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Buffalo Club Of Northern Kentucky (Sc 3473), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3473. Directories of male teachers in northern Kentucky for 1937 and 1941-1942, made for the use of teachers with compliments of the Northern Kentucky Buffalo Club. Data on teachers includes name, position, school, and home address.

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

2019-2020 Ursinus College Course Catalogue, Office Of The Registrar

Ursinus College Catalogues, 1869-Present

A digital copy of the 2019-2020 Ursinus College Catalog. It contains details of the curriculum, departmental requirements and courses of instruction as well as the Open Questions core requirements, experiential learning and the Common Intellectual Experience (CIE). Academic policies, special opportunities and scholarships, off-campus programs and graduation requirements are also outlined.

Mothers Of Intention: Women In The Ku Klux Klan And Massive Resistance, 1954-1968, Michele R. Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines women in the Massive Resistance movement and the Ku Klux Klan of the classic Civil Rights period, 1954-1968. Specifically, it illustrates the way in which these women used their assigned gender roles as women, and specifically as mothers, to further white supremacist goals. White women have been an integral part of white supremacy in the United States from the beginning, yet are rarely portrayed as such. White supremacist movements are most often viewed through a male lens and gender in white supremacy is most often focused on how white men perform gender within the movements. While that …

The War On Winter: How Americans Put Down Roots On The Northern Plains, 1854-1949, Daniel J. Fischer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a study of how the United States was able to expand onto the Northern Great Plains, consisting of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana, between 1854 and 1949 despite the threat to property, comfort, and survival posed by the region’s harsh winters, which brought intense cold, large snowdrifts, and blinding blizzards. This dissertation argues that five tools – government programs, rapidly changing technology, imagination, strong local communities, and toughness – allowed native-born Americans and European immigrants to survive and become increasingly secure in the region. But it also argues that severe gaps …

Westward Empire: George Berkeley’S ‘Verses On The Prospect Of Planting Of Arts’ In American Art And Cultural History, Elizabeth Kiszonas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the extraordinary half-life of a single line of poetry: “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way…”. Beginning with their composition in 1726 by the Irish- Anglican bishop George Berkeley, these words colonized an enormous swath of cultural landscape over nearly two centuries. Immortalized in newsprint, broadsides, statesmen’s speeches, reading primers, geographies, the first scholarly history of the United States, as well as in poetry, paintings, lithographs, and photographs, the words evolved from an old-world vision of prophetic empire into a nationalist slogan of manifest destiny. Following the poem as it threads through literary and visual culture, …

The Worlds Of James Buchanan And Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality And Politics In Civil War America, Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller, John W. Quist

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens examines the political interests, relationships, and practices of two of the era’s most prominent politicians as well as the political worlds they inhabited and informed. Building upon previous scholarship on James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens, the contributors track their personal connections across lines of gender and geography and underline the importance of elementary facts of political association—such as with whom one ate and conversed on a regular basis, the complex social milieu of Washington, and the role of rumor—in determining relationships and political allegiances. The essays in this volume collectively invite further …

Texas Indian Holocaust And Survival: Mcallen Grace Brethren Church V. Salazar, Milo Colton

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the first Europeans entered the land that would one day be called Texas, they found a place that contained more Indian tribes than any other would-be American state at the time. At the turn of the twentieth century, the federal government documented that American Indians in Texas were nearly extinct, decreasing in number from 708 people in 1890 to 470 in 1900. A century later, the U.S. census recorded an explosion in the American Indian population living in Texas at 215,599 people. By 2010, that population jumped to 315,264 people.

Part One of this Article chronicles the forces contributing …

New England Slave Trader: The Case Of Charles Tyng, Paul J. Michaels

Master's Theses

Charles Tyng has been heralded as an American hero after the posthumous publication of his memoir, Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain, 1808-1833, in 1999. Recent research involving British Treasury report books from the nineteenth century suggest otherwise – that Tyng actively promoted and was engaged in the illicit trade of African captives. A Boston Brahmin, Tyng applied the lessons of his time at sea with Perkins & Company, the opium trading firm, to his occupation as an agent of notorious slave trading firms in Havana. This paper uses as evidence records of the captures …

