Digital Commons Network^™

"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …

A 5000-Year History Of Caribbean Environmental Change And Hurricane Activity Reconstructed From Coastal Lake Sediments Of The West Indies, Jason Thomas Knowles

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A ~5000 yr history of modern and prehistoric hurricane landfall and environmental change has been reconstructed from coastal lake sediments of the northern West Indies. Hurricane overwash layers and environmental shifts were identified by changes in biological and sedimentary stratigraphies, core lithology, and loss-on-ignition techniques. 14C and 137Cs were used to establish a chronology of events. Many hurricane-induced overwash layers were identified within the lake sediments. Evidence indicates distinct periods of temporal shifts in hurricane activity for the Northern Caribbean islands of Anguilla, Barbuda, and Acklins Island, Bahamas, providing the first paleotempestological records for the region. The northern Caribbean record …

A Multilevel Discrete - Time Hazard Model Of Retention Data In Higher Education, Christopher W. Guillory

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

College student retention rates are often used as a measure of institutional accountability, institutional success, and are used more frequently as a means of determining resource allocation. Understanding what factors impact the retention of college students has become critical to institutions of higher education. The study of the factors that impact student retention has been plagued with methodological concerns, especially the longitudinal and hierarchical nature of retention data. The purpose of this study was to investigate college student retention using a multilevel discrete-time hazard model. A multilevel discrete-time hazard model deals with many of the concerns associated with analyzing college …

The Anomaly Of Racial Variance In Female Perpetrated Spousal Killing: A Structural Explanation, Mark Melder

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT Research investigating the relationship of structural factors to homicide abounds in the literature. There is also extant research on female perpetrated intimate partner killings (IPK). However this literature for the most part has examined the phenomenon itself, or has disaggregated the rates by race, where it was discovered that there is a racial anomaly in intimate killings, Black females kill their partners at a higher rate than White females. This research sought to determine how structural factors function to differentially amplify this rate, using classic controls for homicide and adding measures for the presence of female kin, the presence …

Africanisms And Cultural Modifications: A Study At Southall Quarter, Williamsburg, Virginia, Jessie Chaiya Cohen

LSU Master's Theses

Archaeological studies at sites of enslaved Africans and African-Americans have been intensely undertaken in recent years. In particular, the search for Africanisms and cultural processes has become a common trend within these studies. I analyzed previously recorded investigations of Southall Quarter (44JC969), an eighteenth-century enslaved African and African-American site in James City County, Virginia. Dominating anthropological themes of slave resistance, owner-imposed hegemony, and agentic actions guided my search for Africanisms at Southall Quarter. I hoped to prove that the distance of the quarters from Southall’s residence and therefore the lax owner supervision provided the enslaved inhabitants with opportunities to express …

Mobile Dna Elements In Primate And Human Evolution, Jinchuan Xing, David J. Witherspoon, David A. Ray, Mark A. Batzer, Lynn B. Jorde

Faculty Publications

Roughly 50% of the primate genome consists of mobile, repetitive DNA sequences such as Alu and LINE1 elements. The causes and evolutionary consequences of mobile element insertion, which have received considerable attention during the past decade, are reviewed in this article. Because of their unique mutational mechanisms, these elements are highly useful for answering phylogenetic questions. We demonstrate how they have been used to help resolve a number of questions in primate phylogeny, including the human-chimpanzee- gorilla trichotomy and New World primate phylogeny. Alu and LINE1 element insertion polymorphisms have also been analyzed in human populations to test hypotheses about …

F07rs Sgb No. 15 (Anthropology Society), Delery

Student Senate Enrolled Legislation

No abstract provided.

Dreams Of Africa In Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda And The Story Of The Last Africans Brought To America, Eric Love

Civil War Book Review

The Illicit Slave Trade

An Ancestral Variant Of Secretogranin Ii Confers Regulation By Phox2 Transcription Factors And Association With Hypertension, Gen Wen, Jennifer Wessel, Weidong Zhou, Georg B. Ehret, Fangwen Rao, Mats Stridsberg, Sushil K. Mahata, Peter M. Gent, Madhusudan Das, Richard S. Cooper, Aravinda Chakravarti, Huilin Zhou, Nicholas J. Schork, Daniel T. O'Connor, Bruce A. Hamilton

Faculty Publications

Granins regulate secretory vesicle formation in neuroendocrine cells and granin-derived peptides are co-released with neurotransmitters as modulatory signals at sympathetic sites. We report evidence for association between a regulatory polymorphism in Secretogranin II (SCG2) and hypertension in African-American subjects. The minor allele is ancestral in the human lineage and is associated with disease risk in two case-control studies and with elevated blood pressure in a separate familial study. Mechanistically, the ancestral allele acts as a transcriptional enhancer in cells that express endogenous Scg2, whereas the derived allele does not. ARIX (PHOX2A) and PHOX2B are identified as potential transactivating factors by …

In Search Of Polymorphic Alu Insertions With Restricted Geographic Distributions, Richard Cordaux, Deepa Srikanta, Jungnam Lee, Mark Stoneking, Mark A. Batzer

Faculty Publications

Alu elements are transposable elements that have reached over one million copies in the human genome. Some Alu elements inserted in the genome so recently that they are still polymorphic for insertion presence or absence in human populations. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in using Alu variation for studies of human population genetic structure and inference of individual geographic origin. Currently, this requires a high number of Alu loci. Here, we used a linker-mediated polymerase chain reaction method to preferentially identify low-frequency Alu elements in various human DNA samples with different geographic origins. The candidate Alu loci were …

Genetic Similarities Within And Between Human Populations, D. J. Witherspoon, S. Wooding, A. R. Rogers, E. E. Marchani, W. S. Watkins, M. A. Batzer, L. B. Jorde

Faculty Publications

The proportion of human genetic variation due to differences between populations is modest, and individuals from different populations can be genetically more similar than individuals from the same population. Yet sufficient genetic data can permit accurate classification of individuals into populations. Both findings can be obtained from the same data set, using the same number of polymorphic loci. This article explains why. Our analysis focuses on the frequency, ω, with which a pair of random individuals from two different populations is genetically more similar than a pair of individuals randomly selected from any single population. We compare ω to the …

Mobile Dna In Old World Monkeys: A Glimpse Through The Rhesus Macaque Genome, Kyudong Han, Miriam K. Konkel, Jinchuan Xing, Hui Wang, Jungnam Lee, Thomas J. Meyer, Charles T. Huang, Erin Sandifer, Kristi Hebert, Erin W. Barnes, Robert Hubley, Webb Miller, Arian F.A. Smit, Brygg Ullmer, Mark A. Batzer

Faculty Publications

The completion of the draft sequence of the rhesus macaque genome allowed us to study the genomic composition and evolution of transposable elements in this representative of the Old World monkey lineage, a group of diverse primates closely related to humans. The L1 family of long interspersed elements appears to have evolved as a single lineage, and Alu elements have evolved into four currently active lineages. We also found evidence of elevated horizontal transmissions of retroviruses and the absence of DNA transposon activity in the Old World monkey lineage. In addition, ∼100 precursors of composite SVA (short interspersed element, variable …

Ancestral Alleles And Population Origins: Inferences Depend On Mutation Rate, Alan R. Rogers, Stephen Wooding, Chad D. Huff, Mark A. Batzer, Lynn B. Jorde

Faculty Publications

Previous studies have found that at most human loci, ancestral alleles are "African," in the sense that they reach their highest frequency there. Conventional wisdom holds that this reflects a recent African origin of modern humans. This paper challenges that view by showing that the empirical pattern (of elevated allele frequencies within Africa) is not as pervasive as has been thought. We confirm this African bias in a set of mainly protein-coding loci, but find a smaller bias in Alu insertion polymorphisms, and an even smaller bias in noncoding loci. Thus, the strong bias that was originally observed must reflect …

A Mobile Element-Based Evolutionary History Of Guenons (Tribe Cercopithecini), Jinchuan Xing, Hui Wang, Yuhua Zhang, David A. Ray, Anthony J. Tosi, Todd R. Disotell, Mark A. Batzer

Faculty Publications

Background: Guenons (tribe Cercopithecini) are a species-rich group of primates that have attracted considerable attention from both primatologists and evolutionary biologists. The complex speciation pattern has made the elucidation of their relationships a challenging task, and many questions remain unanswered. SINEs are a class of non-autonomous mobile elements and are essentially homoplasy-free characters with known ancestral states, making them useful genetic markers for phylogenetic studies. Results: We identified 151 novel Alu insertion loci from 11 species of tribe Cercopithecini, and used these insertions and 17 previously reported loci to infer a phylogenetic tree of the tribe Cercopithecini. Our results robustly …

Analysis Of A Decade In Library Literature: 1994-2004, Kelly D. Blessinger, Michelle Frasier-Robinson

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to analyze trends in publication and citation in library and information science journals over a decade (1994-2004) of the literature. This examination revealed the areas of concentration within the research, frequently published subjects through the years, and the characteristics of the top-cited authors and resources during this time. This information allows those in the field to follow the trends in publication, gives researchers the tools to determine which journals might give their work the most exposure and recognition, and can help libraries to make collection management decisions in this subject area.

Managing Coastal Resources In The 21st Century, M P. Weinstein, R C. Baird, D O. Conover, M Gross, M P. Weinstein, D K. Loomis, Z Naveh, S B. Peterson, D J. Reed, E Roe, R L. Swanson, J A. Swart, J M. Teal, R. Eugene Turner, D E. Van, H J. Windt

Faculty Publications

Coastal ecosystems are increasingly dominated by humans. Consequently, the human dimensions of sustainability science have become an integral part of emerging coastal governance and management practices. But if we are to avoid the harsh lessons of land management, coastal decision makers must recognize that humans are one of the more coastally dependent species in the biosphere. Management responses must therefore confront both the temporal urgency and the very real compromises and sacrifices that will be necessary to achieve a sustainable coastal ecosystem, one that is economically feasible, socially just, and ecologically sound.

Landscapes Of Power And Identity: Comparative Histories In The Sonoran Desert And The Forests Of Amazonia From Colony To Republic, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Relations Between Historical Geography And Latin Americanist Geography, Andrew Sluyter, Kent Mathewson

Faculty Publications

Content analysis of Geography in America (Gaile and Willmott 2003), which collects forty-seven chapters written by representatives of each of the specialty groups of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), reveals much about the recent intellectual structure of the discipline (Sluyter et al. 2006). One striking feature of that structure is the lack of intellectual connectivity, measured in practitioners named and publications cited, between the chapters of the Latin Americanist Specialty Group (LASG) and the Historical Geography Specialty Group (HGSG). Detailed comparison of the HGSG chapter and the Historical and Cultural Perspectives section of the LASG chapter addresses the character …

The Spirituality Of Trees In Later Seventeenth-Century Horticulture, Sandra Sherman

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The Architecture Of Ancient Maya Saltmaking; Distribution And Analysis Of Preserved Wooden Posts At The John Spang Site In Paynes Creek National Park, Belize, Elizabeth Cory Sills

LSU Master's Theses

Archaeological investigations were undertaken at the John Spang Site, a Late Classic Maya saltwork, in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, in Paynes Creek National Park, southern Belize. The field survey mapping yielded over 149 wooden architectural posts preserved below the sea floor in mangrove peat. The presence of briquetage indicates the wooden architecture is associated with the infrastructure associated with production and distribution of salt. The mapped survey areas, including the wooden architecture, artifact boundaries, and site boundaries, as well as the wooden post measurements were combined in a GIS to analyze the spatial distribution. I compare and contrast the patterns observed …

Visual Representations Of The Spatial Relationship Between Bermuda High Strengths And Hurricane Tracks, Jason T. Knowles, Michael Leitner

Faculty Publications

The 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons dramatically demonstrated the magnitude of the societal significance of hurricanes, negatively impacting on all scales from the personal to the national. Although definitive identification of the forcing mechanisms controlling hurricane tracks and landfall patterns remains elusive, increasing evidence supports the hypothesis that the increase in hurricane activity along the Gulf Coast is due to a southwestward shift in the position of the Bermuda High. This research uses multiple visualization techniques to explore the spatial correlation between Bermuda High strengths - as interpreted from the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index - and hurricane tracks. Using …

Use Of The Global Positioning System In The Field Recovery Of Scattered Human Remains, Ginesse A. Listi, Mary H. Manhein, Michael Leitner

Faculty Publications

This study examines the Global Positioning System (GPS) as a tool for field mapping of scattered human remains or other materials in forensic investigations. Two aspects of the GPS are considered: (1) the level of accuracy that can be obtained using a mid-priced GPS unit, and (2) the effectiveness of using the GPS to map scattered materials. The positional accuracy of the GPS receiver was tested using a National Geodetic Survey (NGS) point located in Baton Rouge, LA. The utility of the GPS for mapping was investigated by setting up a mock field recovery and mapping the remains using both …

