American Studies Commons^™

Tracing Moral Injury In Us Wars And Implications For The Year 2050, Robert A. Jensen

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Throughout conflicts in history, the psycho-spiritual construct known today as “moral injury” can be found. This term was coined in 1994 out of conceptions of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to describe intense shame and guilt aspects resulting from military service. The challenge comes with extrapolating this injury in the wake of nuances in terminology about related symptoms in conjunction with an evolving consciousness in identifying invisible military-related injuries. With current research and a historic pattern of unnamed moral injuries, this study explores the following: How did military chaplains address moral injuries without this construct? What are Unitarian Universalist (UU) military …

The Cultural Cold War And The New Women Of Power. Making A Case Based On The Fulbright And Ford Foundations In Greece, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

When in the 1950s C. Wright Mills was writing about the emergence of the new power elites he paid no attention to the presence of women in its midsts. He was not entirely mistaken. Yet there is a particular intertwining of the ideologies of leadership and masculinity which serves to maintain the status quo, the privilege of an elite and perpetuate preconceptions about political agency and gender. In an attempt to go beyond available models and predominantly masculine images of the postwar America the present article accounts for women’s role in the postwar American efforts for cultural hegemony. It focuses …

Miami: Then & Now, Dana Mcgeehan

Library Research Scholars Program 2017-2018

This project consists of an ArcGIS Story Map of Miami-Dade County. Each “then” and “now” photo set will be marked with an icon on the map. The side-bar will show viewers two photos of the same physical space. These photos can be placed side-by-side. These spaces will mostly be buildings, but may also focus on the landscape through maps and how this has changed over time. The “then” photos come primarily from the UM Library’s Special Collections and the Florida State Archives website, floridamemory.com. The “now” photos are ones that I’ve taken myself. A paragraph or two of contextual/background information …

From Democrats To "Deplorables": The Trumpization Of The Republican Party, Lily Talerman

Politics Honors Papers

This thesis explores the transformation of the Republican electoral coalition from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Donald Trump. By comparing the Trump coalition—which Hillary Clinton said was half full of “deplorables”—with previous Democratic and Republican presidential coalitions, the drastic change in the electoral habits of Southerners and white working-class voters is made evident. Trump’s appeal to these voters is due not only to his populist rhetoric but also to the presidential campaigns of Republican candidates Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, as well as to George Wallace’s independent and Democratic presidential campaigns. Trump’s unforeseen victory …

A Blend Of Absurdism And Humanism: Defending Kurt Vonnegut’S Place In The Secondary Setting, Krisandra R. Johnson

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut’s place in the secondary English curriculum, despite his rank on many banned books lists, since his characters’ journeys correlate thematically with the growth and process of postmodern adolescents and encourage moral responsibility without sentimental manipulation.

Focusing on Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as primary sources, specifically …

Clarke, Kenneth Wendell, 1917-2012 (Mss 635), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 635. Manuscripts, notes, publisher’s correspondence, and photographs relating to the scholarly work of WKU English and folklore professor Kenneth W. Clarke, principally "Bud Long: The Birth of a Kentucky Folk Legend" and "The Harvest and the Reapers." Also includes reel-to-reel tape discussing home burial and casket - coffins, African American discussing race relations, singing in Barren County, Kentucky. See also digitized reel-to-reel tape T (T) -7-71-16 discussing cockfighting.

Purgatorio, Rosie Pineda

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

Rodrigo Reyes’ provocative essay film re-imagines the Mexico/U.S. border as a mythical place comparable to Dante’s purgatory. Leaving politics aside, he takes a fresh look at the brutal beauty of the border and the people caught in its spell. By capturing a stunning mosaic of compelling characters and broken landscapes that live on the US/Mexico border, the filmmaker reflects on the flaws of human nature and the powerful absurdities of the modern world. An unusual border film, in the auteur tradition of camerastylo, Purgatorio ultimately becomes a fable of humanity, an epic and visceral experience with powerful and lingering images. …

Placing Caster Semenya Within And Outside Of Discourse On Sex And Gender In The Space Of International Professional Athletics, Joanna Line

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

World Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist Caster Semenya’s body has caused a rupture within the space of international professional athletics, which is structured according to a binary conceptualization of sex and gender. This rupture created a space for international discourse about alternative ways in which sex and gender can be defined, and to reimagine the space of international professional athletics, and other binary-bound non-sport spaces, to be more inclusive. Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove's concept of landscapes and Stuart Hall’s concept of coding and decoding provide a framework for exploring how Caster Semenya’s body has been read and interpreted like a …

Amjambo Africa! (April 2018), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

Welcome to Amjambo Africa! Welcome to Amjambo Africa! We are Maine’s free newspaper for and about New Mainers from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Amjambo Africa! is here to help New Mainers thrive and to help Maine welcome and benefit from our new neighbors.

