American Studies Commons^™

Boarman, Dawn M. (Fa 217), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 217. Paper: "Halloween: Monsters and Myths" written by Dawn M. Boarman for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

Coburn, Rhonda (Fa 212), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 212. Paper: "Famous Ghost Legends at Western Kentucky University" written by Rhonda Coburn for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project

Cederquist, Nancy (Fa 206), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 206. Paper: "Local Ghost Legends of the Bowling Green-Warren County Area" written by Nancy Cederquist for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

Davis, Ezra (Sc 1571), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans of selected items (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1571. Miscellaneous papers, including notes and receipts relating to the business affairs of Ezra Davis and J. C. Burbage/Burbridge. Includes receipts from tobacco warehouses in Louisville, Kentucky. Also includes letters of Kitty McGehee, Irvington, Kentucky, to Virginia Hensley, and yearbook-style biographies by four schoolgirls.

Horton, George Lewis, 1894-1957 (Sc 1569), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1569. Letter, 24 July 1923, from George L. Horton, Ashland, Kentucky to Clare Anderson, Cleveland, Ohio, concerning her upcoming visit to Ashland. Includes a colorful handkerchief printed with the nursery rhyme "Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross" that was enclosed with the letter.

Fantastic Covers, Ellen Corrigan

Faculty & Staff Research & Creative Activity

Introductory and caption text from “Fantastic Covers,” an independently curated exhibit on display at Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University, October-December 2008. The exhibit featured cover art from a collection of pulp science fiction paperbacks and magazines dating from the 1950s to the early 1970s, housed in the library's Special Collections. Text reformatted from original presentation.

History: The Birth Of "America" In 1882, Robert H.I. Dale

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article concerns a New York Times story about the birth of the female Asian elephant calf, named America, at the winter headquarters of the "Greatest Show on Earth" in Bridgeport, Connecticut on February 2, 1882. Phineas T. Barnum, one of the owners of the show, and one prone to self-aggrandizing bluster, claimed that America was the second elephant ever born in captivity. America was born only to months before the arrival in New York of the most famous circus elephant of all time, Jumbo, on Easter Sunday, 1882, and only two years before the origin of a small wagon …

Scholarly Monographs On Rock Music: A Bibliographic Essay, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Purpose This article is an overview of scholarly monographs on rock music from 1980 to the present. It provides an overview to the literature for practical purposes of collections development as well as giving the reader insight into key issues and trends related to a interdisciplinary topic that attracts scholars from many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Design/methodology/approach This bibliographic essay, focusing on works related to American culture and of a general nature, includes an overview and historical background; a discussion of how music and ethnomusiciological scholars approach the topic; geographic approaches; literature on four key icons (Elvis, …

24 And The Efficacy Of Torture, Matthew D. Semel

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In the Fox Television Network program 24 a fictional counterterrorism agent named Jack Bauer uses extreme measures, including torture, to save the United States from catastrophic terrorist attacks. Bauer uses torture even though its efficacy is in question and it is illegal. Political leaders, including President George Bush, have endorsed the use of torture and Bauer's fictional success has reinforced that the idea these methods are both necessary and effective in obtaining actionable intelligence. This paper examines existing literature on military interrogations in the context of 24 and reviews empirical and descriptive evidence about existing practices. While researchers cannot ethically …

Cover To Cover: Contemporary Issues In Popular Women’S Magazines, Debbie Danowski

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Exposure to popular magazine covers is widespread among even those choosing not to read a particular magazine. With news racks in all grocery and convenience stores, the American public cannot escape at least a quick glance at the material presented on the cover. Because of this, it is vital that we analyze the messages being disseminated each month through these publications.

This study will attempt to analyze and categorize the messages sent out via the covers of the five most popular general interest women's magazines with the highest circulation during the year 2000: Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, …

"Dark Spirits: The Emergence Of Cultural Nationalism On The Sidelines And On Campus", Kurt E. Kemper

Research & Publications

Black college students in the 1960s and 1970s struggled to gain access to the university extracurriculum, particularly in spaces dominated by the Greek system and Black females struggled against prevailing assumptions of traditional white femininity. Efforts by Black female students at UCLA to participate in the university spirit squads became enmeshed with broader efforts to create a campus Black Studies Department and the growing campus debate around Black Power.

The Coping Strategies Of Highly Identified Sport Fans: The Importance Of Team Success On Tendencies To Utilize Proactive Pessimism, Frederick G. Grieve, Daniel L. Wann

Psychology Faculty Publications

The authors investigated the use of proactive pessimism among college basketball fans. Rather than assess evaluations of an upcoming season as with previous work on proactive pessimism among fans, Grieve and Wann examined evaluations of a specific game.

"Italians" Know Nothing About Love: The Marx Brothers As Guardian Angels Of Young Couple In Jeopardy, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

Originally published in A Century of the Marx Brothers. Ed. Joe Mills. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007

“The Marx Brothers as Guardian Angels of Young Lovers in Jeopardy.” by Marc DiPaolo

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Danger On The Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism And American Print Culture In The Progressive Era (Book Review), R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Nordstrom, Justin. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. ISBN 9780268036058

Emma Adapted: Jane Austen’S Heroine From Book To Film, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"This work of literary and film criticism examines all eight filmed adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma produced between 1948 and 1996 as vastly different interpretations of the source novel. Instead of condemning the movies and television specials as being «not as good as the book,» Marc DiPaolo considers how each adaptation might be understood as a valid «reading» of Austen’s text. For example, he demonstrates how the Gwyneth Paltrow film Emma is both a romance and a female coming-of-age story, the 1972 BBC miniseries dramatizes Emma’s world as claustrophobic and Emma herself as suffering from depression, and the modern-day teen …

[Introduction To] With The Weathermen: The Personal Journal Of A Revolutionary Woman, Susan Stern, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

Drugs. Sex. Revolutionary violence. From its first pages, Susan Stern's memoir With the Weathermen provides a candid, first-hand look at the radical politics and the social and cultural environment of the New Left during the late 1960s.

The Weathermen--a U.S.-based, revolutionary splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society--advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States. In With the Weathermen Stern traces her involvement with this group, and her transformation from a shy, married graduate student into a go-go dancing, street-fighting "macho mama." …

Table Of Contents

The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard & Pulp Studies

Articles:

Editorial Comments (The Dark Man V3n2),by Charles Allen Gramlich [as by Charles Gramlich]

The Influence of Joseph A. Altsheler’s “Young Trailers” Series on Howard’s Pictish Wilderness Fiction, by Robert M. McIlvaine

Mind-forg’d Manacles? Back to School with Robert E. Howard, by Steve Tompkins

Conan the Shakespearean / Hamlet the Barbarian, by Jeffrey Kahan

News (The Dark Man V3n2), by Paul Herman and S. T. Joshi

Letters to the Editor (The Dark Man V3n2), by Jeffrey Kahan

Letter (The Dark Man V3n2), by Mark Finn

Letter (The Dark Man V3n2), by Chris Gruber

Letter (The Dark Man V3n2), by Darrell …

Jazz On The River By William Howland Kenney (Book Review), Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

Jazz has not always been "America's classical music." In the first decades of the twentieth century it was regarded by much of the black and white Establishment as unsettling, provocative, even dangerous - attitudes exacerbated by the social upheaval of the Great Migration around the time of World War I. Enter black riverboat jazz bands to negotiate the color line: to help "white Americans approach in an oblique manner underlying social and cultural changes that were too deep and too heavily laden with pain, guilt, and fear for most citizens to discuss openly" (5). Such is the thesis of Jazz …

Indians In Unexpected Places (Book Review), Jeffrey P. Cain

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Jeffrey Cain:

Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. ISBN: 9780700613441; 9780700614592 (pbk.)

The Body Of Light : Poems, Alicia Matheny

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis explores the different facets of Pink Floyd and their music, drawing inspiration from albums varying from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) to Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Using images drawn from nature, the cosmos, and Pagan mythology, this thesis also incorporates biographical details found in Nicholas Schaffner’s important biography, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New York: Harmony Books, 1991). There are also experiments with form in the poems, in that in many of the poems, instead of commas, there are tab spaces. Each space expresses the silence between each word. …

Getting Hitched: Weddings And Reality Television, Amanda Vickerson

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

From watching reality shows like A Wedding Story on TLC, I have learned that planning a wedding is stressful, kills friendships, and is generally not fun. In my opinion, I think it’s crazy. So why do people do this? What is the allure of this madness? In addition to the general insanity of weddings, the institute of marriage has been shown to be deeply flawed and quite unequal, but we are still tuning in to watch Engaged & Underage and Perfect Proposal. The fantasy shows that we watch and the glossy magazines we read seem to cover up the fact …

Haunting Experiences: Ghosts In Contemporary Folklore, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, Jeannie B. Thomas

All USU Press Publications

Ghosts and the supernatural appear throughout modern culture, in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts. Popular media's commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from what people believe about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Belief and tradition and the popular or commercial nevertheless continually feed off each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from multiple angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously. They …

Of Wondrous Places And “Benevolent Neglect”: An Interview With Pam Munoz Ryan, Jennifer L. Fabbi, Amy L. Johnson

