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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Cultural History
International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera
International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …
Suicidality As A Discourse Of Safety In The Queer Youth Movement, Robert M. Cleary
Suicidality As A Discourse Of Safety In The Queer Youth Movement, Robert M. Cleary
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In November 1991, a group of queer teenagers gathered to rally at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Two years later, the state passed the first law in the nation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the state's schools. The November rally was the first public expression of what became the safe schools movement, which went on over the following decade to transform the landscape in public education for LGBTQ students. A notable feature of the rally was the staging by the youth of a mass performative act of queer suicide. This paper uses Foucauldian concepts …
“The Amazing Iroquois”: Haudenosaunee History In Myth And Memory, 1776–1955, John C. Winters
“The Amazing Iroquois”: Haudenosaunee History In Myth And Memory, 1776–1955, John C. Winters
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project is a history and memory study of Iroquois exceptionalism. This is an idea that shaped our understanding of the Iroquois as the “most studied” Indian nation and that they, as the debunked Iroquois Influence Thesis claimed, influenced the structure and scope of the U.S. Constitution. My study examines the lives of four related (by blood and by claim) Seneca leaders: Red Jacket, Ely S. Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse, and Arthur C. Parker. These four stand out because each was one of the most famous Native Americans of their generation who worked within and against American colonial society and …
Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore
Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …
Brrap Brrap Pew Pew: Representations Of Abortion In Adult Animated Television Comedy, Erika A. Byrnison
Brrap Brrap Pew Pew: Representations Of Abortion In Adult Animated Television Comedy, Erika A. Byrnison
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis documents and analyzes representation of abortion in American adult animated comedy, charging that it is under-examined and significant because representation on television in other genres has traditionally been absent or misleading. It covers theories on how pop culture communicates social norms, and posits that greater truthful representation of abortion in popular culture may be effective in reducing prevalent abortion stigma in the U.S. amongst the young by normalizing and more accurately representing the procedure. It reviews why our culture should be concerned about reducing abortion stigma in the U.S. It also identifies the “taboo ratings paradox,” wherein television …
Black Business As Activism: Ebony Magazine And The Civil Rights Movement, Seon Britton
Black Business As Activism: Ebony Magazine And The Civil Rights Movement, Seon Britton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In the fight for justice, equality, and true liberation, African American organizations and institutions have often acted as a voice for the African American community at large focusing on common issues and concerns. With the civil rights movement being broadcast across the world, there was no better time for African American community and civil rights organizations to take a role within the movement in combatting the oppression, racism, and discrimination of white supremacy. Often left out of this history of the civil rights movement is an analysis of black-owned private businesses, also giving shape to the African American community. Black …
The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer
The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …
"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen
"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …
Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton
Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …
The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …
On The Appearance Of The Comedy Lp, 1957–1973, David Michael Mccarthy
On The Appearance Of The Comedy Lp, 1957–1973, David Michael Mccarthy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as “satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as “comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one …
Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor
Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of …
The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith
The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …