American Studies Commons^™

Fighting Over The Founders: How We Remember The American Revolution, Andrew Schocket

Andrew M Schocket

The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in U.S. history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also …

Blue Bloods, Movie Queens, And Jane Does: Or How Princess Culture, American Film, And Girl Fandom Came Together In The 1910s, Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

This article explores the complex relationship established between young film actresses and their adolescent female fans during the second decade of the twentieth century. In the 1910s, popular press often promoted movie stars in their teens—such as Mary Pickford, Shirley Mason, Mae Marsh, and Lila Lee—as rag-to-riches Cinderellas released from urban squalor due to employment in the motion pictures. Fan magazines also presented these girl stars as blue-blooded princesses, whose royal bloodline enriched American stardom. Such press pageantry invited girl fans to identify with girl stars’ mythologized biographies.

However, the depiction of female movie stars as manufactured blue bloods also …

Bringing Liturgical Dance Into The Twenty-First Century, Trisha Holmes, Lisa Smith

Trisha Holmes

Dance Is a very powerful and ever changing form of communication found in virtually every civilization on earth. Because it is developing, new forms like Liturgical dance can often go unnoticed by the dance community as a whole. Liturgical dance can be traced back to the early slave churches of the 1700’s where it began as free form worship. Slaves and free “Blacks” gathered in large groups to worship, during these gatherings persons felt compelled by the “spirit of God” to move in wild abandon, like the “ring shout”, a tradition brought to America by the slave trade.(Allen ,“Slave Ships …