Digital Commons Network^™

Oral History Conversation With Najah Abdelkader, Evan Bui, Eric Hoster, Jesseca Bates

Philosophy 111: Philosophy of Human Nature

Najah Abdelkader, Professor of Philosophy at San Diego City College and Southwestern College, share stories and memories from her homeland of Iraq and her experiences of adapting to her new life in the US. This oral history conversation is part of an oral history project entitled "From Cradle to Cradle". In this project, students in a Philosophy of Human Nature course invites Iraqis and Syrians who have migrated to the US to share the stories and memories they have carried with them from their homelands and to explain how those stories and memories continue to shape and enrich the lives …

Introduction To "Migration And The Crisis Of The Modern Nation State", Frank Jacob, Adam Luedtke

Publications and Research

Introduction to an anthology dealing with the interrelationship between migration and a supposedly existing crisis of the modern nation state.

Oral History Of Migrants, Shira Klein

History Teaching Resources

This is a collection of collections of oral histories by migrants that can be used both for teaching and for research purposes.

Ursinus Magazine, Fall 2017, Brock Blomberg, Ed Moorhouse, Mark Schneider, Ellen Labrecque, Jack Croft, Geoff Gehman, Matthew Mizenko, Cory Straub

Ursinus Magazine, 1995–Present

Introducing the student commons • Heroic couplet • A mark of pride • Prestigious honors for alumni • Meet the new Dean • Teaching and learning • A commitment to arts • Grant to fund Christian studies pilot program • Lost and found: Centennial Homecoming celebration • Out of this world • Serving the underserved: At home and around the world • A passion for service • The write stuff: Ursinus alumni pen books that level life's playing field • The mission of admission • Burning question: Could internment camps for American citizens be established again? • Anatomy of the …

“A Disconnected Dialogue: American Military Strategy, 1964-1968,” Oklahoma Humanities, Vol. 10, No. 2, Fall-Winter 2017., Gregory A. Daddis

History Faculty Articles and Research

"The admission, supported by a careful reading of the historical record, begs larger questions: How do we remember American strategy in Vietnam? What language do we use to describe a war that proved so tragic, not only for the United States but, perhaps more importantly, for the millions of Vietnamese who lost their lives in a decades-long civil war? In coming to grips with a complex war, Americans, then and now, have relied on a series of tropes to streamline their conversations about a distasteful war."

Review Of Dumitru, Diana, The State, Antisemitism, And Collaboration In The Holocaust: The Borderlands Of Romania And The Soviet Union And Geissbühler, Simon, Ed., Romania And The Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath, Stefan Cristian Ionescu

History Faculty Articles and Research

Reviews of The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union by Diana Dumitru and Romania and the Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath, edited by Simon Geissbühler.

The Rhetoric Of The Civil War: Literary Devices Of The North And South, Kelsey Williams

Senior Honors Theses

While both Northern and Southern antebellum writers employed religious imagery for their persuasive purposes, their specific rhetoric differed: Timrod pictured the South romantically, as the revival of Camelot even after the Confederacy’s death; Stowe, heavily influenced by her personal background, enacted emotion accompanied by an appeal to ethics in her fictional apologetic for the end of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although history handed both authors the opportunity to affect the nation’s trajectory, only Stowe achieved this feat, and she owes her triumph over Timrod, the victory of the North over the South, to her emotional rhetoric concerning slavery. …

Leftist Militant Songs And War Of Position In Lebanon (1975-1977), Mohamad J. Hodeib

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay looks at the emergence of a generation of leftist militant songwriters against the backdrop of a revolutionary moment that influenced political and cultural landscapes in Beirut during the 1970s. After the Arab military defeat against Israel in 1967, the conjuncture of the Lebanese and Palestinian revolutionary movements in Lebanon fostered a revolutionary moment that manifested itself on different levels, including art and cultural expression. I look at the development of leftist militant songs, a genre, attitude, and approach to song production and performance that came to be at the intersection of radical theatre, poetry, and music. Productions by …

The Grizzly, September 14, 2017, Valerie Osborne, Courtney A. Duchene, Emily Jolly, Skyler L. Gailing, Emily Shue, Kevin Leon, Rachael Carter, David Mendelsohn, A. J. Cutrufello

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Three Workers Injured in IDC Construction Accident • Rush Week Comes Early This Year • Have You Seen Scene / Unseen? • Ursinus Welcomes a New AD to Main Street • A Fairy Tale in the English Department • Opinions: Trump's Move to End DACA is One of his Most Disgusting Acts Yet; Why Resident Advisers Could Benefit From a Union • Fresh Voice for UC Volleyball • Bears Beat Bison and Bullets for Hot Start to Season

Zycie W Ameryce: Life In America (Poster), Brynn A. Cotter

Summer Research Program

Poster complementing author's summer research project exploring the history of the Polish-American community of Worcester, Massachusetts centered on the parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa and how its members responded to the forces of Americanization. Research in area archives such as the Worcester Historical Museum, the Worcester Public Library, and at Our Lady of Czestochowa’s rectory and its parish school of Saint Mary’s, as well as oral history interviews with past and longtime members of the community test the assumption that the story of Worcester’s Polish community is one of loss and decline. On the contrary, Polish-American efforts to preserve …

The Grizzly, September 7, 2017, Valerie Osborne, Courtney A. Duchene, Skyler L. Gailing, Haley Zorger, Sienna Coleman, Emily Jolly, Madison Bradley, Jake Fernandez, Morgan A. Cope, Johnny Myers

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Exciting Changes Coming to the Institute for Inclusion and Equity • New Real Estate Opens up at the Berman Museum • Ursinus Receives Grant for New Christian Studies Program on Campus • Writing for the Invisible: Dr. Keita Awarded a Pew Fellowship • First-year Advising is on Beat: Dr. Holly Hubbs Receives Award for Excellence • Opinions: Removing Confederate Statues Condemns White Supremacy; Fall Orientation Starts the Semester with Efficiency • Women's Soccer Gets New Leader in Ascolese • Bears Top Pick for Centennial Conference

Mybarrio: Emigdio Vasquez And Chicana/O Identity In Orange County, Natalie Lawler, Denise Johnson, Marcus Herse, Jessica Bocinski, Manon Wogahn

Exhibition Catalogs

"Emigdio Vasquez created artwork that challenged Orange County’s more prominent narrative of wealthy beachside neighborhoods. He painted the brown bodies and brown histories that defined our earliest communities and economy... Vasquez produced much of the local art history that Orange County should be known for and should protect. It is with this perspective that Chapman University is proud to present the exhibition, My Barrio: Emigdio Vasquez and Chicana/o Identity in Orange County, in conjunction with the Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. We hope to initiate discourse not only about Vasquez’s prolific career, but also about the larger political …

Zycie W Ameryce: Life In America, Brynn A. Cotter

Summer Research Program

My project explores the history of the Polish-American community of Worcester, Massachusetts centered on the parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa and how its members responded to the forces of Americanization. Like many ethnic groups new to America, Polish-Americans and Polish immigrants in the twentieth century had to adapt in a world that demanded conformity in exchange for social mobility and departure from tradition and community. Over eight weeks, I conducted research in area archives such as the Worcester Historical Museum, the Worcester Public Library, and at Our Lady of Czestochowa’s rectory and its parish school of Saint Mary’s, as …

Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Founding Documents Of The Kahal Kadosh Talmud Tora, Amsterdam, Anne Oravetz Albert

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 1638 founding document of the Kahal Kadosh Talmud Tora of Amsterdam is well known as a “merger agreement” that brought three existing congregations together into one synagogue under one leadership council (Mahamad). It bears the signatures of 218 householding men of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish nation in Amsterdam, signifying their agreement to subject themselves to the authority of the new leadership. It is also well known that this document, along with the set of communal regulations drawn up later that year, granted nearly unfettered authority to the Mahamad. Looking at these two documents along with an …

Construction, Reconstruction And Deconstruction: Stories About Records From The Ottoman Heartlands, Shuki Ecker

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The texts were selected in light of the general question: what kind of records did Ottoman Jewish communities maintain as part of their regular communal activities. They were further chosen to reflect procedures, considerations and conflicts that accompanied record keeping and were not usually recorded in the actual records produced. In most cases the records kept by the communities before the 19th century are no longer available. While references to the existence of various records can be found in a variety of contemporary and later sources (some of which I will mention), the texts translated offer a short selection of …

Unrecorded Justice: The (Non-)Archival Practices Of Medieval Jewish Courts, Rachel Furst

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the summer of 1298, a wave of anti-Jewish violence incited by a German nobleman named Rindfleisch swept through Franconia and the neighboring vicinities. In Würzburg, local burghers joined gangs of murderous knights to massacre nearly 900 Jews. Among the victims was Simeon ben Jacob (R. Shim’on ben R. Ya’akov), a resident of Worms who had come to Würzburg to pay and collect business debts. Following the riots, three witnesses reported that they had seen Simeon’s dead body; and on the basis of these testimonies, the Jewish court in Worms declared Simeon’s wife a widow and granted her permission to …

Volume 14: Cultures Of Record Keeping: Creation, Preservation, And Use In The Early Modern Period, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 2017 Early Modern Workshop's theme was "Cultures of Record Keeping: Creation, Preservation, and Use in the Early Modern Period." The workshop focused on the creation, preservation, organization, collection, translation, and use of records, evidence, and information. It also examined continuities and change between chronological periods --including medieval and modern, and different cultures and settings--Jewish and non-Jewish. Among themes addressed were: official record keeping, personal records, collection and organization of information.

Even more than in our previous topic--history of emotions/emotions in history--there is such an abundance of work on records, and record keeping in non-Jewish historiography, but exceedingly little on …

The Catholic Church And The Formation Of Human Rights Doctrine In El Salvador, Edward Mikus Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The Catholic Church’s focus on human rights in the years following the Second Vatican Council led to increased political activity amongst the clergy in socially stratified El Salvador. This development, in turn, led to a breakdown in relations between the Church and the Salvadoran State

The Anti-Black Hero: Black Masculinity Media Representation As Seen In Netflix Series Luke Cage And Fox Series Empire, Meya Joyell Hemphill

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

The reoccurrence of the Black Brute, the Thug, and the modern day Coon stereotypical images on current television narrowly defines Black masculinity as a monolithic experience. Young Black boys, are often unable to see themselves as those who are portrayed on television. The images they see on screen are sometimes not realistic. Unfortunately, for some young Black boys, these stereotypical images may heavily influence their own behavior. Society often criminalizes and demonizes young Black men as angry, violent, and dangerous. They pose as a supposed threat to society and are thought to be even more problematic as they age. Currently, …

Football And Colonialism : Body And Popular Culture In Urban Mozambique, Nuno Domingos

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. “These manifestations demand a vast study,” Craveirinha wrote, “which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.” …

Oral History: John Bartosiewicz

Zycie w Ameryce: A Collection of Polish-American Oral Histories

This conversation is an oral history interview with a former member of Worcester’s Polish-American community. The interview touches on a variety of aspects of life in the community, from school and parish life, to Polishness and the significance of language, and the effects of suburbanization.

Interview keywords: St. Mary’s, church / parish, all Polish, PNI, women’s guild, basketball, immigrant, Polishness, language, John Paul II, I-290, suburbs.

Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, And Power In San Francisco And Its Hinterlands, 1846-1915, Darren A. Raspa

History ETDs

“Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, and Power in San Francisco and its Hinterlands, 1846–1915” follows the history of San Francisco’s spectrum of formal and informal policing from the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.–Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook’s nationwide law enforcement advisory team tour in 1912 and San Francisco’s debut as the Jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. These six decades functioned as a unique period wherein a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping were fostered. This policing environment was forged in …

Oral History: Richard Lewandowski

Zycie w Ameryce: A Collection of Polish-American Oral Histories

This conversation is an oral history interview with a former member of Worcester’s Polish-American community. The interview discusses much about the Polish-American experience, from the Polish diaspora, the effects of I-290 and discrimination on the community in Worcester, as well as the effect of global events such as the rise of Solidarity on the Worcester parish.

Interview keywords: St. Mary’s, English, displaced people, I-290, Polish-American parish, Solidarity, Polishness, John Paul II, discrimination, education, Church

Oral History: ​Carol Fredette

Zycie w Ameryce: A Collection of Polish-American Oral Histories

This conversation is an oral history interview with a former teacher at the Polish-American high school in Worcester, Saint Mary’s. The interviewee is not Polish, but of Lebanese descent, so provides the point of view of someone who came from outside the community yet still became a part of it. The interview touches on the rising importance of the English language, the Church’s centrality, ethnic parishes, school life, and high school basketball.

Interview keywords: English, ethnic parish, church, nun, club, basketball

Oral History: Anonymous 1

Zycie w Ameryce: A Collection of Polish-American Oral Histories

This conversation is an oral history interview with a longtime member of Worcester’s Polish-American community. The interview discusses aspects of community life, the neighborhood’s ethnic composition, as well as the effect of I-290 on the neighborhood.

Interview keywords: festivals, non-Polish, White Eagle Club, PNA, PNI, Booster’s, crime, expressway, Polish language

Oral History: Irene Rojcewicz

Zycie w Ameryce: A Collection of Polish-American Oral Histories

This conversation is an oral history interview with a longtime member of Worcester’s Polish-American community. The interview discusses aspects of life in the parish of Czestochowa, from festivals to clubs, to tensions within the diocese, as well as trips organized by the parish to travel to Poland.

Interview keywords: festivals, clubs, English, tension, Poland, John Paul II.

Oral History: Charlene Zimkiewicz

Zycie w Ameryce: A Collection of Polish-American Oral Histories

This conversation is an oral history interview with a longtime member of Worcester’s Polish-American community. This interview touches on difficulties the parish faced, tensions between different groups, school life, and the transition from an ethnic community to a public college.

Interview keywords: ethnic communities, festivals, Irish, fire, I-290, White Eagle Club, basketball, languages, college, immigrants, universal, June Show.