Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- History (1017)
- United States History (754)
- American Studies (512)
- Social and Behavioral Sciences (448)
- Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies (272)
-
- American Literature (236)
- Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (165)
- History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology (164)
- English Language and Literature (151)
- African American Studies (146)
- Women's Studies (137)
- Anthropology (126)
- African History (125)
- Social and Cultural Anthropology (118)
- Education (113)
- Political Science (102)
- Indigenous Studies (81)
- European History (75)
- History of Religion (64)
- Religion (49)
- Other Education (48)
- Ethnic Studies (44)
- Psychology (44)
- Military History (42)
- Communication (40)
- Theatre and Performance Studies (39)
- Caribbean Languages and Societies (37)
- Latin American Languages and Societies (37)
- Economics (36)
- Publication Year
Articles 91 - 120 of 1865
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
"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 …
“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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
"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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
"The Right To Think For Themselves": Native American Intellectual Sovereignty And Internationalism During The Cold War, 1950 - 1989, Lucie Kyrova
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This project examines the intellectual discourses and ideas that underlined and shaped Native American transnational activism and indigenous global cooperation during the Cold War. It explores Native activists’ use of the political realities of the Cold War and existing concepts, such as the United Nations’ (UN) human rights agenda, as frameworks for their strategies and demands for treaty rights and sovereignty. By using existing concepts and international mechanisms, Native Americans expanded their presence on the international scene, securing a permanent place in the UN, from which they worked to redefine the meanings of individual human rights and international law to …
Creolized Histories: Hybrid Literatures Of The Americas, Apostolos Rofaelas
Creolized Histories: Hybrid Literatures Of The Americas, Apostolos Rofaelas
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation is about a hemispheric understanding of the Americas by foregrounding hybrid literatures written both by Caribbean and U.S. American authors as the space where a transnational slave past of diversity, relation, and cross-cultural influence can be revealed and discussed. I use the term hybrid because these imaginary writings engage with actual events and real-life people that have shaped the history of the Americas, the interpretation of which is re-negotiated here though both history and literature. and literatures because it is not only novels but also epic poetry and oral stories that writers resort to in order to restore …
The Myth Of Unity: The Contra War, 1980–1990, Benjamin Wyatt Medina
The Myth Of Unity: The Contra War, 1980–1990, Benjamin Wyatt Medina
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This research focuses on the anti-Sandinista forces popularly known as the "contras" who operated in Nicaragua from 1980 to 1990, in particular the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (FDN), the Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática (ARDE), and the two main Atlantic Coast contra groups: MISURA (Miskito Sumu and Rama Indians of the Atlantic Coast) and MISURASATA (Miskito, Sumu, Rama, Sandinista Aslatakanta [Working Together]). This thesis looks at the different ways these contra groups viewed their conflict and explained it to national and international audiences, as well as to those within the anti-Sandinista movement. Because there was such heterogeneity within the contra movement, a comparative …
The City At The Falls: Building Culture In Richmond, Virginia, 1730-1860, Elizabeth Cook
The City At The Falls: Building Culture In Richmond, Virginia, 1730-1860, Elizabeth Cook
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Whether made of stone, brick, or wood, the built environment is a bricolage of materials, skills, aesthetics, and practical needs. This dissertation disassembles the colonial and antebellum cityscape of Richmond, Virginia, into its component parts in order to better understand the relationships between builders, materials, and occupational knowledge as elements of the built environment, as well as the building culture that united them. This approach challenges the historically exalted place of architects and urban planners as the primary producers of a city, and instead focuses on the contributions of previously unknown carpenters, sawyers, joiners, bricklayers, and masons. These craftsmen labored …
“Killing The Cattle, Hogs, And Fowls”/Stories Of Osceola, Andrew Stephen Vickory
“Killing The Cattle, Hogs, And Fowls”/Stories Of Osceola, Andrew Stephen Vickory
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
“Killing the Cattle, Hogs, and Fowls”: Creek Indians and Domesticated Livestock, 1700-1814 During the Red Stick War of 1813-14, the Creek Indian faction known as the Red Sticks killed the majority of cattle and hogs in Creek Country. The rejection of these animals was a purposeful tactic that carried great significance for the Red Stick movement, and was closely tied to Creek discourses concerning identity, autonomy, and community organization. By the early nineteenth century, Creeks already had a century-long history of experience with livestock, and the historical trajectory of those experiences is crucial to understanding Creek actions during the Red …
New South(Ern) Landscapes: Reenvisioning Tourism, Industry, And The Environment In The American South, John Barrington Matthews
New South(Ern) Landscapes: Reenvisioning Tourism, Industry, And The Environment In The American South, John Barrington Matthews
