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Rebellion And Ethnicity In Colonial New York: Jacob Leisler, Nicholas Bayard And Their World, Rachael Nicole Headrick
Rebellion And Ethnicity In Colonial New York: Jacob Leisler, Nicholas Bayard And Their World, Rachael Nicole Headrick
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation is an analysis of the political chaos in New York in the second half of the 1600s and the effect that had on the Dutch-identified population there, specifically the development of a distinct New York Dutch ethnicity. The ultimate conclusion of this dissertation is that political turmoil in New York from 1664 through the early years of the eighteenth century, turmoil brought about largely by events in England and continental Europe, caused a split in the Dutch population. One part of that community developed a new identification as a distinct people, a New York Dutch ethnicity. Another part …
The Octagon House And Mount Airy: Exploring The Intersection Of Slavery, Social Values, And Architecture In 19th-Century Washington, Dc And Virginia, Julianna Geralynn Jackson
The Octagon House And Mount Airy: Exploring The Intersection Of Slavery, Social Values, And Architecture In 19th-Century Washington, Dc And Virginia, Julianna Geralynn Jackson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This project uses archaeology, architecture, and the documentary record to explore the ways in which one family, the Tayloes, used Georgian design principals as a way of exerting control over the 19th-century landscape. This project uses two Tayloe homes as the units of study and investigates architectural choices at the Octagon House in Washington, DC, juxtaposed with its Richmond County, Virginia counterpart, Mount Airy, to examine architectural features and contexts of slavery on the landscape. Archaeological site reports, building plans, city maps, and various historic documents are used to identify contexts of slavery and explore the relationship between slavery, social …
Dolly Parton And Southern Womanhood / Race, Respectability, And Sexuality In The Mid-Century South, Madalyn Bell
Dolly Parton And Southern Womanhood / Race, Respectability, And Sexuality In The Mid-Century South, Madalyn Bell
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
“There is No Such Thing as Natural Beauty”: Dolly Parton’s Cinematic Performances and Concepts of Southern Womanhood Despite the influx of scholarship surrounding popular film and gender in recent years, little to no studies focus on one star’s impact on concepts of identity. The existing scholarship tends to investigate how types of films influence spectators’ understanding of the identities represented on screen. For instance, a study of female friendship films would argue that the spectators’ concepts of relationships and female to female interaction would be influenced. This paper aims to study one actress whose multiple representations of the same identity, …
’Wretched Petitioners’: Jamaican Maroon’S Petitions/ Catiline And Caesar In Early American Insults And The Whiskey Rebellion, Connor Fenton
’Wretched Petitioners’: Jamaican Maroon’S Petitions/ Catiline And Caesar In Early American Insults And The Whiskey Rebellion, Connor Fenton
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The ‘Wretched Petitioners’: Jamaican Maroon’s Petitions, 1795-1800 In 1795 the Jamaican Maroons from Trelawney Town revolted against the British. The rebellion was short lived but sent shockwaves across the Island that saw the British Governor, Lord Balcarres, gather the Assembly of Jamaica and order the removal of the rebellious Maroons. The Jamaican Maroons responded to Barclarres, not with renewed violence, but with British legal strategies by employing petitions in order to try and salvage their stay on the Island. Sic Semper Tyrannis: Catiline and Caesar in Early American Insults, Allusions, and The Whiskey Rebellion, 1789-1804 The use of classical allusions …
Creating The Border: Defining, Enforcing And Reasserting Physical And Ethnic Borderzone Spaces During The 16th, 17th And 18th Centuries In The Lake Champlain Richelieu River Valley, Andrew Robert Beaupre
Creating The Border: Defining, Enforcing And Reasserting Physical And Ethnic Borderzone Spaces During The 16th, 17th And 18th Centuries In The Lake Champlain Richelieu River Valley, Andrew Robert Beaupre
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation examines the creation of space and place in a border region through a historically grounded, multi-scalar approach to spatiality. The work draws upon the pre- and post-contact archaeology of the Lake Champlain Richelieu River Corridor, a historically contested waterway where the states of Vermont, and New York meet the Canadian Province of Québec. This is a region that has played host to countless complex cultural interactions between Native American/First Nation groups and Europeans of various cultural and national identities A tripartite model for multi-scalar study of space and place creation is presented and applied to the political and …
Fear, Foreigners And Federalism: The Naturalization Act Of 1790 And American Citizenship/Foundering Friendship: French Disillusionment After The Battle Of Yorktown, Cody Nager
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The Naturalization Act of 1790’s requirements of residency and “good character,” reveal that the First Congress set the limits on the access of immigrants to citizenship to mostly restrict European foreigners, rather than African Americans or Native Americans. These residency and “good character” clauses resulted from a combination of concerns regarding foreigners that came to prominence during the Confederation Period. Among these fears were the perceived abilities of immigrants to the gain control over land in the trans-Appalachian West and control over political influence in the unstable political order after the American Revolution. These worries about national stability were inflamed …
P.S. Don’T Tell My Mother: American Children Debate Race And Civil Rights, 1946-1991, Cara Anson Elliott
P.S. Don’T Tell My Mother: American Children Debate Race And Civil Rights, 1946-1991, Cara Anson Elliott
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Thousands of children throughout the United States participated in debates over race-based civil rights that occurred from the late 1940s through the early 1990s. One of the ways in which young Americans contributed to racial conflicts was by offering their opinions in letters and other writings. Children defended particular positions in the midst of national battles over integration, racial violence, desegregation, busing, urban uprisings, racial representation, poverty, and drugs. By communicating their interpretations of race and rights over the course of fifty years, children contributed to the development of American racial discourses. Children composed arguments both for and against racial …
Reading Bodies: Disability And American Literary History, 1789-1889, Amanda Stuckey
Reading Bodies: Disability And American Literary History, 1789-1889, Amanda Stuckey
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation brings the field of critical disability studies to bear on organizational paradigms of nineteenth-century American literature. “Reading Bodies” intervenes in these fields with the claim that the book in a variety of formats, publications, and circulations acts as a disciplinary tool that seeks to arrange physical and mental characteristics and capacities into the category of disability. This project moves beyond examining representations of disability to demonstrate that the same social, cultural, and political forces that generated literary movements and outpourings – such as nationalism, displacement of Native peoples, slavery, and state-sanctioned violence – also generated material conditions of …
Songsters And Film Scores: Civil War Music And American Memory, Ari Marie Weinberg
Songsters And Film Scores: Civil War Music And American Memory, Ari Marie Weinberg
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis consists of two separate essays both concerned with affect, memory, and music of the Civil War. The first examines the production, use, and purpose of a booklet called The Soldier’s Friend, with an emphasis on the mission of its producer, the United States Sanitary Commission and the needs of the readers of the booklet. In addition, I highlight the explicit connections that the organization made in this document between health and music by bringing cultural and psychological theories to the study of music. While many scholars have emphasized the ubiquity and importance of music during the War (and …
Race And Culture In The Early-Twentieth-Century United States And Colonial Hawaii, Leah Kuragano
Race And Culture In The Early-Twentieth-Century United States And Colonial Hawaii, Leah Kuragano
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The following essays are two explorations of the role of culture in colonial Hawai‘i and in the American metropole in racializing and dominating Native Hawaiians in terms of a larger history of race-based oppression and romanticization in the US. The first essay draws from Werner Sollors’ Ethnic Modernism, in which he argues that the aesthetic movement of modernism, which has been historically white-washed by scholars, had strong ties to the influx of immigrants and the growing popularity of jazz music and other forms of African American cultural expression in the early twentieth century. The second essay, written for “Politics of …
Native Citizens And French Refugees: Exploring The Aftermath Of The Haitian Revolution, Frances Bell
Native Citizens And French Refugees: Exploring The Aftermath Of The Haitian Revolution, Frances Bell
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
“Native Citizens!” Citizenship, Family, and Governance During the Haitian Revolution, 1789-1806 Given the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, and first head-of-state Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s insistence on divesting Haiti from all French influence, it is unsurprising that many historians have depicted Dessalines’s rule as a dramatic rupture; the end of an old state, and the beginning of a new one. However, despite Dessalines’s stated desire to divest from French influence, he continued to use the language of citizenship in legal texts, speeches, and proclamations, despite its strong association with French republicanism. By examining legislative texts and proclamations from 1793 to 1806, I …
Black Capes, White Spies: An Exploration Of Visual Black Identity, Evolving Heroism And 'Passing' In Marvel's Black Panther Comics And Mat Johnson's Graphic Novel, Incogengro, Ravynn K. Stringfield
Black Capes, White Spies: An Exploration Of Visual Black Identity, Evolving Heroism And 'Passing' In Marvel's Black Panther Comics And Mat Johnson's Graphic Novel, Incogengro, Ravynn K. Stringfield
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis is a portfolio which contains two essays. The first essay, “Reclaiming Wakanda,” is a character biography of the Black Panther comic character from his inception in 1966 until 2016. The work historicizes and politicizes a character written as apolotical by his creators while also placing him firmly within a legacy of Black Power, Civil Rights and other Black freedom movements of the second half of the 20th century. The second essay, “Incogengro: The Creation and Destruction of Black Identity in the ‘Safety’ of Harlem” considers how images and representations race and racial violence are constructed in graphic novel …
A Mass-Produced Yet "Authentic" Food : A Transatlantic History Of Pasta, Identity, And National Values In Italy And The Us, 1890 To 1974, Melissa Faith Gray
A Mass-Produced Yet "Authentic" Food : A Transatlantic History Of Pasta, Identity, And National Values In Italy And The Us, 1890 To 1974, Melissa Faith Gray
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Pasta gained international popularity simultaneously as both a banal and a culturally symbolic food in the 20th century. This dissertation contends that as pasta emerged in US and Italian consumer culture, negotiation of its dual meanings unfolded in the market as discourses of national and regional identity. This study tracks the role of governments, science professionals, cultural elites, manufacturers, and advertisers in articulating the meaning of commodities and juxtaposes these voices to the experience and contributions of consumers. Between 1900 and 1930, US Government officials, home economists, and advertisers recast pasta from a food synonymous with negative stereotypes of an …
Refining The Desert: The Politics Of Wealth, Industrialization, And Environmental Risk In The Twentieth-Century Texas Oil Industry, Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre
Refining The Desert: The Politics Of Wealth, Industrialization, And Environmental Risk In The Twentieth-Century Texas Oil Industry, Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation describes seventy years of West Texas oil expansion and decline juxtaposed against a growing environmental and public health crisis. It tracks the experiences of industry employees, demonstrating that their understanding of oil industrialization and the environmental cost of economic success was complex and historically contingent. Rather than assuming that simple greed allowed industry personnel to ignore resource depletion and environmental contamination, this dissertation argues that a workplace culture of individualistic risk-taking coupled with industry propaganda that bred a utopian faith in technology was reinforced by the region’s punishing geography, general isolation, and the limits of industrial infrastructure. This …
Folk Into Art: John Fahey, Modernism And The American Folk Revival, Lisa Carpenter
Folk Into Art: John Fahey, Modernism And The American Folk Revival, Lisa Carpenter
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
John Fahey’s music holds a distinct place in the mid-century folk revival--distinct because he is difficult to fit in with traditional narratives of the revival. John Fahey created a unique musical style through incorporation of traditional American music with classical music forms. His musical “quotations” and renditions of American blues, folk, ragtime, Protestant hymns, and parlor songs did not merely revive traditional music, but gave it new form and newfound respect in order to further artistic exploration. Fahey was a musical modernist, infusing tradition with the new. Fahey’s work can be situated in the context of modernist/folk connections that began …
Masters Of Light And Flight/ ”This Most Republican Amalgamation”, James Jonathan Rick
Masters Of Light And Flight/ ”This Most Republican Amalgamation”, James Jonathan Rick
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Masters of Light and Flight: The Spectacle of Invention in fin-de-siècle U.S. Popular Culture, 1876-1917 Popular fascination with inventors in U.S. popular culture was at a high point in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. This paper analyzes the discourse surrounding inventors in the aviation and aeronautics industries: including Thomas Alva Edison, Nicola Tesla, Glenn Curtiss and Wilbur and Orville Wright. By analyzing invention as a spectacle, it sheds light on the relationships between the spectacle of invention and industrial modernity. On the one hand, inventors became popular symbols of control over the process of labor and …
“Defenceless Wives” And “Female Furies” / Botany And The Early American Family, Holly Gruntner
“Defenceless Wives” And “Female Furies” / Botany And The Early American Family, Holly Gruntner
