American Studies Commons^™

Lineages Of The Literary Left: Essays In Honor Of Alan M. Wald, Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman, Paula Rabinowitz

Robbie Lieberman

For nearly half a century, Alan M. Wald’s pathbreaking research has demonstrated that attention to the complex lived experiences of writers on the Left provides a new context for viewing major achievements as well as instructive minor ones in United States fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. His many publications have illuminated the creative lives of figures such as James T. Farrell, Willard Motley, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Rahv, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Kenneth Fearing, and Arthur Miller. He has delved into a consideration of Sidney Hook and pragmatism, brought attention to debates within tendencies associated with Cannonism and Shachtmanism, and developed …

Artful Lives: The Francis Watts Lee Family And Their Times, Patricia Fanning

Patricia J. Fanning

Francis Watts Lee and his family hold a special place in the history of American photography. F. Holland Day completed a series of remarkable photographs of Lee’s daughter Peggy, and the striking portrait of the child and her mother titled Blessed Art Thou among Women is one of Gertrude Käsebier’s most iconic compositions. In Artful Lives, Patricia J. Fanning uses these and other significant images as guideposts to explore the Lee family and the art and culture of their age.

A social reform advocate, Francis Watts Lee was an artistic photographer and a talented printer, part of the circle …

Bringing Books To A "Book-Hungry Land": Print Culture On The Dakota Prairie, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

The dearth of reading material was a recurring lament in the writings and memoirs of Dakota settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “I was born with a desire to read, . . . and I have never gotten over it,” declared Henry Theodore Washburn, recalling his Minnesota boyhood and homesteading years in Dakota Territory, “but there was no way in those days to gratify that desire to any great extent.”1 This lack was indeed of consequence. In the pre-electronic era, print was a primary means of obtaining information, insight, and pleasure. High rates of literacy, sharp increases …

"So Long As I Can Read": Farm Women's Reading Experiences In Depression-Era South Dakota, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

During the Great Depression, with conditions grim, entertainment scarce, and educational opportunities limited, many South Dakota farm women relied on reading to fill emotional, social, and informational needs. To read to any degree, these rural women had to overcome multiple obstacles. Extensive reading (whether books, farm journals, or newspapers) was limited to those who had access to publications and could make time to read. The South Dakota Free Library Commission was valuable in circulating reading materials to the state's rural population. In the 1930s the commission collaborated with the USDA's Extension Service in a popular reading project geared toward South …

Conquering A Wilderness: Destruction And Development On The Great Plains In Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

Jules Ami Sandoz came to America in 1881 at the age of 22. Following a three-year sojourn in northeastern Nebraska, he headed further west, settling in the recently surveyed region northwest of the Nebraska Sandhills. In Old Jules, the biography of her pioneer father, Mari Sandoz presented a character filled with conflicts and contradictions. Pitted against Jules's dynamic vision of community growth was his self-centered and destructive nature. Well aware of the more unsavory qualities exhibited by her father. Sandoz nonetheless maintained that he and others like him were necessary to the development of the West. This recognition did not …

Inviting Us To Come Closer: Philip Levine's Portraits Of Detroit (Forthcoming), Christina Triezenberg

Christina Triezenberg

No abstract provided.

Boost Or Blight?’ Graffiti Writing And Street Art In The ‘New’ New Orleans, Doreen Piano

Doreen M Piano

Before the storm, responses to graffiti writing and street art in New Orleans were typical of other urban environments where it was viewed as being “out of place” (Keith, 1999), “a spectacle of filth” (Conquergood, 2004), involving what Ferrell (1993, p. 37) describes as a “war of the walls.” David (2005) describes the political aspects of street art in New Orleans as “visual resistance” (p. 233), a term that captures relations of power among graffiti producers, their products, and the effects of their actions (p. 233). However, attempts to eliminate graffiti and street art by enforcing stricter penalties, encouraging neighborhood …

Governor Winthrop's "Little Speech": Another Hearing, Michael Ditmore

Michael Ditmore

No abstract provided.

Speaking Of Religion In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

No abstract provided.

Session A-2: Encountering Ourselves: American Indians And The Age Of Revolution, Claiborne Skinner

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

This session will explore how Europeans who encountered the indigenous peoples of North America came to see them as a window into their own past. This provided philosophers and political theorists with a means by which to critique Baroque civilization. The result was Locke's "Natural Law," and Rousseau's Noble Savage." The notion that the world had moved away from freedom and liberty by becoming civilized became a potent argument for both the American and French Revolutions.

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 …

The Main Street Spirit Of Jcpenney: A Department Store Chain In The Downtowns Of Washington, David Kruger

David Delbert Kruger

For the better part of the 20th Century, the JCPenney chain had a rich history of Main Street locations throughout Washington state. The article traces the origins of James Cash Penney's operations in Washington, including the Golden Rule philosophy of its founder and unique architectural features of Penney's downtown locations, notably the company's first metropolitan store that served downtown Seattle from 1931-1982.

"Quotation, Simile, Photograph: Margaret Fuller On The French In Algiers, Christina Zwarg

Christina L Zwarg Professor

Quotation, Simile, Photograph: Margaret Fuller on The French in Algiers In this essay I focus on an obscure New-York Daily Tribune column written by Margaret Fuller and published roughly two weeks before her well-known review of Frederick Douglass. Fuller’s review of Lucy Duff-Gordon’s translation shows not only her range in topic (in this case, a consideration of French colonial practice) but also how she writes through the moment when Walter Benjamin’s famous “aura” was losing ground against modern modes of production. The extended quotations juxtaposed in Fuller’s review have about them a visual or dramatic quality, as if Fuller reaches …

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 …

Stalking Glory, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

My Father's Dogs, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

July 24, 1952 - Premiere Of High Noon, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Melville And Americanness: A Special Issue, Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

No abstract provided.

Dreaming And Surviving In Heterotopia: First-Generation Immigrant Girls’ Pursuit Of The American Dream In New York City, Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa

This paper analyzes experiences of first-generation immigrant girls in a newcomer school using Foucault’s notions of heterotopia.

Kokkyo Wo Koete Omoi Wo Tsutaeru: Seikatsu Tsudurikatata Kyoiku To Mekishiko Kei Imin No Kodomotachi / Sending A Message Across The Border: Life Experience Writing And Children Of Mexican Immigrants, Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa

This article focuses on how the principles of Seikatsu Tsuzurikata Kyoiku, Life Experience Writing Education, can assist understanding literacy practices of migrant children in Pennsylvania.

Nancy Drew And The Hardy Boys: The Secrets Of Our Favorite Teenage Sleuths, Patricia Bravender

Patricia Bravender

If the words ‘mystery’ and ‘clue’ still give you a shiver of excitement, you were probably a fan of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. These books, read by millions, were the target of teachers and librarians who were largely successful in keeping them out of libraries for over 50 years. Nancy Drew and Frank and Joe Hardy had a secret that was too much for the times and certainly bigger than they ever encountered in River Heights and Bayport. Patricia Bravender will reveal the secret of these series books and talk about why these books were (and still are) …

Slavery And The Laws Of War, Patricia Reid

Patricia Reid

National Endowment for Humanities/Institute for Constitutional History, Seminar in Constitutional History

Framing Farming: Communication Strategies For Animal Rights, Carrie P. Freeman

Carrie P. Freeman

Myriad Mirrors: Doppelgangers And Doubling In The Vampire Diaries, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

Mirroring is of fundamental importance in Gothic literature and filmic texts generally, and is a prevalent trope in the CW network teen drama, The Vampire Diaries. The television series is itself a “doubling” in that it is an adaptation of a series of novels by L.J. Smith, creating a situation wherein the same central characters inhabit the parallel townships of the novels’ Fells Church and television’s Mystic Falls, and thus have histories which are, at times, contradictory. The television version also explicitly explores the concept of the doppelganger, and thus the idea of reflection, even as it manipulates the historical …

Phoebe Snow: Odd, Rare And Sublime, Vincent L. Stephens

Vincent L Stephens

A draft from my work-in-progress essay collection on post-war American popular singing "Sound Love." The essay argues that Phoebe Snow is unique among her generation of singer-songwriters as she is more notable as an interpreter than as a writer. Her synthesis of elements from blues, jazz, pop, gospel and R&B defy category as does her artistry.

Journalism In A Pr World, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

Mike Niman discusses the future of journalism in a PR-dominated communication environment. In particular, he examines the migration of talent from journalism to the PR industry, the collapse of mainstream journalism and the role of an emergent alternative media as American journalism goes through metamorphosis from what it was to what it could become. Journalism is a social good that should equip people to understand and resist spin. Niman argues that mainstream American journalism, rather than rising to this challenge, has transparently succumbed to serving as an arm of the corporate PR industry, thus laying the groundwork for its own …

Blood-Stained Linen And Shattered Skull: Ford's Theatre As A Reliquary To Abraham Lincoln, Erika Schneider

Erika Schneider

No abstract provided.

Melville And The Trope Of The Starving American Artist In Rome, Erika Schneider

Erika Schneider

No abstract provided.

Romancing The Fan-Girl: Early Film Fan Magazines And American Girls’ Longing For Stardom., Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

No abstract provided.