Digital Commons Network^™

The Crucible Of War: The Personal History Of A Social Democrat In Nazi Germany, Michael Tetto

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

On Christmas Day 1943, Somewhere in Russia, Siegfried Sinz enjoyed a jovial moment with his unit of the German Army. It was a refreshing break from the trials of war, for he had been on the eastern front since June of 1941. Cautiousness, endemic of their proximity to the battle front, attended the preparations for the event. All windows needed to be sealed to prevent light from escaping into the night lest any Russians on patrol ascertain their location and attack. Unfortunately, someone did not seal one of the windows completely; a ray of light escaped to illuminate the darkened …

Voices Of Resiliency And Persistence: Native Americans In Southern New England In The Seventeenth Century, Debra Taylor

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

During the early seventeenth century, the Algonquian Indians of Southern New England demonstrated courage and resilience as their societies survived a "massive depopulation" from diseases introduced through European colonization (See Fig. 1). It is a credit to the strength of their core values that Native Americans successfully combined remaining clan members and reconstructed stable communities. However, these communities became threatened as increased numbers of English colonists arrived believing that the devastation of Indian numbers was the divine hand of God paving the way for colonial settlement and supremacy. As contact increased between two vastly different worlds, colonists minimized Indians and …

Elizabeth As Constantine: John Foxe And Holy Women, Courtney Jensen Peacock

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

One of the most frequently discussed issues in Renaissance feminist scholarship is the degree of authority and influence women held in their respective societies. During the sixteenth century, the most obvious indication of female power was the dramatic appearance of powerful female regents and monarchs. This was especially apparent in England, with Jane Gray, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth Tudor each succeeding to the throne and initiating a succession of female domination for almost fifty years. Whereas women had been traditionally excluded from civil and religious authority, the advent of these female ru lers initiated a new discussion concerning the rights …

Dr. John Snow And The Nineteenthcentury British Cholera Crisis, Betsy A. Maughan

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

During the nineteenth century, Britain underwent attacks from a silent, determined killer. Invisible to the naked eye, this sinister enemy invaded towns, villages and homes with unforgiving stealth and cruelty. Lives were changed forever as panic, terror, and death overtook human habitats. The sneaky menace was Asiatic cholera. Although the first devastating British attack occurred during 1831-1832, London was fortunate enough to stay out of its destructive path. Luck ran out, however, as the second assault occurred during 1848-1849, consuming a good part of the city. Dr. John Snow, English physician, anesthetist and epidemiologist, dedicated most of his life to …

French Algeria: How Influential Was France On The Algerian Identity?, Sabrina Laib

Peace Studies Student Papers and Posters

Algeria is known for its revolutionary acts for freedom against French colonialism. The French ruled the religion after Algeria was handed over to them by the Ottoman Empire. The Empire had previously ruled the Algerian territory 400-500 years prior. Algerians were introduced to French rule, which drastically changed the social and political layout of the country. This paper looks at the two time periods of colonization in Algeria: from 1830-1930, as well as 1931-1962. These time periods are very different from one another and represent unique turning points for the country, with the reason being that the period looks at …

Diplomacy And The Dead: Authenticating The Sacred In Early Modern Spain, Caroline Barraco

Theses - ALL

This thesis considers two case studies from the transnational Spanish relic trade at the turn of the seventeenth century. The first study is that of Don Guillén de San Clemente y Centellas, a Spanish ambassador active at the end of the sixteenth century who was a conduit for antique and medieval relics for elite collectors within Spain. The second is of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, was a Spanish noblewoman who traveled to England at the beginning of the seventeenth century and retrieved, prepared, and transported the bodies of Catholic martyrs back to Spain as new relics. These case studies …

Proctor & Gamble’S Irreverent Wartime Marketing Campaign, Mary Gifford

History & Classics Student Scholarship

In the early twentieth century, Ivory Soap was renowned in America as a “dependable, old fashioned house-hold soap,” but by mid-century they began to face struggles with the rise of competition from similar soap companies and needed to differentiate themselves. The market was at capacity, with the “sales of soap to consumers rapidly reaching the saturation point and synthetic detergents coming into wider use, soap manufacturers face the ‘keenest competition in years.’” This saturation coincided with economic challenges stemming from World War II. During this turbulent period, marketing for non-essential products declined, prompting Procter & Gamble, Ivory Soap’s parent company, …

Curing Bodies With Bodies: Renyao (Human-Derived Drugs) In Late Imperial China, Erqi Cheng

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores the philosophical and socioeconomic context of late imperial Chinese pharmacology and medical therapies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It examines the rise of human-derived drugs (renyao) in the sixteenth century and their subsequent decline in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influenced by a complex interplay of changes in social mores, urban tastes, commercial publishing, and philosophical ideologies. By drawing from a diverse range of sources including bencao (materia medica) works, formularies, Daoist texts, government documents, biji (belles lettres), novels, collected verses, and local gazetteers, the dissertation argues that Chinese medical culture in the Ming …

