American Studies Commons^™

Book Review Of The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard By Charles E. Trimble, Barbara W. Sommer, And Mary Kay Quinlan., Susan D. Penfield

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The American Indian Oral History Manual offers a clear, succinct, and practical approach to guide and encourage the collection of American Indian oral history by Indigenous peoples themselves. Building on previous work conducted for the Native American Veteran History Project, it was tested at two Great Plains states workshops (South Dakota and Nebraska) attended by representatives from tribal colleges and veteran interest groups. The authors bring a great deal of expertise to the table in producing this useful text. Charles Trimble, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, has a distinguished record of involvement in Indigenous issues, including service …

Book Review Of Contesting Knowledge: Museums And Indigenous Perspectives Edited By Susan Sleeper-Smith., Karen Coody Cooper

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Seventeen scholars contributed to this group work. First exposed to compilation books in the eighties, I found the format exhilarating then. There were so many angles, so much information. Now, however, such books are, to me, rather like walking a cobblestone path. Maybe I just have inappropriate shoes, but the journey is seldom entirely smooth going. And having to adapt to different writing styles every 20 to 30 pages is an added hindrance. Still, the genre is here to stay, and Contesting Knowledge has much to recommend it. Analyzed in four out of twelve pieces, the National Museum of the …

Book Review Of Native Activism In Cold War America: The Struggle For Sovereignty By Daniel M. Cobb., Daniele Bolelli

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Nearly all of the many books dedicated to Native activism focus on the Red Power movement that flourished between 1968 and the late 1970s. In the minds of most people familiar with the topic, Native activism has become synonymous with events such as the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, the 1968 creation of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, and the 1970s civil war on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. In the present book, Daniel Cobb argues that Native activism is not limited to these events. In an effort …

Book Review Of Identity Captured By Law: Membership In Canada’S Indigenous Peoples And Linguistic Minorities By Sébastien Grammond, Patrick Macklem

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In Identity Captured by Law, Sébastien Grammond assesses the constitutional and international legality of rules that control membership in Indigenous societies and the official language minorities of Canada. Grammond’s main argument is that Indigenous and minority membership rules do not violate legal commitments to equality if there is sufficient correspondence between the legal criteria that determine membership and the actual criteria that group members themselves deploy to define themselves. Membership rules based on a racial conception of ethnic identity are less likely than those based on cultural or relational conceptions of ethnic identity to correspond to actual identities and therefore …

Book Review Of Let’S Speak Chickasaw: Chikashshanompa' Kilanompoli' By Pamela Munro And Catherine Willmond, Joshua D. Hinson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Let’s Speak Chickasaw: Chikashshanompa’ Kilanompoli’ is a landmark achievement in Chickasaw language revitalization and fills a wide gap in the available literature. A Chickasaw Dictionary (1973), compiled by the late Reverend Jesse J. Humes and his wife, the late Vinnie May James Humes, is an English-Chickasaw word list, an effort on the Humes’ part to preserve the language in written form. Chikashshanompa' Holisso Toba'chi: Chickasaw: An Analytical Dictionary (1994) is a remarkable effort of over 12,000 entries and includes a chapter on “The Structure of Chickasaw Words,” a brief though thickly constructed examination of Chickasaw syntax, morphology, and phonology. Let’s …

Review Of War Of A Thousand Deserts, Jesús F. De La Teja

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Among the challenges that battered Mexico in the decades following independence was raiding from independent Indian groups that increasingly found plunder preferable to peace. In this ambitious and erudite work Brian DeLay argues that it was exhaustion from fighting Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas among northern Mexicans that largely made for the easy victory of the United States in its 1846- 1847 war of conquest against Mexico. As the evidence mounted for American policy makers that the Mexican government was not only unable to develop its northern territories properly but was incapable of defending them, the logic of incorporating Texas into …

Review Of Listening To The Land: Native American Literary Responses To The Landscape By Lee Schweninger, Kelli Lyon Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Listening to the Land, Lee Schweninger demonstrates a Native American connection to Mother Earth to be a prevailing stereotype in cultural representations of Indigenous peoples in literature, television, and film. While refusing to dismiss "an indigenous relationship to, appreciation for, awareness of, or understanding of the land that is significantly different from non-Indian relationships," Schweninger analyzes the complicated portrayal of the landscape in Native American literature in the context of this stereotype, which he calls the "Land Ethic Stereotype," the framework with which he begins his study of a wide range of twentieth-century Native writers from a number …

Review Of For All We Have And Are: Regina And The Experience Of The Great War By James M. Pitsula, Brandon Dimmel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great War touched many places in Canada, but James M. Pistula's book is the first to examine closely its impact on a distinctly agrarian and western community. Regina, Saskatchewan, was, like many towns in the Canadian prairies after the turn of the century, dependent on agriculture, ethnically diverse, and led by an Anglophile majority that viewed the war as an ideological clash between the democratic British Empire and the despotic German autocracy. That way of thinking made the city of 30,000 a veritable battleground between "Germantown," the "alien" immigrant district, and its English-speaking majority, who through assimilative social reform …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder And Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, And Culture By John E. Miller, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his third book on Laura Ingalls Wilder, John E. Miller presents another fascinating study of this most cherished writer and her times. Miller weighs in on a number of the continuing controversies surrounding Wilder's books, foremost among them the question of how the Little House books were authored. He also enters into the continuing debate on the racial politics of Wilder's writing, especially in Little House on the Prairie, that has become the focus of many newer studies of Wilder's work. Miller presents Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane as products of their respective times, showing how during …

Review Of Sentimental Journey: The Art Of Alfred Jacob Miller By Lisa Strong, Martha A. Sandweiss

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Alfred Jacob Miller (181O-1874) spent six months in the Rocky Mountain West in 1837, capturing a visual record of the fur trader's world for his patron, the Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart. He created only about a hundred works in the West, but over the next thirty-five years he painted close to one thousand western scenes in his studio in Baltimore, benefiting not just from Stewart's patronage, but from the sustained patronage of Baltimore's leading merchant princes, many of whom had commercial interests in the West. As Strong argues here in this beautifully illustrated book, published to accompany an exhibition …

Metaphysics And The Charge Of Misanthropy : Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “Circles” As A Cipher For Understanding The Connection Between Robinson Jeffers And Herman Melville, Hunter Stark

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Herman Melville’s and Robinson Jeffers’s metaphysical thoughts reflect Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of looking towards Nature for discovery; all three writers’ observations of Nature influence how they see humanity’s place in existence. Both Melville and Jeffers observe Nature decentralizing humanity, which distinguishes their views from Emerson’s. Where Jeffers’s verse sternly voices this message, openly criticizing the anthropocentric viewpoint, Melville utilizes humor, subtly confronting the anthropocentric proponent and downplaying humanity’s power. Jeffers garners the label of misanthrope, whereas Melville’s metaphysical realm in Moby-Dick largely escapes this charge with the masking quality of his humor. Comparing both writers’ texts to an Emersonian …

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

Edith Lewis As Editor, Every Week Magazine, And The Contexts Of Cather's Fiction, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

On 26 August 1915 the New York Times reported the spectacle of two "Women Editors" who became "Lost in Colorado Canon" as a "Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide." "Miss Willa Sibert Cather, a former editor of McClure's Magazine, and Miss Edith Lewis, assistant editor at Every Week, had a nerve-racking experience in the Mesa Verde wilds," they reported, giving Lewis and Cather roughly equivalent status as magazine professionals and comic fodder ("Lost"). The war in Europe was still far away for most Americans that August, although the sinking of the Lusitania in May had inched the conflict closer. In …

Susanna Rowson’S Transatlantic Career, Melissa J. Homestead, Camryn Hansen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work …

Governing Gambling In The United States, Maria E. Garcia

CMC Senior Theses

The role risk taking has played in American history has helped shape current legislation concerning gambling. This thesis attempts to explain the discrepancies in legislation regarding distinct forms of gambling. While casinos are heavily regulated by state and federal laws, most statutes dealing with lotteries strive to regulate the activities of other parties instead of those of the lottery institutions. Incidentally, lotteries are the only form of gambling completely managed by the government. It can be inferred that the United States government is more concerned with people exploiting gambling than with the actual practice of wagering.

In an effort to …

Race & Rock & Roll: A Visual Analysis Of Rolling Stone Cover Photography, Erica D. Block

Honors Theses

If African Americans heavily influenced the development of rock & roll as a musical genre, why do we picture rock stars as white men with guitars? In this project I examine, with a particular focus on race, how the the visual culture surrounding rock music evolved to where it is today. To do this, I performed a close visual analysis of Rolling Stone Magazine covers from 1967-1980. In this presentation I illustrate Rolling Stone's trend of featuring 'white negroes' on their covers, which allowed the magazine to use the selling power of a white person's face while retaining the attractiveness, …

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

Judy Holliday's Urban Working Girl Characters In 1950s Hollywood Film, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

A Jewish-created urban and cosmopolitan working girl feminism persisted in the 1950s as a cultural alternative to the suburban, domestic consumerism critiqued so eloquently by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The film persona of Jewish, Academy Award-winning actress Judy Holliday embodied this working girl feminism. Audiences viewed her portrayals of popular front working girl heroines in three films written by the Jewish writer and director Garson Kanin, sometimes in association with his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, and directed by the Jewish director George Cukor in the early 1950s: Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It …

Branding America: Patriotic Products And Consumerism After September 11th, Lori Bindig, M. Bosau

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Post-9/11 culture provided an opportunity for companies to rebrand themselves and their products as American. In doing so, they supported the president’s directive to consume, gave Americans a concrete way to express their support for their country, and made a tidy profit in the process.

