American Studies Commons^™

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 46, No. 2, Nancy Kettering Frye, Jean-Paul Benowitz, Amos Long Jr., John A. Milbauer

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• "An Uncommon Woman" in the Age of the Common Man: The Life and Times of Sarah Righter Major
• Maintaining Mennonite Identity: The Old Order Church in Pennsylvania and Virginia
• The End of an Era: The Last One-Room Public Schools in Lebanon County
• Pennsylvania Extended in the Cherokee Country: A Study of Log Architecture

Film Language And The Persistence Of Racial Stereotyping In The Last Of The Mohicans (1992), Gary Edgerton

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Gary Edgerton's contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Thought, Vol. 7.

Edith Wharton's "Secret Sensitiveness" The Decoration Of Houses, And Her Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Surely one of the reasons that Edith Wharton lived most of her life in France was that she greatly admired the way the French "instinctively applies to living the same rules that they applies to artistic creation." Wharton believed that the French had an eye for beauty, or what she called "the seeing eye," in contrast to Americans whose sight had been dimmed by the puritanism of their Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, in her last and unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938), Wharton suggests through her American protagonist's relationship with her European governess, Laura Testvalley, that the art of seeing can be …

Laura Jensen, Dina Ben-Lev

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Poet and critic Tess Gallagher has described Laura Jensen as “the Einstein of the ordinary.” Just as Einstein's theories disrupted the then common-sense understanding of a universe governed by immutable laws, Jensen’s poems transform our view of the everyday things we take for granted, the ordinary birds and flowers we no longer notice. “Behind a poem is a bad intention / to make the reader worry deeply,” Jensen writes in “What Is Poetry?”, a poem from her first chapbook (After 16). Her poems “worry” us because they force us to confront our fear of the unpredictability of the world. …

Garrett Hongo, Laurie Filipelli

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Garrett Kongo’s poetic voice rises from cultural, historical, and personal memories. As a Yonsei (a fourth-generation Japanese American) born in Hawai i and raised largely in Los Angeles, his concerns span time and place, and his style links Asian and European traditions. He writes from the crowded trains and serene temples of his ancestral homeland, the lush jungles and active volcanoes of his birthplace, and the racial tension and dispossession of life in urban America, fitting the pieces together in a mosaic of self, family, and culture.

New Narratives Of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, And Closure In Ernest Gaines's Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In his fiction Ernest Gaines is interested not only in deconstructing stereotypes but also in presenting new models of southern manhood, for both black and white men. While Gaines has employed traditional definitions of manhood in his fiction, the vision he presents in his most recent novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is similar to that of Cooper Thompson and other contemporary theorists of masculinity, who believe that young men must learn 'traditional masculinity is life threatening' and that being men in a modern world means accepting their vulnerability, expressing a range of emotions, asking for help and support, learning non-violent …

Journal Of Pedagogy, Pluralism And Practice, Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 1997 (Full Issue), Journal Staff

Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] The Oxford Book Of The American South: Testimony, Memory, And Fiction, Edward L. Ayers, Bradley C. Mittendorf

Bookshelf

Resonating with the testimony of slaves and slaveholders, the powerful and the powerless, women and men, black people and white, The Oxford Book of the American South combines the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present. The first anthology to put short stories, novels, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and journalism together, this collection is a rich and varied record of life below the Mason Dixon line. We see the antebellum period both from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand, such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Jacobs, as well as …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 18 (1997), Includes Cumulative Author Index, Volumes 1-17, Virginia Gunn, Sara Reimer Farley, Nancy Hornback, Barbara Carow, Lorre M. Weidlich, Catherine A. Cerny, Ruth Rhoades, Loretta B. Hammonds Woodward, Jill Hemming, Gayle R. Davis

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Virginia Gunn

Research Papers

The Quilting Records of Rachel Adella Jewett and Lucyle Jewett by Sara Reimer Farley and Nancy Hornback

Art Quilt Makers and Their Critique Groups by Barbara Carow

The Sunday Friends: The Group and Their Quilts by Lorre M. Weidlich

Quilt Ownership and Sentimental Attachments: The Structure of Memory by Catherine A. Cerny

Feed Sacks in Georgia: Their Manufacture, Marketing, and Consumer Use by Ruth Rhoades

Hawaiian Outline-Embroidered Quilts by Loretta B. Hammonds Woodard

Waccamaw-Siouan Quilts: A Model for Studying Native American Quilting by Jill Hemming

Seminar Keynote Address

Women's Quilts and Diaries: Creative Expression …

Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Moore, Opal (b. 1953), poet, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic of children's literature. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Opal Moore was influenced from childhood by the particular dynamics of the Pentecostal church; echoes of that institution reverberate in her plots, themes, characters, tone, and language. When Moore entered Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Art in 1970, she was so shocked by her first real encounter with racism and her sens~ of powerlessness in the face of it that she sought some control over what was happening to her by writing, thus initiating her first journals. She also …

Interview: Cindi Katz. Creating Safe Space And The Materiality Of The Margins, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Cindi Katz, associate professor and chair of the environmental psychology program at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, visited the University of Kentucky in February of 1996 to deliver the keynote address at the 5 1/2 Annual Geography Graduate Student Conference. In her address, entitled "Power, Space and Terror: Social Reproduction and the Public Environment," Professor Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban public space, negatively affected New York City children. Privatization, she argued, not only serves a 'child hating' mentality prevalent in our society, but fosters, among other things, …

Silk And Society: Silk Manufacturers And Users 1870-1930. Based On A Study Of The Haskell Silk Company, Westbrook, Maine, Jacqueline Field Ma

All Student Scholarship

This thesis makes several contributions to the history of American silks. It shows that some of the most exemplary and well known U.S. silks were manufactured by Haskell despite its location at the far periphery of the major Mid Atlantic silk manufacturing region. It traces the changes in the domestic silk product over time and argues that changing consumer tastes and lifestyle exerted a major influence on what was made and sold.

[Introduction To] The Viper On The Hearth: Mormons, Myths, And The Construction Of Heresy, Terryl Givens

Bookshelf

Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people--the "viper on the hearth"--who sought to violate the domestic sphere of the mainstream. While other critics have mined the socio-political sources of anti-Mormonism, Givens is the first to reveal how popular fiction, in its attempt to deal with the sources and nature of this conflict, constructed an image of the Mormon as a religious and social "Other."

Yoknapatawpha As Camelot: The Influence Of The Arthurian Legends On The Writings Of William Faulkner, Sally Dye

Masters Theses

In my thesis I examine works of William Faulkner which show the influence of the legends of King Arthur. In the introduction to the thesis, I discuss evidence that Faulkner was not only familiar with the characters of the Arthurian legends but was also aware of many of the different versions of these stories.

The main sections of my thesis consist of character studies of various characters from Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha works in light of their similarities to their Arthurian counterparts. The King Arthur section includes the characters of John Sartoris of The Unvanquished and Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom!, …

The Ruins Of Childhood: Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, And William Faulkner Expose Guilt And Consequence, Robert Thomas Newell

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine the novels of Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner and, in turn, depict their exploration of poisoned childhood. This theme is prevalent in many of these authors' works, and I not only illustrate what horrors children are put through in their novels, but I also show that uncaring and unthinking adults are the root cause. The ruining of a child's life is a rippling problem; often times, adulthood is ruined because of a person's childhood.

I explore the devastation that irresponsible adults can have on their impressionable children. Through either neglect or selfish values, …

Benjamin Franklin And His Critics: John Adams, Mark Twain, And David Herbert Lawrence, Marzuki Jamil Baki Bin Haji Mohamed Johar

Masters Theses

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) provided the paradigm for special qualities in each of his multiple careers which have since been regarded as characteristically American. Franklin's Autobiography is the epitome of Franklin's spirit. The first edition of the Autobiography appeared in French in 1971 and the first edition in English, published in 1793, was actually an anonymous retranslation of the French edition. Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin prepared Parts One, Two, and Three in 1818. In John Bigelow's 1868 edition, all four parts appear for the first time in English. In the twentieth century, there have been three major editions, each more …