American Studies Commons^™

Influence Of Stress And Cytokinic Profiles On Cognitive Performance In Older Adults, Kerri S. Rawson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

With aging, changes in the immune system, makes cognitive performance, and the prevalence of stressors can lead to poorer overall functioning. Within the immune system, a balance should exist between cytokines regulating Th1 and Th2 immune responses; however, age-related declines in the endocrine and immune systems can disrupt this equilibrium. Several studies report higher levels of Th1 associated cytokines in inflammatory conditions of the brain, whereas fewer studies remark on Th2 associated cytokines and cognitive functioning. Declining cognitive abilities are a common concern that accompanies advancing age and some research has suggested the prevalence and impact of stressors lead …

Analysis And Optimization Of Broadband Measurement Cells For The Characterization Of Dielectric Polymer Films, Scott Skidmore

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current techniques and methodologies used in the field of material characterization are well documented and widely accepted as reliable and accurate. However, literature describing these techniques focuses on the algorithms used during material characterization; few studies have reposted on the design of, and the selection criteria for, the test fixtures themselves. This research focuses on the measurement cell with the goal of determining the sensitivity of the measurement cell to the addition of a thin film material.

Microstrip and coplanar waveguide were chosen for the analysis, which included three configurations of each transmission line geometry: a reference with no …

The Electronic Structure Of Biomolecular Self-Assembled Monolayers, Matthaeus Anton Wolak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The studies presented here address the characterization of the electronic structure of various self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) and tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP) SAMs and arrays, formed on gold substrates.

PNA is a promising alternative to DNA for bio-sensing applications, as well as for strategies for self-assembly based on nucleic acid hybridization. In recent years charge transfer through PNA molecules was a focus of research due to possible applications in self-assembled molecular circuits and molecular tools. In light of this research it is interesting to investigate the electronic structure of PNA interfaces to gold, a potential electrode material.

TPP …

Extraction Of Text Objects In Image And Video Documents, Jing Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popularity of digital image and video is increasing rapidly. To help users navigate libraries of image and video, Content Based Information Retrieval (CBIR) system that can automatically index image and video documents are needed. However, due to the semantic gap between low-level machine descriptors and high-level semantic descriptors, the existing CBIR systems are still far from perfect. Text embedded in multi-media data, as a well-defined model of concepts for humans' communication, contains much semantic information related to the content. This text information can provide a much truer form of content-based access to the image and video documents if it …

Up In Smoke: The Place Of The Modern American Cigarette, Hannah B. Grose

Student Publications

Since its discovery, the use of tobacco products has acted as a form of meditation, social engagement, and reprieve. In the era following the late 1950’s, designated “smoking areas,” whether sequestered informally by social constraints or formally by the law, have led to a culture of very “implaced” cigarette smoking. These have become places of escape, places of exile, and places of compromise. This paper explores what it means to belong, and not to belong, to these places, and the role of designated smoking areas in the formation of our culture.

How Mormons Became American, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A century ago, it was once a simple matter to assume a norm for American culture and situate the Mormon well outside it. Polygamy was likened to slavery in the nineteenth century (as the first Republican Party platform did in 1856). Brigham Young was compared to an Asian despot. Mormon women were victims in need of mythic frontier heroes like Captain Plum and Buffalo Bill to save them. Even Joseph Smith’s martyrdom could be seen as the penalty for his violation of the right to a free press. Mormonism made available to the playwrights of the Great American Saga the …

Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Robert Berry, research librarian for the social sciences at the Sacred Heart University Library, has written an essay about the role of the American Judiciary in interpreting laws of the United States government. The essay was written for the occasion of Constitution Day 2012 at Sacred Heart University.

The Continuing Exodus: The Synagogue And Jewish Urban Migration, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Catalog essay in Silent Witnesses: Migration Stories Through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned (Farmington Hills, MI, 2012) that deals with Jewish settlement and migration in American cities (especially New York, Boston and Cleveland) and the religious and community buildings erected and left behind in the process.

Television, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

One Time, One Place? Richard Wright And Eudora Welty's Shared Visual Politics In The Depression Era, Mallory Blasingame

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis questions the absence of critical comparative studies of Mississippi-born authors Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. It argues that, though the authors' writing has traditionally been understood as residing on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they share a political vision of the rural South and urban North in the Depression era that is established in their documentary works—Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and Welty's One Time, One Place (1971)—and extends into such fictional works as Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1936) and Native Son (1941) and Welty's "Moon Lake" (1949) and "Flowers for Marjorie" (1941). In chapter …

Design Of A Reversible Alu Based On Novel Reversible Logic Structures, Matthew Arthur Morrison

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Programmable reversible logic is emerging as a prospective logic design style for implementation in modern nanotechnology and quantum computing with minimal impact on circuit heat generation. Recent advances in reversible logic using and quantum computer algorithms allow for improved computer architecture and arithmetic logic unit designs. In this paper, a 2*2 Swap gate which is a reduced implementation in terms of quantum cost and delay to the previous Swap gate is presented. Next, a novel 3*3 programmable UPG gate capable of calculating the fundamental logic calculations is presented and verified, and its advantages over the Toffoli and Peres gates are …

Yellow, In Peril: How Public Health Discourse On Tuberculosis (Tb) Reveals, Refines, And Reinforces The Racial Stigmatization Of Asian Americans, Laura Dellplain

Honors Papers

In this paper, I argue that while public health discourse on tuberculosis may reveal existent epidemiological trends in and among particular social groups, the discursive framing of this data unnecessarily racializes the disease. More specifically, public health discourse uses frameworks of "othering" and an imagined transnationalism to reflect but also refine and reinforce historicized stigmas of Asian Americans as non-normative, perpetual outsiders, and disease carriers. I assert that this discursive raciliazation of TB superficially constructs a causal link between Asian Americans and the incidence of TB in America and consequently results in significant social and political costs for many Asian …

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

Faulkner's Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, And The Accessible Past, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner's newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation's efforts to "countenance," or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner's descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, …

William Faulkner, William James, And The American Pragmatic Tradition (Review), Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

In his book's final sentence, David Evans is concerned that we "assure a future for Faulkner, and a Faulkner for the future" (236). Taken at a glance, this concern might imply a need to safeguard Faulkner's continuing relevance: pointing to the future and Faulkner together suggests that their mutuality is not, in fact, certain. And in light of shifting critical approaches to this canonical writer, not to mention the diminishing importance of author studies as well as scholarly genres like the monograph, Evans's caution makes a certain critical sense.

Yet the statement's fuller meaning within the context of this new …

Only Nixon Could Go To China: L. Q. C. Lamar And The Politics Of Reconciliation, Richard Brian Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lucius Quintus Cinncinatus Lamar was a statesman with an almost unmatched career, serving on the President's Cabinet, in Congress, and on the Supreme Court. Lamar's work in government spanned one of the most tumultuous times in American history, and his transformation from secessionist to advocate for reconciliation in the post-Civil War period illustrates the complexity of politics at that time. This thesis examines Lamar's life and provides an historiographic survey of Lamar scholarship to date. From this review, the thesis moves to new and necessary areas of inquiry, including Lamar's relationship with black Reconstruction politicians, his role in the early …

Disciplining The Body: Societal Controls Of Gender, Race And Sexuality, Michelle Renae Bright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin's propositions about "new" media's relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies.

"To Bend Without Breaking": American Women's Authorship And The New Woman, 1900–1935, Amber Harris Leichner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated …

Apaches And Comanches On Screen, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: A generally accurate appraisal of Western films might claim that Indians as hostiles are grouped into one undifferentiated mass. Popular hostile groups include the Sioux (without much differentiation between tribes or bands, the Apaches, and the Comanches).

Four Indian-Related Novels By Lucia St. Clair Robson, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: Lucia St. Clair Robson began publishing historical novels in 1982 with Ride the Wind, which draws on the history of the Comanches, and has continued to work in the field of historical fiction. Four of her novels focus closely on historical personages: Ride the Wind (Cynthia Ann Parker and Quanah Parker); Light a Distant Fire (Osceola of the Seminoles); Walk in My Soul (Tiana Rogers of the Cherokee and Sam Houston); and Ghost Warrior(Lozen of the Chiricahua Apache).

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

In The Spirit Of Liberation: Race, Governmentality, And The De-Colonial Politics Of The Original Rainbow Coalition Of Chicago, Antonio R. Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Original Rainbow Coalition was a revolutionary alliance established in Chicago in early 1969 by the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Organization, and the Young Patriots. The alliance connected one of the largest Black Panther chapters in the country with its headquarters in the heart of North Lawndale, to militant organizations in other outcast communities of the city. In Uptown, the Young Patriots were rooted in almost a decade of grassroots efforts that aimed to organize poor people in a community that featured a large population of southern whites who migrated to Chicago. And in …

An American Mess: How Colorblind Racism Prevents An Enlightened Conversation On Race In Television Media, Nathaniel Phillipps

McNair Poster Presentations

This project aims to demonstrate how the current racial ideology in America is portrayed through television media. It is primarily guided by the work of Eduardo Bonita-Silva and his masterful examination of post-civil rights racism in the United States in his book Racism Without Racists. From a firm understanding of the ideology of this new racism -- its frames, styles, and storylines -- the content of two televisions shows are analyzed to identify the racial ideology and the representations of people of color within.

Scandal (ABC) is progressive in the sense that it has a Black female lead, and two …

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Anticipative Feminism In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S This Side Of Paradise And Flappers And Philosophers, Andrew Riccardo

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 14 Fall 2012

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

This Fact Which Is Not One: Differential Poetics In Transatlantic American Modernism, Sarah Ruddy

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation proposes that the literary fact, first discussed by Jurij Tynajnov in his 1924 essay "The Literary Fact," and later in "On Literary Evolution" (1929), names an intersection of literary formalism and social representation central to experimental modernist texts in the twentieth century. The poetics of literary fact that I propose finds its basis in Russian Formalist and Frankfurt School theory and reflects several important twentieth century social moments to illustrate how historical and social facts seek poetic form. In my use of the term, "fact" is the materiality of history as it moves from the social world, carrying …