Digital Commons Network^™

Power In Portrayal: An Exploration Of The Evolving Cold War Relationship Between Germany And America Through Film, Kaleb Wentz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The end of the Second World War brought many questions to the United States. One of the greatest among these was what to do with defeated Germany. Many clamored for the dissolution of the former Nazi State and the shameful humbling of its people while others recognized the value of a revitalized Germany as an ally against the looming threat of an emboldened and empowered postwar Soviet Union. Though retribution held sway immediately following the war, the Cold War consensus of an alliance with West Germany and a reimagining of the German people as victims rather than perpetrators won out …

“An Exercise In International Extortion”: Operation “Intercept” And Nixon’S 1969 War On Drugs, Justin M. Reid

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

When the former senator and vice president assumed the Oval Office in January 1969, President Richard M. Nixon inherited a nation in crisis with drugs playing a central role. At a campaign stop a few months earlier, Nixon announced to a packed convention center in Anaheim, CA, that if elected president he would end the flow of the illicit drugs coming into the United States “decimating a generation of young Americans.”

True to his word, Nixon moved aggressively after his election victory to refocus the federal drug enforcement bureaucracy on drug source control, blaming Mexico as the main culprit. On …

Forging Community In The Ouachita Foothills Of Southwest Arkansas: Duckett Township, Homesteading, Distilling And Race, Lisa C. Childs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Community was key to successful subsistence agriculture in Arkansas, especially in the Ouachita foothills in southwest Arkansas (including Polk, Howard, Montgomery, Pike, Garland Counties) and Oklahoma (McCurtain, Pittsburgh, LeFlore Counties) until the 1940s. Nearly a quarter of Arkansas’s land remained in the federal government’s name twenty years after statehood, and even more of the land in the western Ouachita foothills. Much remains unknown about how farming communities were formed in this area from the end of the Civil War until approximately World War II. As seen in the Duckett community in northern Howard County, while family connections were important to …

Obenchain, William Alexander, 1841-1916 (Sc 3664), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid, typescript and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3664. Letter, 2 February 1874, of William A. Obenchain, Dallas, Texas, to A. G. Hobson, Bowling Green, Kentucky. The “Civil Engineer and Real Estate Agent” reports on a purchase of land in Dallas, outlines a plan for developing “our grounds” as building lots, and discusses the economic outlook for Dallas. Includes a deed, 19 December 1873, to Hobson’s son Joseph V. Hobson of lands in Dallas County, Texas, reciting that payment was made through Obenchain as his agent.

272nd Army Field Artillery Battalion (Sc 3665), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3665. Materials collected by Haskell Pedigo, a World War II veteran of the U.S. Army’s 272nd Field Artillery Battalion. Includes copies of reports of actions against the enemy, August 1944-June 1945; unit histories, 1944-1945, and other historical data and reminiscences; and reunion materials, lists of attendees, and memorial rolls.

An Overview Of The Major Developments In Early American Choral Education Methods: Notation-Centered Versus Sound Before Symbol, Aubrey Mangle

Senior Honors Theses

For the American choral music educator, knowledge of the beginnings and major developments of choral music education is valuable for both instruction and context. This project seeks to fill a gap in the resources available to choral music teachers by providing a brief yet comprehensive overview of the major developments in choral music education in the United States from the establishment of the Jamestown settlement in 1607 to the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. The discussion will focus on the major figures, pedagogues, published works, and educational philosophies for singing instruction that promoted either notation-centered or sound before …

Becoming Camilla Urso: A Female Celebrity Violinist And The Transformation Of American Musical Culture, Maeve Nagel-Frazel

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

Camilla Urso (1840-1902) was the first nationally famous female violinist in the United States. Between 1852-1902, Urso gave over a thousand concerts in the United States, becoming a musical celebrity on par with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. Through her public visibility, Urso transformed nineteenth-century American violin playing from a male-dominated field into an acceptable and even fashionable field for women. Despite her nineteenth-century fame, today Urso is mostly forgotten. Over the course of six chronological chapters, this thesis presents a contextual biography of Urso’s American concert career. Utilizing archival sources, digitized newspapers, and digital mapping methodologies, I argue Urso’s …

An Imaginary* Interview With A Philippines Collections Museum Donor, Camille Ungco

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Ontological distance is the dehumanization that emerges from uninterrogated coloniality between colonized subjects and the oppressive systems. This distancing has occurred in the histories of U.S. teachers both domestic-based and abroad, especially in Southeast Asia. In Steinbock-Pratt’s (2019) historiography on the relationships between early 1900s U.S. teachers and their Filipinx students, ontological distance was “The crux of the colonial relationship was intimacy marked by closeness without understanding, suasion backed by violence, and affection bounded by white and American supremacy” (Steinbock-Pratt, 2019, p. 214). This dehumanizing psychological or ontological distance existed during U.S. colonial regimes abroad, specifically in Southeast Asia and …

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Sings Which Story?: Narrative Production And Race In The Curriculum Of Film Musicals, Joanna Batt, Michael Joseph

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Film musicals serve as a tool to infuse historical and cultural content into social studies curricula towards greater student engagement—for example, Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton has become a celebrated classroom piece due to its ability to blend history with hip-hop and pop culture. Yet beyond language and content scans, teachers rarely examine or utilize musicals for how their narratives (mis)represent racial communities. This critical film analysis of three film musicals, using the theoretical framework of history production, reveals themes of historical morality, romantic relationship and race, and implicit/explicit racial messaging. Although troubling in their overall contribution to racial projects, film musicals …

Simeon Hart, The "Milmo Affair," And The Confederate Cotton Trade On The Rio Grande, 1861-65, Leonel Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

The cotton trade on the Rio Grande played a crucial role in the transnational history of Confederate-Mexican diplomacy as well as the history of the American Civil War and the Second French Intervention in Mexico. The renowned merchant from El Paso, Simeon Hart, was an important figure in the cotton trade since he helped facilitate diplomatic and commercial relations between Mexico and the Confederacy. Due to his reputation as an emissary and supplier for the Confederate Army of New Mexico, Hart was appointed quartermaster of the Trans-Mississippi Department. During the winter of 1863-64, the son-in-law of the Governor of Nuevo …

Model Minority Or Myth? Reexamining The Politics Of S.I. Hayakawa, Vivian Yan-Gonzalez

Asian American Studies Faculty Articles and Research

This article problematizes the model minority myth as an analytic in discussions of Asian American conservatism by reassessing the personal and political development of S.I. Hayakawa, Acting President of San Francisco State College during the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1968–1969. Contemporary activists and Asian American studies scholars influenced by the strike’s legacy have seen Hayakawa as a staunch conservative and an advocate of the model minority myth. However, Hayakawa was primarily motivated by his lifelong identification with the liberal tradition and his work as an advocate for racial equality. His realignment as a neoconservative Republican reflected the shifting …

Color, Countee Cullen

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Color (1925), his first published book of poetry, confronts head-on what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the 20th century—the problem of the color line.” The work includes 72 poems, such as the following:

Incident (For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, …

Linus Babcock, Oral History Interview, 2022, Cellach Allen

COVID-19 Oral Histories

In October and November of 2022, You Li's Journalism 313 students conducted oral history interviews with one another to document the student experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this interview, EMU undergraduate Linus Babcock describes the early days of COVID, the initial shutdown of the university and the experience of moving back home with family and siblings.

Comic Literature And Graphic Novel Uses In History, Literature, Math, And Science, James O. Barbre Iii, Justin Carroll, Joshua Tolbert

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Graphic novels and comics have a rich history and have long served as a medium for both education and entertainment. Although we live in an increasingly technology-rich era which offers abundant visual stimulation to compete with comics, graphic literature is arguably a more immediate and robust resource than ever before. The following paper highlights specific applications of graphic literature to pedagogical purposes, including implications for the use of comics in teaching history, world languages, English as a new language, science, and mathematics. Across these areas, a wide degree of application exists for teachers, in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. In …

The Limits Of Financial Equity: The Federal Reserve, The Depression Of 1921, And The End Of Wilsonian Progressivism, Terril Hebert

LSU Master's Theses

The Limits of Financial Equity: The Federal Reserve, the Depression of 1921, and the End of Wilsonian Progressivism is an examination of monetary policy and centralized macroeconomic planning in the American economy during the inflationary spiral of the 1910s that culminated in the Depression of 1921. Put forward for consideration is the successful populist campaign for agricultural credit equity by the burgeoning Federal Reserve System; set against a backdrop of intentional inflation, world and domestic citizens competed against as the price and supply chain distortions perpetuated by the policing of American commerce by the Food Administration, A. Mitchell Palmer’s Department …

The Grizzly, November 17, 2022, Layla Halterman, Marie Sykes, Tatiana Kent, Sean Mcginley, Amelia Kunko, Isabel Wesman, Ava Compagnoni, Izzy Dalesandro

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Budgeting for Ursinus' Future • Democrats Win Big in Pennsylvania Amidst Midterm Elections • Letter From the News Editor • A Year's Worth of Plays in Two Days • Concerts This Weekend • Meet Dora Zeibekis '24 • Opinions: Senior Beer at the Senior Bar • Field Hockey Season Recap • From the Bench to Breaking Records

A Persecuted Minority To Wealthy Merchants And Planters: A Study Of A Huguenot Family And Shifts In Identity, Garrett Gay

Honors College Theses

This project takes a look at an interwoven system of familial, religious, social, and economic ties known as the Protestant International. By analyzing genealogies, correspondence, business records, and transactions of the Mazyck Family from the early eighteenth century, it is seen that these international connections often led to the further material success of these families. This project also takes a look at how the Protestant International aided in shifting the vast majority of Huguenots’ identity from being religiously persecuted refugees to being wealthy merchants and planters who formed trade relations both domestically and internationally.

The Dance Of Domesticity: How Gender Constructs Obscure Lived Experience At Museums, Marcy J. Botwick

Museum Studies Theses

My thesis focuses on Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein and Ernest L. Blumenschein, married artists born in the late 1860s. Ernest Blumenschein was an important regional artist and member of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). Paintings by Blumenschein and other TSA members promoted tourism in the Southwestern United States through annual exhibitions and their use in advertising the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF). Mary Greene Blumenschein was an award-winning painter and illustrator whose work focused on images of women at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, she is now a secondary and obscure figure in art history. …

Creating A 1940s Costume: A Historical Investigation, Jennifer Mott

The Confluence

The purpose of this Art History research investigation was to create a costume from the 1940s by immersing myself in a time period when people often made their own clothing. This was done to better understand what it means to have a personal connection to the items I wear. Our experiences as consumers in the twenty-first century are vastly different than those belonging to the people that lived during the mid-twentieth century because almost all of our clothing is purchased from corporations and created by people that we will likely never meet. For this investigative study, I shopped for and …

Black Voices In Southern Labor Spaces: The Delta-Providence Cooperative Farms & The North Carolina Commission Of Interracial Cooperation, Tyler Eugene Fulks

Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) at UNI

This thesis project explores the role of voice in Black social movements in the context of US labor history. This project aims to examine three distinct spaces from 1928-1949 under the lens of struggle, versus a narrative of linear progress. This thesis argues that the social and economic conditions of these Black working class spaces have been filtered through White interpretations. This thesis seeks to build upon the historical methods and framework of Robin D.G. Kelley and Michel-Rolph Trouillot to interpret the records of these spaces beyond their surface values. This thesis examines the records and letters of the Mississippi …

"Maudie" - Letter To (Sc 3662), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3662. Letter, 26 March 1892, to Maudie at school, from her father “Geo W B” in Moark, Arkansas. He hopes she is learning and behaving, promises to “catch a big fish” for her homecoming, and tells her that her “Red bird” sings every morning.

Mammoth Cave National Park - Relating To (Sc 3663), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3663. Deeds relating to lands of the Vanmeter family (tract #37) in Edmonson County, Kentucky, which were conveyed to the Kentucky National Park Commission as part of the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park. Also includes a list of former owners of 575 tracts of land acquired for the park, and sketch maps of the tracts.

The Grizzly, November 10, 2022, Layla Halterman, Amelia Kunko, Chase Portaro, Erin Corcoran, Kate Horan, Tatiana Kent, Chase Rondeau, Ava Compagnoni

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

UC Imagine Fest Starts Today! • Students are a Microcosm of Midterm Political Landscape • Meet Ursinus' New Religious Faculty • Book it to the Center for Writing and Speaking • Opinions: Break Days at Ursinus • Corey Shaffer Takes Over Men's Lacrosse • From Reimert to Rollins!

Fry, Ulysses S., 1865-1907 (Sc 3659), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3659. “In Loving Remembrance of Ulysses S. Fry,” a memorial notice with details on the life and death of Fry, of Hardin County, Kentucky, and a description of his funeral.

Preston, John Bowker, 1851-1925 (Sc 3657), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3657. Reward of Merit for correctness in spelling, awarded to John B. Preston by his teacher. The reverse is inscribed June 14, 1864.

Ballard, Marshall Brugler, 1913-1914 (Sc 3658), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3658. Notice of death and invitation to the funeral of Marshall Brugler Ballard on 17 September 1914. Buried in Major County, Oklahoma, Marshall was the son of William H. Ballard and Stella Brugler.

Languages Of Reform: Populist Revolution Or Middle-Class Progressivism?, Timothy Vest Klein

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Populists and Progressives around the turn of the 20^th century had similar reform goals and many of the same foes. Both wanted to expand the power of the federal government to counter corporate monopolies which were dominating the nation’s economy and political system. In the early 1900s, Progressives enacted numerous reforms that were championed by Populists, including regulating railroads and other large corporations, breaking-up monopolies, implementing a graduated income tax, among other reforms. With so much agreement on policy, why did Populists and Progressives actively work against one another in the 1890s?

Part of their antagonism came from their …

Beam, Ernie (Sc 3655), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3655. “Home Folks,” a booklet of poems by Ernie Beam, Hodgenville, Kentucky.

Woods, Edgar Hall, 1864-1939 (Sc 3656), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3656. Letter, 3 May 1915, from E. H. Woods of Woods Hall Ranch, Pageville, Kentucky and Malvina Plantation, Malvina, Mississippi, to Lester Carter, Knob Lick, Kentucky. Woods writes of his wish to have Carter paint a portrait from a photograph of a young boy on a pony, but regrets his inability to meet Carter’s price.

Leopold Family Collection (Mss 747), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 747. Papers of the Leopold family of Louisville and Smiths Grove, Kentucky, primarily business records of William J. Leopold.