American Studies Commons^™

The Simms Initiatives - University Of South Carolina, Todd Hagstette

Digital Projects

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Gilmore Simms did more than any other writer and editor to frame white southern self-identity, nationalism, and historical consciousness. He also did more to foster the South’s literary life and place in America’s imagination.

The Simms Initiatives, generously funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the University of South Carolina Libraries, offers full access to this prolific author’s work. That comes through both digital and Print-on-Demand editions. Our digital holdings represent three categories of works: Printed Materials, Scrapbooks, and Scholarship.

We strive to enhance the value of these materials and grow the study of Simms and …

The Gay Of The Land: Queer Ecology And The Literature Of The 1960s, Jill Elizabeth Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue not only that queer ecology is a legitimate and important next step for ecocritics and queer theorists but also that its literary application does a great amount of good in exploring and dismantling the natural/unnatural binary and exposing the ecological impact of the choices humans make everyday. I take as my method a combination of queer and environmental theory and literary criticism, as well as the foundational queer ecocritical works and include important historical and political perspectives influencing the emergence of the environmental and gay and lesbian movements. Through this dissertation, I legitimize more recent …

Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed: The Thematic Importance Of Doubling In Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Gothic Literature, Katharine Mclaren Todd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Without question, Gothic literature provides an impressively suitable venue for the expression of societal anxieties and frustrations, especially those concerning power, patriarchy, and the socially sanctioned roles of women (i.e. to be obediently passive wives and nurturing mothers) and men (i.e. to be representatives of strength, rationality, morality, and order). While it might seem as though supernatural entities or outside forces are often to be feared in Gothic literature, the most sinister force is usually that of the protagonist's unsettled mind. The shadowy haunted houses and often isolated, gloomy, and claustrophobic spaces in which terrorized protagonists are trapped frequently mirror …

Starved: Food Deserts In The Mississippi Delta, Novelette L. Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the impact of food deserts on obesity, and builds a case for additional research on rural food deserts independent from urban ones. The Mississippi Delta consistently presents the highest obesity rates within the state, yet both the third unhealthiest county (Quitman) and the healthiest (DeSoto) are located in that region. One of the reasons there is such a large discrepancy between the health rankings of DeSoto and Quitman counties is that DeSoto is contained within the Greater Memphis Metropolitan Area, but Quitman is entirely rural. Previous research has focused on the prevalence of urban food deserts and …

Playing The Game: Violence And The Revolt Against Normative Masculinity In John Updike's Rabbit Run, Norman Mailer's An American Dream, And Phil Andros's $Tud, Ann Marie Schott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine two high-brow examples of Cold War literature by white male authors, Norman Mailer's An American Dream (1965) and John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), and examine them through the lens of the lesser-known gay pulp $tud (1966) by Phil Andros. Although $tud's gay hustler protagonist Phil seems to be a progressive, even transgressive example of an alternate masculinity, he is actually heavily invested in the binary strictures of normative masculinity and therefore works to uphold or reinforce normativity. $tud, therefore, is not about deviance from a masculine norm but rather a meditation on the ways that American …

Reforming Tastes: Taste As A Print Aesthetic In American Cookery Writing, Sarah Wurgler Walden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many eighteenth-century philosophers such as Kant and Hume worked to develop discourses of taste as a means of standardizing cultural behaviors. Using physical taste as a metaphor for aesthetic perception and judgment, these writers could both define and abstract group boundaries. As American writers worked to distinguish their nation from their British forebears, many recognized the utility of taste-based discourse and worked to develop cultural tastes around shared principles of egalitarianism and democracy. Cookbooks and domestic writing soon engaged these discourses, as it was the task of women to cultivate a virtuous citizenry, and—through domestic print culture—to demonstrate the deleterious …

Southern Noir: Appropriations And Alterations Of A Twentieth-Century Form, Bob Hodges

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Southern noir conjoins the two seemingly antithetical words in a telling fashion. The word noir conjures images of cheap films about detectives, criminals, and luckless men scurrying across a city at night with expressionistic shadows and light play, a foreboding sense of doom, and deadly seductive femmes fatales nipping at their heels. The understanding of noir as a symptom of urban modernity inextricably linked to cities and cinema stands in stark contrast to the traditional understanding of the south as rural, retrograde, and a repository for all the antiquated, “coercive forms of human society” in labor and social practices (Greeson …

The Role Of Lipoproteins/Cholesterol In Genomic Instability And Chromosome Mis-Segregation In Alzheimer's And Cardiovascular Disease, Antoneta Granic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Several lines of evidence link Alzheimer's disease (AD) to atherosclerosis (CVD), including that elevated low density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol is a common risk factor. Development of genomic instability could also link the two diseases. Previous fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analyses revealed a clonal expansion of aneuploid smooth muscle cells underlying atherosclerotic plaques. Likewise, cellular and mouse models of AD revealed tau-dependent mitotic defects and subsequent aneuploidy partly resulting from amyloid-beta (A&beta) interference with microtubule (MT) stability, and specific MT motors function. Moreover, AD patients develop aneuploid/hyperploid cells in brain and peripheral tissues, implicating similar mechanism that may lead to apoptosis …

Characterizing Wireless And Powerline Communication Channels With Applications To Smart Grid Networks, Sabih Guzelgoz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Smart grid aims at improving the efficiency, reliability, security, and quality of service (QoS) of the current electricity grid by exploiting the advances in communication and information technology. In parallel to size of the electricity grid, smart grid communication infrastructure should cover a very large geographical area that may extend from remote generation sites to densely populated residential regions and inside buildings, homes, and electricity-power-system environments. In such an extensive communication network, different communication technologies operating on different communication medium are likely to coexist. Among the communication technologies available, wireless and power line communication (PLC) based solutions are comparatively attractive …

Design Issues In Magnetic Field Coupled Array: Clock Structure, Fabrication Defects And Dipolar Coupling, Anita Kumari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Even though silicon technology is dominant today, the physics (quantum electron tunneling effect), design (power dissipation, wire delays) and the manufacturing (lithography resolution) limitations of CMOS technology are pushed towards the scaling end. These issues motivated us towards a new paradigm that contributes to a continued advancement in terms of performance, density, and cost. The magnetic field coupled computing (MFC) paradigm, which is one of the regimes where we leverage and utilize the neighbor interaction of the nanomagnets to order the single-domain magnetic cells to perform computational tasks. The most important and attractive features of this technology are: 1) room …

Magneto-Dielectric Polymer Nanocomposite Engineered Substrate For Rf And Microwave Antennas, Cesar A. Morales

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents the first reported systematic investigation on the implementation of multilayer patch antennas over Fe3O4-based polymer nanocomposite (PNC) magneto-dielectric substrates. The PNC substrate is created by the monodispersion of Fe3O4 nanopthesiss, with mean size of 7.5nm, in a polymeric matrix of Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS).

Recently, magneto-dielectric substrates have been proposed by several researchers as a means for decreasing the size and increasing the bandwidth of planar antennas. Nevertheless, factors such as high loss and diminished control over magnetic and dielectric properties have hindered the optimal performance of antennas. In addition, the incompatibility and elevated complexity prevents integration of conventional …

Selection And Implementation Of Technologies For The Re-Engineering Of An Existing Software System, Stan William Naspinski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A major hurdle for any company to cross is the act of re-engineering software if they wish to stay relevant. With the speed that software and technology advances, it would be ignorant for any product to stagnate. With that comes the inherent difficulties of choosing which of the older technologies to keep (if any) and which newer technologies to employ in the re-engineered solution. Once that is covered, the actual implementation presents its own set of challenges to both the decision makers and developers in the process.

This thesis describes a case study, in particular the efforts put forth to …

Live Video Streaming From Android-Enabled Devices To Web Browsers, Justin M. Bailey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The wide-spread adoption of camera-embedded mobile devices along with the ubiquitous connection via WiFi or cellular networks enables people to visually report live events. Current solutions limit the configurability of such services by allowing video streaming only to fixed servers. In addition, the business models of the companies that provide such (free) services insert visual ads in the streamed videos, leading to unnecessary resource consumption.

This thesis proposes an architecture of a real-time video streaming service from an Android mobile device to a server of the user's choice. The real-time video can then be viewed from a web browser. The …

Developmental Trajectories Of Self-Control: Assessing The Stability Hypothesis, James Vance Ray

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A key proposition of Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) self-control theory is the stability hypothesis which suggests that an individual's level of self-control, once established between the ages of 8-10, is stable over the life course. Empirical results from examinations of the stability hypothesis have been mixed. Prior tests of the stability hypothesis have employed aggregate assessment methods (e.g., mean-level and correlational analyses). Such approaches fail to take into account the possibility that individual developmental pathways may differ. This study employs individual longitudinal data over a four year period for 3,249 7^th to 10^th grade subjects to assess the …

Evanescent Wave Coupling Using Different Subwavelength Gratings For A Mems Accelerometer, Al-Aakhir A. Rogers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A novel technique of coupling near-field evanescent waves by means of variable period subwavelength gratings (1.2 ìm and 1.0 ìm), using a 1.55 ìm infrared semiconductor laser is presented for the use of an optical MEMS accelerometer. The subwavelength gratings were fabricated on both glass and silicon substrates respectively.

Optical simulation of the subwavelength gratings was carried out to obtain the maximum coupling efficiency of the two subwavelength gratings; the grating thickness, grating width, and the grating separation were optimized. This was performed for both silicon and glass substrates.

The simulations were used to determine the total system noise, including …

Design, Synthesis And Test Of Reversible Circuits For Emerging Nanotechnologies, Himanshu Thapliyal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reversible circuits are similar to conventional logic circuits except that they are built from reversible gates. In reversible gates, there is a unique, one-to-one mapping between the inputs and outputs, not the case with conventional logic. Also, reversible gates require constant ancilla inputs for reconfiguration of gate functions and garbage outputs that help in keeping reversibility. Reversible circuits hold promise in futuristic computing technologies like quantum computing, quantum dot cellular automata, DNA computing, optical computing, etc. Thus, it is important to minimize parameters such as ancilla and garbage bits, quantum cost and delay in the design of reversible circuits.

The …

Inside And Outside Southern Whiteness: Film Viewing, The Frame, And The Racing Of Space In Yoknapatawpha, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Though neither film nor film viewing is ever named in As I Lay Dying, both the apparatus of cinema and what we might term its sociohistorical effects are evoked powerfully by and in the novel. These include the passing before the reader’s “gaze” of the discrete, separate “frames” of the various characters’ monologues, as well as, in particular section, a fascination with watching machinery that resembled the interest of early film biewers in the cinematic apparatus (see Doane 108).

If Vardaman and his family are not explicitly depicted as film viewers, they nevertheless show signs of what has been …

Review: Sisters Red

Georgia Library Quarterly

Book review of "Sisters Red," by Jackson Pearce.

"Theah's Life Anywheres Theah's Booz And Jazz": Home To Harlem And Gingertown In The Context Of National Prohibition, Kathleen Morgan Drowne

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Writing The Northland: Jack London's And Robert W. Service's Imaginary Geography, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim.

Giehmann, Barbara Stefanie. Writing the Northland: Jack London's and Robert W. Service's Imaginary Geography. Würzburg, Germany: Könighausen & Neumann, 2011.

[Introduction To] America's War: Talking About The Civil War And Emancipation On Their 150th Anniversaries, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

Edited by Edward L. Ayers, America’s War is an anthology of Civil War writing originally published between 1852 and 2008. Co-published by the American Library Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities, America’s War was created in support of a national reading and discussion program for libraries called “Let’s Talk About It: Making Sense of the American Civil War.”

The selections in America’s War include works of historical fiction and interpretation, speeches, diaries, memoirs, biographies, and short stories. Together, these readings provide a glimpse of the vast sweep and profound breadth of Americans’ war among and against themselves, adding …

Sentimental Ideology, Women's Pedagogy, And American Indian Women's Writing: 1815-1921, Christine Cavalier

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Sentimental Ideology, Women's Pedagogy, and American Indian Women's Writing: 1815-1921 by Christine Renée Cavalier Washington University in St. Louis, 2011 Professor Vivian Pollak, Chairperson This dissertation examines how sentimental notions of respectable womanhood and refined education shaped the polished poetry and prose of four seminal female figures in the history of American Indian literature: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft: 1800-1842), the earliest American Indian female author recovered thus far; E. Pauline Johnson: 1861-1913), the most successful nineteenth-century Native writer who became Canada's iconic poetess and Native national symbol; S. Alice Callahan: 1868-1894), the first American Indian female novelist; …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 32 (2011), Laurel Horton, Loretta B. Chase, Jan Coor-Pender Dodge, Aimee E. Newell, Phyllis S. Herda, Margaret M. Bingham, Valerie J. Davis, Jackie (Jacqueline) Schweitzer, Carolyn K. Ducey, Deborah E. Kraak

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Laurel Horton

The Dublin Quilt: A Civil War Textile Document by Loretta B. Chase and Jan Coor-Pender

Dodge Seeking Enlightenment: A Quilt Historian's Guide to Freemasonry Aimee E. Newell Tivaevae: Women's Quilting in the Cook Islands by Phyllis Herda

The Collaborative Relationship between Professional Machine Quilters and Their Customers in the Contemporary Quilt Movement by Margaret M. Bingham

The Policy of Good Design: Quilt Designs and Designers from the WPA Milwaukee Handicrafts Project, 1935-1942 by Valerie J. Davis and Jackie Schweitzer

Reminiscences of Women's Work: Chintz Applique Album Quilts of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia by Carolyn …

Repugnant Aboriginality: Leanne Howe’S Shell Shaker And Indigenous Representation In The Age Of Multiculturalism, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe’s 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts, at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. And yet, these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by pre-emptying identification through difference, an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we …

Preface: Monsters And Mormons, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In the nineteenth century, Mormonism seemed grist for everybody's mill. Humorists like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain made hay out of polygamy; conspiracy theorists like Thomas deWitt Talmage imputed President Garfield's assassination to the Mormons; pseudo-memoirists like "Maria Ward" recounted their seduction, imprisonment, and torture at the hands of Mormon mesmerists; the Republican jump-started their political party with a promise to expunge the Mormon "relic of barbarism"; and pulp fiction writers and serious novelists alike fueled sales with stories of bloodthirsty Danites, lecherous elders, and grief maddened Mormon wives who murdered competitors.

Log-Periodic Microstrip Patch Antenna Miniaturization Using Artificial Magnetic Conductor Surfaces, Ahmad Tariq Almutawa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Microstrip patch antennas are attractive for numerous military and commercial applications due to their advantages in terms of low-profile, broadside radiation, lowcost, low-weight and conformability. However, the inherent narrowband performance of patch antennas prohibits their use in systems that demand wideband radiation. To alleviate the issue, an existing approach is to combine multiple patch antennas within a log-periodic array configuration [1]. These log-periodic patch antennas (LPMAs) are capable of providing large bandwidths (>50%) with stable broadside radiation patterns. However, they suffer from electrically large sizes. Therefore, their miniaturization without degrading the bandwidth performance holds promise for extending their use …

Smart Grid Functionality Of A Pv-Energy Storage System, Nenad Damnjanovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Renewable Energy will be the key to preserving the Earth's remaining resources and continuing this surge of technological progress that we have experienced this past century. New philosophies of how/when/where energy should be consumed and produced are attempting to improve upon the current grid infrastructure. The massive advancement in communications, renewable and control systems will allow this new-age electric grid to maximize its efficiency while reducing cost. Renewable, "green" energy is now at the forefront of innovation. As the world population increases, there will be a need to free ourselves from natural resources as much as possible. Advanced Energy Storage …

Physical Activity Promotion Among School-Aged Children Using Pedometers And Rewards, Kari E. Ek

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Physical activity is important for children as many children are considered overweight or obese. The benefits of exercise have been demonstrated in empirical studies across all age ranges (Horne, Hardman, Lowe, & Rowlands, 2009; Kelly et al., 2004; Louie & Chan, 2003; Southard & Southard, 2006). In the current study, a multiple baseline design across participants was used to assess the effectiveness of goal setting, reinforcement contingencies, and pedometers that provide feedback to increase step count of 5 participants. During baseline each participant wore a sealed pedometer to assess the average steps the participants took per day. After baseline, each …

Grouper: A Packet Classification Algorithm Allowing Time-Space Tradeoffs, Joshua Adam Kuhn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an algorithm for classifying packets according to arbitrary (including noncontiguous) bitmask rules. As its principal novelty, the algorithm is parameterized by the amount of memory available and can customize its data structures to optimize classification time without exceeding the given memory bound. The algorithm thus automatically trades time for space efficiency as needed. The two extremes of this time-space tradeoff (linear search through the rules versus a single table that maps every possible packet to its class number) are special cases of the general algorithm we present. Additional features of the algorithm include its simplicity, its open-source …

Gumil Hawaii Vision And Writing (Association Of Ilocano Writers In Hawaii): Potentially Disenfranchising?, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.