American Studies Commons^™

Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …

The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Nancy Buirksi’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor centers on a brutal sexual assault in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944. A 24-year-old African American wife and mother, coming home from a sanctified church service with a friend and her son, was forced into a car at gunpoint, and gang raped by six young white men. The beating heart of the film is the on-screen testimony of Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, and her younger sister, Alma Daniels, who convey the unspeakably cruel and vicious character of the attack: Corbitt repeats the perpetrators’ directions to Recy: “They said they wanted her to …

The Making Of A Raisin In The Sun, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun premiered on the Broadway stage in January 1959 just as the edifice of national segregation was cracking open. Response to the momentous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education included both the important early challenges to long-accepted practices of white supremacy and the intensified mobilization of widespread white defiance to the ruling. Black Bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama, and their young minister leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black high school students attempting to attend Little Rock’s Central High and their families faced organized harassment and dangerous forms …

No Laughing Matter: Failures Of Satire During The 2016 Presidential Election, Jamie Noelle Smith

Honors Theses and Capstones

The 2016 presidential election was so full of unusual characters and unprecedented scandals, that media outlets, from the nightly news to late-night, had to adjust to this new normal in politics. Indeed, not even the jokesters on the handful of political satire shows on television were immune to the necessary changes that all the media had to take in covering Donald Trump. Given how many people tuned into to these shows each week, it is no surprise that the role that political satire television may have played in the election results was fodder for those giving post-election hot takes. Many …

The Hamilton Effect: How One Musical Made The Founding Fathers Cool, And What It Means For Historic Sites And The Academic World, Charlotte Skala

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper chronologically examines academic opinions about Hamilton: an American Musical and analyzes visitor attendance at historical sites to determine if Hamilton affected the numbers.

The Anorexic's Anorexia: Depictions Of Anorexia In Popular Culture, Samantha L. Tomson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Writer Re-Written: What Really (Might Have) Happened To Atticus And Scout, Rob Atkinson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

A "Chinese Wall" At The Nation's Borders: Justice Stephen Field And The Chinese Exclusion Case, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

First, the sweeping implications of The Chinese Exclusion Case had as much to do with the Supreme Court's concerns about its relationship with both Congress and the President as it did with the Chinese as a disparaged racial group. There are other dimensions beyond race, and one of these was the Supreme Court's view of its role with respect to the other branches of government. Importantly, the Court did not decide the balance of authority between the President and Congress on matters of immigration, an omission that surely lessens its precedential value today.

Second, the Court's pronouncement in the Chinese …

In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk

Theses and Dissertations

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.

Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky

Theses and Dissertations--English

Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …

Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton

Theses and Dissertations--English

Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.

Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations--English

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …

Collaborative Organizational Structures Among Artist Member And Other Related Organizations, Kelsey Shackelford

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

Kentucky has a rich cultural and artistic tapestry that is part of the economic future of the state. An important consideration of this future is the artist-member organizations that serve Kentucky creatives and how they work together collaboratively, both internally and externally. The objective of this study was to see how ten different organizations viewed themselves and interacted with their communities in the way in which they are structure, or lack a definite structure as is the case with several different groups. Through web analysis and a series of interviews with organizations that provide benefits to Kentucky artists, we learn …

Literary Didacticism And Collective Human Rights In Us Borderlands: Ana Castillo's 'The Guardians' And Louise Erdrich's 'The Round House', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

There is now a sizable body of scholarship on the relationship between human rights and literature. James Dawes suggests that the work of human rights is largely a matter of storytelling ("Human Rights in Literary Studies"). Joseph Slaughter contends, in turn, that "literary works and literary modes of thinking have played important parts in the emergence of modern human rights ideals and sentiments, as well as in the elaboration of national and international human rights laws" ("Rights" xiii). More specifically, in her oft-cited Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt argues that contemporary human rights thought derives from the rise of …

Tom And Jerry: Performative Queerness In Action, Cade M. Olmstead

Undergraduate Student Work

This presentation’s theoretical focus is a return to the performative dimension of identities and social life. Its vehicle for doing such is Tom and Jerry, a series of animation shorts. This American “cat chases mouse” series produced hundreds of shorts and has become a classic in American media memory. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s queer theoretical work and a justification from Eve Sedgwick, a selection of episodes has been subject to analysis. This analysis lays out basic descriptions of performative gender identity in the series while making a normative assessment of their effects. Ultimately, I claim that through ironic detachment, the …

Fake News: Latinos, Representacion, Ciudadanizo Y Trump, Grace Thieme

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis uses in-depth analysis of historical Los Angeles Times articles to trace the changing representations of the Latino community in the media. Focusing on themes of patriotism and citizenship, this thesis draws out the subtleties of syntax and semantics that silently influence public opinion. The Zoot Suit Riots and the Chicano Moratorium serve as the main historical backdrop, leading to a concluding exploration of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric surrounding immigration and the Latino community.

Evangelizing Neoliberalism Through Megachurches In Latin America And The United States, William O. Collazo

Dissertations and Theses

The most prominent and influential feature of worldwide Evangelicalism, is the megachurch. In Latin America megachurches have proliferated and grown in political influence when they first came into contact with neoliberalism during Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. As Latin America's poor first migrated out of rural areas into Latin American cities, then north, to the United States, they have brought with them their religion. Increasingly, this religion is Protestant, evangelical, and for many, it is Pentecostalism. Misunderstood by the early literature on Pentecostalism, is the strain of neoliberalism that has become infused in the religion's most powerful institution - the megachurch. …

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper

Honors Theses

This thesis wrestles with the duality of the terms haunting and ghosts in relation to Mississippi and its collective identity and narrative. Ghostlore and haunted tourism provide insight into shared cultural constructs and indicate an absence of certain perspectives from more generally held ideas of identity. Analyses of ghost stories from around the state explore these hauntings of history and ghosted narratives, so it is ghosts v. ghosted and hauntings v. haunted. I use ghost stories from Natchez, MS to explore postsouthern spaces and performances of southernness and the narratives around female apparitions to study the role of southern womanhood …

Tales As Old As Time: The Origins Of Selected Fairy Tales And Their Legacies In Popular Culture, Ann Louise Jackson

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to analyze a selection of fairy tales and their film adaptations. The research centers on the origins of these selected stories and their cinematic derivatives, with particular focus given to authorial and cultural influences as well as audience perceptions of these works. The evolution of character through these fairy tales is an area of interest in this thesis, with an emphasis on agency and the depiction of the heroines through the stories and their adaptations. Including two well-known fairy tales and one that is more obscure, this thesis aims to understand how each variation is conceived and …

A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth

Honors Theses

On the surface, L. Frank Baum's Oz series would appear to merely be fourteen books of inventive children's fantasy, but in truth Baum communicates several personal progressive beliefs to his youthful audience through the use of his fantastical world upon closer examination. For my research, I reread every book in Baum's original Oz series and made note of any potentially relevant allegorical or metaphorical themes. Once I started to notice a trend of themes regarding technology, labor, politics, and gender, I settled on these themes to be the overall focus of my thesis's discussion. I read as many academic essays …

Reevaluating Religion: A Case For Inclusivity Of Lgbtq Christians In The Church, Amber Erin Dupree

Honors Theses

This thesis project is focused on understanding the discrimination that is rampant amongst Southern churches regarding their LGBTQ members and offering solutions to this problem that has occurred throughout the many generations of Christianity. In order to understand this discrimination, three books were consulted for the research aspect of this project. The three books include the following: Sweet Tea by E. Patrick Johnson, Don't Be Afraid Anymore by Troy Perry, and Our Tribe by Nancy Wilson. A Questionnaire was also given to people who identified as Southern, Christian, and LGBTQ in order to gain an understanding of the current sentiments …

Media Framing Of Refugees In The United States And Canada, Janine Allwright

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The ongoing war in Syria and the subsequent refugee crisis has brought the need for refugee resettlement to the forefront of policy debates. Canada and the United States display stark differences in the outcome of their refugee policies. Canada continues to welcome Syrian refugees, whereas the United States has become less willing to engage in resettlement. The purpose of this study was to use Entman's conceptualization of framing theory to compare media framing of refugees in Canada and the United States to deliver insight into the different policy outcomes. Data were acquired through a content analysis of 850 newspaper articles …

Review Of John James Audubon: The Nature Of The American Woodsman, By Gregory Nobles, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When we think about American ornithology, John James Audubon is often the first name that comes to mind. As evidence to Audubon’s lasting ability to enrapture readers, it bears repeating that an original Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America sold for an astounding $11.5 million in 2010 (2). Yet, for a man who produced such stunning and memorable visual and literary work on the avifauna of North America, some of the important details of his life and origins have remained highly contested. Even though Gregory Nobles’s new biography is not explicitly tied to the study of the Great Plains, …

Small Batch: Women's Positions In Southern Craft Beverages, Victoria De Leone

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores three different forms of narrative in order to understand how and why craft beverage industries, specifically beer and whiskey, have been framed as masculine spaces. Women who seek to work in or around these industries are often sorted into the marketing, sales and service corners of the industry, and the production floor still hosts very few women, and those women must negotiate performing their femininity and the masculinities deemed necessary for the environment simultaneously. I argue that the way that we talk about women who choose to do this work is rooted in a history of domestic …

"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article details a project that involved collecting the necessary items to produce a set of wedding pictures. While photographs have long been understood as indexical signs, the process of collecting the items via trips to thrift stores reveals a host of additional indexical signs through the set of underlying contextual cultural constraints surrounding the difference between the rituals of the marriage rite and the wedding as a public, performative practice. Indeed, the second hand items leave indexical and material traces of the excess and the disposability of weddings, while the pictures offer the material connection to the ostentation of …

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.

“When One Shingle Sends Up Smoke”: The Summit Beacon Advises Akron About The Epidemic Cholera, 1849, Elizabeth Hall

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Elizabeth Hall explains the American cholera epidemic of 1849, with special attention to how cholera afflicted Akron, a booming canal town in Northeast Ohio. The article presents the full text of 1849 Akron newspaper articles on cholera and explains how their mix of good and bad information was published right before scientific breakthroughs in cholera research.