American Studies Commons^™

For The Love Of Music: A Story Of Organizational Culture And Change, Malii Brown

Capstone Collection

For the Love of Music: A Story of Organizational Culture and Change is an examination of culture and possibilities for change at an organization that manages one top-tier, U.S. classical music orchestra. The research was carried out for the purpose of making and refining meaning from collective employee experiences at a canon cultural organization whose practices reflect and influence our society beyond the context of music. The inquiry at the heart of the work is, ‘How does the organizational culture of the subject organization, Orchestra, Inc.[1], affect its readiness for organizational change?’ The research methodology consisted of organizational culture assessments …

Second Lines, Story Circles, And Freedom Songs: A Call And Response, Ann-Meredith Wootton

Capstone Collection

Community Is Survival

In New Orleans, all the grandmothers tell the story about the live oaks. Our roots don't grow deep into the swamp, but they grow wide – weaving, growing, and binding together with all of the surrounding trees, so that when the hurricane winds come, we will not fall. Together we can stand up against the strongest Gulf force winds (and the many faces of the Cradle to Prison Pipeline) – pushing, pulling, and leaning on one another when we need – and survive to see another day.

Live oaks also carry the story tradition of being a …

Between Literature And Science: Inscribing Zora Neale Hurston’S Mules And Men In The Post-Human Condition, Jung-Hsien Lin

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Intrigued by the influence of technology on or in literature as well as the ways of which the posthuman body subverts the existing social constructs of race, gender, and culture, this paper appropriates the Foucauldian concept of “technologies of the self” to investigate the narrating “I/eye” in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. I flesh out how Hurston’s new “cyborg” identity, along with the idea of performativity—particularly in relation to her manipulation of the genre of autoethnography—resists the dominant constructs of race, gender and culture. Through a re-examination of these major moments of transformations of knowledge/power in Hurston’s Mules …

Stuart, Jesse Hilton, 1907-1984 (Sc 1221), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1221. Letter, 25 January 1959, from Jesse H. Stuart to Mrs. Higgason explaining that his poem "Kentucky is My Land" is out of print and regretting that he cannot provide a copy.

Zuzu's Petals, Jeffrey James Jarot

Theses and Dissertations

Zuzu's Petals relates the travails of Jules and Julie, a couple whose marriage is in the process of breaking apart. Jules has a "fanboyish" obsession with the 1946 Frank Capra film "It's a Wonderful Life." Furthermore, he is fixated on his own past, and his eccentric behavior has caused his disenchanted wife to seek romantic and emotional solace in David, an old flame from high school. Their child, Zuzu, who was named at Jules' insistence after a key character in the Capra film, has herself sensed that something is amiss in her parents' dealings with each other. The story's narrative …

The Evolution Of Dinner: A Review Of Three Squares: The Invention Of The American Meal By Abigail Carroll, Claire Stewart

Publications and Research

Food historian Abigail Carroll’s debut book, Three Squares: the Invention of the American Meal, explores the historical reasons why we eat what we do, and when. Combing through a range of primary sources, she analyzes how Americans' eating choices have been determined by changing economic circumstances. A book review by Claire Stewart.

Beware Of Mad John: Political Theology, Psychedelics And Literature, Roger K. Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using the discourse of Political Theology as a mode of enquiry we can overcome a longstanding tension between aesthetics and history that characterized much of twentieth century thought. Focusing on literary and occasionally musical works from the mid twentieth century, my aim is to show how works displaying psychedelic aesthetics are important venues for political deliberation with regard to citizenship. Through affective means, psychedelic aesthetics reimagine the boundaries of liberal subjectivity through a consciousness expansion and return from that expansion. The subject who returns from a psychedelic “experience” – which can be attained in various ways – comes to ethically …

Lg Ms 026 Michael Martin Papers Finding Aid, Nicholas Martin

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Print materials collected by this AIDS activist, primarily about the AIDS epidemic and treatment, including The AIDS Project in Maine.

Size of Collection:

1 ft.

Giles, Janice Meredith (Holt), 1905-1979 - Relating To (Sc 1172), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1172. Photographs taken at the Giles House, Spout Springs, Adair County, Kentucky, on the occasion of the first autographing event by Dianne W. Stuart for Janice Holt Giles: A Writer’s Life.

The Butler, Carol Miles

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels.

Bland, Katherine "Kittie" (Sublett), 1860-1941 (Mss 485), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 485. Scrapbook of Katherine “Kittie” (Sublett) Bland, a resident of Simpson, Logan and Warren counties in Kentucky, containing mostly clippings of poems (a few composed by her), articles and obituaries.

Mark Twain And Critical Thinking In The Secondary Classroom, Daniel Zehr

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study will explore and evaluate the school literacy practices of high school-aged participants at the freshmen level (grade 9). It will interpret their analysis, comprehension, and critical thinking skills through an examination of confidence, abilities, and fluency through discussion and student-led dialogue. Building on previous research regarding critical thinking skills, the researcher hopes to articulate the ways in which students with varied levels of ability (grades 9-12) may be able to use their literacy learning to demonstrate critical thinking skills that will enhance their reading fluency, comprehension, and analytical skills and to foster an appreciation of literature and …

Progressive Foote? Gender Politics In An 1887 Letter From Mary Hallock Foote, Tara Penry

Western Writers Online

Mary Hallock Foote is not known for progressive gender politics. Quite the opposite. As her biographer Darlis Miller observes, Foote and her longtime friend Helena DeKay Gilder agreed that woman’s most important work lay in the home, and suffrage would distract her from her primary duties. But Foote did not always practice her belief in the separate spheres of men and women perfectly. Not only did necessity compel her for a time to support her family, but an 1887 letter also shows that in her professional life, Foote did not always think of her work as feminine or separate from …

Unruly Catholics From Dante To Madonna: Faith, Heresy, And Politics In Cultural Studies, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"During the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church went through a period of liberal reform under the stewardship of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. Successive popes sharply reversed course, enforcing conservative ideological values and silencing progressive voices in the Church. Consequently, those Catholics who had embraced the spirit of Vatican II were left feeling adrift and betrayed. In Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna, scholars of literature, film, religion, history, and sociology delve into this conflict–and historically similar ones–through the examination of narratives by and about rebellious Catholics.

Essays in Unruly Catholics explore how renowned Catholic literary figures …

Indigenizing King Lear, Michael K. Johnson

Western Writers Online

Staged with an all‑aboriginal cast, the 2012 production of William Shakespeare’s King Lear at Canada’s National Arts Centre creatively reimagined the play in a frontier New World setting. Directed by Peter Hinton, and starring August Schellenberg (Mohawk) as Lear, the production placed Shakespeare’s drama in seventeenth‑century Canada, amongst a group of Algonquin people on the outer edge of European colonialism and cultural contact. The idea for this resetting of the play originated with August Schellenberg—some 45 years ago—who thought that Lear would be particularly adaptable to an indigenous / First Nations setting. That it took nearly half a century to …

From The Dust Bowl To Frederick Manfred’S The Golden Bowl—A Journeyman’S Masterpiece, Randi Eldevik

Western Writers Online

The time and place of Frederick Manfred’s birth—1912, on a farm in a corner of northwestern Iowa close to the South Dakota and Minnesota borders—gave him several perspectives on American life, resulting in the creation of several kinds of fiction. Manfred’s most celebrated novels, the five Buckskin Man tales, take place in the nineteenth century and have a wild west (mostly South Dakota) setting: they arose out of Manfred’s awareness of the dramatic and tumultuous events that had occurred near his home during the hundred years before his birth. But Manfred’s own childhood and youth in a settled agricultural community …

Jackson Unchained: Reclaiming A Fugitive Landscape, Susanna Ashton, Jonathan Hepworth

Publications

Slaves were allowed three day's holiday at Christmas time, and so it was over Christmas that John Andrew Jackson decided to escape. The first day I devoted to bidding a sad, though silent farewell to my people; for I did not even dare to tell my father or mother that I was going, lest for joy they should tell some one else. Early next morning, I left them playing their "fandango" play. I wept as I looked at them enjoying their innocent pay, and thought it was the last time I should ever see them, for I was determined never …

Queer Pedagogical Desire: A Study Guide, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This essay explores the queer pedagogical desires that attended my writing of the Study Guide for the documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard, 2012). The analysis takes up Robyn Wiegman’s central question in Object Lessons, “What is it we expect our relationship to our objects of study to do?”, which is of particular importance to the discipline of queer studies insofar as the field is oriented around the desire to meld social justice with critical pedagogy. The queer professor’s desire in the case of the Study Guide-as-object was to create a text that …

Review Of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, And Place Edited By Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, And Karla Armbruster, Jenny Kerber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Given the emphasis that advocates of bioregionalism have historically placed on principles of decentralization and localization in the development of more ecologically sustainable modes of inhabitation, it is perhaps not surprising that no wide-ranging survey of bioregional literary criticism has appeared on the scene until now. This is a shame, however, because it turns out that examining bioregional practices across cultures and places yields a wealth of new ideas about how to live more sustainably in one's home place. In The Bioregional Imagination, readers finally have access to a much-needed set of comparative perspectives on bioregionalism, ranging from the implementation …

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 2013 Vol. 33 No.4 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Inside The Ark: The Hutterites In Canada And The United States By Yossi Katz And John Lehr, Rod Janzen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Geographers Yossi Katz and John Lehr's new book on the Hutterites provides an in-depth analysis of the social life of one of the four branches of the Hutterite Church in North America, the Group 2 Schmiedeleut. In many ways it is also an informative introduction to Hutterite life in general.

Katz and Lehr provide detailed explanations of virtually every aspect of Hutterite life in the province of Manitoba. This includes social and political organization at the colony and intercolony levels, religious and cultural traditions, the impact of space and how it is employed (with helpful charts and images), as well …

Review Of I'Ll Be Here In The Morning: The Songwriting Legacy Of Townes Van Zandt By Brian T. Atkinson, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas's Townes Van Zandtwas a musician's musician whose fame grew after his 1996 death. Brian T. Atkinson, contributor to the Austin AmericanStatesman, Texas Music, Lone Star, American Songwriter, and No Depression, has woven together a collection of interviews from Van Zandt's contemporaries and friends, as well as his musical heirs-singer-songwriters who grew up too late to have known the troubled author of "Pancho and Lefty," "Tecumseh Valley," and "Lungs" but who admired his dark, poetic lyrics.

The Diminishment Of The Great Sioux Reservation Treaties, Tricks, And Time, Alan L. Neville, Alyssa Kaye Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historically, Indian-white relations have been marred by mistrust and dishonesty. This is especially true in numerous land dealings between the United States government and the Lakota/ Dakota/Nakota people of the northern Great Plains. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court noted, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."¹

Our focus here is to chronicle and analyze the tragic diminishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, first established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.² The land loss progressed with the Homestead Act of 1862, Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, …

Making War On Jupiter Pluvius The Culture And Science Of Rainmaking In The Southern Great Plains, 1870-1913, Michael R. Whitaker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For two weeks in August 1891, the grounds of the "C" Ranch in rural West Texas thundered with the sound of explosions, as a federal government- sponsored expeditionary force hurled hundreds of pounds of heavy ordnance against an invisible enemy. In command of this unusual operation was "General" Robert Dyrenforth, who with $9,000 of congressional funding in pocket was doing his utmost to find out whether, as a bit of folk wisdom ran, the furious tumult and aerial concussions of battle could somehow cause rain. From tiny western hamlets to the metropolises of the East, Americans were fascinated by the …

Review Of Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs And U.S. Soldiers On The Upper Missouri, 1854-1868 By Doreen Chaky, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When strong tensions exist between cultures, small incidents can have grave consequences. Thus, in August of 1854, when a Sioux Indian living near Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory, found a lame cow and killed it to feed his family, a sad chapter began. The cow's emigrant owner complained of his loss to the fort's commander, and Lt. John Grattan was soon on his way to a Sioux encampment to demand that the thief be turned over to face justice. As a cannon rolled into place to reinforce his demand, violence broke out, and thirty soldiers, including Grattan, soon lay dead. Secretary …

Review Of Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History Edited By Susan A. Miller And James Riding In, Angela Parker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Susan Miller and James Riding In position this anthology as the first to collect historical work from Native scholars participating in an "Indigenous discourse"-an academic conversation "rooted in North American Indigenous thought" and, they claim, global Indigenous thought. If your essentialism alarm bells are ringing, it is for good reason. Ignore the alarms long enough to work your way through the entire anthology and you will find rich, complicated, vibrant historical analysis and critique from Indigenous historians working in Canada and the United States.

The introduction and framing essays by Susan Miller in part 1 elaborate on the idea of …

Review Of Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past And Present By Jean A. Boyd, John Mark Dempsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The patrons of Saturday-night Texas dance halls still two-step to the music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, more than thirty-five years after Wills's death. Jean Boyd is one of the Texas music authors who has mythologized Wills in her previous "We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills": An Oral History (2003) and The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (1998). In her newest book, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present, Boyd puts the spotlight on less well known practitioners of the music that Wills pioneered along with …

Review Of Weapons Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition By Jim Garry, Brooke Wibracht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jim Garry's recent publication offers a meticulous assessment of the Corps of Discovery's arsenal. One of Garry's goals centers on correcting outdated information from well-known books, about the Corps and the weaponry the men carried, especially Carl P. Russell's Guns of the Early Frontiers (1957). The author acknowledges that historians have continuously advanced the scholarship on the Corps' weaponry, but misconceptions about the arsenal still exist, muddying the historical record. He encourages readers to view his book as a tool for placing the expedition and the weapons of the early nineteenth century in an accurate historical context.

The volume contains …

Review Of Villages On Wheels: A Social History Of The Gathering To Zion By Stanley B. Kimball And Violet T. Kimball, W. Paul Reeve

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Villages on Wheels is the culmination of historian Stanley B. Kimball's more than fifteen years' research on and long career as a scholar of the Mormon Trail. When he died in 2003, his wife, Violet, a writer, photojournalist, and occasional student of the trail herself, completed the project. This social history, a detailed examination of the everyday aspects of creating and maintaining a mobile society, is the result of their collaboration.

Based upon "hundreds of journals"-mostly located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Library in Salt Lake City, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at …

Strategies For Strengthening The Great Plains Oral Health Workforce, John Reinhardt, Kimberly Mcfarland

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

The looming shortage of dentists in rural communities throughout the Great Plains is a well-documented concern. Access to care can be a problem, and the lack of dental care is generally most acute among those with low income, those with complex health issues, and minorities. Studies are finding that there are significant associations between poor oral health and the occurrence of systemic diseases or problems. Examples include cardiovascular disease, stroke, and preterm delivery of low-birth weight infants. The two primary diseases of the oral cavity-dental caries and periodontal disease-are not only treatable but also preventable with adequate care.

The University …