An Evolutionary Model Of Parabolic Dune Development: Blowout To Mature Parabolic, Padre Island National Seashore, Texas, Winston Mckenna

LSU Master's Theses

The Texas barrier islands have been studied and well documented in relation to barrier island evolution and morphology (Leatherman, 1979; Morton, 1994; White and Weise, 1980). The detailed analysis and mapping of various dune types and systems that comprise Padre Island National Seashore, specifically parabolic dunes, is the focus of this research. Dune surveys and doqq’s, along with wind and weather records were used to develop an improved morphodynamic model for parabolic dunes. The wind records were provided by the Padre Island National Seashore, the National Data Climate Center, and the Texas Coastal Ocean Observation Network. Individual dune surveys were …

Methodological Lagniappe: A Walk In Representations Of The Red Stick Farmers Market, Jesica Eileen Speed

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, I take you on a walk – a walk in the making of representations – around the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This thesis is written at a moment of instability, or crisis, in this discipline. In a “crisis of representation,” how do we represent anything? Experimenting with various methodologies of writing, representation, dialogic performance, history, and ethnographic inquiry, this thesis provides a walk over various terrains. We begin by building the framework for the walk, then tour three areas of ethnographic expansions and alternatives: new ethnography, performative writing, and historicity. John VanMaanen calls …

Voices In Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Comparative Study Between New Orleans And Changting (China), Guiyuan Wang

LSU Master's Theses

This is a comparative study between the historic preservation in two countries – the United States (New Orleans) and China (Changting). The main questions are how the voices of different groups become foregrounded or effaced in the dynamics of the political process. Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts -- social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital – are applied. The historic preservation in the United States is distinct from that in China. First, the national structures of governments are different, and the historic preservation systems are established in dissimilar ways. Second, at the local level, the question, that who take part in historic …

Accuracy Assessment Of Individually Calibrated Journey-To-Crime Geographic Profiling Models, Tania Pal

LSU Master's Theses

Technological advances are fundamental to the development of spatial analysis tools and methodologies available and used within the criminal investigative process. This research focuses on one such methodology for serial crime analysis: Journey-to-Crime (JTC) Geographic Profiling (GP). JTC or the study of the travel behavior between an offender’s residence to and from the crime scene has been a subject of study within criminology for many years. GP, based on such travel behavior, is a spatial analysis and decision support tool that is used by law enforcement agencies to determine or predict the likely location of a serial offender’s residence or …

Hurricane Andrew And Pregnancies In Louisiana, Anzhelika Antipova

LSU Master's Theses

There are anecdotal accounts about the possible impact of a pregnant woman's mental health on her unborn fetus. This thesis investigates the possible association between hurricane-related stress experienced by pregnant women living in the area afflicted by Hurricane Andrew in Louisiana in 1992 and poor pregnancy outcomes such as preterm and Low Birth Weight (LBW) births. This is an important topic of research because by investigating past events one can better understand the pregnancy-related health issues for areas affected by extreme weather events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This research analyzed birth data from Louisiana both before and after …

In Vivo Facial Tissue Depth Study Of Chinese-Americans In New York City, Wing Nam Joyce Chan

LSU Master's Theses

Facial tissue depth measurements are used to create forensic facial reconstructions to aid in human remains identification. Collection of such measurements began in the late nineteenth century with anatomists His, Kollman, and Welcker. Their results were used to bring the rich and famous back to life. In the 1970s, the technique of facial reconstruction was revitalized and incorporated into the forensic science field to aid in human identification. However, certain populations are extremely under-represented. This study collected facial tissue depth information from the adult Chinese-American population in New York City. The study sample included 101 adult Chinese-Americans of varying weights …

Reevaluating Age In Subadult Remains In Response To Secular Changes In Skeletal Growth, Katherine Ann Blackwelder

LSU Master's Theses

The goal of forensic anthropology is the analysis and identification of human skeletal remains in a medicolegal context (Byers 2005:1-2). A forensic anthropologist can determine the age of subadult remains by various means, including dentition, centers of ossification, cranial suture closure, and epiphyseal union. Epiphyseal union is when all bones have completed their growth and fused, which happens for all bones by early adulthood. In this way, a forensic anthropologist can analyze the extent of epiphyseal union to determine the age of a deceased individual. This is done by comparing the skeletal remains to age-specific x-ray images of bones featured …