Dreadful Sorry: Spots Of Passion And The Memory Of Being Human In Kaufman’S “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” And Pope’S ‘Eloisa To Abelard’, June-Ann Greeley

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Memory is a journey of infinite possibility, a continuous passage through time and sense that offers each person an opportunity not merely to recall and to reflect on former occasions and previous experiences, but to reconsider and to reexamine the past as a guide, as instruction, for healthy individuation. Memory, then, can be understood to be the aggregate of experiential and emotional recollection that frames the essential ground in forming and realizing individual identity. Both Alexander Pope in his poem “Eloisa to Abelard” and Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman in the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” offer portraits of individuals …

Recovering Brande : Freewriting And Sustainable (Procedural) Expression, Richard Bower

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Dorothea Brande is rarely known in rhetoric and composition yet continues to hold popular influence over writers attracted to Cartesian beliefs. The aim of this project is to recover Brande's contributions in order to rethink composition's trajectories. Chiefly, Dorothea Brande's legacy has been in creative writing through Becoming a Writer. In this bestseller, she establishes a program for putting the Cartesian divide to work. "Writing with the unconscious mind in the ascent," as Brande explains about what Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow later call freewriting, harnesses the bifurcated consciousness of writers and begins a journey of unification.

Photosynthesizer : A Novel, Naoko K. Selland

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Photosynthesizer - A Novel

Silent Letters : Directions In Late Twentieth Century New Lyric Poetry, Charmaine Gladdie Cadeau

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Silent Letters: Directions in Late Twentieth Century Poetry consists of three essays that consider modes of silence in the work of North American poets bpNichol, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. A poetry manuscript, Place Holder, accompanies these critical chapters, investigating silence in human relationships, landscapes, and language itself. The critical-creative work reframes embodiment by interrogating a poetics of intimacy through ephemerality, dialogue, and encounter.

Radical Localism In The Network Society, Edward Russell Cole

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This is an ethnographic study conducted upon third-party sociopolitical movements in American society. The research included participant observation in a Midwestern State Green Party, in addition to the Populist Party of America: a micro-party based in Los Angeles.

The Crescent And The Cross: Islamic Influence In Southern Culture, Jesse Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To a large degree, America has adopted African American culture as its own. One may hear and see African American influence in popular music, grammar, fashion and art, but rarely are the sources of these influences divined, in no small part to difficulties inherent in interdisciplinary studies. This thesis will examine the Islamic aesthetics in African American quilts. This work focuses on design and color elements and I trace Islamic influence from West Africa to the U.S. South by way of the slave trade. The original scholarship comes from in the Mississippi Delta, although this thesis also uses quilt books …

Amelia [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

What is the cultural terrain staked out by Amelia, the recent Hollywood-distributed biopic about intrepid flyer Amelia Earhart? The quick shots that precede the opening credits direct attention to the particular themes that Producer Ted Waitt, director Mira Nair, and screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan have emphasized in their 2009 feature about the flyer. Her airplane taking off into the dark gestures to the mystery of her last flight and disappearance without a trace. Her celebrity status is indicated by cheering crowds, radio interviews, and photographs, fusing seamlessly with her status as an object of heterosexual adoration once …

Brief History Of Religion In Northeast Ohio, A, George W. Knepper

Cleveland Memory

This monograph presents a concise but comprehensive look at the history of religion in Northeast Ohio. Starting with the early settlers from New England, Professor Knepper traces the increasingly diverse mixture of faiths that now characterize the life of the sacred in Northeast Ohio. In doing this, Professor Knepper is drawing on a lifetime of study into Ohio's history. Original publication date 2002.

Polish Influence On American Synagogue Architecture, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland came to America after 1880. Many built synagogues with details recalling synagogues in their homeland. Immigrant artisans brought motifs and methods of Poland. Many of these synagogues were small, so the relationship to Polish art was on the inside in the painted and carved decoration. Established architects also had access to Polish synagogues as sources. With publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-06) images of Polish synagogues, such as the Warsaw’s Tlomackie Street Synagogue, became part of many Jewish libraries. More Polish influence came in the 1950s. Most architects were building modern synagogues, …

Calvinism And Military Justice In American Literature, Nadia Hamilton Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores judicial process in the military as revealed in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny and Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. The purpose of my project was to conduct an in depth study of Essentialism in military justice that is indicative of a culturally specific form of information management, as revealed in these texts. Essentialism is a form of information management that relies upon classification qualified through intuitive knowledge and superficial signification. This signification is used to certify the existence of self-contained states that function as a metaphorical metonymy for multiple unknowns. Moreover, …

True Crime, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Whether or not Capote invented something called the “nonfiction novel,” he ushered in the serious, extensive, non-fiction treatment of murder. In the years since In Cold Blood appeared, the genre of true crime regularly appears on the bestseller list. It is related to crime fiction, certainly – but it might equally well be grouped with documentary or read alongside romance fiction. And while its readers have a deep engagement with the genre that is very different from the engagement of readers of crime fiction, its writers are often forced to occupy a position – in relation to victims, criminals and …