Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Talk This Way: A Look At The Historical Conversation Between Hip-Hop And Christianity, Joshua Swanson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christianity and Hip-Hop culture are often said to be at odds with one another. One is said to promote a lifestyle of righteousness and love, while the other is said to promote drugs, violence, and pride. As a result, the public has portrayed these two institutions as conflicting with no willingness to resolve their perceived differences. This paper will argue that there has always been a healthy conversation between Hip-Hop and Christianity since Hip-Hop’s inception. Using sources like Hip-Hop lyrics, theologians, historians, autobiographies, sermons, and articles that range from Ma$e to Tipper Gore, this paper will look at the conversation …

A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dollar General Corporation has grown into a retail titan with more than 15 000 stores across the continental United States. The first chapter of this thesis traces the history of this multibillion-dollar firm since its founding as a family-run business in Scottsville Kentucky in the late 1930s. Situating Dollar General’s history within the evolving contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries illustrates that Dollar General Stores succeed when the economy staggers. Neoliberalism and global finance capitalism have only exacerbated the geographic expansion and profitability of the company as the second chapter begins to explore. Although Dollar General Stores open at …

Design Plan For The Sawmill Town History Wing At The Texas Forestry Museum, Kendall D. Gay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Texas Forestry Museum in Lufkin, Texas is the only forestry museum in the state. It preserves artifacts and educates visitors about Texas’ forest industry history. The museum has a Sawmill Town History Wing that is outdated and in need of a refreshing exhibit design based on current best practices. Using a previous museum audit as a guide, the new exhibit will have better flow, panel aesthetics, content, and interactive elements. By creating a new exhibit, the museum is better able to educate and entertain the visitors about Texas’ forest industry history.

Reconciling The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haley V. Manis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the observations of Nancy J. Peterson on historical wounds as a springboard to discuss Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and its use of both white and black characters to reexamine the origins of the historical wounds and why they are so difficult to deal with even today. Other scholarly works will be used to further investigate the importance of each character in the story and what they mean to the wound itself. Specifically, Dana is analyzed alongside the other main characters: Rufus, Alice, and Kevin. Though Dana’s relationships with these characters, Kindred’s version of the past can be …

I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis focuses on the role of “place” in the poems of two black South Carolinian poets, Nikky Finney and Kwame Dawes. Borrowing from cultural and humanistic geographers’ myriad understandings of place, as well as philosophers’, I examine the ways in which Finney’s Rice and Dawes’s Wisteria function as meditations on and transmutations of the South Carolina low country in both its physical and non-physical dimensions, ultimately shedding light on historically silenced and marginalized emplaced realities. I also examine how Finney and Dawes employ different strategies of emplacement and their influence on the poems’ structure and meaning. In the …

The Ghost Of Ravishment That Lingers In The Land: The Beginnings Of Environmentalism In Seraph On The Suwanee And Go Down, Moses, Elisabeth Anne Wagner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner are recognized for their environmental writing. However, few scholars have acknowledged the sophisticated environmentalism present in Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Faulkner's fictional depiction of Lafayette County in Go Down, Moses. This thesis seeks to prove that Hurston and Faulkner were keenly aware of the ecological problems of their hometowns through a close reading of each book alongside the environmental history each book was based on, Eatonville, Florida and Lafayette County, Mississippi respectively. Each author's distinct regional environmental knowledge helped Hurston and Faulkner to see larger national and global problems with using land …

The Crescent And The Cross: Islamic Influence In Southern Culture, Jesse Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To a large degree, America has adopted African American culture as its own. One may hear and see African American influence in popular music, grammar, fashion and art, but rarely are the sources of these influences divined, in no small part to difficulties inherent in interdisciplinary studies. This thesis will examine the Islamic aesthetics in African American quilts. This work focuses on design and color elements and I trace Islamic influence from West Africa to the U.S. South by way of the slave trade. The original scholarship comes from in the Mississippi Delta, although this thesis also uses quilt books …

The Internal Odyssey Of Identity: James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain, And History., Brent Nelson Lamons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates how James Baldwin thought about history and treats his first novel as an important document in extricating his construct of the past. A close reading of the work reveals that it is an examination rather than a symptom of two powerful forces that dominate Baldwin's psychology, his father and his history.

James Baldwin felt the individual interpretation of one's experience is just as important as the experience itself. The novel is an informative exposition of how people interpret their experience and how that interpretation affects their psychology. Through Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin recreates the …