Amjambo Africa! will serve as a conduit of information for newcomers as they navigate life in Maine.

Amjambo Africa! will include background articles about Africa so those from Maine can understand why newcomers have arrived here.

Amjambo Africa! will profile successful New Mainers from Sub-Saharan Africa in order to give hope to those newly arrived as well as make …

On Being Trans: Narrative, Identity, Performance, And Community, Chloe Jo Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis focuses on various topics related to transgender identity and culture. Through a combination of ethnographic and secondary research, I studied transgender coming out narratives, trans media representation, transgender performance and identity, and conceptualizations of group and chosen family in a community of trans students, the WKU Transgender and Non-Binary Student Group.

The three chapters of my thesis address some of the traditional milestones of a trans person’s acculturation: coming out, constructing one’s newly discovered trans identity, and finding community. Chapter 1 explores coming out as transgender, and the way in in which coming out is valued and discussed …

Examining The Strategies Of Formation And Action Among Social Movements: A Comparison Of The Civil Rights Movement And Black Lives Matter, Hailee Saxton

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In today’s tumultuous political landscape, the question of what makes an effective social movement? is often asked. This can be a complicated question to answer as social movements vary greatly across racial, ethnic, economic, and political boundaries. Therefore, I am conducting a case comparison of two widely-known socio-political organizations, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter. In this comparison I will examine whether or not they truly fit the definition of a social movement, look at the strategies of action that have or could prove successful in enacting long-standing socio-political change, and make recommendations on how movements could continue …

How Do Native American Women Win Elections In Non-Native Districts?, Opalina Peralta

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In light of the recent tensions between Native American tribes and non-tribal elected leaders over such issues as environmental protection and treaty violations, caused in part by the United States' disproportionately Caucasian electoral representation, I aim to bring light the obstacles that Native Americans face in electoral politics. I analyze state legislative elections in which Native American candidates win. Using the data from the 2016 National Census and from University of North Dakota, Professor Mark Trahant. I hypothesize that the reason many Native American candidates win is because they are tied to non-native elements of the community. The two candidates …

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

The Beholder, Allan Lake

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A poem on the effect of landscape on the emotions.

Shifting Rurality American Gothic, Iowa Nice, Biotech And Political Expectations In Rural America, William D. Nichols 890252

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper traces the linkage between heritage landscape within the context of the election of Donal Trump. Trump's invocations of heritage riled certain regions of the US which had a distinct connection to Regionalism, both as a political idea and as an aesthetic practice. Focusing on Iowa, home to the quintessential American painting, American Gothic, the paper looks at modernity and agriculture, and how the two categories seem to rely on (but also negate) heritage. By examining what a genetically modified landscape might mean in relation to the historical image of the pastoral/provincial farmer, a network of frictions and …

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Review Of Thinking Continental: Writing The Planet One Place At A Time, John Charles Ryan Dr

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017) edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall and O. Alan Weltzien

Saturn/Cronus-11, Joel Weishaus

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

“Saturn/Cronus-11” is from a Cosmography, an in-progress project of Literary Digital Art that invokes the gods of seven planets in our celestial neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Incognita. It includes my trope of invagination: fragments exhumed from the authored corpus and transplanted into the body of a living text, which, along with superimposed images and animations, advances us toward a more magnanimous, transdisciplinary sphere. The project also includes notes.

