Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Asiatic Cholera And Dysentery On The Oregon Trail: A Historical Medical Geography Study, Brian Lee Altonen

Dissertations and Theses

Two disease regions existed on the Oregon Trail. Asiatic cholera impacted the Platte River flood plain from 1849 to 1852. Dysentery developed two endemic foci due to the decay of buffalo carcasses in eastern and middle Nebraska between 1844 and 1848, but later developed a much larger endemic region west of this Great Plains due to the infection of livestock carcasses by opportunistic bacteria.

This study demonstrates that whereas Asiatic cholera diffusion along the Trail was defined primarily by human population features, topography, and regional climate along the Platte River flood plain, the distribution of opportunistic dysentery along the Trail …

El Cuarto De AtráS : The Challenge Of The Autobiographical Text, Linda Kathleen Helton

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the notion of autobiography as presented in Carmen Martin Gaite's novel El cuarto de atras. I propose that the novel is intended not to be read as a straightforward autobiography, rather, the reader is invited to consider the autobiographical elements that function on various levels within a fictional mode. Although events from the author's childhood and adolescence are included in the novel, they are recounted through the use of a fictional protagonist.

By analyzing the narratological fabric that comprises the text, I show how the framework of the fictional mode provides a background for the various autobiographical …

Fort, Da : The World Of Play, Kevin Marc Ginger

Dissertations and Theses

The theoretical and contextual placement of my work is informed by child development psychology. The intention is to evoke and analyze what children do, not to imitate. My use of faux fur, comforting blankets and the form of play balls all function to create objects and environments that lend themselves to absurdity, humor, and of course child-like play.

"fort, da" is titled in spirit from Sigmund Freud's observation of a child throwing a toy with an accompanying statement fort, German for "gone." The child then delights in retrieving the object while exclaiming da or "here."1 The anxiety …

Textuaries, Patricia Millar Boas

Dissertations and Theses

The paintings, sculpture and digital prints presented for this thesis explore language as a field where sense and non-sense coexist With my focus on the activity of deciphering, both literally and metaphorically, I have examined the play between word as image and image as word. What poetry lies embedded in the strange physicality of familiar graphic marks? What is the pleasure we find, as the poet Robert Pinsky suggests, in language only partly understood?

Following the lead of the Surrealists, who used the camera to investigate the paradoxical notion of reality as a sign, I amassed a collection of newspaper …

The Bone Yard, Katherine Bartolomucci

Dissertations and Theses

This novel explores the everyday lives of two blue-collar workers Levi and Cressida -over the course of one summer in a rural fruit processing plant. The main protagonists exhibit contrasting forms of faith and courage, which drives their divergent fates.

Levi is a soul-searching twenty-five-year-old high school dropout who feels extraordinary obligation to family and is engaged to his pregnant girlfriend. Although Levi's father wants him to stay home and take over the family's strawberry farm, he intends to amass the courage to return to school and get a degree in agronomy.

In contrast, Cressida is a twenty-year-old senior in …

Legislating Against Reality : The Political Conflicts And Context Of The Seventh-Century Merovingian Church Councils, Gregory Burgas

Dissertations and Theses

The bishops of the seventh-century Merovingian Church were often drawn from the secular aristocracy after long careers in local or royal government. They remained involved in politics even after becoming . bishops, and these entanglements occasionally dictated their actions. Historians have examined these actions by using the chronicles and hagiography of the seventh century, but not by using the Church councils.

I translated the last five general councils of the Merovingian Church from the Latin into English for the first time, and then examined the councils in their political context. In the seventh century, the bishops were asserting their independence …

Tribal Constructs And Kinship Realities : Individual And Family Organization On The Grand Ronde Reservation From 1856, Aeron Teverbaugh

Dissertations and Theses

This project examines marriage and residence patterns on the Grand Ronde Reservation between 1856 and the early 1900s. It demonstrates that indigenous cultural patterns continued despite a colonial imagination that refused to see them. Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde continued to live in family groups much as they had in the pre-reservation era. They continued to exhibit patterns of marriage and kinship that were described in the ethnographies and by the earliest explorers in the Oregon area.

Voices Of Solitude In Creativity, Rebecca Jane Carpenter

Dissertations and Theses

Solitude is a philosophy, a state of mind, and a lost art in today's frantic world. Evolving from the Latin root word "solus" which means "alone," it is a concept which carries an aura of mystery, because it moves at the pace of reflection and focuses on the wonder of the present moment. Much of society views solitude with distrust, fear, or even contempt as it counters the current trends of perpetual activity, technological domination, and instant gratification.

This essay explores the author's three-way encounter with the richly intricate nature of solitude, to pursue an intuitive belief in its significant …