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Fiery Dissent: Antiwar Activism And Institutional Tensions At Seton Hall University, 1969–1970, Amelia Olson

Cohort 2025-2026

Amelia Olson is a sophomore majoring in Diplomacy and International Relations, with a minor in Spanish. Her research focuses on campus culture at Seton Hall University in 1970, drawing on archived WSOU recordings, The Setonian, and the Thomas Fahy Papers. Through this work, she explores how the Vietnam War shaped student life and heightened tensions on campus.

Archival Collections Used: SHU 0003-015 Office of the President & Chancellor of Seton Hall University: Thomas G. Fahy records, SHU 0037 WSOU Records, SHU 0054 The Setonian

The Postmodern Frontier: Richard Prince And The Neoliberal Spectacle Of The American Dream, Taïs Khassanova

MA Theses

This thesis examines the oeuvre of Richard Prince’s as a sustained allegory of contemporary American visual culture, beginning with his Cowboys series as the point of origin from which his later appropriations, including Girlfriends, Spiritual America, and New Portraits, unfold. Through the recursive gesture of appropriation, Prince’s Cowboys expose the myth of rugged independence as a corporate fiction, revealing how the frontier ethos was redeployed under the Reagan presidency to naturalize neoliberal ideology. Building on this premise, the thesis traces how such logic extends throughout Prince’s subsequent body of work, as his Girlfriends refigure the cowboy’s masculine autonomy as the …

Blood And Belonging: Remembering Massacres Of The American West In The Twentieth Century, Mountain Meadows And Sand Creek, Kenzie Burns

Honors Theses

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a turning point in mainstream America’s sense of national identity. A wave of nostalgia for the American Frontier enshrined the region’s idealized nineteenth-century past as myth. A key part of the story is romanticized violence—often depicted through cultural imagery of cowboys, gunfights, and battles with American Indians. This project seeks to understand more about how violence is represented in the cultural memory of the American Western past. Within the past twenty years, scholars of the American West have begun to incorporate the study of memory into their scholarship, frequently with how cultural …

Hot Topic Of The Cold War: Analyzing The Bomb In American Media During The Late Twentieth Century, Ryan Lambert

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores nuclear war–related media (i.e., media involving “the Bomb”) from the late twentieth century, beginning in the early 1950s and ending in the late 1990s, although media from the 2000s and beyond are briefly touched on. Unlike other studies of nuclear war narratives, this analysis intends to explore this media through a rhetorical framework of an “eroding” society, and the “erosion” concepts of the 50s–70s paved the way for cumulative “erosion” storylines in the 80s (the height of the Cold War), and then “restoration” storylines in the 90s (after the end of the Cold War). This framework is …

“None In Velvet Gowns”: Camp Followers And White Womanhood In Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Warfare, Angelica Labren Torres

History Theses

For over two hundred years, women who followed American and European armies during the long eighteenth century were popularly stereotyped and denigrated as prostitutes, burdens, and generally individuals of ill repute by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of historians. While recent scholarship has largely debunked this long-standing characterization as simplistic and inaccurate, the question remains: why exactly were these women so mischaracterized in their own time, particularly by commissioned officers and other members of Anglo-American middling and elite classes, when ample evidence existed of their material usefulness and comparative marital fidelity? This thesis seeks to address the ideological and cultural …

Missionaries And Magic: Freed People, Conjure And Reformation During Southern Reconstruction, Sanaa Belton

Undergraduate Research Awards

I argue in the pages to follow that during the Reconstruction period, reformation efforts by white northern activists attempted to shift the perception of Conjure from a dangerous yet useful spiritual tradition that served both the enslaved and their enslavers, to a spiritual tradition representative of a savage and backwards African people. Mainstream religious movements of the 1800s, the same movements that contributed to the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and early 1930s, were centered on the moral reformation of the United States. Missionary societies that branched off from these larger religious movements sent workers into southern states to …

Bitcoin And The American Conflict Over Money And Property, Jacob Smagula

CMC Senior Theses

I argue that Bitcoin is the latest expression of the recurring American conflict over who controls the terms of money and property, and that the political coalition formed around Bitcoin shares the same characteristics as earlier coalitions formed around this struggle. I review three historical cases that each produced a coalition opposing the existing monetary order: the Bank War of the 1830s, the Free Silver movement of the 1890s, and the populist backlash against the Federal Reserve during the 1979 Farm Crisis and the 2008 Great Recession. I find that Bitcoin’s architecture, which allows for self-custody, permissionless access, and an …

Creating A Modern American Piano: Antecedent, Launch, And Reinvention Of Mason & Hamlin's Piano Line Through 1905, Arian Sheets