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
“Defenceless Wives” and “Female Furies”: Late Eighteenth Century Periodicals’ Depictions of Frontier Women The frontier had a firm hold on late eighteenth century popular imagination, trailing through newspapers and magazines of the era, which included, time after time, prominent accounts of the women who had made their homes on the outskirts of the “settled” colonies and early republic. My project examines the ways in which eighteenth century newspapers and magazines discussed frontier women’s experiences. Periodicals sought through their representations of women to illustrate the perils of the frontier by dramatizing women’s tales of trauma and woe, appropriating them in order …
Negotiating American Youth: Legal And Social Perceptions Of Age In The Early Republic, Holly Nicole Stevens White
Negotiating American Youth: Legal And Social Perceptions Of Age In The Early Republic, Holly Nicole Stevens White
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
“Negotiating American Youth” examines the venues in which young people and authority figures negotiated understandings of how age and communal or familial expectations affected one’s marriageability, independence and dependence, culpability, capability, and reliability in the Early Republican United States. Historians have characterized the period following the American Revolution as a progressive march toward legally uniform and modern interpretations of childhood, age, and family relationships that we might recognize today as more standardized. More specifically, historians of the Early Republic have often seized on newly codified definitions of age and independence as a means to explain changes in family relationships and …
"I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us": Ex Machina And The Performativity Of Lateral Surveillance, Kayla Danielle Meyers
"I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us": Ex Machina And The Performativity Of Lateral Surveillance, Kayla Danielle Meyers
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Surveillance plays a central role in the film Ex Machina (2015). Though surveillance is usually conceived as a unilateral force exerted by one agent onto another, the film imagines a more fluid system where characters perform roles of surveillant and subject of surveillance simultaneously. to provide commentary on surveillance culture, the film connects the A.I. film genre to the office film and fraternity film, which privilege male kinship. In bringing these three genres together, the film highlights gender hierarchies and constructions of masculinity where surveillance is a tool for exacting hetero-patriarchal power. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I …
The Francophone World And The Making Of An American Catholicism, Mitchell Edward Oxford
The Francophone World And The Making Of An American Catholicism, Mitchell Edward Oxford
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Although historians have long understood the importance of France to the institutional development of the Catholic Church in British North America, this portfolio is an attempt to demonstrate the significant role played by the Francophone world in shaping a distinctly American Catholicism in the United States. It does so by looking at two moments in the history of the American republic. The first is the attitude of the Continental Congress toward Quebec, which culminated in the invasion of Canada in 1775. In their attempt to sway Canada to the Patriot cause, Congress slowly reconciled themselves to guarantee religious liberty to …
Migrant Nation-Builders: The Development Of Austria-Hungary's National Projects In The United States, 1880s-1920s, Kristina Evans Poznan
Migrant Nation-Builders: The Development Of Austria-Hungary's National Projects In The United States, 1880s-1920s, Kristina Evans Poznan
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation charts the ways in which migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire crafted new forms of identification in the United States, complicating their relationships with their home and host states. Transatlantic migration and migrants’ heightened nationalism were, I argue, causative factors in the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire into ethnically-based states after Word War I. Rather than focusing on a single ethnic group, Migrant Nation-Builders looks broadly at early multilingual immigrant institutions, Austro-Hungarian and American perceptions of panslavism, and the splintering of immigrant institutions in the United States along linguistic lines. The project traces the long arm of homeland authorities, …
Contesting Identity And Citizenship In National Parks, 1900-1935, Rebecca Capobianco
Contesting Identity And Citizenship In National Parks, 1900-1935, Rebecca Capobianco
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
“In the Bosom of the Storied Blue Ridge Mountains:” Contesting the Future of American Culture in Shenandoah National Park, 1924-1936 In the early 20th century, as the National Park Service gained traction, legislators in the east pushed to preserve large tracts of land in the “western” mind. Yet the forces that converged in the early twentieth century to produce the National Park movement and to envision what those parks should be were more complicated than Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s presidencies imply. Theoretically parks for “the people,” National Park locations, resources, and regulations were often governed by the social and …
Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, And Consumer Culture, Wendy Korwin-Pawlowski
Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, And Consumer Culture, Wendy Korwin-Pawlowski
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation posits that a new form of material literacy emerged in the United States between 1890 and 1925, in tandem with the modern advertising profession. A nation recalibrating the way it valued economic and cultural mass consumption demanded, among other things, new signage – new ways to announce, and through those announcements, to produce its commitment to consumer society. What I call material literacy emerged as a set of interpretive skills wielded by both the creators and audiences of advertising material, whose paths crossed via representations of goods. These historically situated ways of reading and writing not only invited …
Reading The Gothic At Madame Rivardi's Seminary/Prodigal Sons And Virtuous Daughters, Emily Priscilla Wells
Reading The Gothic At Madame Rivardi's Seminary/Prodigal Sons And Virtuous Daughters, Emily Priscilla Wells
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In Reading the Gothic at Madame Rivardi’s Seminary, I study the reading patterns of young women in the early American republic using letters exchanged between students who attended Madame Rivardi’s Seminary in Philadelphia. By examining the language employed by young women in their discussions of gothic novels and romantic fiction, I argue that young women’s engagement with these texts defied the expectations of educators and moralists, especially in regards to the practice known today as sympathetic identification. By reading, comparing, and identifying with works from these two genres, young women participated in broader discussions regarding artifice and virtue in the …
Escaping Through The Past, Haunted By The Future: Confronting America Through Child Of God And The Underground Railroad, Zarah Victoria Quinn
Escaping Through The Past, Haunted By The Future: Confronting America Through Child Of God And The Underground Railroad, Zarah Victoria Quinn
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
My Master’s Thesis is comprised of two essays that review two contemporary American texts. Through genres of the gothic and historical fiction, these texts confront America’s violence of the past and present. The first essay, “Desiring and Dispossessing: Whiteness in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God,” investigates the novel’s reliance on a gothic genre as an affective strategy to confront whiteness’ specter of self-destruction. The second essay, “Escaping Through The Underground Railroad,” reconsiders the movement of escape and theorizes the action as a miraculous but forever-incomplete movement toward alternative ways of being--a theorization that could be useful for the present day. …
The Sacred Ginmill Closes: Heavy Drinking, White Masculinity And The Hard-Boiled Detective In American Culture, David Camak Pratt
The Sacred Ginmill Closes: Heavy Drinking, White Masculinity And The Hard-Boiled Detective In American Culture, David Camak Pratt
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Through close readings of fiction, film, and television, “The Sacred Ginmill Closes” provides a cultural history of the heavy-drinking hard-boiled detective in his twentieth-century cultural prime. Emergent in the Prohibition era, hard-boiled fiction comprised a cultural response to both the real and imagined effects of national prohibition. In portraying the Prohibition era’s corrupt and violent public sphere, early hard-boiled fiction by authors like Dashiell Hammett contrasted heavy drinking masculine authority figures, often private detectives, with transgressively greedy and excessively thirsty women whose participation in the public sphere and in masculine behaviors like heavy drinking represented both the cause and ongoing …
"The Irish Servants Of Barbados 1657-1661: Illuminations On Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, And Labor"/ "Moral Dynamite: Support And Opposition For Nationalist Political Violence And Nationalist Activity Among Irish-Americans In The 1880s", Jacqueline Wheelock
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The first paper, "The Irish Servants of Barbados, 1657-1661: Illuminations on Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, and Labor" explores the Irish as subjects within the English Empire and their access to the immunities, rights, and tolerance of other subjects of non-Irish nationality. This paper attempts to demonstrate not only the various ways in which the Irish were conceived as subjects in the early modern English Atlantic but also the ways in which this subjecthood was articulated and deployed in often fluid and haphazard ways. This paper uses colonial Barbados in the late 1650s and early 1660s as a case-study and relies on …