American Studies Commons^™

A Long Strange Trip Through The Evolution Of Fan Production, Fan-Branding, And Historical Representation In The Grateful Dead Online Archive, Anna Richardson

Masters Theses

This study explores how a digital music archive tells the story and contributes to the public memory of cult bands. Utilizing the Grateful Dead Archive Online (GDAO) as the primary data source, the researcher obtained a population of 26,835 items and categorized them by the production method of fan or band, item type, era, and logo. Content analysis illustrated themes within the archive in relation to the fannish production and activity within the fandom of the Grateful Dead. The span of this specific fandom spreads across five decades and sheds light onto the ways in which the fandom surrounding cult …

Deceiving, Fraudulent, And Seductive: The Discourses Of Money In Us Novels Of The Early Republic, Fabian Rempfer

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the importance of money and the representations of its various physical manifestations (such as coin, paper money) in American fiction of the 1790s. My project traces the transition from the colonies' financial dependency on Britain to their independency, relating to the monetary union created after the passage of the constitution. I argue that this shift from financial dependency to independency influences books such as Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, Kelroy by Rebecca Rush, Ormond or the Secret Witness and Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown. My project highlights, on the one hand, the importance of such …

Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

The American Hero In A Hawaiian Myth: Convergence Of Cultures In London’S “Koolau The Leper”, Morgan Daniels

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Jack London’s “Koolau the Leper” (1912) tells the story of a leprous Hawaiian who refuses to be reallocated to Molokai by the American government. During Koolau’s last stand, he keeps the American army at bay despite their superior weaponry. The story ends with Koolau dying from leprosy a free man on Kauai, his island home. Critics have long debated what this story reveals about London’s viewpoint on American imperialism and colonialism. I would like to augment this understanding by suggesting that London’s critique of American imperialism is in itself an act of imperialism. I propose that Jack London’s “Koolau the …

Defining An Agency: Animals, Fire, And The U.S. Forest Service, Ellen A. Ipsen

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Today, the United States Forest Service has established itself as an enduring authority on federal lands management. However, in 1905 when the federal government established the agency, its fate was far from secure. Prior to 1905, people living in the West had unchecked access to public land resources and many disapproved of an expansion of federal power. It was the issue of forest fire fighting that gained public support for the agency, and animals, in large part, helped them succeed. Horses and mules were used for transportation, scouting missions and trail building before adequate technology existed. Every ranger was required …

Television (From The Mississippi Encyclopedia), Steven Classen

Faculty Publications - Department of Communication and Cinematic Arts

Television came relatively late to Mississippi and several other southern states. Following a federal freeze on licensing new stations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), television stations came on air in 1953 in Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina. Over the next three years Mississippians built six stations-first WJTV and WLBT in Jackson and WCOC in Meridian and later WCBI in Columbus, WDAM in Hattiesburg, and WTWV in Tupelo. Anticipating WJTV's first broadcast, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's January 1953 inauguration, the station's general manager, John Rossitor, told city leaders and educators that television would "bring the world into your home and …

There's No Space Like Home : Locavore Writing And Rhetorics Of Place, Darcy Mullen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project seeks to treat the word “local” as a social construct that, if left unexamined, has concrete consequences, from seed to fork, and from reader to student writer. As a study in contemporary rhetorical formations, I focus on what I term the genre of Locavore writing as a discrete genre of social movement writing, to intervene in definitions and applications of a set of rhetorical concepts; discourse communities, rhetorical situations, and proverbial knowledge. Additionally, I reframe the need for post-spatial turn considerations within rhetorical studies in spatial rhetoric for both the study of literature, and writing pedagogy. The focus …

A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This PH.D dissertation aims to develop a 3-D numerical model of dam-break flows on movable beds. Three tasks are defined to accomplish the goal of this study. The first task is developing a 3-D hydrodynamic model to simulate dam-break flow on fixed beds with simple geometry and test the water surface tracking technique. This model solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations using a finite-difference method on rectilinear, staggered grids. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) technique with SOLA-VOF advection scheme is used to capture the free surface motion. The developed model is tested using several experimental dam-break flows and the VOF technique is …

“Calypso”—Harry Belafonte (1956), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Harry Belafonte, the Harlem-born son of poor undocumented Jamaican immigrants, an untrained singer whose heart was set on becoming an actor, made music history with “Harry Belafonte: Calypso.” This record was the very first by a solo performer to sell a million copies, holding the top spot on “Billboard’s” pop album charts for an unprecedented 31 weeks (in addition, 58 weeks in the top ten, 99 weeks among the top 100). The higher-ups at RCA had doubted the commercial potential of a thematically unified recording of “island and Calypso songs,” but the “Calypso” record, released at the end of May …

One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, Joseph Aaron Farmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines autobiographical writings by formerly poor white Southern women, who are rarely considered as a group and are more typically studied with “rough South” male writers, which would suggest that few women have contributed their own gendered experience to discussions of class, race, and sexuality vis-à-vis Southern poverty. Correcting this assumption, I examine formative statements by women from poor white backgrounds, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, Dorothy Allison’s Trash, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Each of these writers engage in narrative strategies that do not defend …

Reading The Culture Wars In The New Academic Novel, 1984-Present, Ian Butcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “new academic novel” emerged in the 1980s as what had previously been a cloistered, insular genre began to engage much more directly with the social and political import of universities and the people who work in them. I argue that an important strand of this development centres on a group of novels that through their depiction of recent developments in academia—the threat of political correctness, the so-called theory wars, the growth of contingent labour, and the elevation of a corporate logic above educational concerns—document the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant logic of American higher education and the American …

Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens

Honors Theses

This study explores the life of Nella Larsen, investigating how her unusual childhood and early adulthood provided substance for her to make critical and unique views on race relations and racially dichotomized communities. The study shows how the Harlem Renaissance was essential in providing this outlet to Larsen; it was an era where African American art was lauded. The investigation required research into Larsen's childhood and early adult life using several different pieces of biographical works. After detailing impactful events in her early life, the study developed further with critical analyzation of her fictional short stories and novels. Additional research …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …

Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs

Theses and Dissertations--English

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of …

American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.

I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …

From Blues To The Ny Dolls: The Rolling Stones And Performance Of Authenticity, Mariia Spirina

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

Rock’n’roll has specific aesthetic — a set of invisible rules that each young rock musician accepts as a given. If one examines the history of rock’n’roll starting from 1950s, one will notice that there was a clear division in rock that separates the rock’n’roll of 1950s from rock of the second half of the 1960s and beyond—the rock that we know today. This thesis investigates how the visual aesthetic of rock’n’roll evolved from its origins in the 1950s blues tradition, how it was formed in the second half of the 1960s, and how it was modified in the first half …

Nidus Idearum. Scilogs, Iii: Viva La Neutrosophia!, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Welcome into my scientific lab! My lab[oratory] is a virtual facility with noncontrolled conditions in which I mostly perform scientific meditation and chats: a nest of ideas (nidus idearum, in Latin). I called the jottings herein scilogs (truncations of the words scientific, and gr. Λόγος – appealing rather to its original meanings "ground", "opinion", "expectation"), combining the welly of both science and informal (via internet) talks (in English, French, and Romanian). * In this third book of scilogs collected from my nest of ideas, one may find new and old questions and solutions, referring to topics on NEUTROSOPHY – email …

How To Be A Good Neighbor: Christianity's Role In Enacting Non-Interventionist Policies In Latin America During The 1930s And 1940s, Joelle Leib

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis attempts to demonstrate how Reverend and Professor Hubert Herring’s dedication to Congregationalism motivated him to advocate for the autonomy of Latin American nations through the pursuit of non-interventionist policies, an approach the U.S. government ultimately adopted when it best suited its interests during World War II.

[Introduction To] Darkness Falls On The Land Of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings In Eighteenth-Century New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

Bookshelf

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors …

Empire, LáZaro Lima

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

"Empire" is the keyword that frames both the field of Latina/o studies and what Latina/o studies projects interrogate in order to make visible how empire's scattered remains throughout the Americas cross national borders as well a affective states of being. In so doing, Latina/o studies' methodological recourse to and critique of empire seeks to apprehend empire's legacies beyond the singular historical actor model of the exceptional nation-state in order to engage how empire saturates and conditions affects across space, time, and bodies.

Remaking "Public" Space: Neoliberal Spatial Management And The Criminalization Of Homelessness In San Francisco's Union Square, Sophie Newman

Honors Papers

This thesis examines how San Francisco vies for attention on an international stage, through destination cultivation and image management that is dependent on the criminalization of homelessness. This intertwined practice of aesthetic transformation with the rendering of homeless bodies as nonnormative and therein “removable” has fundamentally transformed public space in San Francisco. Public space redevelopment has been carried out through city planning, selective destruction and displacement, increased policing and securitization, and a rearticulation of social services and notions of “care” linked to punitive enforcement of the law. Neoliberalization of the built environment has engulfed thought on homelessness. As a result, …

Adapting Skazki: How American Authors Reinvent Russian Fairy Tales, Sarah Krasner

Scripps Senior Theses

Adaptations of works have the potential to bring their subject matter to a new audience. This thesis explores the adaptation of Russian fairy tales into novels by authors Orson Scott Card and Joy Preble by looking at how they present Russian fairy tales, folkloric figures, and fairy tale structure to an American audience.

From Weak Woman To New Woman And Back: The Long Struggle To Legitimize Women Athletes In The U.S., Rashaun Debord

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper details the complicated history of women in sport by looking at the changing popular image of women athletes from the late 19th century to today.

Salvation Through Community And Protest, Hannah K. Griggs

Audre Lorde Prize

This essay examines the theodicies of Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Dorothee Soelle to strategize ways for Christians to combat rising threats to marginalized communities. Synthesizing the arguments of these three feminist Christians, I argue that only a theodicy of protest succeeds in accounting for structural injustice caused by kyriarchal relationships. As Christians come to terms with America’s current political situation, I call for a reimagining of Anselm’s salvation narrative. My protest theodicy theorizes a new Christian narrative that strives to alleviate this-worldly suffering in order to produce salvation through radical community, by “signifyin’” to disrupt power, and using …

Empire, LáZaro Lima

American Studies Faculty Publications

"Empire" is the keyword that frames both the field of Latina/o studies and what Latina/o studies projects interrogate in order to make visible how empire's scattered remains throughout the Americas cross national borders as well as affective states of being. In so doing, Latina/o studies' methodological recourse to and critique of empire seeks to apprehend empire's legacies beyond the singular historical actor model of the exceptional nation-state in order to engage how empire saturates and conditions affects across space, time, and bodies.

“No Other Agency”: Public Education (K-12) In Washington State During World War I And The Red Scare, 1917-1920, Jennifer Nicole Arleen Crooks

All Master's Theses

This paper examines the impact of World War I and the Red Scare upon public education in Washington State. Schools, expected to be the instruments of governmental policy, played an important role in the everyday lives of people on the American homefront. Although many helped in the war effort willingly, this wartime drive included both instilling nationalism and loyalty to American political and economic institutions as well as the assimilation of immigrants. While these forces existed well before World War I and the Red Scare, they strengthened and became more publicly acceptable in 1917-1920 as more people grew convinced that …

Reclaiming The Streets: Black Urban Insurgency And Antisocial Security In Twenty-First-Century Philadelphia, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” This regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end …

Shaping The Body Of Grief: Converging The Personal, Academic, And Visual In Memoir To Create A Broader Way Of Mourning, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

I have been writing a memoir of my mother’s death since before she died. It began with a piece I started after she moved to hospice care, on the cusp of 2013. I began at my grief’s beginning: writing about the spring of her diagnosis the previous year. I currently have over 100,000 words that trace her life, her illness, her death, my grief, and my (ongoing) healing; the first chapter begins with that first piece, which I will excerpt later on. As I edit, I’m shaping the body of the text, as though it’s a person, as though it’s …

Understanding Community Character As A Socio-Ecological Framework To Enhance Local-Scale Adaptation: An Interdisciplinary Case Study From Rural Northwest Connecticut, Joanna Wozniak-Brown

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Around the world, municipalities are facing new challenges, not the least of which is climate change. This is especially true for rural communities that, for a variety of reasons, will be disproportionately affected by the climatic changes and accompanying policies or programs.

This dissertation, written in manuscript-style, integrates climate change and social-ecological scholarship to address the unique character of rural communities, to communicate the complexity of rural identity through the term "rural character"; and to empower rural communities to incorporate adaptation strategies into their daily municipal operations and planning.

Specifically, this dissertation seeks to answer the following questions: What is …