Dissertations and Theses

The American piano industry was in a significant period of technical innovation, increased production, and standardization during the second half of the nineteenth century. This resulted in the American form of the instrument dominating the design and sound ideals still expected of the modern piano. Mason & Hamlin, a major reed organ company, entered the piano market in the early 1880s, relatively late compared to the largest, and most market-dominant companies, such as Steinway and Chickering. This thesis examines the origin and early implementation of the designs and innovations that have become standard for the modern American piano, and how …

Presidential Slaves: The Story Of Black People In The Lives Of Antebellum U.S. Presidents, Nika Davis

History Dissertations

The historical narrative about American slavery included many topics such as the African slave trade, the Middle Passage, slave culture, rebellions, religion, and abolition.  This study revealed more information to be examined in the record of American slavery relating to the presidents of the United States and their enslaved laborers.  This oversight proved prevalent during the years leading to the American Civil War from 1820-1860.  Therefore, this dissertation focused upon the enslaved and free Black people who intersected with the presidents and their friends, political acquaintances, and family.  By studying their lives, this dissertation revealed that the slaves associated with …

Continental Violence And The "Oregon Question": George Frederick Ruxton And The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest, Rory Orion Johnson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper builds on recent efforts to depict Indigenous polities across North America in their international relations with European and Euro-American colonists and their centralized governments. It examines George Frederick Ruxton, a private English citizen and former army lieutenant, as he developed his response to the U.S.-British Oregon dispute while living in London in early 1846. He concluded that continental warfare was imminent and took overt steps to influence British policy, which he believed could halt U.S. expansion and definitively resolve the “Oregon Question.”

“For Rescuing His Horse”: An Anthrozoological Approach To Dissent In Seventeenth-Century New England, Richard Mcgee

Open Access Master's Theses

The seventeenth-century colonization of New England entailed varying social, political, economic, cultural, and religious processes that were driven by and impacted several peoples. However, the presence of animals is undermentioned. This thesis forms an animal history of seventeenth-century New England, explains how different peoples understood human-animal relations, and evaluates how human-animal connectivity impacted how people conceptualized and conducted settler-colonialism. This thesis especially interrogates why some Puritan colonists limited different understandings of human-animal relations in the 1600s, namely from Indigenous Peoples, Quakers, and dissenting colonists deemed criminals. This thesis proposes that some Puritans restricted different concepts of human-animal relations because those …

Green As Cure: The City Beautiful Movement And The Spatial Politics Of Health, 1870-1950, Avi Patel

Library Map Prize

At the turn of the twentieth century, Progressive Era reformers understood the American city not merely as disordered but as pathological—an environment that bred disease and eroded civic life. This thesis argues that the City Beautiful Movement (CBM), embodied in Washington's 1902 McMillan Plan, advanced a spatial logic it terms "green as cure:" the conviction that disciplined landscape design could function as a form of environmental medicine, restoring health to the urban body. Drawing on maps, planning documents, and congressional reports, the thesis shows how plans defined disorder, prescribed intervention, and embedded assumptions about race and belonging into the built …

"Queens Of Ghost-Land" 134 Years Later: Un-Masking An Appalachian Witchcraft Accuser, Aine Norris

English Faculty Publications

In 1891, newspapers across America printed a story about witches in the Appalachian Mountains and the alleged powers they possessed to control their small farming community. The article was scathing in accusation and ultimately contributed to continued othering of the women profiled, increasing their visible vulnerabilities of class, gender, and societal status. Despite an implied familiarity with the region, the article was published with initials for its byline, an act that simultaneously identified the author to locals as historian Eva Grant while offering her anonymized national protection as a subject expert. For over five years the accusations were re‐printed in …

Contesting Conservatism: Neoconservatives, Evangelicals, And Foreign Policy In The Reagan Era, Emily B. Kissel

All Master's Theses

This thesis explores how foreign policy shaped and destabilized the conservative coalition during the Reagan era. Although historians often portray the conservative movement of the 1980s as unified by anti-communism, this study argues that foreign policy debates exposed significant ideological divisions between neoconservatives, evangelical Christians, and the broader conservative base. These groups shared common goals but disagreed over the moral and strategic direction of American foreign policy. Neoconservatives and evangelical Christians wanted the same muscular assertion of American power abroad, but the factions framed foreign policy differently to appeal to their supporters. These policies and aggressive anti-Soviet rhetoric struck widespread …

Contesting Conservatism: Neoconservatives, Evangelicals, And Foreign Policy In The Reagan Era, Emily B. Kissel

All Master's Theses

This thesis explores how foreign policy shaped and destabilized the conservative coalition during the Reagan era. Although historians often portray the conservative movement of the 1980s as unified by anti-communism, this study argues that foreign policy debates exposed significant ideological divisions between neoconservatives, evangelical Christians, and the broader conservative base. These groups shared common goals but disagreed over the moral and strategic direction of American foreign policy. Neoconservatives and evangelical Christians wanted the same muscular assertion of American power abroad, but the factions framed foreign policy differently to appeal to their supporters. These policies and aggressive anti-Soviet rhetoric struck widespread …

Religion, Death, And Journalism In The Christian Science Monitor, 1908-1918, Natalie Hammill

All Master's Theses

The Christian Science Monitor was created in 1908 by the Christian Science Church and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, with the goal to “injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” The question arises, how does a religion that does not believe in physical reality produce a newspaper, and how does that newspaper treat subjects like sin, sickness, and death, subjects Christian Science teaches its adherents to ignore? This thesis argues that the Christian Science Monitor used the inherent flexibility of Christian Science beliefs around physical reality in combination with popular ideas about non-sensationalism and “clean journalism” as the basis …

Finding Aid Of The James Z. George Autograph Album Collection

Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids (alphabetical)

The James Z. George Autograph Album contains signatures of members of the U.S. House of Representatives circa 1886 and a collection of signatures of delegates at the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890.

Women's Work And Wealth: Measuring The Impact Of Incremental Liberations, 1850-1870, Hannah Kelly

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-difference model, this project analyzes data from the IPUMS Full Count census for 1850, 1860, and 1870 at a state level for 48 states. Four models assess the impact of property laws on women's real property holdings, labor force participation, household types, and real property values.

By quantifying the impact of various legal reforms on women's economic empowerment, this project fills a gap in the understanding of the intersection between law, society, and women's economic agency during a transformative period in pre-industrial American history. These impacts can implicate the effectiveness of legislative measures in advancing …

Beyond Judicial Intent: The Agency Of The Defense Counsel In Ozawa’S And Thind’S Supreme Court Cases, Bret K. Luchs

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

This thesis seeks to examine how specific legal strategies by the defense counsel in Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), compelled the Supreme Court of the United States into a reactive and contradictory position. A re-examination of Ozawa and Thind delves deeper into the legal briefs and arguments made by Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind, alongside their legal teams. These briefs, opinions of the court, past lower court cases, and personal statements by Ozawa and Thind demonstrate how they did not surrender to the confines of …

Clyde On A Cloud: Black Mass-Media Activism In 1950s Orlando, Nathan M. Pelz

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Clyde Sanders is fondly remembered by those who were fortunate enough to tune their radio dial to WLOF during the 1950s or WOKB in the ‘60s. His show played the coolest tunes for teenagers who, for the first time, could carry with them music in their pockets. Sanders served as more than a radio DJ, however. Being Black in Orlando in the midcentury was complex and often dangerous. Careful not to explicitly engage with topics of civil rights, Sanders quietly advocated toward racial justice, helped to coordinate meetings, and advance racial harmony with his show which, though intended for Black …

Forces Of Movement: How Changing Perceptions Of Slavery And Freedom Affected Black Lives In The Mason-Dixon Borderland, 1861-1872, Rachael B. Nicholas

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The Mason-Dixon Line, first surveyed between 1763 and 1767, became the symbolic “dividing line” between free and slave states in antebellum America. This perception of the Mason-Dixon Line allowed a larger borderland to grow around it: the Mason-Dixon Borderland, which consisted of northern Maryland, Washington, D.C., southern Pennsylvania, northern Virginia, and the Shenandoah Valley (western Virginia and the eastern panhandle of West Virginia).

Americans used slavery and freedom as referents to make decisions about survival, military policy, politics, and freedom-seeking during the Civil War. Those decisions had consequences for their movement across the Mason-Dixon Borderland, causing it to change as …

Walking In The Footsteps Of My Ancestors: A Deep Map Of Cherokee Forced Removal, Deborah Lyn Kirk

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In this study of the place of Cherokee forced removal, I use a Third Space approach to blend Indigenous Methodologies, Deep Mapping, Geospatial mapping and analysis, and 3D Geography. Using a hybrid platform that provides a mélange of media types, storytelling forms, and interactive tools, I reimagine and retell the story of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.”