Library Faculty Research

With her recent book, "Paint the Wind" (2007), hitting the shelves this fall, author Pam Munoz Ryan delivers a welcome addition to the 25 plus books she has written for young people, including her award-winning novels "Esperanza Rising" (2000) and "Riding Freedom" (1998) and picture books "Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride" (1999) and "When Marian Sang" (2002). With "sense of place" as the focus, this article presents an interview with Ryan about her thoughts on the place of imagination in her writing and in the lives of the readers she writes for; the place of history and research …

Winning It All: The Cinematic Construction Of The Athletic American Dream, Andrew Miller

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Powered by a philosophy of self-determination and an ideology of a level playing field, the Athletic American Dream has become firmly entrenched in American culture. Following narrative pattterns influenced by both newspaper sports sections and juvenile sports fiction, it coalesces around underdog-to-champion, hard-work-leads-to-victory narratives that shape the sporting imagination and help to forge the masculine ideal that is the foundation of American self-image. The Athletic American Dream is produced, packaged and sold by mass media so successfully that one could argue that it becomes the most dominant vision of the American Dream by the end of the twentieth century.

Lawyers Not In Love, The Defenders And Sixties Tv, Steven Classen

Faculty Publications - Department of Communication and Cinematic Arts

This essay offers a social history and examination of The Defenders as a popular, criti- cally acclaimed television text that negotiated anxieties regarding crime, law, justice, lib- eralism, and masculinity in the 1960s and 1990s. Both The Defenders television series (1961–1965) and the Showtime motion picture series (1997–1998) by the same name rearticulated enduring tensions between law’s formalism and just desires for compassion and mercy, depicting defense attorneys as men who work both inside and outside of “law” to ensure justice and confront the lack of humanism in “the rule of law.” Such discourses are understood and appreciated in different …

Using The Novel To Teach Multiculturalism, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

Description of a fourteen week course taught by Michelle Loris, professor of English at Sacred Heart University. The course, titled Recent Ethnic American Fictions, introduced students to several concepts from contemporary literary theory. The theories included New Criticism, Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Feminist Theory. The assumption was that these concepts would give students the tools to become critical readers, which would then provide them with a deeper understanding of these multicultural novels and their particular cultural contexts.

For a semester, reading and thinking about these multicultural novels engaged and challenged the students' assumptions about themselves and the …

Table Of Contents

The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard & Pulp Studies

Articles:

Introduction (The Dark Man V3n1) by Mark Hall

The Mysterious Isle by Patrice Louinet                 

Short Stories:

“The Isle of the Eons”, Draft a1 — circa July 1925, novelette by Robert E. Howard

“The Isle of the Eons”, Outline — circa April 1926, short fiction by Robert E. Howard

“The Isle of the Eons”, Draft a2 — circa April or May 1926, short story by Robert E. Howard

“The Isle of the Eons”, Draft a3 — circa spring 1928, short story by Robert E. Howard

“The Isle of the Eons”, Draft b1 — circa second half of 1929 , novelette …

The Rhetoric Of Crisis: How We Talk About The Vulnerability Of Youth, Casey Cramer

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The classical definition of rhetoric is generally understood to be the art of persuasion. Originating in ancient Greece, rhetoric was one of the three original liberal arts. It focused on effective use of language, most often in the arena of politics and public discourse (Brummett, 35). By mastering persuasive language, politicians were able to shape and sway public opinion in their favor. Conversely, by understanding the mechanics of rhetoric, citizens were able to recognize and interpret speech that was purposefully constructed. The prevalence of rhetoric in political speech made it an integral part of a democratic society - politicians needed …

Personalized Gravestones: Your Life's Passion For All To See And Hear, Peter A. Maresco, Ahmed U. Zafar

WCBT Faculty Publications

In the past several years, a trend has developed that in an earlier age would have seemed inappropriate and perhaps even morbid; the increased personalization of gravestones (memorials). What makes this trend interesting is the variety of shapes, designs, manufacturing processes, and types of personalization actually appearing on gravestones, including seven-inch LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screens recessed into the face of memorials. This paper discusses gravestones (memorials) in a religious context. It examines the rapidly developing market for elaborately designed memorials both in their traditional forms, typically vertical and created out of granite with just a name and date of …

Mining The Meaning Of Collective Memory And Imagination: The Construction Of Identity In The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Courtney Hooper

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project illuminates the relationship between cultural resistance, cultural production, and cultural identity in the poetry of Puerto Ricans in New York (“Nuyoricans”). Through textual analysis, informal interviews, and participant observation conducted in the South Bronx, this project is interested in how the descriptions of the island as “home” are used to mediate a cultural or ethnic identity, particularly amongst a people who do not live there, or perhaps never have. While the construction of an ethnic identity and a conceptual homeland in a diasporic community has been studied in past research, the intention here is to elaborate upon the …