American Studies Commons^™

This Land Isn’T My Land: How Canonical Literature Has Shaped Representation In The Outdoors, Claire Himmel

American Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Wine As Gossip: The Making Of Living Objects And Human Experience, Elena Angerman

American Studies Honors Papers

In this honors study Wine as Gossip: The Making of Living Objects and Human Experience, I argue that there is an inherent power to wine as a means to subvert the narrative of the current American myth. I emphasize how the living nature of wine reflects how objects can have a level of consciousness and power. In the opening chapter, “Gossip and Wine: Uncovering Forms of Resistance and Methods to Subvert and Revise Power Structures” gossip serves as a means to understand how wine can be used in this subversion. I argue that wine and gossip are linked in …

Volume 18 - Issue 1: La Créole - A Journal Of Creole History & Genealogy, Melissa Daggett, Alan Rosenberg, Pat Marant Schexnayder, Mark Charles Roudané, Nancia R. Sterling, Kalie Dutra, August J. Darbonne, Angela D. Aubry, Alex Da Paul Lee, Kimberly F. Monroe Ph.D, Gisele Perez, Katy Morlas Shannon, René Grandjean

La Créole - A Journal of Creole History & Genealogy

The Louisiana Creole Research Association, Inc., known as LA Creole, was founded on August 21, 2004 as a New Orleans-based, non-profit family research and educational organization. Its purpose is to assist Creoles of Color in researching their ancestry, to educate the general public about Creole history and culture, and to celebrate the contributions and legacy of a unique, sometimes forgotten people. La Créole, the Association’s journal is published annually.

More Bookman Than Bookerite: William Stanley Braithwaite And Poetic Stereotypes, Susanna Ashton

Publications

William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962) began his life with printed words as a printer’s apprentice with Ginn and Company in Massachusetts. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, all of whom began their meteoric literary careers by typesetting, Braithwaite’s rise was thwarted by the cultural stereotyping around race. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that throughout his career as anthologizer, publisher, poet, critic, and Boston Evening Transcript columnist, William Stanley Braithwaite used his facility with type to inform valuations of narrative and language with an eye not to race-blind aspects of literature, but to ways race might be recognized …

Iii.B.2 Educational Barriers, Kim Rostan, Bria Harper, Rylee Jorgensen

Crafting Democratic Futures

The document examines how historical segregation and systemic racism have shaped educational disparities in Spartanburg County, highlighting persistent inequities in school resources, teacher pay, and student outcomes. It concludes that these historical barriers continue to influence academic performance and post-secondary enrollment, with schools serving more diverse populations often facing lower proficiency rates despite high graduation rates.

University Of Southern Maine Commencement Program 2025, University Of Southern Maine

Commencement Programs

University of Southern Maine Commencement Program 2025

Pressing Matters: American Print Culture And The Development Of Proto-Romanticism, Daniel Young

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the distinctive features of post-independence American print culture and their influence on the emergence of American Romanticism. Advancements in printing technology, the establishment of paper mills, and the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets created a dispersed and unrestricted print environment. This accessibility allowed for a dynamic exchange of ideas, disseminated revolutionary concepts, and cultivated a unique American ethos characterized by individualism and intellectual freedom. Key works such as Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Edgar Huntly illustrate how early American Romanticism evolved to reflect the unique American …

Blackness And Nineteenth-Century Art In The Atlantic World, Rachel Hooper

Curatorial Publications

No abstract provided.

“Off To Greek Camp”: A History And Examination Of Greek America And Its Adaptation Of American Summer Camp Culture, Julia J. Walsh

Honors Theses

Camps are one of the most distinct institutions of American childhood, offering children a place to socialize and explore their identities. Since the late 19th century, camps have been used to inspire religious, social, and ethnic identity. Extensive research has been done into some kinds of summer camps, this thesis attempts to add to this literature through analysis of Greek Orthodox Summer Camp programs run under the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (The Metropolis of Boston Camp and Ionian Village). This dissertation examines the role of the modern religious summer camp in building and maintaining Greek American and Greek Orthodox …

The Paradox Of Value, David Enrique Guarnizo

Theses and Dissertations

The present thesis project examines how, in the United States, and especially in the state of Virginia, archetypes of "wealth," "value," and "identity" have been constructed in relation to land and territory. This analysis explores the tension between the inherent value of life on the land and the economic value that can be derived from it. This tension is exemplified by a theory known as the "paradox of value", also referred to as the "paradox of water and diamonds", which was developed by the renowned Scottish economist and philosopher, Adam Smith. This theoretical framework serves as a fundamental axis for …

Rubie K. Lee Photograph Albums, Zach S. Henderson Library Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection consists of three photograph albums documenting Rubie K. Lee's work with the Methodist Church’s Women's Missionary Council (WMC) in Korea from the 1920s through the early 1930s. The photographs depict Korea under Japanese rule, showcasing its people and landscapes. Albums also contains photographs of the Ogeechee River flood of 1929, as well as an extensive collection of color postcards from Lee’s travels to Korea, Japan and China.

Revising The Nation: Tribal Sovereignty And The American History Textbook, 1929-2002, Grace R. Ellis

Library Map Prize

This thesis examines Indigenous representation in twentieth-century American history textbooks. Chapter One contends that the most popular U.S. history textbook of the late twentieth century, The American Pageant, erased tribal nations from its narrative and its maps. Across twelve editions (1956-2002), The Pageant taught generations of students that “Indians” served only as barriers to building the modern American nation-state. While Indigenous erasure can be traced back to specific passages in The Pageant, erasure can better be understood as an iterative process, both textual and cartographic in nature. Beginning in 1983, The Pageant added new maps that depicted tribes …

Black Bodies On American Stages, Gabrielle Burton

Honors College Theses

The following study explores the character types that have been historically available to Black actors in American theatre and how that representation enforced, resisted, or ignored stereotypes. To examine the impact of those roles on the performers who played them, I examine the documented approaches Black actors have taken to embody their characters, as well as my own evolving process used to portray the eight characters I have inhabited in my personal college performance career at Georgia Southern University. This research and retrospective analysis reveal that while a lazy or performative indifference leads to harm, color-conscious inclusion, challenging conversations, and …

Cracking The Quotas: The 1948 New York Fair Educational Practices Act And The Jewish Quest For Color-Blindness, Miyuki Kita

FIU Law Review

This article explores how vigorously Jews pushed to enact the 1948 New York Fair Educational Practices Act to fight anti-Jewish quotas in higher education. The Act was the first state-level legislation to prohibit higher educational institutions from excluding, limiting or otherwise discriminating against persons seeking admission as students because of race, religion, creed, color, or national origin. Seeking a way to overcome discrimination in university admissions, Jews sought to combat it by promoting racially and religiously neutral admission procedures within the broad context of the expansion of opportunities in higher education after World War II instead of directly attacking antisemitism. …

Record Scratch: The Podcast, Kate Widmer

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

“Record Scratch: The Podcast” is an attempt to gather some of the history of Missoula’s alternative music scene from the 1990s until now, to contribute to documentation of Montana’s art scenes as well as to summarize and finalize my two and a half years of doing music reporting in Missoula. For the podcast, I interviewed four people who are active in Missoula’s music scene. Our discussions range from their youth through to the present day, giving several perspectives on Missoula’s changing music culture, as well as what it means to be a punk in Montana. My guiding reason for this …

Operation Dumbo Drop: Cultural Memory, And Representations Of The Vietnam War In The 1990s, Sylvie Kromer

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1995, the film Operation Dumbo Drop was released by Walt Disney Pictures. This film, based on a true story of elephants being airlifted across Vietnam in 1968 by the American military, holds a unique position as a rare family-friendly comedy about the Vietnam War. As a reflection of 1990s-era cultural memory of the Vietnam War, the film rehistoricizes and sanitizes the war, following a similar trend in other pieces of media from the same era. Operation Dumbo Drop must be seen in this context and as a product of the moment in which it was made. In taking a …

Love Is Dead In The Restless West: Hippies, Manson, And California Culture, 1966-1970, Rebecca Allen

Scripps Senior Theses

Though an extreme aberration from most of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, Charles Manson’s ultimately murderous cult arguably represents something particular about American culture in the late sixties, in which youthful hostility towards the status quo sometimes grew radical, and in the case of the Manson Family cult, extremely violent. By the mid-sixties, more and more young people began to feel alienated by a culture they felt no longer embodied their larger aspirations, and as a result, were drawn to the emerging counterculture that embraced alternative lifestyles that frequently clashed with the traditional sensibilities of their parents’ generation. After …

Plantation Matters: The Black Production Of Space In Southeastern Louisiana, 1830 To 1912, Noura Jabir

Pomona Senior Theses

Taking one Louisiana sugar plantation as a starting place, I demonstrate how African-descended laborers created life-sustaining spaces within/beyond the death-driving plantation complex during and after slavery.

Occupied Lands, Occupied Histories: Activist-Historians And The Red Power Movement, Elena Rose Paz Thompson

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay.............................4

II. Primary Document Collection......25

III. Textbook Critique........................37

IV. New Textbook Writing.................42

Keepunumuk: Teaching The Deconstruction Of The “Myth Of The First Thanksgiving”, Pierce Thompson

A with Honors Projects

The goal of this project was to volunteer to teach a reading activity for elementary school students about the indigenous peoples (Wampanoag) contact in 1621 from the indigenous perspective and deconstruct the “First Thanksgiving myth” using the book “Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun's Thanksgiving Story” published on August 2, 2022, by authors Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry, and Alexis Bunten.

The Cut Worm Forgives The Plow, August Neuscheler

Theses and Dissertations

The explorations in this thesis writing are centered on William Blake’s proverb “The cut worm forgives the plow.” It has been reinterpreted as an allegory of history and energy. A theory of their relation is proposed based on forgiveness, a theory that accepts the palimpsest of orders as evidence for the abundance of the present moment. The writing focuses on questions of proportionality, scale, archaeological screening methods, planar cutting, and a critique of entropy as grounds for this theory. Some of its subjects include the Statue of Liberty, Kate Raworth’s donut economic model, sashimi, triangulation, Joseph Beuys’ “7,000 Eichen,” semiconductors, …

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

Reclaiming Revolutionary Relics: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Used George Washington’S Objects To Understand The Civil War, Abbi E. Smithmyer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

By combining cultural, memory, and material culture studies, this dissertation examines the ways objects associated with George Washington became instruments within the proxy war over whether the United States or the Confederacy best represented the American Revolutionary era’s principal values of liberty and equality. Exploring monuments, statues, historic homes, relics, and mementoes, as well as antebellum speeches and schoolbooks, letters, diaries, military orders, newspapers, and memoirs, this work demonstrates how the relics linked to Washington and the nation’s founding shaped how the Civil War generation thought about America’s past.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States has …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Rifles And Riflemen: Material Culture, Violence, And Early American Identity, 1720 -- 1820, John Bradstreet Weaver

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The rifle was one of many material objects which colonists of British North America brought with them from Europe. Starting in the early eighteenth century, German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania began to manufacture rifles from locally made and imported parts. These rifles became associated with other material objects – namely a system of dress, which included wearing a whitetail deer’s tail in the hat, the hunting shirt, and forms of Native American dress – which became emblematic of some British colonists who used rifles in hunting and war. Rifles became militarily important in the Seven Years’ War, where Native American warriors, …

Embracing The Both/And: Learning From The Lived Experiences Of White Facilitators Of Racial Equity Workshops, Alicia M. Wargo

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study focuses on the lived experiences of seasoned White facilitators of racial equity workshops to understand how they navigate the complexity of occupying a White racial identity while working to challenge the belief systems of white supremacy ingrained in themselves and others. Through applying Critical Race Theory as a framework to grounded theory methodology, this study examined whiteness as a sensitizing concept in micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis, situating this dissertation in the theoretical exploration of the multifaceted and pervasive nature of whiteness. Much of the research on racial equity work examines White participants in nascent stages …

The Vietnam War And The Regional Context, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This chapter traces Southeast Asia’s overall pro-U.S. trajectory from before and through the American war in Vietnam, a process in which the region’s anticommunist nationalists collaborated with the United States and Britain to gain, and remain in, power. Between the late 1940s through the early 1960s, indigenous anticommunist elites in Thailand and the Philippines rose to political dominance with U.S. assistance; in Malaya and Singapore they did so with British support. The United States and Britain, with their Malayan and Singaporean allies, would influence developments within Indonesia that precipitated the Indonesian Army’s rightwing coup of 1965, a transformative event that …

Self-Sacrifice And Civilization: American Everyday Heroism And The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission In The Progressive Era, Simon Wendt

Heroism Science

This article examines the multi-layered meanings of civilian heroism around 1900. It argues that the Progressive Era was an important transition period in the history of heroism in the United States, during which definitions of what was regarded as heroic multiplied and no longer revolved solely around military valor or political leadership. Especially everyday heroes received unprecedented media attention. They were seen by many as evidence of the continuing progress of American civilization, which appeared to allow for a peaceful coexistence of individual self-interest and social consciousness. The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, established in 1904, contributed much to such interpretations …

Re-Indigenizing And Collaboratively Tending Urban Greenspaces, Divinity Nnenne Adewale

University Honors Theses

This work details the active process of land tending with the intention of re-Indigenization in the Pacific Northwest at several Portland sites; The Native American Student Community Center, PSU Oak Savanna, and the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Land tending is an intuitive process, one rooted in love and respect for life of all forms as well as becoming the perpetual student; land tending is not a skill to be mastered, only practiced. Unlike environmental management, tending cannot be done separate from the earth, in a classroom or otherwise. Connections are what tending is built on top of: the foundation; effort …

Finding Racial Identity: Analyzing Eddy L. Harris’S Journeys Through Africa And The Southern United States, Veronica G. Johnson

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.