Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Western Duck Sickness: Avian Botulism And Conservation In The Bear River Marsh, 1910-1933, Andrew J. Simek

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis investigates how the Bear River marsh’s protection became a national interest and a cause for conservation in the Progressive Era. The thesis documents how the marsh declined because of irrigation development culminating with an outbreak of avian botulism in 1910, and traces the long process to protect the marshland. The research focused on examining local water development patterns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ornithological research in the 1910s, and the national sportsmen’s conservation movement of the 1920s. Upon examination of these events, it becomes clear that a coalition of ornithologists, sportsmen, and policy makers worked together …

To Belong As Citizens: Race And Marriage In Utah, 1880-1920, Scott D. Marianno

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the decades leading up to the twentieth century, social reformers and politicians, alarmed by Mormon political control (and polygamy) in Utah Territory, challenged Mormon whiteness and their competency for American citizenship. In re-examining Mormonism’s transition period, this study reveals how Mormon conformity to an encroaching American culture increased the movement’s exposure to discursive arguments on race-mixing, marriage, and eugenics that helped legitimize Mormon citizenship claims. Focusing on the themes of race, marriage, and citizenship, this thesis examines Mormonism’s racial transformation from not white to white as they assimilated and reified the racial ideology promoted by their Progressive-era contemporaries and …

Religious Outsiders And The Catholic Critique Of Protestantism In America, Bradley Kime

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous new religious and irreligious groups arose throughout the United States. These groups were often radical in their assertions of religious authority, their interpretations of scripture, their predictions about Christ’s second coming, their practice of supernatural gifts, their rejection of traditional Christian doctrines, or their rejection of Christianity altogether. American Catholics watched and commented as these groups multiplied and gained momentum. Catholics believed that the growth of radical religious and irreligious groups was the fault of mainstream Protestantism. Over the centuries, Catholics had argued that the Pope’s authority was necessary to provide spiritual …

The Legend, The Madman, And The Prophet A Memoir About Fathers And Sons, Erik K. Thalman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Legend, the Madman, and the Prophet is a memoir about fathers and sons, about the experience of being a son of a man of the Rocky Mountains, a legend grown old. The narrative centers around my struggle with the fact that my father had grown old and sick while I was still young, and my consequent search for other fathers, employing two primary examples—a martial-arts instructor from my high-school years who was later exposed as a pedophile, and the eccentric figure of my ex-girlfriend’s wealthy and traditional Egyptian-American father. The memoir relates the story of my father’s impact on …

"We Want To Get Down To The Nitty-Gritty": The Modern Hardboiled Detective In The Novella Form, Kendall G. Pack

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

My novella explores the character of a detective, Whitney Sloat, who lives and works in the hardboiled tradition, distant from reality. The characters of this fictionalized
Ogden, Utah act as they would in a hardboiled novel, but without the actual criminal element of that world.

Whitney and the characters that inhabit the novella are more products of detective fiction than inhabitants of that world. In line with Geraldine Pederson-Krag’s analysis of the primal scene as it applies to detective fiction, Whitney and those he associates with enact the detective fantasy and gratify their “infantile curiosity with impunity.” The world crumbles …

Understanding Myth And Myth As Understanding: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Mytho-Logic Narration, Sandra Bartlett Atwood

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

I wanted to see if there were points of overlap between the various accounts of creation found in folklore, philosophy and physics. In order to justify such a project, I initially considered literature from each of these disciplines regarding the necessity of interdisciplinary dialogue generally and specifically the need for both intuition and logic when considering how anything actually exists. Through my research and casual observation, I hypothesized that opposition seemed to be a universal characteristic of nature. I then looked at how each discipline has described fundamentally opposing pairs and created a list of primary features that those accounts …

Propaganda Powers Social Reform: The Visual Rhetoric Of Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, And Norman Rockwell, Shelly Stock Halling

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The scope of this thesis is an examination of visual rhetoric and its societal impacts. The framework is an historical timeline from the end of the 19^th century to the middle of the 20^th century. The thesis is an interdisciplinary activity that embeds Art History in American Studies. It is beneficial to scholars in a variety of fields, including, but not limited to: English, American Studies, Art History, Photography, Sociology, Anthropology, and History. It braids together the theoretical perspectives of propaganda, visual rhetoric, and advocacy. The thesis is based on library research with no outside funding.

A Painted Void, Kevin Larsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This creative thesis contains four original short stories and a literature review written by Utah State University student Kevin Larsen. The four short stories were written and revised in 2013 under the mentorship and guidance of Professor Jennifer Sinor. Works for the literature review were selected by Kevin Larsen after reading extensively within the horror and magical realism genres.

Horror and magical realism both are well established genres with their own rules and tendencies. By pulling from both genres, these stories explore ideas and themes of horror fiction using the structure and setting that magical realism allows. This isn’t to …

St. John Chrysostom's And Philip Melanchthon's Views Of Justification (Δικαιωσις) In St. Paul's Epistles, With Special Attention To How Their Respective Intellectual Environments Influenced Their Interpretations, Cameron Davis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The objective of this thesis is to provide insights into why John Chrysostom (349- 407 CE), who was the most prolific scriptural commentator in early, Eastern Christianity, understood the core theological concept of justification differently than Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560 CE), who was the first, and one of the most influential, theologians of the Protestant Reformation. Furthermore, because of their prominent positions within their respective faith movements, their perspectives reveal broader implications regarding how Christians within their respective periods and geographical locations were interpreting Christian scripture, and how the ideological currents were influencing their interpretations.

By understanding what led Chrysostom and …

The Mystical Union Of Infant Baptism: How Baptists Contributed To The Idea Of Race By Their Rejection Of Infant Baptism, Isaiah E. Jones

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the first three centuries CE, the sacrament of baptism proved to be a universal tool which united people beyond age, race, or ethnicity as we understand it today. To put it simply, the theological meaning of baptism was reinforced by the sacrament of infant baptism. That is to say that the Christian faith was for all, irrespective of one’s race, age, or social-status. This openness to Christianity changed in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century the Baptists rejected infant baptism, for a more rational faith based on Enlightenment and Romantic assumptions. What the Baptists did not realize …

Gorongosa: A History Of An African Landscape, 1921-2014, Domingos João Muala

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Gorongosa: a history of African landscape, 1921-2014, focuses on changes in the Gorongosa ecosystem, in central Mozambique, southeastern Africa. Environmental changes result from natural, non-human causes and from the activities of humans. I describe four socioecological events: African and Portuguese interactions, Gorongosa National Park, the effects of Mozambique's civil war, and the Park's restoration in the aftermath of the civil war. Prior to European partition of Africa in 1884-85, Mozambique did not exist as clearly a demarcated territory as it is now. Today, the sense of Mozambicanhood bears traces of Portuguese colonial era experience. The demarcation of Mozambique's boundaries and …

"They Are Hiring The White Women But They Won't Hire The Colored Women": Black Women Confront Racism And Sexism In The Richmond Shipyards During World War Ii, Paige Tuft

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Historians disagree about the lasting progress wartime defense work helped women and blacks achieve. Both gender and race historians explored the meaning of progress in terms of economic opportunities and social change. Ultimately, the progress debate centers on whether the war afforded women and minorities greater opportunities or whether remaining barriers limited these opportunities. This thesis complicates the progress narrative by looking at black women, a group largely overlooked by both gender and race historians. This thesis defines progress specifically as the ability to secure skilled jobs in the shipyards.

This thesis also takes an in-depth look at the reasons …

The Underground Gang: Cyclist Group Identity As Expressed Through Folk Art, Folk Events, Narratives, And Community Spaces, Anna P. Christiansen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a study of the “underground” cycling community in Ogden, Utah. This thesis establishes a groundwork understanding of the nature of underground cycling culture, particularly in relation to identity. Using folkloric definitions of identity and subculture as my foundation, I conducted fieldwork with the Ogden cycling community to examine four different facets of cyclist activities: folk art, folk events, narratives, and the community’s use of space. Each of the four facets also illustrated the different levels of identity, shifting from individual levels, outward to the performance of identity as an individual and group within a larger local and …

Claiming The Best Of Both Worlds: Mixed Heritage Children Of The Pacific Northwest Fur Trade And The Formation Of Identity, Alanna Cameron Beason

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, a region encompassing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, the western half of Montana, and British Columbia, supplied the needed ingredients for the formation of a distinctive identity to form among the mixed heritage children born to indigenous women and men of the fur trade. This thesis examined how this identity formed in some the leading families of the time. The MacDonald’s, McKay’s, and the Tolmie’s all embraced both sides of their parental cultures and used them to create and defend their own sense of identity and community. Language was an important aspect of this new …

Fascism And Culture In Sicily: The Centennial Of Vincenzo Bellini's Death, Olga A. Casaretti

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Benito Mussolini constantly portrayed his regime as a protector of nationalism and the ultimate promoter in the re-discovery of Italian culture. The 1930s represent the highest involvement of the regime in cultural activities. Such events had the specific propagandistic goal of ingraining the idea of fascism as a solution to poverty and cultural disunity between north and south. An ongoing theme of propaganda was connecting fascism’s mission to the glory of the Italian past and of its most illustrious protagonists. The Duce and his followers built the idea of a new political establishment that legitimized its rule through a reassertion …

"We Are Entitled To, And We Must Have, Medical Care": San Juan County's Farm Security Administration Medical Plan, 1938-1946, John Howard Brumbaough Jr.

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

From the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, in 2010, politicians and laypeople have been given much debate on national healthcare. With these circumstances, the study of Farm Security Administration’s health plans, one of the earliest attempts of government sponsored healthcare systems, is both timely and prudent. A study of the FSA becomes a usable past, which one medical historian believed would illustrate “some of the enduring themes that punctuate the debate over the proper role of government in health care.

The research project consisted of exploring primary and secondary documents related to …