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Commenting on two distinct bodies of visual culture, this thesis examines how the American South has been depicted in photography, advertisement, and popular media. Exploring images of the South ranging from Depression-era Virginia to present day lower Louisiana, these papers seek to better incorporate views of a region traditionally underrepresented in visual depictions of the American landscape. Underlying both projects is an interest in utilizing visual culture as a means to understand humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. Taking a closer look at promotional materials from the early years of Shenandoah National Park, as well as the (post)industrial/posthumanist landscapes of …
Uncanny Objects: The Art Of Moving And Looking Human, Khanh Van Ngoc Vo
Uncanny Objects: The Art Of Moving And Looking Human, Khanh Van Ngoc Vo
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Automata ("self-moving" machines) and reborn dolls (hyperrealistic baby dolls) individually conjure up questions of dynamic and aesthetic realism--external components of the human form as realistically represented or reproduced. as simulacra of humans in movement and appearance, they serve as sites of the uncanny exemplifying the idea in which as varying forms of the cyborg imbue them with troubling yet fantastical qualities that raises questions about our own humanness. My first essay, “Automaton: Movement and Artificial/Mechanical Life” directly addresses the characteristics that define humanness, principally the Rene Descartes mind-body dichotomy, by tracing the evolution of mechanical life, predicated as much on …
The Politics Of Empire: The United States And The Global Structure Of Imperialism In The Early Twenty-First Century, Edward P. Hunt
The Politics Of Empire: The United States And The Global Structure Of Imperialism In The Early Twenty-First Century, Edward P. Hunt
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In the field of diplomatic history, scholars have debated how the United States has played an imperial role in the world. Although diplomatic historians have presented many different interpretations, they have never agreed on the defining aspects of U.S. imperialism. My dissertation intervenes in the debate by reviewing how the United States functioned as an imperial power at the start of the twenty-first century. In my dissertation, I make use of a wide array of publicly available sources, including the public remarks of U.S. officials, the public records of the U.S. government, and the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, to …
Putin' On For Da Lou: Hip Hop's Response To Racism In St. Louis, Travis Terrell Harris
Putin' On For Da Lou: Hip Hop's Response To Racism In St. Louis, Travis Terrell Harris
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The brutal slaying of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 by Police officer Darren Wilson is part of an endemic system of institutional racism against Blacks in St. Louis, Missouri. This system takes place in racialized spaces that entail disparate health care, failing schools, commercial redlining, an unjust justice system and several additional oppressive forces. I am seeking to understand the ways in which Hip Hop respond to these systems of oppression. I am interested in Hip Hop’s response because Hip Hoppers are enduring racism. Further, Hip Hop’s representation in popular culture draws attention to misogyny, drugs, violence and the …
“The Improvements Made By America On The Ancient Mode”: Classicism And Nationalism In The Early American Republic, 1780-1850, Alexander Strickland
“The Improvements Made By America On The Ancient Mode”: Classicism And Nationalism In The Early American Republic, 1780-1850, Alexander Strickland
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Classicism, an interest in the history, society, and arts of the ancient world, became a staple of American culture with the first permanent European settlements, and reached its zenith in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The extant scholarship on early American classicism offers a wealth of information about how citizens of the nascent United States read and interpreted the sources of the ancient world. However, it has done little to address the political utility of that classicism. The first of the two studies presented here attempts to locate one possible utility of American classicism in the Federalist Papers. …
Muskogee Internationalism In An Age Of Revolution, 1763-1818, James L. Hill
Muskogee Internationalism In An Age Of Revolution, 1763-1818, James L. Hill
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation reevaluates the consequences of the American Revolution by examining how indigenous peoples preserved their role as regional powers in the decades following the birth of the United States. Focusing on the Creek Indians of the present-day southeastern United States, I demonstrate that they maintained ties with Britons, Spaniards, and other Native peoples, employing these connections to their advantage. Creeks created borderlands that connected their societies with those of the British and Spanish Caribbean. The Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of Florida and their surrounding waters became zones of encounter and exchange between Native peoples, British wreckers from the Bahamas, …
Cabinet Of Monkies: Dancing Politics In Anglo Culture, From Jacobite To Jacobin And Royalist To Republican, Amy Stallings
Cabinet Of Monkies: Dancing Politics In Anglo Culture, From Jacobite To Jacobin And Royalist To Republican, Amy Stallings
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Dance has long been known to play a significant role in the social lives of men and women in colonial British America. What historians have largely failed to note is the integral nature of dance, in particular the longways English country form, to the realm of politics and the formation of national identity. From the earliest days of its dissemination in print, English country dance served a political purpose. In 1651, under Oliver Cromwell’s dour Protectorate government, Royalists like publisher John Playford used dance as a subtle form of resistance. Urging the public to remember the monarchy fondly and to …