American Studies Commons^™

Facebooking Under Crisis: A Comparative Study Of Online French And American Mutual Aid Organizing During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Clare Reimers-Hejnal

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis studies the political discussions, practices, and projects that emerged through mutual aid Facebook groups based in France and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of particular interest is how these online spaces and the Facebook users that comprised them understood their mutual aid organizing in relationship to specific themes, including but not limited to: the COVID-19 pandemic as a "crisis", the role of government presence or absence in the wellbeing of the public, and the concept of collective yet differentiated struggle. Chapter 1 looks at four Facebook pages based in the greater Paris area: Entraide Danube, Clichy …

More Than Meets The Eye: Operation Blue Star & Us-India’S Deadly Exchange, Jannat Verma

Scripps Senior Theses

Operation Blue Star is often memorialized as an independent action carried out by India's Congress Party. While such an understanding is not entirely historically inaccurate, it fails to account for the role played by US influence in the operation. An examination of CIA files and America's involvement in the subcontinent during the Cold War calls for a re-interpretation of Operation Blue Star, not as a solo campaign, but rather as a product of counterinsurgent and deadly exchange between the US and India.

From South Korea To South Central: The 1992 Los Angeles Uprising And The "Rooftop Korean", Mina Althea Lamson Jung

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the historical formation of the "rooftop Korean," the racial figure of the armed Korean American shopkeeper that emerged during the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising and has since been mobilized repeatedly in service of anti-Black counterinsurgency. Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this thesis argues that the rooftop Korean was not a spontaneous product of the Korean-Black conflict in South Central Los Angeles but the culmination of decades of U.S.-Korea relations, South Korean militarization, and the racial geography of capitalist development on both sides of the Pacific.

Tracing a transnational arc from the Korean War through the …

The Dirt Underneath My Fingernails: The American Pastoral And 21st-Century Food System Reform, Annabella Isaacson

Scripps Senior Theses

The following is an amalgamation of my experiences personally and vested interests academically, and is meant to be read as just that. As a thesis that combines Environmental Analysis and Writing & Rhetoric degrees, this project challenges traditional academic forms by integrating creative nonfiction and poetry with academic writing and analysis. This thesis attempts to fuse the academic and personal essay into one cohesive piece. The inconclusive nature of the narratives and explorations that follow are intended to represent my process in grappling with the histories and significance of American pastoral literature through the ways in which this genre has …

The Photographic Lens Of Lewis Wickes Hine And The Spaces In Between Progressive, Documentary, And Artistic Photography, Lara Ann Kolinchak

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Progressive Era photographer Lewis Wickes Hine is best known for his child labor photography from the National Child Labor Committee. This dissertation seeks to expand the understandings associated with Hine’s photography of Southern and Eastern European immigrants by examining his photography as both historical document and as works of art. Pressing Hine’s work past the previous categorizations allows for analysis of his photography which opens new interpretations and spaces. Hine’s photography is not only a pictural historical reference but when read in its entirety many more historical insights become visible. Evaluating Hine’s photography from Ellis Island, The Pittsburgh Survey and …

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.

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

Iguza N Wurfan Tasuqilt N The Grapes Of Wrath, Arezki Boudif

Journal of Amazigh Studies

N/A

Originalism & Judicially-Enacted Religious Exemptions: Revisiting Employment Division Of Oregon V. Smith, Eric Russell Coykendall

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In the 1963 case Sherbert v. Verner , the Supreme Court read the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to mean that, in certain cases, religious believers should be exempted from otherwise applicable laws. In 1990, the Supreme Court essentially overturned that framework in the case Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith . The Smith case has proved quite controversial, and numerous public-interest law firms, especially those that defend religious litigants, have regularly asked the Court to overturn it in favor of a re-application of the Sherbert precedent. Their contention is often that the Smith ruling is inconsistent with the original …

“The Scientist Is Wrong”: Joseph Fielding Smith, George Mccready Price, And The Ascent Of Creationist Thought Among Latter-Day Saints In The Twentieth Century, Thomas Benjamin Spackman

CGU Theses & Dissertations

At the beginning of the twentieth century, leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took a wary but open position regarding the burgeoning science of evolution. By the end of the century, Latter-day Saints had effectively become old-earth creationists. Through implicit hermeneutical framing and explicit statements, Church-published interpretive materials created a strong perception of a Church orthodoxy; scripture might allow for an old earth, but nothing died before the fall of Adam c. 4000 BC. Such a time frame ruled out the possibility of the evolution of plants, animals, and humans, and attributed the formation of fossils …

Treading Our Path Through The Blood Of The Slaughtered: Race And Martyrdom In America, 1830-1968, Katherine J. Veach

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The United States has a longstanding practice of ascribing the language and imagery of martyrdom to political and cultural figures, resulting in a variegated canon of American martyrs outside the strict bounds of religious tradition. As a contribution to religious studies, American studies and African American studies, this dissertation identifies and examines the language, imagery and trajectory of the strain of American cultural martyrdom I term “Black American martyrdom.” I trace the genealogy of Black American martyrdom from the 1830s, when martyrdom rhetoric flourished among the zealous Northeastern immediate abolitionists, to the 1960s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. influentially cast …

Fugitive And Sumud Encounters: Geographies Of Black-Palestinian Transnational Refusal, Anna Babboni

Scripps Senior Theses

“Fugitive and Sumud Encounters: Geographies of Black-Palestinian Transnational Refusal” explores the parallel practices of Palestinian sumud, a “political-psycho-affective subjectivity” or philosophy of refusal that roughly translates to “steadfastness” from Arabic, and Black fugitivity, the practice by which Black folk find freedom and escape from the continual construction of Blackness as fungible object, rooted in histories of maroonage. Both practices of refusal are historically and spatially contingent, responding to conditions of settler colonial and anti-Black enclosure. However, when put into conversion, sumud and fugitivity are strikingly familiar in their methods of refusing liberal enclosure. In their overlap, sumud and fugitivity lay …

Making Freedom A Place: Geographies Of Social Movement Activism And Repression In Oakland, California, Sophie Mcclain

Pitzer Senior Theses

This senior thesis explores the ways in which people in Oakland, California make place and spaces through their activism and subsequently how these places and spaces are policed by the state. Building off of the works of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D.G. Kelley, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre, McClain examines the ways in which activists create abolition geographies while engaging in their right to the city through social movement activism with a particular focus on the Black Panther Party and Occupy Wall Street Movement in Oakland. Through these examples, McClain shows how abolition geographies often exist in a dialectical relationship …

Rainbow-Washing The Occupation: A Critical Examination Of Israeli Claims To Feminist And Gay-Friendly Modernity, Melia Oliver

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I employ a queer analytic to uncover how Israel weaponizes claims to feminist and gay-friendly modernity—referred to as pink- and purple washing, respectively—as forms of propaganda to justify their occupation of Palestine. Pink- and purplewasing narratives rely on racist and Orientalist conceptions of Palestinian “barbarism” which Israel reproduces in order to bolster their settler colonial project. I analyze pink- and purplewashing propaganda as symptoms of larger homo- and femonationalist formations which stem from and further reinforce settler colonialism. I address allegations of “weaponized rape” during and after the events of October 7th and argue that this form …

‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Rage Should Not Be A Privilege: The Potential Power Of The ‘Racial Imaginary’, Georgia Mcgovern

CMC Senior Theses

Female rage exists outside of the constructed masculine ideal of anger. To examine female rage, one must analyze the intersections between gender and race. I examine white women's privilege and access to female rage in reality and the fictional world. I explore Black Feminist poetry as a form of storage for rage at gender-based prejudice, racial injustice, and their intersection. Using Myisha Cherry’s term “Lordean Rage”, I recognize this specialized manifestation of female rage as an artistic, intergenerational source of energy for change.

I examine Claudia Rankine’s term “racial imaginary” as an imaginative space in which white people draw lines …

“I Don’T Want To Cook”: Reconfiguring The Domestic Space In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Rida Leonard

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In the scholarship that considers ways in which the concept of domesticity features in the lives of black and white women in history, there is less discussion of how these women’s unique challenges led them to alter the traditional domestic space. This dissertation first assesses a range of nineteenth-century American newspapers to understand the prevalent social milieu and then closely analyzes select literary texts of the time, to argue that the distinct racial circumstances that framed black and white women’s struggles enabled them to reform the domestic space as needed. Analysis of the nineteenth century press reveals that while white …

The Restoration Of Religious Freedom: Joseph Smith’S Evolving Understanding Of The United States Constitution, 1830-1844, Mitch Nelson

CGU Theses & Dissertations

As the founder of the most persecuted denomination of the nineteenth century in the United States, Joseph Smith desperately yearned for religious freedom. I argue that Joseph Smith understood religious freedom as a theological doctrine given by God to help individuals, communities, and nations discover how to balance order and diversity. Rather than being a product of democratic government, he viewed religious freedom as the necessary foundation for a just government and society. Therefore, maintaining religious freedom would preserve the governing system, not the other way around. For Joseph, religious freedom was incrementally discovered in a process of identity formation …

Topographies And Counter-Topographies Of Social Reproduction At People’S Park, Sarah Weaver

Scripps Senior Theses

Created at a key moment in New Left political rebellion and organizing in 1969, the mythic People’s Park still stands today between Dwight and Haste St. in Berkeley as open multi-use green space made of and for community development on lawful University of California Regent property. Despite repeated attempts by UC to take back the land, the insurgent space continues to pull defense from various parts of the local community, students and not, have accessed forms of self-determined social reproduction and created material critiques of UC as a vehicle for capital. For 54 years, the park was maintained significance as …

Militarized Foodways: The Connection Between The Militarization Of American SāMoa And Chronic Health Conditions Experienced By Sāmoans In The U.S., Marina Aina

Pomona Senior Theses

American militarism and imperialism in Oceania led to the partitioning of Sāmoa, transforming Eastern Sāmoa into an unincorporated American territory, one that persists to this day. Sāmoans living in the United States continue to face numerous chronic health illnesses to this day. Both of these statements are true, but how are they related to one another? This thesis proposes “militarized foodways” as a way to bridge the gap and understand how those two statements are connected to one another. Militarized foodways refers to how the cultural, social, and economic practices concerning production and consumption of food have taken a military …

The Making Of The Classic Period Of The Long Black Power Movement In Los Angeles, California, Sherwin Keith Rice

CGU Theses & Dissertations

It is often believed that the Black Power Movement started after civil rights/black power activist Stokely Carmichael declared, “We want Black Power” in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 16, 1966 and ended in the 1970s. Similar to the Civil Rights Movement the Black Power Movement is often examined through a dominant narrative short movement view. Some scholars suggests that “Black Power” stood for a change in direction away from the nonviolent civil rights approach. But Black Power is an enigma and it means different things to different people. It is just one element of the Black Freedom Struggle. Black Power uses …

The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination And Sacrifice In The Contemporary Prison, Timothy Malone

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I develop a convict epistemology that interweaves two elements: 1) a deep engagement with the works of particular philosophers and scholars investigating questions of punishment, violence, biopolitics and political philosophy 2) with some specific, publicly-reported incidents within California prisons in the late 20th and 21st centuries and my own detailed narration of events and the structural and quotidian dynamics of the prison yard as I experienced them as inmate #K73299 from 1997 to 2005. Diverging from Foucauldian theories of disciplinarity, I argue that under neoliberalism, the primary punishments that any inmate is subjected to within the carceral …

A Fearless Set Of Men, Spencer Gregory Pirnik

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Formed from the 9th Louisiana Volunteers of African Descent, the 47th USCI (United States Colored Infantry) was one of many African American Regiments which saw service in the U.S. Army in the Civil War and was a participant at the battles of Milken’s Bend, the Yazoo City Expedition, the Siege of Fort Blakely. With very little in the way of surviving accounts from the regiment’s Black enlistees This project seeks to examine the challenges this regiment, like so many other USCT (United States Colored Troops) regiments, faced in terms of manpower, leadership, equipment, and health, arguing that the despite these …

Dressing The Witch: Clothing, The Body, And Accusations Of Witchcraft In Puritan New England, Rachel Murrell

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Though this infamous period in American history has been examined numerous times, this paper aims to analyze the role in which “soft culture,” in particular dress and clothing, played in the search for witches amongst Salem women in 1692. Of necessity to this analysis is a thorough examination of early American material culture and the role in which early New Englanders interacted with newfound notions of materiality. This analysis examines two distinct points of contention at the crux of this cultural turn: the maintenance of and visual adherence to rigid social class standards through clothing and the visual interpretation of …

Remote Learning In The Era Of Covid-19: Accounting For Students' Personal Verve, Marissa Langley

Scripps Senior Theses

This study focuses on accommodating remote academic lessons for students’ personal verve levels. Personal verve is defined as the ability to adapt to and concentrate in environments with high levels of stimulation. The sociocultural psychologists Boykin discerned higher verve levels in Black communities compared to White communities. Boykin found that many Black students tend to learn best in high verve conditions, which incorporate aspects of African American culture like group work, varied activities, movement and noise, as opposed to traditional low verve conditions which consist of sitting quietly at a desk during lectures. White students tend to have low personal …

Crawl Space: Driving Over The Anthropocene In A Jeep, Michael Pesses

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The automobile has long been directly and indirectly connected to human conceptions of nature, yet few studies linger with the act of driving as a practice that contributes to how nature is experienced. I argue that a more nuanced understanding of automobility is necessary for any scholars who study both social practices and environmental sustainability. Following the work of the human geographer Doreen Massey, I explore how relations between humans and non-humans, the social and the natural, ideology and practice work together to produce places specific to space and time. I also argue that American automobility is not simply transportation, …

(Re)Producing The Neoliberal Subject: Child-Rearing Advice Literature Following "The Great Risk Shift", Sophie Boczek

Scripps Senior Theses

Following neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s, parenting advice literature experienced a significant growth in popularity. As the state largely transferred responsibility to individual citizens for economic survival, child-rearing discourse encouraged the cultivation of a subject who was best-suited for the contours of neoliberal life. This thesis explores the implications of this parenting rhetoric, as well as of the rise in popularity of parenting advice literature in neoliberal circumstances.

Making Memory, Making Meaning: Memorial Museums And The Participatory Audience, Hillary Kirkham

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between memorial museums and visitors, reexamining the process of remembering traumatic events in United States history. My work examines this meaning-making dynamic in case studies of four memorial museums: The 9/11 Memorial Museum, The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, Manzanar National Historic Site, and Carthage Jail. By combining textual analysis of museums with data from visitor-produced materials such as guestbooks, letters, periodicals, and Instagram posts, I examine memorial museums' aims and rhetorical strategies while analyzing visitors' roles and contributions, illustrating how both guest and site collaborate to create memory and meaning. Drawing and …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …