American Popular Culture Commons^™

Piercing The Veil In Sinners: Theological Insights From The Juke Joint, Antonio D. Sison Cpps

Journal of Religion & Film

Celebrated as a critical and commercial success, Ryan Coogler’s genre-defying opus Sinners has also been considered as one of the most culturally significant films of 2025. It also promises to be one of the most theologically resonant films of the year. This is evinced not only in its thematic and literary bases but, importantly, in its very audiovisual language and grammar, its stylistic strategies qua film. As reasoned in this essay, Coogler’s film is a rich locus theologicus, a nexus for theological discovery and insight.Sinners kindles the hermeneutical impulse to dialogue with African American/Pan-Africa theologies exemplified by the …

Going The Distance: How The Disney Renaissance Illustrated The Social And Cultural Changes In America During The 1990s, Deborah A. Bates

Graduate Masters Theses

The cultural and social history of America in the 90s is examined in this thesis by looking at the Disney Renaissance, a period of ten films made by the Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). This thesis illustrates how the animators were able to seamlessly incorporate important societal trends of the 90s into their films, portraying a changing world within their films. As they were creating a new style of the animated movie musical, they were creating works that connected to the audiences watching in new ways, by putting up a reflection of society within their films. The way that the …

Disney's Illusion Of Inclusion, Marissa Davis

All Theses

Walt Disney’s films were not simply entertainment, but a use of racial stereotypes as a profit strategy. Even scholarship that explores these tactics and critically analyzes his most problematic misrepresentations do not to consider the role of Walt Disney, as a man, in creating and promoting these narratives. These depictions, while somewhat in line with the culture when he first entered the business, failed to evolve as society changed. Rather, they were deliberate choices to attract white audiences and increase revenue.

Over time, these tropes became socially unacceptable, yet Disney maintained them for public consumption. While Disney and his company …

Res Historica, Volume 5, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette Phd

Res Historica

The 2026 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, Julia Ackerman, Callyn Wright, Logan Davis, and John Hinton. Cover art by Mary Beth Lee.

Rock, Rock, ‘Til You Drop: How Acid Rock Amplified The Counterculture Rebellion Of The 60s And 70s, Evan Bauer

Honors Projects

Acid rock’s rise to the top was aided by unprecedented times in American history. A collision of forces such as anti-war sentiment, youth rebellion, and the emergence of lysergic diethylamide exploded into a generation changing era of peace, love, violence, and above all else, music. Through the early years of acid rock's dominance, the outspoken virtues of the artists were held dear to their fans and listeners across the country, who never had to question its authenticity. Acid rock’s popularity was unlike anything the American people had ever seen, with major weekend long events which captivated the media and the …

Billiken As Transcultural Object From American Mascot To Japanese Pop Deity, M.W. Shores

Asia Pacific Perspectives

This article examines Billiken’s transcultural journey from American novelty mascot (1908) to cultural icon, illuminating early twentieth-century Pacific exchange networks and patterns of cultural adaptation. Drawing on American and Japanese archives, it demonstrates how this commercial figure, born from Progressive Era optimism and incorporating Japanese (and Orientalist) design elements, was transformed within Japanese religious and cultural frameworks. The study analyzes Billiken’s metamorphosis from “good luck” commodity to quasi-religious icon, particularly in Osaka’s Shinsekai district, where strategic marketing drove his its late twentieth-century revival after decades of obscurity. While largely forgotten in America and elsewhere, Billiken’s endurance in Osaka challenges narratives …

Ruthless: The Revolution Of Gangsta Rap, Laci D. Lavoy

Theses

The popularization of gangsta rap in the United States was pivotal to the advancement of Black America following the close of the Civil Rights Movement. The ruthlessness of gangsta rap created a distaste of authority that became a catalyst for Black American unity and change. Artists quickly started writing songs that spoke out against issues plaguing Black and poor Americans, realizing the power of the microphone and the radio. These rappers created an awareness for White audiences that had not been present before and even created a space for White artists with shared experiences. Female rappers took this activism a …

American Utopia: The Evolution Of David Byrne’S Viewpoint Of America From 1977 To Present, Morgan A. Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

David Byrne is a multimedia artist known primarily as the lead singer and main songwriter for the new wave band Talking Heads. Throughout Byrne’s career he has continually written about America and Americans. This thesis traces his writings about America from the beginning of Talking Heads to his most recent projects. In doing so, the thesis puts forward that Byrne’s opinion on America has changed from one that is centered on the American people to one that is instead focused on American institutions. Additionally, the thesis traces how Byrne’s work has evolved from idealization to realism, as his early work …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

Disability: A Dirty Word? How Language Historically Perpetuates Exclusion And Systemic Oppression, Kelly E. Imm

Graduate Masters Theses

In 1990, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) marked a pivotal moment in the American disability rights movement, which began in the 1960s and sought to secure civil rights for people with disabilities. Despite this monumental achievement, this thesis considers how the language used throughout American history and culture to describe people with disabilities, even within the confines of progressive legislation like the ADA, remains deeply rooted in ableist and oppressive historical attitudes. At the heart of this issue, this thesis demonstrates how the medicalization of disability, which has dominated American culture for centuries, continues to frame …

Visibly Invisible: Reclaiming Atlanta Black Architecture Through Black Expression, Sean M. Spencer

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Architecture has long grappled with questions of self, community, and cultural identity. While the number of Black architects is growing, architecture that genuinely reflects Black identity remains rare. This lack of representation has contributed to a sense of invisibility for Black communities within the built environment—whether by design or neglect. There is an urgent need to define and celebrate Blackness and Black space in ways that reflect the cultural richness of Black communities. As George Will points out, broad labels like African American or African often obscure the unique cultural experiences within Black communities. Historically, the lack of economic and …

Double, Double, Toils And Troubles: Analyzing The “Magical” Relationships Between University Leaders’ Personality Traits And Their Self-Efficacy In Leadership Situations, Fay Ludvine Boudreaux

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This present study investigated the relationship between higher education leaders’ personality traits and their self-efficacy in leadership situations. A total of 151 leaders employed across the nine institutions within the University of Louisiana System completed a survey that prompted them to identify their personal values, traits, and skill sets, as derived from the online Pottermore quiz, the official Harry Potter Hogwarts House sorting instrument. This niche personality metric was chosen to cater to higher education’s evolving landscape, as it welcomes an influx of Millennials into leadership positions. Participants’ responses were eventually recoded to “sort” them into their respective Houses: Gryffindor, …

“Re-Storying” Anne Shirley And The Adhd Child: A Crip Genealogy Of Anne Of Green Gables, Darian Aleyna Wilson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the contested nature of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), focusing on its cultural and historical constructions. While ADHD has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since 1980, its legitimacy remains a subject of debate across medical, disability studies, and historical scholarship. Using Eli Clare’s critique of diagnosis as a tool rather than a fact, this project examines how ADHD is both pathologized and re-storied within societal and medical discourses. It highlights the tension between medical classifications and lived experiences of those diagnosed with ADHD, particularly in the context of girlhood.

The central …

Beyond Just The Negros’ Art: Langston Hughes And The Poetic Renewal Of Black Musical Tradition, Samuel Adewumi

All Theses

Where do we begin the study of Black music in America? Is there even a beginning to it? As a poet, how does Langston Hughes contribute to its continuance during the Harlem Renaissance? These are some of the questions that shape the trajectory of this research. In it, I set a precedent for African orature in future studies of Black music in America. Essentially, I trace the survival of African orature and Langston Hughes’s role in the sustenance and utility of its style and themes in the early 20th century. Through it, I argue that Hughes’s poetry serves not as …

The Formation Of The American League In Baseball; Changes In American Society And Culture That Contributed To The Demand For More Baseball In The Late 19th Century, Shawn M. Smith

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

The second professional major league (the American League) in baseball came about in response to the demand for more baseball entertainment due to the increased amount of leisure time Americans had in the late-19th century as society started the shift from an agricultural based lifestyle to a culture who worked predominantly in factory work.

The culture and society of the day changed drastically due to changing economic conditions of the time period. Due to monumental changes in industry, the vast majority of the population had shifted from working in an agrarian society to working in factories as a result of …

Deuce Redemption: Grindhouse Cinema, Moral Panic, And Urban Renewal, Robert Brenner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you consult standard histories of the “redevelopment” of 42^nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, AKA “the Deuce,” you will read that it was filled with nothing but criminals and pornographers, that decent people avoided it at all costs, and the only way the block could be “saved” was by seizing it via eminent domain, evicting all the current tenants, and replacing them with Disney and its fellow entertainment corporations.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a more nuanced alternative to these standard histories. I will argue that the Deuce was a lower-class, multiracial, queer entertainment …

Love Is Dead In The Restless West: Hippies, Manson, And California Culture, 1966-1970, Rebecca Allen

Scripps Senior Theses

Though an extreme aberration from most of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, Charles Manson’s ultimately murderous cult arguably represents something particular about American culture in the late sixties, in which youthful hostility towards the status quo sometimes grew radical, and in the case of the Manson Family cult, extremely violent. By the mid-sixties, more and more young people began to feel alienated by a culture they felt no longer embodied their larger aspirations, and as a result, were drawn to the emerging counterculture that embraced alternative lifestyles that frequently clashed with the traditional sensibilities of their parents’ generation. After …

Is Sexyy Red Minstrelsy, Or Are We Overreacting?, Malik Brizan-Reed

Capstones

This criticism piece explores the controversial female rapper Sexyy Red. It challenges negative perspectives about her persona, primarily based on respectability politics. It highlights Sexyy Red's ability to capitalize on a moment and business savviness. The article has themes of racial double standards and classism. Sexyy Red is more than the "ghetto Black girl," aesthetic. She's a mother and entrepreneur who is authentic to herself.

Black Radio’S Contribution To Collective And Cultural Memory: Personnel Perspectives Of Black Radio History In The United States, Kim Fox

Faculty Journal Articles

This interdisciplinary research investigates the significance of the community connection between Black radio personnel and their audiences through the lens of collective and cultural memory narratives. The study addresses two key research questions. First, how do Black radio personnel’s collective and cultural memories contribute to the Black public sphere? Second, what are the defining characteristics in developing parasocial relationships and interactions between Black radio personalities and their audiences? The qualitative research employs an autoethnographic methodology and a questionnaire, utilizing insights gained from the author’s experiences working at a Black-owned radio network and station. The questionnaire, distributed to key informants in …

Come As You Are: The Rise And Fall Of The Grunge Movement And Its Implications On The Identity Of Seattle, Colin J. Wood

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

This paper evaluates the rise of the Grunge movement through Nirvana’s Nevermind album as a unique burst of culture through the city of Seattle. Culturally, in the late 20th century, Seattle found its identity in the area around it, though other American cities overshadowed its significance. Through music, figures such as Jack Endino and the iconic Kurt Cobain gave Seattle an unfathomable uplift within global culture. This paper argues that grunge culture emerged as a distinct facet of Seattleite identity, with elements like flannel clothing and thrifting playing pivotal roles in shaping the city's recognizable and esteemed cultural landscape. It …

El Nacimiento Del Rock En Español: ¿Cómo Fue Que Este Género De Música Latina Tuvo Éxito?, Alejandro V. Martinez

World Languages and Cultures

This paper titled El nacimiento del rock en español: ¿Cómo fue que este género de música latina tuvo éxito? will cover information regarding the Spanish rock movement. This essay compares what is written in this paper to that of prior scholars to show that although they do bring valid points, there is a lot more than many of us realize. There are various articles and reports written about the movement, but many do not explain the creation of the movement, let alone its survival in the music industry as a new genre that some had never heard of or had …

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

Bear Bryant, Sam Cunningham, And Popular Memory Of The Civil Rights Movement, Kurt E. Kemper

Research & Publications

Popular writers, sports journalists, documentarians, and fans of college football have built a legend surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game and its alleged significance in the process of desegregation, a legend that is deeply flawed and strongly resistant to scholarly correction.  The persistence of the legend, told from a white perspective for a white audience, does much to illustrate ongoing resistance to an interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement that places Black activists and direct action at the center of the story.

Negative Estrangement: Fantasy And Race In The Drow And Drizzt Do’Urden, Steven Holmes

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This essay introduces the concept of negative estrangement to help understand current cultural interventions into the norms of depicting fantasy races. First, this essay builds on Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement to describe the literary practice of negative estrangement, wherein artists craft “more evil” foes based on hybridized amalgamations of stereotypes to create antipathy toward a subject, be it monster or fantasy race. This practice is sometimes used in service of confronting the issue of race and racism, despite seeming to reify or rearticulate racist stereotypes.

This essay builds on Tolkien’s argument in favor of creating “more evil” foes to exemplify …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

Militure, Bingdong Duan

Masters Theses

The aim of this research is to explore how individual soldier equipment can be systematically integrated into everyday life. War, as the epitome of struggle and conflict, stimulates the fundamental human instinct for survival. To achieve this end, various methods involving a wide range of fields such as technology, culture, economy, and politics are utilized. Under the driving force of survival, explorations are conducted in various areas, with individual soldier equipment being notably prominent. Nations spend a substantial amount each year on developing individual soldier equipment, which optimizes functionality to such an extent that it has formed its unique aesthetics …

We4: Leisure Quotes, Lance Gibbs Phd

We Exist Series 4: Quotes

Welcome to the fourth exhibit in the series of “We Exist”. In this section we have selected quotes that represent and explain how Maine’s Black residents’ create the processes behind their engagement in particular leisure activities. The quotes also highlight the particular types of leisure activities that Maine’s Black residents suggest that they are involved in. The quotes are taken from transcripts of the oral history project "'Home Is Where I Make It': African American Community and Activism in Greater Portland, Maine”. The interview subjects are all native to Maine or are longtime residents of Maine. The original intent of …

Birth Control And The Sixties: The Dialogue Surrounding The First Oral Contraceptive, Eden E. Baize

The Cardinal Edge

No abstract provided.

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study in communication and rhetoric seeks to ascertain constructive applications for distinct advertising practices by examining Isocrates’s work and place in postmodern advertising. The focus uses 5 principles known to Isocrates which are: 1) commonwealths of households, 2) integration of reputation, elegance, substance and style, 3) education and public discourse, 4) phronesis and praxis, and 5) truth and verisimilitude. These 5 principles can form a constructive and practical advertising approach. This study is important. It examines Isocrates through the lens of advertising and extends the research done about him by leading Isocrates scholars who have looked primarily at his …