History Commons^™

Mother Of A New World? Stereotypical Representations Of Black Women In Three Postapocalyptic Films, Karima K. Jeffrey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay explores three cinematic representations of Black matriarchs who play prophetic roles in redeeming humanity in the midst of apocalyptic change: Ika (Quest for Fire), Kee (Children of Men), and The Oracle (The Matrix trilogy). Not only do these courageous women resist the politics of domination, rebelling against a dying status quo, but they "give birth" to the leaders needed to rebuild a world in chaos and decay. One film ends with a pregnant woman rubbing her belly as she stands on the precipice of evolutionary change; another positions a mother and newborn adrift, waiting to be found by …

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Child Labor In America: A History By Chaim M. Rosenberg, Joel E. Black

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

“To Fly Is More Fascinating Than To Read About Flying”: British R.F.C. Memoirs Of The First World War, 1918-1939, Ian A. Isherwood

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

Literature concerning aerial warfare was a new genre created by the First World War. With manned flight in its infancy, there were no significant novels or memoirs of pilots in combat before 1914. It was apparent to British publishers during the war that the new technology afforded a unique perspective on the battlefield, one that was practically made for an expanding literary marketplace. As such former Royal Flying Corps pilots created a new type of war book, one written by authors self-described as “Knights in the Air”, a literary mythology carefully constructed by pilots and publishers and propagated in the …

"Remembrance Will Cling To Us Through Life": Kate Bushman's Memoir Of The Battle Of Gettysburg, Brian Matthew Jordan

Adams County History

Kate Bushman never expected that the Civil War would visit her tiny town. Nor could she have predicted the life altering impact of Gettysburg’s grisly scenes, indelibly etched into the folds of her memory. The best evidence of that transformation is the remarkable memoir of the battle and its aftermath that she obediently entered into her leather-bound scrapbook sometime in the early 1870s. Leaving no room for pretense, she recognized that the events she witnessed were significant, and that hers was important historical testimony. No longer just another devoted wife, mother, and Unionist, she was “an eye witness.” [excerpt …

Dan Sickles, William H. Tipton, And The Birth Of Battlefield Preservation, John M. Rudy

Adams County History

Thirty years after the battle of Gettysburg, the small Pennsylvania town was once again besieged—only this time, the invaders were not rebels, but entrepreneurs with an unquenchable thirst for profit. The most visible sign of their voracious commercialism was an electric trolley line (“from which the shouts and songs of revelry may arise to drown the screams of the suffering”) belting the battlefield. The Gettysburg Electric Railway Company’s venture raised a host of new questions regarding the importance of battlefield preservation. Most significantly, it prompted Americans to ask if they had any obligation to set aside for posterity the land …

Review Of Nicandro Di Colofone Nei Secoli Xvi-Xviii; Edizioni, Traduzioni, Commenti, By Livia Radici, Fred W. Jenkins

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

War Powers In The American Constitutional Scheme: A Legal-Historical Inquiry, Max Guirguis

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

Since World War II, there has been a significant shift in the balance of war­ making power between the executive and legislative branches. Although the Constitution reserves the formal power of declaring war exclusively for Congress, modern presidents have increasingly mm·ginalized Congress in times of international tension or conflict by acting unilaterally without congressional authorization. Congress has lent impetus to this problematic trend by failing to take decisive action whenever its war-making power is usurped by the executive. The War Powers Act of 1973 has not been successful in curbing the exercise and expansion of executive war- making power because …

Mexican Revolution At Age 100, Irving W. Levinson

History Faculty Publications

For many, the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 was the most important event in Mexican history. Although the immediate causes of that revolution were the conditions brought about by the 1876 to 1910 dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz causes far older that those need to be considered. So, I’ll spend the next five minutes on a quick review of early Mexican history.

Aspects Of Human Historiographic Explanation: A View From The Philosophy Of Science, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

While some philosophers of history have argued that explanations in human history are of a fundamentally different kind than explanations in the natural sciences, I shall argue that this is not the case. Human beings are part of nature, human history is part of natural history, and human historical explanation is a species of natural historical explanation. In this paper I shall use a case study from the history of the American Civil War to show the variety of close parallels between natural and human historical explanation. In both instances, I shall argue that these explanations involve narrative descriptions of …

Quantifying The Grimm Corpus: Transgressive And Transformative Bodies In The Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

What do bodies mean in fairy tales? Donald Haase’s engagement with the Grimms’ fairy tales has offered some hints, ranging from his attention to feminist scholarship on the Grimms to his multifaceted review of recent Grimm scholarship that addresses various meanings of bodies in the language and translation of their tales. Inspired by Haase’s work and encouragement, I created a database that lists every mention or description of a body in the Grimms’ tales and in five other European tale collections. I detailed the results of this quantitative investigation in my dissertation, generally treating all the tale collections as part …

Strategic Silences: Voiceless Heroes In Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In a number of international fairy tale types, such as ATU 451 ("The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers"), the female protagonist voluntarily stops speaking in order to attain the object of her quest. In ATU 451, found in the collected tales of the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen as well as in oral tradition, the protagonist remains silent while weaving the shirts needed to disenchant her brothers from their birdlike forms. While this silence is undoubtedly disempowering in some ways as she cannot defend herself from persecution and accusations of wickedness, here I argue that the choice to remain silent …

"Public Sentiment Is Everything": Abraham Lincoln And The Power Of Public Opinion, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: Since Abraham Lincoln’s death, generations of Americans have studied his life, presidency, and leadership, often remaking him into a figure suited to the needs and interests of their own time. This illuminating volume takes a different approach to his political thought and practice. Here, a distinguished group of contributors argue that Lincoln’s relevance today is best expressed by rendering an accurate portrait of him in his own era. They seek to understand Lincoln as he understood himself and as he attempted to make his ideas clear to his contemporaries. What emerges is a portrait of a prudent leader …

Volume 5: Genealogy And Knowledge In Muslim Societies : Understanding The Past, Sarah Bowen Savant, Helena De Felipe

Exploring Muslim Contexts

Genealogy is one of the most important and authoritative organising principles of Muslim societies.

From the Prophet’s day to the present, ideas about kinship and descent have shaped tribal, ethnic, sectarian and other identities. An understanding of genealogy is therefore vital to our understanding of Muslim societies, particularly with regard to the generation, preservation and manipulation of genealogical knowledge.

This book addresses the subject through a range of case studies that link genealogical knowledge to the particular circumstances in which it was created, circulated and promoted. They stress the malleability of kinship and memory, and the interests this malleability served.

The Political Aesthetics Of Global Protest : The Arab Spring And Beyond, Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, Kathryn Spellman-Poots

Independent Volumes

A remarkable feature of the Arab Spring and other protests that followed in Egypt, India, Botswana and the UK, among other places, has been the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances.

This book explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the mass mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes, the apolitical silent majority, as well as enabling solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties.

Comparing the North African and Middle Eastern uprisings with protest movements such as Occupy, the authors bring to bear an anthropological …

The History Manifesto, Jo Guldi

History Faculty Publications

How should historians speak truth to power -- and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history -- especially long-term history -- so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which give rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society.

The Rising Expectations Of Free And Enslaved Blacks In The Greater Caribbean, Wim Klooster

History

As David Geggus has shown, scores of slave conspiracies and revolts occurred during the Age of Revolutions. In the Greater Caribbean, slave uprisings were especially frequent in the 1790s. One year stood out: 1795. While in a number of colonies revolts were planned in that year but failed to materialize, and in other colonies small numbers of slaves took up arms, large-scale rebellions involving slaves did occur in Coro and Curaçao. The seeds for such rebellious behaviour had been sown in 1789 with the destruction of the ancien régime in France, the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of …

Modern Japanese Literature And Visual Culture: Constructions Of Religious And Historical Identity, Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This course is a survey of modern Japanese literature and visual culture since the Meiji Restoration (1868). It focuses on constructions of identities within historical contexts. Our objective is to analyze ways in which writers and artists have positioned their subjects and re-imagined culture to create particular portrayals. The class examines a selection of shōsetsu (the Japanese novel) of Natsume Soseki, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Murakami Haruki, and Ogawa Yōko, films of Miyazaki Hayao, and important anime. The course promotes critical methodologies and interdisciplinary or comparative studies, combining, for example, literature with film, visual culture, gender studies, cultural history, Buddhist …

Xuanzang’S Manual For Conferring The Bodhisattva Precepts, Ronald S. Green, Chanju Mun

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This is a translation of the Manual on the Procedures for Conferring the Bodhisattva Precepts (T.24.1499.1104c19- 1106b27) by Xuanzang (602-664) and the preface to it written by the monk Jingmai (T.24.1499.1106c3-29). Xuanzang was a Chinese monk and a translator of Buddhist scriptures. Although it is recorded that Xuanzang translated this manual in 649, he may have written it himself based on the Yoga-ca-- s rabhu-mi-s´astra in 100 fascicles. After travel through Central Asia and India from 629 (or 627?) to 645, he translated 75 Buddhist scriptures in 1,335 fascicles into Chinese, including a number of major Yoga-ca-ra Buddhist texts. He …

Introduction: Memory And Reflection, Annette Finley-Croswhite

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

During the spring semester of 2014, Old Dominion University offered a Study Abroad course called “Paris/Auschwitz” that I designed with funding from the Curt C. and Else Silberman Foundation and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Over spring break, I led a group of eighteen students to France and Poland to study sites of Holocaust memory along with faculty team member, Dr. Brett Bebber. Dr. Bebber and I are both professors in the Department of History. The Study Abroad course was part of my attempt to create more Holocaust courses at Old Dominion …

Auschwitz As A Site Of Memory, Emma Needham

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Auschwitz is known as the most substantial site of the Holocaust namely because Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest concentration camp in Europe, and it is estimated that about 960,000 Jews and 125,000 others were murdered there.¹ Not only was the process of creating the memorial at Auschwitz filled with controversies, but the site also remains questionable today with regards to dark tourism, or thanatourism, “the tourism of death.”² For some, the thought of traveling to a place subsumed in death and despair sounds troubling as the consumption of dark tourism involves a process of “confronting, understanding and accepting death.” …

Sites Of Memory, Tonya Schmehl, Sherry Dixon

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Photo Essay.

The Great War On Film: Examining The Cinematic Variations Of Three Films On The 1916 Battle Of The Somme, Nicole Denae Yarbrough

History Theses - Archive

Propaganda has been an integral part of human history, and while the documentation of conflict through film began in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not until the First World War that the production and distribution of war films as propaganda became a mass phenomenon. Moving images of the war proliferated in all Western countries at an unprecedented rate. This thesis explores the role of wartime propaganda films in Britain, France, and Germany during the First World War by assessing the achievements and missteps of cinematic variations on the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Although these films achieved …

A Study In Married Women's Rights And Repatriation In The United States, The United Kingdom, And Latin America: Citizenship, Gender And The Law In Transatlantic Context, Stephanie Anne Mcintyre

History Dissertations - Archive

During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States and Great Britain, fearing the dramatic changes occurring in the Atlantic world due to increased migration and threats from war, denied many of their female citizens their natural-born right of citizenship. What was the reason for stripping these women of such a precious possession guaranteed by law? They married non-citizens. Without due process, the women could not be deprived of their citizenship, so laws were put into place proclaiming that when a woman married an alien man, she would automatically assume his citizenship. Because women did not have independent …

Fear Of "Unnatural Acts": Law And Sexuality In London, 1500-1800, Ashley M. Umphenour

History Theses - Archive

Eighteenth-century London experienced a prosecution wave attempting to eradicate sodomy from the city. Discovered and exposed to the public by journalists, the "public outing" of molly houses and their patrons made them a target for the newly formed Societies for the Reformation of Manners. Through the analysis of Society-produced pamphlets, newspaper articles, and trial records, this thesis will show that a rise in Protestantism in England after the Glorious Revolution, along with the changes to masculinity in Europe, led to the prosecution wave against London's sodomites. While the organizations would eventually dissolve, the fear and hatred they helped to promote …

How To Make A Foreign Idea Your Own: Argentine Identity And The Role Soccer Played In Its Formation, Brandon Todd Blakeslee

History Theses - Archive

Since Spanish-speaking Latin America achieved independence from Spain the question has been whether to follow the North American or European example. Do the new republics embrace the Old World with its aristocracy or the meritocracy of the United States? To choose one, was to dismiss the other, or so the debate went. However, there are points of contact between the Old-and-New Worlds.Argentine soccer proves a potent example of something that is not wholly one or the other but a combination of both. Though developed exclusively in England, Argentina claims soccer as their national sport. A truly pervasive concept, all parts …

Coleman Young’S Detroit: A Vision For A City 1974-1994, Rachel S. Dauenbaugh 14

Honor Scholar Theses

None

“Like Husband And Wife”: The Role Of Susan B. Anthony And Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Friendship In Advancing Their Personal And Professional Successes, Maritza Mestre 14

Honor Scholar Theses

None

Unpacking The Suitcase: The Real Last Chapter Of Alice Paul And Peg Edwards’S Activism, And Why These Stories Matter, Clark Edwards 14

Honor Scholar Theses

I was fortunate enough to find a thesis topic within my own family. My paternal grandmother was guardian ad litem for Alice Paul in the later 1970s. Paul was instrumental in securing the passage of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, and author of the Equal Rights Amendment among other contributions for women’s rights. Fortunately my grandmother saved court records, letters, her notes, and more for her period of activism with Paul and as part of the Ridgefield Connecticut National Women’s Political Caucus. I knew nothing of my grandmother’s work until last year. My thesis seeks …

Social Childbirth And Communities Of Women In Early America, Jocelyn Jessop 14

Honor Scholar Theses

None