The Hydraulic Dimension Of Reconstruction In Louisiana, 1863-1879, Matthew P. Carlin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Louisiana developed an extensive system of levees throughout the Atchafalaya Basin and along its territorial Mississippi River. This system reached its zenith on the eve of the American Civil War. It went into dramatic decline following the conflict due to the confluence of military activity, protracted irregular warfare, and neglect stemming from labor and capital revolution. These shifts intensified with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and finally consolidated after the ratification of Louisiana’s Constitution of 1879. The shift of responsibility for the construction and maintenance of levees during the Reconstruction Era led to many significant changes in the character and function …

“Of Nobler Song Than Mine”: Social Justice In The Life, Times, And Writings Of Fitz-James O'Brien, John P. Irish

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation will be a detailed study of the life, times, and writings of a mid-nineteenth century Irish-American writer, Fitz-James O’Brien. This will be the first full length study of O’Brien’s thought and writings. O’Brien was known, during his day, for two different types of writing: fiction of the supernatural and his writings on social justice, written in the emerging style of literary realism. It is his writings on social justice which this dissertation will explore. O’Brien’s writings on social justice covered three main topics: children, women, and animals. I look at how the historical context, O’Brien’s life, and his …

Ike's Last War: Making War Safe For Society, Jesse A. Faugstad

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis analyzes how Eisenhower defined war and its utility in his New Look defense policy and the ramifications for America’s interactions with the world through its foreign policy. It argues that Eisenhower redefined the relationship between war and society as he executed his grand strategy, further removing society from the decision for war. To avoid what he believed to be the inevitable global destruction of a general war turned nuclear, Eisenhower broadened the scope of ‘war” to balance domestic opinion for containing communism while also avoiding the devastating consequences of war in American society. By authorizing coups in Iran …

A Cause Lost, A Story Being Written: Explaining Black And White Commemorative Difference In The Postbellum South, Bailey M. Covington

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

This paper addresses the disparate commemorative modes and purposes employed by black and white Southerners following the Civil War, in their competing efforts to control the cultural narrative of the war’s legacy. I attempt to explain commemorative difference in the post-war era by evaluating the historical and rhetorical implications of the white Confederate monument, in contrast with the black freedom celebration. The goal of this research is to understand why monuments to the Confederacy proliferate in the South, while similar commemorative markers of the prominent role of slavery in the Civil War are all but nonexistent. I conclude that, while …

Gettysburg College Journal Of The Civil War Era 2019

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

No abstract provided.

Rennick, Robert M., 1932-2010 (Sc 3419), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3419. Letters, March 1972, to retired WKU faculty member Frances Richards and her sister Mary Ellen Richards, Franklin, Kentucky, from Robert M. Rennick of the University of Kentucky’s Prestonsburg Community College. Rennick outlines the objectives and methods of a national undertaking to survey all the place names of the United States and his work with a committee to ensure Kentucky’s participation. He requests their help in supervising the research and gathering of data from Simpson County. A second letter thanks Frances for her agreement to participate and …

Mapping Policy Issues: A Simple, Active-Learning Exercise For Critical Thinking, Richard Holtzman

History and Social Sciences Faculty Journal Articles

Many students in my undergraduate American politics courses struggle to see policy issues as complex. Too often, they get stuck making surface-level observations or jumping straight to personal opinions, falling far short of critical thinking. This article introduces an active-learning exercise—situational mapping—that provokes students to recognize and think critically about the complexities of policy issues such as immigration, abortion, campaign financing, and guns. Adapted from a grounded-theory research technique, the goals of this mapping exercise are to (1) help students see policy issues as messy, (2) encourage them to “wallow in complexity” rather than oversimplify, and (3) provoke them to …

Description Of Area On Sookatoncha Creek Near West Point, Miss., Author Unknown

Manuscripts and Books

Describes positions of the "3rd Miss" the "19th" and the "5th" in relation to Sookatoncha Creek (possibly Town Creek) near West Point, Miss.

The Farmers’ Federation: Regional Racial Mythologies As Agricultural Capital, Jama Mcmurtery Grove

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1927, the Farmers’ Federation agricultural cooperative in Western North Carolina launched an organization to solicit funds from wealthy donors. The money raised through philanthropic campaigns enabled the cooperative to fund large-scale agricultural projects, which helped members navigate the dramatic agricultural transformations of the early twentieth century. Although the cooperative advocated a progressive program of business-minded, scientific farming, its leadership modified programs to reflect farmer members’ limited resources and the realities of mountain production. As a result, the co-op provided a crucial bridge between white farmers and new methods of agricultural production that reached deep into peoples’ familial and productive …

North Of Ourselves: Identity And Place In Jim Wayne Miller’S Poetry, Micah Mccrotty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, …

Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …

Becoming Legible: The Racial Making Of The Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole People In The Coahuila–Texas Borderland, Rocío Gil Martínez De Escobar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This historical ethnography analyzes the making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as part of the production of the Coahuila-Texas borderland. In the quest to become legible to improve their living conditions and maintain a sense of dignity, Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles use history and racialization as tools of negotiation between themselves and the two nation-states where they live: Mexico and the United States. I analyze the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as a case of racialization that illustrates the ongoing mechanisms of settler colonialism (dispossession, exploitation, and elimination via genocide or assimilation), as they play out in specific socio-historical contexts.

The …

A Roundtable On Robert K. Brigham, Reckless: Henry Kissinger’S Responsibility For The Tragedy In Vietnam, Amanda Demmer, Richard A. Moss, Scott Laderman, Luke A. Nichter, David F. Schmitz, Robert K. Brigham

Presidential Studies Faculty Articles and Research

A set of reviews of Robert K. Brigham's Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam, with a response from the author.

“Mixed Up In The Coal Camp”: Interethnic, Family, And Community Exchanges In Matewan During The West Virginia Mine Wars, 1900-1922, Lela Dawn Gourley

History Theses & Dissertations

The West Virginia Mine Wars are etched in the popular memory of West Virginians, who view these events as an important part of their identity as Mountaineers; yet, there is still much historians do not know about the Mine Wars, especially when concentrating on the perspectives and experiences of the working-class miners. These everyday miners and their families are the topic of this thesis. Using oral histories from the Matewan Development Center Records housed in the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, this thesis argues that community-building across ethnic and racial lines within Matewan’s …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Creason, Joe, 1918-1974 (Sc 3347), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3347. “Kentuckians: How and Why We’re Different,” a speech delivered by Joe Creason, columnist for the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, to a joint meeting of the Simpson County (Kentucky) Historical Society and the Franklin (Kentucky) Chamber of Commerce, September 1967. The speech reviews Kentucky’s history, geography, settlement, culture, and notable citizens. Includes a “Kentucky mountain version” of the fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

"I Think Of The Future": The Long 1850s And The Origins Of The Americanization Of The World, Joshua Taylor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While historians often point to the rise of the United States as a major global player and technological leader on the world stage in the 1890s and early 1900s, this study argues it was the 1850s, not the 1890s, that this transition occurred. It utilizes transnational methodologies to analyze European perceptions of the United States, American international businessmen, and new ways Americans thought and talked about their place in the world. During the 1850s, European travelers to the United States began to recognize the young nation was taking the lead in technological innovation, while American businessmen like Samuel Colt began …

Ray, Joseph Malchus, 1907-1991 (Sc 3329), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text scan of memoirs and photographs and digital files of interviews (Click on "Additional Files" below to access) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3329. Memoirs, sundry papers, and oral histories of Joseph Malchus Ray, a native of Warren County, Kentucky, who went on to teach at universities in Texas, Alabama and Maryland. He ended his career as president of the University of Texas at El Paso in 1968, but stayed on afterwards as the H.Y. Benedict Professor of Political Science at UTEP. The memoirs discuss in detail his professional and personal life and the values that shaped …

Traitors In The Service Of The Lord: The Role Of Church And Clergy In Appalachia's Civil War, Sheilah Elwardani

Masters Theses

Studies of the guerrilla war in the central and southern Appalachian Mountains reveal repeated instances of violence and threats directed at the pastors of mountain churches. Instances of churches being burned, pastors and laymen beaten and at times murdered are sprinkled throughout the primary source materials. The question raised here is why were pastors and specific churches being targeted for violence? The church was the center of the life for secluded Appalachian communities, church leadership carried tremendous weight in influencing loyalties. Research focused solely on the Dunkard Church in Floyd County, Virginia revealed that amidst a particularly violent guerrilla war, …

Spanish Attempts To Apprehend Lewis And Clark, Jay H. Buckley, Dan Sturdevant

Faculty Publications

American General James Wilkinson–a general who never won a battle or lost a court-martial—served as the ranking military leader of the United States while moonlighting as secret agent #13 on imperial Spain’s payroll. A traitor to his country, the vainglorious general repeatedly revealed American military secrets to the Spanish from the 1790s to the early decades of the nineteenth century in exchange for silver dollars and land grants. Astonishingly, Wilkinson’s full range of espionage did not surface until after his death because Wilkinson instructed his Spanish contacts never to reveal any of his written communications to others.