The Multi-Vocal Trailscape Of The Natchitoches Trace: A Trail Of Tears, Trade And Transformation, Jade L. Robison

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper demonstrates how individuals have inscribed the Natchitoches Trace trailscape with meaningful narratives via oral traditions, historical accounts and material evidence, and considers how descendent populations curate their heritage in such a landscape. Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri River near St. Louis, the Natchitoches Trace stretches southwest through the Ozark region in Missouri and Arkansas, and onto Natchitoches, Louisiana. Created by pre-Columbian groups for trading purposes, the trail was later utilised by early European pioneer families for westward expansion. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forced the repurposing of the trail as a route of exile for displaced …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic …

Archbold, Annie And Barbara Dubczak (Fa 379), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 379. A reel-to-reel audiotape recording of a program titled “Documents in Sound: A Sample in Folk Arts,” which was sponsored by the Barren River Regional Arts Council with funds from the Kentucky Folklife Foundation. According to the tape summary, the program includes five separate features, which can be played as individual vignettes or as a full 29-minute program. Features include traditional artists and cover topics such as woodworking, broom making, basket making, weaving, and drawn work.

Social Identity Theory And Public Opinion Towards Immigration, Maurice Mangum, Ray Block Jr.

Political Science Faculty Publications

Several scholars have called upon social identity theory to investigate the relationship between an American national identity and American public opinion on immigration. Lacking a uniform measure of American identity, by and large, scholars find that a two-dimensional conception of American identity influences these opinions. Our review suggests that the extant measures of American identity do not fully account for the various aspects of social identity theory. We capture more fully the different components of social identity theory. By doing so, we find that American identity has five dimensions. Therefore, in this analysis, we advance a more comprehensive measure of …

Disoriented Nationalist Discourse Of The Wenxuan Group Amidst Manchukuo’S Anti-Modern Chorus, Chao Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Disoriented Nationalist Discourse of the Wenxuan Group amidst Manchukuo's Anti-Modern Chorus" Chao Liu analyzes the proposal of "native-land literature" made by left-wing Chinese writers in occupied northeast China. As it turns out, inheriting the nationalist discourse of the May Fourth Movement and further radicalizing it via a "new romanticism," those writers over-emphasized the socio-political function of literary production and took native-land literature as the most effective tool for nationalist mobilization. Accordingly, they repelled modern civilization as it was associated with the colonists, relying instead on natural wilderness and primitive force and thus adopting subject matters as well …

Pantheism And Escapism In Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' And 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives, Yasser K. R. Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Pantheism and Escapism in Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' and 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives" Yasser K. R. Aman investigates and analyses the possibilities of pantheism's encirclement of escapism in Elia Abu Madi's two poems from English Romanticism perspective. The article compares Abu Madi's fluctuating attitude towards escapism and pantheism to William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour July 13, 1798," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," highlighting the affinities and differences. The …

Cederquist, Nancy (Fa 378), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

FFinding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 378. Multiple interviews with Mrs. James Hall conducted by Nancy Cederquist on 22 February 1985, 1 April 1985, and 22 April 1985. Hall, a resident of Bowling Green, discusses her passion for quilting, her preferred patterns, fabric care, and her experiences with a local quilting group.

Conaster, Victoria (Fa 377), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 377. Interview with Joe H. Page conducted by Victoria Conaster on 3 April 1993. Page, a resident of Lewisburg, discusses his childhood memories of growing up on a tenant farm. Topics covered include tobacco harvests and sales, pest control, traditional farm lore, home remedies and religious life.

Exploring Places Of Street Drug Dealing In A Downtown Area In Brazil: An Analysis Of The Reliability Of Google Street View In International Criminological Research, Elenice De Souza Oliveira, Ko-Hsin Hsu

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study assesses the reliability of Google Street View (GSV) in auditing environmental features that help create hotbeds of drug dealing in Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest cities. Based on concepts of “crime generators” and “crime enablers,” a set of 40 items were selected using arrest data related to drug activities for the period between 2007 and 2011. These items served to develop a GSV data collection instrument used to observe features of 135 street segments that were identified as drug dealing hot spots in downtown Belo Horizonte. The study employs an intra-class correlation (ICC) statistics as a measure …

Military Citizenship In The Post-9/11 Homefront, Estefania Ponti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In discussion with the literature on the treatment of veterans in the United States and the nature of American citizenship ideology, the following dissertation asks how post-9/11 veterans are defining, (re)creating, and contesting citizenship in the contemporary U.S. By studying a localized community of post-9/11 veterans, my dissertation highlights the dilemmas of U.S. citizenship at a time when the U.S. is engaged in a global War on Terror using less than 1% of the U.S. population as paid volunteers. Soldiers and veterans occupy states and spaces of exception, marking military citizens as distinct from civilians. Military citizenship benefits the nation …

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …