American Studies Commons^™

Archaeological Investigation Of The Drive Circle And West Hyphen At Gore Place Waltham, Massachusetts, Christa M. Beranek, Alexandra Crowder

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

In July of 2015, the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston conducted test excavations at Gore Place, the 1806 mansion house of Christopher and Rebecca Gore in Waltham, Massachusetts, to answer questions about changes in the landscape on the north side of the house. The excavations focused on areas of interest within the drive circle and against the west hyphen of the house. The project was carried out under State Archaeologist Permit #3559. The main results in the oval were the discovery of a Gore-period driveway under the grassy oval, indicating that the driveway was broader in front …

Enhancing The Campus Experience: Helping International Students To Adapt To North American Campus Life, Qiaoying Wang

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates how culture adaption topic can be applied to a design solution by enhancing international students experience on North American campus. Each year more than half a million international students enroll in American colleges and universities. Many will spend several years on a campus working toward their degree. Most of them arrive with clear academic goals, but they may have no clue what their social lives will be like. In that case, a common phenomenon that most of the international students need to get along with is called “Culture Shock”, which involves culture and academic adapting difficulties, limited …

Art Aids America: Expressions From An Epidemic, Rebecca Holbrook, Lu Freitas, April Lammers, Rebecca Acree, Jamie Hollis, Holly Martin

P-12 Lesson Plans

This series of lessons for K-12 Art classrooms emerged from the spring 2016 ZMA exhibition, Art AIDS America. This groundbreaking exhibition underscored the deep and unforgettable presence of HIV in American art. It introduced and explored a wide spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, surveying works from the early 1980s to the present. Art AIDS America was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and co-curated by Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, Director, Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo (The State University of …

Ernest Hemingway: The Modern Transcendentalist, Camryn Scott

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

When thinking about Transcendentalism, most of us look solely to the 19^th Century writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In this paper I reject this static treatment of the movement by exploring Ernest Hemingway’s connection to nature both in his life and in his writings, and claim that he created a modern version of Transcendentalism in the early 20^th Century.

Flannery O'Connor's Protestant Grace, Emily Strong

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Flannery O’Connor has long been known for the didactic Catholic message in her literature. However, upon closer study we may find that there are Protestant themes in O’Connor’s portrayal of grace. This paper explores the differences between Catholic and Protestant grace, examines the Protestant themes that can be found in her texts “Greenleaf,” “Revelation,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” and offers possible explanations as to why these Protestant themes exist in her literature.

Usc South Campus: A Last Look At Modernism, Lydia M. Brandt, Paul Haynes, Andrew Nester, Robert Wertz, Ana Gibson, Margaret Mcelveen, John Benton, Adam Bradway, Hatara Tyson, Caley Pennington, Carly Simendinger

Faculty Publications

This is a class project from ARTH 542: American Architecture taught at the University of South Carolina by Lydia Mattice Brandt in Spring 2016.

With more Americans attending college than ever before; urban renewal; racial integration; the expansion of coeducation; and the architecture community’s advocacy for holistic relationship between planning, architecture, and landscape architecture, the American college campus developed rapidly and dramatically in the mid twentieth century. Using the University of South Carolina’s Columbia Campus as a case study, this project explores the history of American architecture in the mid-twentieth century.

Social Media & Political Engagement: Environmental Organizations, Social Media And Political Engagement, Tyler Cate

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Social media is becoming more important in today’s digital society, but how effective is the use of social media when it comes to political engagement? How do environmental organizations use social media and is it effective in encouraging their “followers” to engage in online and/or offline political activity? I collected Facebook and Twitter data from ten environmental organizations to assess the effectiveness of each posting. I hypothesize that the groups making direct calls for action via social media receive a greater response – beyond “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” – than the groups that do not. The data includes the number of …

The Bannock Street Project And Midterm Voting, Sean Murphy

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The Bannock Street Project was an effort by the Democratic Party during the 2014 congressional elections, to offset the Midterm Dilemma. The Midterm Dilemma is the focus of many theories trying to assess why the president's party tends to do poorly during the midterms. The Bannock Street project failed and as a result the Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2014. I attempt to discover why the Democrat's project failed, and if its failure can be attributed to either The Surge and Decline Theory or The Negative Voting Theory. I use 2014 Pew Center election data to analyze the …

The Cyber-Industrial Complex, Connor O’Malley

Political Science Theses and Capstones

When Edward Snowden released a massive trove of classified files from the National Security Agency, the world became aware of numerous global surveillance systems. As Snowden hoped, a global dialogue began concerning surveillance, privacy, and government transparency. While there was a lively discourse surrounding the leak and Snowden, another story was missed. Snowden was not an employee of the NSA; rather he was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private contractor maintaining computer systems for the NSA. The deeper story here is the emerging relationship between government agencies and technology companies. This paper discusses the theory of iron triangles …

"A Date Which Will Live In Infamy": College Newspaper Reporting Of U.S. Entry Into Wwii, Jill Crane, Marcella Lesher

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ad Hoc American Studies: Michigan And The Hidden History Of A Movement, Alexander I. Olson, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay uses the history of the American Culture program at the University of Michigan as an occasion for rethinking the early years of American Studies more generally. Our archival research has found that the program was founded in 1935—seventeen years earlier than previously thought—making it the oldest American Studies degree program in the world. These forgotten years challenge conventional genealogies tracing the field’s origins to the “myth and symbol” school at Harvard. Instead, Michigan’s history reveals a deep engagement with interdisciplinary movements in the 1930s that shared an interest in critiquing American democracy, particularly human ecology, institutionalist economics, and …

Morality And Pleasure In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Sarah Bonney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In “Morality and Pleasure in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” I examine how representations of pleasure in O’Brien’s novel indicate how the soldiers establish a new code of morality during their military service in Vietnam. Although civilians live with a binary understanding of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, the soldiers must commit immoral acts in order to serve honorably, thereby conflicting with this previous understanding. Western ideology asserts that pleasure accompanies moral behavior; because the soldiers perform violent acts, they must ascertain a new understanding of morality in order to continue to feel pleasure throughout and in spite of …

The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …

The Pastor's Theology Of Uncertainty In Lila, Ben Lehnardt

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Marillynne Robinson’s most recent novel Lila depicts a preacher, John Ames, whose personal theology is studded with uncertainty. Rather than being a weakness to his faith, however, his insecurity is actually his greatest strength. This unusual theological trait becomes especially applicable when placed in the context of the philosophical struggle between scientific positivism and humanistic reasoning. This article explores the nuances of Ames’ theology of uncertainty and expands its philosophical importance in a greater context.

A Tourist Performance: Redefining The Tourist Attraction, Brandy Lee Kinkade

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to examine the intersection of tourism and memoirs in the United States specifically how specific travel memoirs function as tourist attractions. This investigation employs performer-centered analysis as a method of inquiry in order to gain insight on tourist experience as well as concepts of travel, imagination and embodiment. The paper also employs MacCannell’s Semiotics of Attraction as a framework to illustrate the presence of the following categories: tourist, sight, and marker. The presence and the relationships established between these categories establish Into Thin Air and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-eight Days on the John Muir Trail …

To Utopianize The Mundane: Sound And Image In Country Musicals, Siyuan Ma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider music, songs, and dance performance as utopian signifiers for cinema, but few has entered the utopian discourse of country musicals, a small genre of cinema usually known as country music films. By closely scrutinizing Pure Country (1992), this thesis aims to reveal how country music—as music numbers and as background cues— integrate and connect the fragmented on-screen world for the country musicals so as to offer audiences a fullness of utopian experience, and how this utopian effect are culturally significant for American audiences due to country music’s unique mechanism of constructing utopia and nostalgia in its past-orientations, sentimentalities, …

Constructing The West: The Hired Hand And Mccabe & Mrs. Miller And The Challenge Of Public Space, Eric Ward Ross

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Western has been an important and iconic part of American culture since the opening of the frontier. However, very few scholars have looked closely at the way the genre constructs the past through public and private spaces like frontier towns and settlements.

The 1971 films, The Hired Hand and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are two texts that revitalized, and in the process revised, the Western genre in the early 1970s. My paper examines the ways in which conflicts between public and private spaces in the films reflect the social and cultural conflicts in America at the time. Both films …

Oral History Of Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. (Part 1 Of 2), Eddie Lee Webster Jr., Chet Bush

Oral History Interviews

Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. is a resident of Marks, MS in Quitman County who participated in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Writing Resistance: Agency And Politics In The Postmodern And Contemporary Novel, Bradley Michael Poling

Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to substantiate a key ambivalence at the heart of contemporary literature: what does it mean to "return" to politics? Critics of contemporary literature have outlined the new literary aesthetic, using social and political engagement as a key component in distinguishing the contemporary novel from its postmodern predecessor. This project, in response to this claim, will examine both the discursive and representation politics of two landmark postmodern novels, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo's Libra, while examining Jennifer Eganâ??s A Visit from the Goon Squad as a descendent of this literary lineage. This project argues that the …

Whitefield's Music: Moorfields Tabernacle, The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754), And The Fashioning Of Early Evangelical Sacred Song, Stephen A. Marini

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Evangelical hymnody was the most significant form of popular sacred song in eighteenth-century Anglo-America. John and Charles Wesley built their Methodist movement on it, but little is known about the music of their great collaborator and eventual rival, George Whitefield (1714-1770). The essential sources of Whitefield's music are the development of ritual song at his Moorfields Tabernacle in London, his Collection of Hymns for Social Worship (1753) prepared for that congregation, and a little-known tunebook called The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754) that contains the first and definitive repertory of music known to be sung at Moorfields. This essay recovers Whitefield's …

Family Affairs Newsletter Business Directory 2016-03-15, Family Affairs

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS is a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out on the 1st and 15th of each month. It covers the State of Maine only

Family Affairs Newsletter 2016-03-15, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

Warren, Robert Penn, 1905-1989 (Sc 2988), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2988. Letter, 20 March 1952, of Robert Penn Warren, New Haven, Connecticut, to Mrs. Carl P. Rollins. He refers to his “wandering loquacity about the sadistic Lewises” (an apparent reference to his poem Brother to Dragons) being included in certain minutes, but observes that the entry will be “much shorter” than the poem itself.

9 March 1916, Part I: Newton Baker Sworn In As Secretary Of War, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This invited blog post explores the appointment of Newton D. Baker to the post of Secretary of War during the Woodrow Wilson Administration.

Session C-4: Mary Lincoln’S Journey, Mary Kerr

Professional Learning Day

Lincoln's Journey will detail in an interesting and objective manner the pivotal points in her life: early feelings about slavery, the decision to leave Lexington and settle in Springfield, IL, being a single mother while her husband was "riding the circuit", her continued support of Lincoln as a national politician, restoration of the White House, and her inability to make positive decisions after Lincoln's assassination. In the end she was able to live on a budget and died with dignity. The presentation follows the book Mary Lincoln's Journey by Kerr and Kerr in which primary sources are emphasized.

Session A-1: The New Illinois Civics Curriculum: Perils And Pitfalls, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr., Eric Smith

Professional Learning Day

The Illinois Legislature will require all Illinois students to complete one semester in civics in order graduate beginning with students entering next academic year. IMSA adopted a combined one-semester civics/American history curriculum this year that can serve as a critical study in how to achieve the goals the state hopes to achieve. Rather than wrestle with the issue of American History vs. American Government curriculum, we are attempting to present a History of American Government, exploring the origins of our political institutions beginning in the Dark Ages and how these have evolved to meet the needs of the times. We …

March 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Purim Celebration; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Bissel of Maine; Community Notices

Digital Humanities And Publishing A Learned Journal, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the "colonialism of knowledge," Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital …

World War I And The Idea Of Progress In Powers's Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World War I and the Idea of Progress in Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" Karsten H. Piep reads Powers's 1985 novel as a critical reexamination of the dynamics and iconography of the early twentieth century that challenges the technological positivism espoused by many U.S. neoconservatives during the 1980s, while insisting on the individual's interpretive powers to discern and release the ever present transformative potentials of history. Situating Three Farmers in the postmodernism debates of the 1980s, Piep argues that the novel succeeds in challenging the idea of history conceived as linear progression, …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.