personal honor. While redeeming the memory of Philip as a martyr for his …

Men Of The West: Entrepreneurs And American Expansion In The East Florida Borderlands, 1812-1845, Matthew Saionz

Florida Historical Quarterly

On July 16, 1844, Robert Christie, a London businessman, wrote to his distant relative, Floridian James Ormond III. "You men of the West," he observed, "certainly surprise the folk of the East by your perseverance and intrepidity of character."1 Although the particular nature of his relationship with Ormond is unclear, Christie's commentary on the character of "men of the West" stands out in a letter that, on the whole, consists of rather mundane personal matters. In this instance, Christie posits an interesting dichotomy that casts the decidedly more enterprising Americans (men of the West) opposite the British, or, more generally, …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

O'Donoghue, Water from Stone: Archaeology and Conservatfon at Florida's Springs. by Guy H. Means; Ivers, This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715-1728. by Jason Herbert; Geier, Scott, and Babits, eds., From These Honored Dead: Historical Archaeology of the American Civil War. by Carl G. Drexler; Hurt, Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South. by Judith Gentry; Graham, Silent Films in St. Augustine. by Bruce Chadwick; Ingram, Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930. by Kevin Mitchell Mercer; Capo Jr., Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940. …

Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined …

Technologies Of Territoriality: Indigeneity, Surveillance, And The State, Elspeth Iralu

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the twenty-first century through a multi-site relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous cartography in the United States, India, and Palestine. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, I demonstrate how air and the aerial perspective actively shape what happens on and below the ground. I argue that Indigenous experiences of and responses to colonial and counterinsurgent surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and colonialism. …

The Cop In Your Head: Criminal Justice Education, Liberalism, And The Carceral State, Nicole Haiber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis centers policing ideology in higher education and the way it is constructed and fortified through criminal justice programs. In 1968, the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) made funds available to police officers to attend college and awarded grants to universities to create criminal justice programs. The program effectively funneled federal money into the project of professionalizing the police and developed criminal justice as a field devoted to conducting crime research, as defined by the federal government. Criminal justice programs exploded across the country with the availability of LEEP funding, and the City University of New York’s (CUNY) John …

Practicing Abolition: A Digital Roundtable On Abolitionist Pedagogy, Samantha Lilienfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project explores education and pedagogy as sites for abolitionist practice, and approaches abolitionism as a method by building on the idea of abolition democracy. Using the framework of abolition as a pedagogical practice, I see teaching and learning as urgent tasks of contemporary abolitionism. My project integrates research and scholarship on the abolition of prisons and policing with practices of pedagogy, in part by thinking interdisciplinarily with students and scholars working within CUNY. Practicing Abolition: A Digital Roundtable on Abolitionist Pedagogy incorporates voices from students and scholars about how they practice abolitionist pedagogy in higher education by presenting …