Imagination, Performance, Expression: Unraveling Global Pakistani Identity, Omaer Naeem

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Expressions of Pakistani identity are presently being flattened out by both the state and global West, dominantly being explored through religion. This project argues that gender is used domestically and internationally to present a multifaceted resistance to the state’s idea of the national identity. This project interrogates the creation of global Pakistani identity through examining the historical antecedents in imagining Pakistan, resistance to the state’s identity- construction process demonstrated in performing Pakistan, and transnational expressions of identity. This project argues that gender, while leveraged by the state in a top-down construction of national identity, has been used bottom-up to reconfigure …

Going Beyond The Margins: Photographs By Ming Smith, Isis A. Serna

Art & Art History ETDs

Ming Smith is a photographer who has been creating images since the early 1970s and trained with the artist collective Kamoinge Workshop. Throughout most of her career, Smith has been marginalized by art historians, critics, and museum curators. Since the early 2000s, Smith has only been included in museum exhibitions highlighting African-American female artists from 1960 to the present. Before this surge of interest in her work, the art world ignored and silenced her. However, Smith’s creative process allowed her to see and experience going beyond the struggle by being consistent in her strategy to do what she wanted on …

History In The Present Tense: News And History On The Radio, 1924-1944, Steven R. Kostelecky

History ETDs

This dissertation addresses questions about the contested claim to an authoritative historical voice on American radio from its earliest days in the 1920s to its role in the Second World War in the 1940s. My major arguments involve, first, how the development of radio news in the 1930s took on the nature of “history in the moment” with live event programming—something its rival, the newspapers could not do. Secondly, with the press of world events, I argue, history and the news increasingly seemed to dovetail into the other on the radio, and the American Historical Association debated the most effective …

Moral Exemplars Of Note - Teresa Langness, Sam And Pearl Oliner

Moral Exemplars Study

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Robbed In The Wilderness: The Western Odyssey Of John Hoback, Edward Robinson, And Jacob Reznor, Aaron Cobia

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Warned by John Reed that a band of Shoshones were on the war path, Marie Dorion gathered her two young children, got on her horse, and headed to where her husband, Pierre, was hunting. Delayed by darkness, cold, and fear of Indians, Marie finally reached the hut from which Pierre and the other men were hunting. As she approached the hut, she saw Giles Leclerc "staggering as if unwell." Wounded and faint from the loss of blood, Leclerc told Marie that La Chappelle, Reznor, and her husband had been "robbed and murdered that morning. " Marie put LeClerc and one …

Domestic And Foreign Opium Regulation In Victorian England: 1830-1900, Zachary Zundel

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

By the nineteenth century, the British Empire had extended its reach all the way around the globe. They did not come to this position easily. Extending their reach required the British to fight wars with many of the major European powers, such as France, both on the mainland and in colonies around the world. China proved to be one of the most difficult areas for the British to extend into. In China the people were resistant to diseases and possessed greater technology than the other areas of the globe. Europeans wanted access to Asia for products such as spices and …

Manchester And The Lit And Phil, Nik Vigil

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In writing his extensive History, Directory, and Gazetteer of the County Palatine of Lancaster, Edward Baines wrote, "When the increase of wealth and population lead to the establishment of societies for the improvement of the mind and the extension of science, they produce their legitimate influence; of this nature is the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society." The Lit and Phil, as it was most commonly known, was established in 1781 as a society intended for the discussion of topics as diverse as experimental chemistry and the commercial arts. The Lit and Phil was unique in that it was begun …

"Dish For An Epicure": Spanish Perceptions Of Indigenous Food In Mexico And Central America, 1517-1577, Timothy Boyer

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Upon Arrival in Veracruz, Mexico in 1520, the conquistadors were exposed to the sights, sounds, and tastes of the New World. In Cuba they had subsisted on a mostly European diet, but in Mexico they would have to learn to make do with indigenous foods. Their leader, Hernan Cortes, ordered the ships burned to prevent deserters, destroying any hope they had of receiving supplies of European foods during their conquest of what would later become known as Nueva Espana. This left them highly dependent on either their own ability to properly identify food sources or, as was usually the case, …

Moral Exemplars Of Note - Dr. Mimi Silbert, Sam And Pearl Oliner

Moral Exemplars Study

No abstract provided.

Increasing The Accuracy Of The Military‟S Post-Deployment Mental Health Screening Strategies, Daniel Fass

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The author investigated the prevalence rates of mental health problems reported by college students and compared them with previously existing data on active duty, reserve, and National Guard Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans. Participants completed the mental health portion of the Post-Deployment Health Re-Assessment and an additional questionnaire in which the effect of a drug use screen was explored. Subjects were also asked about their intentions to seek mental health or substance abuse treatment and how anonymity affected their treatment seeking and reporting accuracy. Results indicate similar and at times higher rates of mental health problems in the sample of college …

