Digital Commons Network^™

Preaching Unbelief: Freethought In Boston, 1825--1850, James Rogers

Master's Theses and Capstones

Freethinkers in the early nineteenth century embarked upon unprecedented organizational efforts in a period characterized by evangelical religious awakenings. In the face of almost pervasive discrimination, unbelievers conspicuously appropriated the recruitment and publicity methods of Christian organizations. Radical developments in print technology resulted in the publication of atheistic books and periodicals, none of which survived longer than the Boston Investigator. Its editor, Abner Kneeland, further disseminated antitheistic thought through oratorical performances and by engaging with contemporary social issues. More than this, unbelievers unashamedly copied specific religious practices: they sang rational hymns celebrating "truth" and science, and individual freethinking intellectuals gave …

Resisting Colonialism: Cultural Syncretism, Indigenous Agency And Exploition In Colonial Potosí, Isaac Galef-Brown

Senior Independent Study Theses

I analyze the transition indigenous peoples made from their native Andean communities to the Spanish colonial city of Potosí­ in modern day Bolivia. Although most historic study focuses on the infamous mita system of forced indigenous labor, I study the transition through the indigenous lens to find example of their economic gains as well as the cultural interactions they had with Spaniards. This alternative focus gives Potosí's past a very different characterization, defined less by exploitation and more by cultural syncretism.

Mastering The Patrol: A Look At The Importance Of Training For American Pilots In The Battle Of The Atlantic, Ethan M. Feinstein

Senior Independent Study Theses

This thesis studies the role of training in the Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. I argue that training played a significant role in this decisive battle in World War II. I detail the different stages of training for both the Navy and Army Air Force.

Re-Framing The Slaughter: Remembering The Rwandan Genocide, Jordan C. Broutman

Senior Independent Study Theses

This project looks at both official and silenced discourse pertaining to Rwandan genocide remembrance. I look specifically at discourse at museums, memorials, memoir, and film. I argue that the Rwandan state exists in the midst of a political conflict that has produced dual memories of victimization. While the genocidal violence inflicted on Tutsi should be commemorated as uniquely cruel and inhumane, many Hutu experienced similar acts of genocide in the 1972 Burundian genocide and in eastern Congo at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The Rwandan state faces the challenge of rebuilding in a context in which both sides …

A Short History Of Asbury Theological Seminary, Howard Fenimore Shipps

Heritage Material

No abstract provided.

Language, Politics, And History: An Introductory Essay, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This book chapter examines different articulations of language and history and introduces a new configuration that focuses on the political dimension of language.

A Sense Of Home: A Cultural Geography Of The Leschenault Estuary District: Report, Sandra Wooltorton

Research outputs 2013

Executive Summary

In 2012, a project was implemented to determine the place-based social values of the people of the Leschenault Estuary district. The project included a historical study, a literature review, a survey with quantitative and qualitative questions, targeted community engagement (five focus groups, six individual interviews) and a photo-elicitation study with a group of high school children.

Research Question

What is history of the relationship between people and place in the Leschenault Estuary District, and what is the relationship in 2012? What were, and what are the place-based social values of the population?

Videopoetry: Collaboration As Imaginative Method, Peter Lutze, James Armstrong, Laura Woodworth-Ney

Literacy, Language and Culture Faculty Publications and Presentations

Three Idaho professors (a poet, videographer, and historian) have been collaborating for eight years on a cross-disciplinary project called VideoPoetry, which integrates historical narration, narrative poetry, historical photographs, and videography into the video medium. To this point we've worked primarily on a specific program, Culture of Reclamation, which explores the culture of the early irrigated landscape communities in southern Idaho. In reflecting on our work-process, we’ve discovered that we’ve fundamentally changed as scholars as a result of our collaboration. This paper identifies the nature of our changes and documents instances of the ways in which we have been challenged to …

The Van Lidth De Jeude Family And The Waste From Their Privy: Material Culture Of A Wealthy Family In 18th-Century Tiel, The Netherlands, Michiel H. Bartels

Northeast Historical Archaeology

This study uses the comprehensive material culture of the 18th-century privy of the regent family Van Lidth de Jeude in Tiel (the Netherlands). The analysis takes advantage of the secondary sources that are common in the Netherlands to evaluate the privy contents. The archaeological finds are interpreted with the aid of historical documents, contemporary literature and probate inventories, and the content of the privy is set against the background of an 18th-century provincial town in the heart of the Netherlands. This combined study reveals much surprising information about the daily and private lives, personal history, gender aspects and socioeconomic status …

Leaving In The Past: The Role History Plays In Video Games, Joseph Fordham

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

How can something considered by many within academia as childish or a waste of time be potentially useful in presenting or even studying history? Not only has the video game industry grown into one of the largest forms of media in the world, but these games are also finding use as a training aid for the military and major companies, as an advertising medium, and, most importantly, as a tool for teaching. As developmental capabilities improve with new generations of graphics hardware, video games are turning towards the recreation of real-world and historical events. This drive towards realism and accuracy …

Provo City Library: Building Across A Century, Gregory M. Nelson

Faculty Publications

The public library in Provo City, Utah has undergone significant changes since the founding of the original 1906 building that was funded by Andrew Carnegie. The library has changed according to the needs of the community as it has adapted from its pioneer heritage to a modern service information organization. As it has adapted, however, the Provo Library has maintained its focus on community service with its physical facilities, collection development, community outreach and quality staffing.

The Courier, June 2012, Tennessee. Historical Commission.

Tennessee Historical Commission

No abstract provided.

Literacy By Subscription: Writing Instruction In Turn-Of-The-Century American Periodicals., Alicia Brazeau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines popular periodicals in the late 19th- and early 20th-century America as pivotal artifacts in the history of literacy education. It first reviews current histories of literacy, writing instruction, and magazines at the turn of the century, and then concentrates on the formation, circulation, and function of agricultural journals and of two women's periodicals, Harper's Bazar and The Ladies' Home Journal, between 1880 and 1910. In analyzing this collection of periodicals, this dissertation outlines both how magazines provided audiences with explicit instruction in reading and writing practices, and how editors and readers constructed unique, contextually-specific, definitions of advanced …

Lightning In A Bottle: A History Of The Syracuse Writing Program, 1986-1996, Laura J. Davies

Writing Program – Dissertations

Lightning in a Bottle: A History of the Syracuse Writing Program, 1986-1996, is directed by Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Collin Gifford Brooke. This historical study of the Syracuse Writing Program's administrative structures for contingent faculty focuses on professional development and evaluation systems for the Writing Program's part-time writing instructors. The study draws on archival methodology, using saved administrative documents from the Syracuse Writing Program and retrospective interviews of past members of the Syracuse University Writing Program. This history is influenced and contextualized through scholarship on contingent faculty labor, writing program administration, and the establishment of stand-alone writing programs. The goal …

"So Much For Fond Five-Dollar Memories": Prostitution In Las Vegas, 1905-1955, Marie Katherine Rowley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the fifty years examined in this thesis, the interactions between federal and local officials shaped prostitution policy in Las Vegas and Clark County. At times that federal authorities were concerned about prostitution in the county, local leaders balanced tradition and economic necessity in their responses. In the early twentieth century, prostitution's benefits to the local economy outweighed fear of federal reprisals, so local officials worked to protect the city's brothels. By the start of World War II, the federal government's increased power and presence in the West made local officials more willing to abandon the tolerance for prostitution in …

Liberian Clergywomen And The Women Of Liberia Mass Action For Peace : Causal Factors For Clergywomen's Participation Or Nonparticipation And The Impact On Clergywomen's Leadership In The Liberian Church, Katurah York Cooper

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Latent Crusaders: Narrative Strategies Of Survival In Early Modern Danubian Principalities, 1550-1750, Caius Dobrescu, Sorin Adam Matei

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

The essay concentrates on a master narrative strategy presiding over the early emergence of modernity in the area in which contemporary Romania is situated. This narrative strategy richly illustrates the neoByzantine survival strategies of the Greek elites who ruled the Danubian Principalities (Moldova and Valahia) during the earlier stages of Romanian modernization (18th century). Early modem Romanian political and intellectual elites borrowed from the post-Byzantine political theology a set of Gnostic-inflected narrative strategies to explain their subordination to alien powers (Turkish, Ottoman, Russian, Austrian, or Hungarian). These strategies operated a reversal of "real" and "unreal" or of "essential" and "fleeting" …

Hancock County Public Library System: History And Hurricane, Andrea Moreau

SLIS Connecting

The award-winning Hancock County Library System, consisting of four branches within the southwest corner of Mississippi, was dealt a devastating blow on August 29, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina made landfall and ravaged the Gulf Coast. The Waveland and Pearlington branches of this library system were destroyed. The headquarters branch in Bay St. Louis and the Kiln branch sustained critical damage as well.

The impact of Hurricane Katrina, the most notorious natural disaster in our nation’s history (as many have proclaimed), has historical significance in the field of library science as affected libraries, such as the Hancock County Library System, proceed …

Vox Populi-Vox Belli: A Historical Study Of Southern Ante Bellum Public Attitudes And Motivations Toward Secession, Julian Boyden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines why the south seceded in 1860 as opposed to any other time in the 19th century and what changed the mentalité of the people in the period 1857-1860. The underlying issue in southern politics and the issue of secession was clearly slavery and slavery rested on the economics of cotton. Yet slavery and cotton do not explain why the South seceded in 1860 and not at other times in the preceding seventy years. 1807 saw the outlawing of the international slave trade and 1819 saw Congress pass the Slave Trade Act interdicting the ships involved. In 1828 …

Gender Divide: Re-Examining The Feminization Of Teaching In The Nineteenth Century With Emphasis On The Displaced Male Teacher, Matthew Fegan

Senior Independent Study Theses

This thesis explores the intersection of the formalization of schools and the feminization of teaching in the nineteenth century. Specifically, it shares the perspective of the displaced male teacher who often re-located into newly formed administrative positions in the field of education.

Surviving War, Surviving Memory: An Oral History Of The South Vietnamese Civilian Experience In The Vietnam War, Leann Do

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Senior Independent Study examines the South Vietnamese civilian experience during the Vietnam War through an oral history approach. Using interviews conducted with six South Vietnamese men and women, this thesis investigates how individuals constructed and defined a sense of normality during the war and formed an identity dedicated to survival.

Rats! Foiled Again: A History Of Rodent Control Methods Development At The National Wildlife Research Center, Kathleen A. Fagerstone, Michael W. Fall, Gary W. Witmer, William C. Pitt

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

The National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) and its predecessor laboratories have a long history of developing materials and methods for managing rodents and the damage they cause. The NWRC has been influential in exploring, developing, and maintaining legal uses of many traditional field rodenticides such as strychnine and zinc phosphide. Products have been developed for managing rodents in a variety of locales, and for managing a variety of species, from commensal rodents in urban areas, to pocket gophers and mountain beaver in forests, prairie dogs and ground squirrels on rangelands, and nutria and beaver in wetlands. Considerable research has also …

Prevented Or Missed Chinese-Indochinese Encounters During Wwi: Spatial Imperial Policing In Metropolitan France, Tobias Frederik Rettig

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Confronting “Indivisibility” In The History Of Economic And Social Rights: From Parity To Priority And Back Again, Roland Burke

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Indivisible Human Rights. By Daniel Whelan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2010. 269pp.

First Mover: Otto Struve And The Use Of Scientific Capital In Astrophysics, 1921–1950, Erik Paul Norquest

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Otto Struve (1897-1963) came to the United States in 1921 and became one of the dominant personalities in the field of astrophysics. Struve’s career made him, in the words of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a “first mover” in a scientific field that was firmly engaged in the process of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” Struve pulled astrophysics further away from its empirical roots in categorization and made it more like physics in its unification of theory and observation. The primary way that he accomplished this was through his administration of Yerkes and McDonald observatories, where he brought in theorists to …

Material Culture And Multi-Cultural Interactions At Sylvester Manor, Jack Gary

Northeast Historical Archaeology

The material culture recovered from Sylvester Manor’s 17th-century deposits not only informs our understanding of the plantation’s depositional history but also is characteristic of cultural interactions between Europeans, Native Americans, and possibly Africans. The mixture of cultural material in these deposits suggests intense and sustained cultural interactions that have lead to the production and use of certain materials outside of their cultural norms. Several of these items are European goods altered for use in Native or possibly African cultural systems, while other items reflect the creolization of material culture by blending morphological and stylistic attributes of two material cultures. These …

The Archaeology Of Sylvester Manor, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Katherine Howlett Hayes, Anne P. Hancock

Northeast Historical Archaeology

This chapter introduces the history of the Sylvester Manor Project. It emphasizes the importance of the interdisciplinary approach employed during the project and the overall goals of the investigations. A discussion of pluralistic space and its importance as a central theme of the investigations is also presented. This is followed by a discussion of the Native American history of Shelter Island and its European colonization with particular attention given to the initial establishment of Sylvester Manor as a provisioning plantation, its connections to two large sugar plantations on Barbados, and its subsequent transformation into a commercial estate.

Memory In Paintings Of Quattrocentro Renaissance Florence: Religious Paintings And Secular Portraits, Ashley Matcheck

Psi Sigma Siren

Collective memory studies as a field has always been the interdisciplinary study of how and why memories have been created. The difference between collective or cultural memory studies and that of a strictly historical study is often discussed and debated as people question whether memory or history is more valuable regarding past events. Jan Assmann explains that “in the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes. Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered.” Assmann has …

From Citoyenne To Amazon: The Evolution Of Women’S Political Self-Identity During The French Revolution, 1789 – 1793, Jacob Cassens

Psi Sigma Siren

French women were already presenting concerns and ideas into the charged atmosphere during the summoning of the Estates General before the Revolution of 1789 began. This meeting of members from all classes of French society was elected to present the citizens’ concerns to King Louis XVI. From their petition to the king on January 1, 1789 to the laws prohibiting women from gathering in clubs in 1793, women made themselves heard by many means, yet there was never any one particular group or movement which encompassed the entirety of the female population of France. Women’s involvement varied from impassioned pleas …

The Courier, June 2011, Tennessee. Historical Commission.

Tennessee Historical Commission

No abstract provided.