In accordance with Cherokee philosophies of duyuktv, harmony, and “a good mind” I first sought out Cherokee sponsorship from community respected and culturally knowledgeable Cherokee citizens; partnered with the National Trail of Tears Association (NTOTA); submitted my research proposal to the Cherokee …

Tuberculosis In Jim Crow Virginia, 1900-1972, Elizabeth Dooley

Theses and Dissertations

Tuberculosis (TB) was a major public health concern in the United States, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Transmission and treatment of the disease, which is spread between humans through close contact, was complicated by racial segregation laws in the South known as Jim Crow laws. Virginia subscribed to these laws, which played a role in how and where Black Virginians with TB could be treated. Segregated treatment facilities with an inadequate number of beds for the number of infected people and deaths in the state added to these complications of disease control and plan for eradication. …

Civil War Memory In New York City, 1861-1902, Kevin J. Sugrue

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines how New York City experienced, understood, and later remembered the American Civil War, from the outbreak of war (1861) through the dedication of major monuments at the turn of the twentieth century (1902). Although New York was the Union’s largest city and its most significant source of troops, casualties, industrial output, financial capital, and press coverage, the city’s wartime experience was deeply conflicted. As a Democratic stronghold and home to large populations of recent immigrants and working-class laborers, New York’s support for the Union was broad but conditional, fractured by class, ethnicity, race, and political allegiance. These …

Light And Fire: Kerosene And The Rise And Fall Of Standard Oil, 1859-1911, Minseok Jang

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation revisits the rise and fall of Standard Oil between 1859 and 1911 through the lens of petroleum’s materiality and the fire hazards it posed. Moving beyond traditional narratives that focus on the company’s corporate strategy, this study argues that the volatility of petroleum and the global consumer experience of its environmental risks were central to shaping the company’s trajectory. The research highlights how Standard Oil struggled to control the flammable nature of kerosene—the primary petroleum product used for illumination at the time—before aligning with Great Britain’s advanced inspection technologies and regulatory frameworks. This transimperial cooperation enabled Standard Oil …

German Science, American Manufacturing: Ethnic Capital, Transnational Technology, And Corporate Development At Bausch & Lomb, 1853–1953, George L. Grobe Iv

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation examines the first century of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, founded in Rochester, NY in 1853 by German immigrants John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb. It argues the firm’s success was driven by leveraging of management’s German ethnic identity as “ethnic capital” to access resources like financial liquidity, immigrant labor, and technical expertise. These resources allowed for the transformation of the firm from a small optical retail shop into a major manufacturer of advanced optical instruments. However, as later generations of the family Americanized, the ability of the firm to leverage ethnic capital eroded until breaking completely …

From Ship To Shore: The Impact Of Sailor Resistance On The Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Trent Chamberlain

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis explores the often-overlooked role of United States Navy personnel in the broader anti-Vietnam War movement. While civilian protests dominate historical narratives of the era, the impact of active-duty sailor resistance remains underexplored. To address this gap, this thesis examines shipboard and shore-based dissent to determine how Naval resistance influenced both military operations and domestic anti-war efforts. By conducting a historical analysis of primary source materials, including military records, underground press publications, and personal accounts, this research traces the evolution of sailor organizing and its intersections with civilian peace movements. The thesis shows that Naval dissent not only posed …

Speaking Freedom: Black Liberation, Abolitionism, And Substantive Justice, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

Subordinate groups form social movements to contest societal norms and practices that sustain inequality. Social mobilization by subordinates can spark countermovements by privileged classes who perceive egalitarianism as a threat to their economic, political, and social power. Privileged-group countermovements often seek to suppress speech that challenges oppression, known as liberation speech. In the nineteenth century, defenders of enslavement suppressed “liberation speech” by legal and extralegal means in order to maintain Whites’ social dominance. Abolitionist resistance to speech suppression helped foster a culture of free speech that created a foundation for First Amendment doctrines developed in the twentieth century. Drawing from …

0897: William A. “Red” Dawson Collection, 1915-2023, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

William Alfred “Red” Dawson, a native of Valdosta, Georgia, led his high school football team to a state championship and played for four years at Florida State University. Dawson briefly played professional football for the Boston Patriots in the AFL and the Orlando Panthers. He was serving as an assistant football coach at Marshall University when a fatal plane crash killed seventy-five players, coaches, staff, and prominent citizens of Huntington. Dawson was essential in restarting the Marshall University football program, serving as acting head coach and coached through the 1971 season. He then began working in the construction industry and …

The Making Of Modern Kentucky, Melanie Beals Goan

Open Educational Resources

Kentucky has always been something of an enigma, never fitting neatly into regional categories of north, east, south, or west. It is a borderland, and its unique blend of glitz and glamour juxtaposed with its rough and wild reputation continue to make it a place that is hard to pin down. Designed for college students, both those born here and those who are making the state their temporary home, this book provides an introduction to Kentucky's history, moving beyond simplistic stereotypes to consider the forces that have shaped its development over more than two centuries.

The book can also be …