Aristotle's Division Of The Sciences And The Impossibility Of A Science Of Everything, Christopher Lutz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aristotle’s division between practical, productive, and theoretical sciences is widely acknowledged, and it is uncontroversial to say that it organizes his texts. However, contemporary scholarship often treats the division of the sciences as a mere organizational structure without investigating its underlying principles. My dissertation seeks to correct this oversight by investigating the logical principles of Aristotle’s division of the sciences in the Posterior Analytics’ account of scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). My central argument is that Aristotle sees the sciences as inherently divided, so that a demonstrative science of everything is impossible. By understanding why science is divided, we are better …

Carl Maneri, Mathematics And Statistics, Carl Maneri, Kathy Morris

Wright State University Retirees Association Oral History Project

In this May 10, 2024 oral history interview conducted by Kathy Morris, Carl Maneri reflects on his thirty-year career as a founding faculty member in Wright State University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He discusses the university’s early development, faculty governance, departmental leadership, and the challenges of teaching first-generation students at a growing public institution.

Comparing Remembrances: The Collective Memory Of The Displaced People Of Shenandoah National Park And Their Descendants, Kaylee Wenger

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Shenandoah National Park (SNP), established in 1935, was the first major case of the United States seizing privately owned land for the creation of a national park. As a result, approximately 500 families that resided in the area of the Blue Ridge Mountains that was to become SNP were removed from their homes on the mountain throughout the 1930s. This experience of removal greatly impacted not only the displaced themselves, but it has had a lasting impact on their 21st-century descendants. The collective memory of the displaced and their descendants is made up of varying themes that can be used …

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Bahrdt' S Psychological Portrait Of The Dogmatic Priest In Das Religions-Edikt And Herr Pastor Rindvigius, Timothy Wright

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

'What is enlightenment?' This question, posed to German reading audiences in the autumn of 1783 by the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, ignited a debate that lasted a decade. While the famous answer, given by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, emphasized enlightenment as, above all else, self-emancipation, others stressed the role of external factors-education and institutions-in promoting the individual's ability to think for himself. Through correct upbringing, education, and laws, the individual and society can be brought to enlightenment, so the thinking went. This latter model accented the importance of human development (Bildung) and institutional reform as a means to facilitate this …

Lds Women And The Teton Dam Disaster Of 1976, Emily Willis

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

June 5, 1976, started like any other spring day in southeastern Idaho. After the cold winter, most of the residents of the numerous farming towns that lie throughout the Upper Snake River Valley found the beautiful Saturday ideal for farm work, gardening, or spring cleaning. About twenty miles northeast of Rexburg, the largest town in the area, the Teton Dam neared completion. A Bureau of Reclamation project, the dam promised to stop the annual flooding that so often decimated portions of farmers' fields along the Teton River. Around 11 o'clock that morning, however, came a terrifying report: the Teton Dam …

Spiritual Chemistry: The Theosophic Roots Of Newtonian Alchemy, Jeffery Tucker

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The popularization of mathematics in the Modern Era and the subsequent proliferation of technologies have created a cultural environment in which the meaning of 'science' is often assumed to be self-evident. Philosophically, this presumptive consensus derives many of its arguments from Popperian criteria, which seek to delineate the critical differences between 'science' and 'non-science.' These demarcations imply that 'science' is an empiric reality, discoverable in both its methods and qualities. Although Kuhnian relativism has attenuated the robustness of these assertions, the fact remains that many individuals purport to have an intuitive ability to state definitively, "This is science." Such claims …

"Across The Atlantic": How World War Ii Changed British Public Opinion Of Americ, Lexi Edgar

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

It was July 4,1951. Exactly 175 years earlier, America had boldly proclaimed its independence from Great Britain and entered a fierce and desperate struggle to separate itself from the mother country. Yet on this day, reminiscent of the division of the two nations, Americans and Brits came together in London to celebrate their unity. They gathered to dedicate the Roll of Honor, a book containing the names of the 28,000 American soldiers who gave their lives in Great Britain during World War II.

Satorial Manipulation Within Historical Politics, Heather Dew

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Fashion's impact on the course of history largely unexplored. Herbert Blumer, a noted sociologist at UC Berkeley, accurately credits this oversight to

"a failure to observe and appreciate the wide range of operation of fashion; a false assumption that fashion has only nivial or peripheral significance; a mistaken idea that fashion falls in the area of the abnormal and irrational and thus is out of the mainsneam of human group life; and, finally, a misunderstanding of the nature of fashion."

Blumer was criticizing sociologists, but he may as well have been criticizing historians; scholarly works analyzing fashion's impact are rare …

Generational Awareness Of Folk Figures In The American Midwest, Addison L. Jensen

Honors Thesis

The popular folklore of a region can clearly reflect how its citizens understand themselves and their nation. The goal of this study was to determine the number of individuals who can be considered “well-versed” in traditional folklore and to speculate on the possible reasons for the differences in recognition that arise. Five figures (Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Annie Oakley, and Rip Van Winkle) were selected to serve as a representative sample of folk characters that have been historically significant to the country. An online survey of 279 Midwesterners and interviews with various age groups in South Dakota, found …

Full Issue

The Bridge

No abstract provided.