Cultural History Commons^™

Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini

Doctoral Dissertations

Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …

Public Wife: The Life Of Jessie Benton Fremont, Lorraine D. Herbon

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the life of Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902) and the ways in which she performed the role of a “public wife” through her marriage to John C. Frémont. This re-examination of a woman immensely popular in the nineteenth century offers a new way of thinking about the wives of famous men and the steps they took to both participate in, and direct the narrative of, American history.

Jessie Benton was the daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. At sixteen, Jessie met a young man from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers who came to meet with …

Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History, Dan Allosso

Doctoral Dissertations

Explores rural history through the experiences of three families that dominated the American peppermint oil business from its beginning in the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The rural entrepreneurs who became Peppermint Kings acted in ways that challenge traditional historical depictions of rural people. The freethinking Ranney clan built a family business that extended from Massachusetts to western New York and Michigan during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Hotchkiss brothers entered the international market and ventured into finance and banking at a time when the United States government was reducing opportunities for regional bankers. …

And Liberty For All: Geechee Culture And The Black Freedom Struggle In Liberty County, Georgia, 1752-1946, Felicia Jamison

Doctoral Dissertations

“And Liberty For All” is a case study of an African-American rural community in Georgia. It argues that to understand the manners in which Southern rural black communities fought for civil rights in the Black Freedom Struggle, one must take the longue durèe approach to researching and writing their histories. Thus, this dissertation covers the period of slavery until the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s. This case study is representative of other Southern rural communities in that it highlights the nuanced ways in which they survived and persevered while facing racism, racial violence, and disenfranchisement by using grassroots …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …

Theatre Women And Cultural Diplomacy In The Transatlantic Anglophone World (1752-1807), Sandra Perot

Doctoral Dissertations

Anglophone theatre provided a solid cultural bridge between Britain and America and served as an influential, informative, and accessible mode of social, political and cultural exchange transported throughout the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Unlike works focusing on colonial American restrictions on theater, or examining its subsequent role in constructing American nationhood and identity, I explore how theatre served to both cultivate and challenge transatlantic connections. I show that actresses and women playwrights played a distinctive role in this process; they exercised agency in helping shape Anglo identity, influenced the formation of the cult of celebrity, challenged physical gendered spaces and normative …

Experiencing Defeat, Remembering Victory: The Army Of Tennessee In War And Memory, 1861-1930, Robert Lamar Glaze

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the meaning of the Civil War in the South by examining white Southerners’ perceptions of the Army of Tennessee from 1861 to 1930. While scholarship on the war’s memory is immense and growing, little of this literature examines the memory of the Confederacy's war effort in the western theater—the area of operations military historians now deem central to the war's outcome. This project rectifies that oversight by examining white Southerners’ memory of the Army of Tennessee in the post-war decades. Unlike Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s primary western field army suffered a near …

The Physical Uplift Of The Race: The Emergence Of The African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900-1930, J. Anthony Guillory

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900—1930,” situates the early twentieth century of African American physical culture within a historical narrative that shaped philosophical viewpoints of African American urban community development. Previous inquiries of related topics attempt to describe a physical culture movement that was somehow separate and apart from the larger historical narrative of African people in the United States. My work does not continue in that vein. My objective is to illustrate how the black physical culture movement was primarily a reaction to African Americans’ new geo-political …

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …

Engineering Victory: The Ingenuity, Proficiency, And Versatility Of Union Citizen Soldiers In Determining The Outcome Of The Civil War, Thomas F. Army Jr

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores the critical advantage the Union held over the Confederacy in military engineering. The skills Union soldiers displayed during the war at bridge building, railroad repair, and road making demonstrated mechanical ability and often revealed ingenuity and imagination. These skills were developed during the antebellum period when northerners invested in educational systems that served an industrializing economy. Before the war, northern states’ attempt at implementing basic educational reforms, the spread of informal educational practices directed at mechanics and artisans, and the exponential growth in manufacturing all generated a different work related ethos than that of the South. Plantation …

“The Dictator Without A Uniform: Kārlis Ulmanis, Agrarian Nationalism, Transnational Fascism, And Interwar Latvia”, Jordan Tyler Kuck

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Dictator without a Uniform: Kārlis Ulmanis, Agrarian Nationalism, Transnational Fascism, and Interwar Latvia” tells for the first time the fascinating backstory of Latvia’s period of authoritarian rule (1934-1940) under Kārlis Ulmanis. The son of a former serf in the Russian Empire, Ulmanis rose to national prominence as an agronomist before becoming in 1918 the prime minister of the new Latvian republic. However, despite his earlier commitment to democracy, on May 15, 1934, Ulmanis led a coup d’état, proclaiming himself the Vadonis (Leader) of Latvia.

Based on previously unexamined archival materials in Nebraska and Latvia, this dissertation illustrates how many …

Taking Off: The Politics And Culture Of American Aviation, 1920-1939, Mcmillan Houston Johnson V

Doctoral Dissertations

Historians have traditionally emphasized the sharp differences between Herbert Hoover’s vision of an associational state and the activism of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. This dissertation highlights an important area of continuity between the economic policies espoused by Hoover—during his tenures as Secretary of Commerce and President—and Roosevelt, focusing on federal efforts to promote the nascent aviation industry from the end of World War I until the passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act in 1938. These efforts were successful, and offer a unique arena in which to document the concrete gains wrought by Hoover’s associationalist ideology and Roosevelt’s New Deal. …

“Tentative Relations: Secession And War In The Central Ohio River Valley, 1859-1862”, Timothy Max Jenness

Doctoral Dissertations

In the fall of 1859, John Brown launched a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and in so doing arguably fired the first salvo of the Civil War. That his raid occurred in the border area between North and South should come as no surprise because it was in that area where Americans were the most divided. Citizens across the border state region–that area that comprised the lower North and upper South–soon found themselves caught between two hostile sections. Based on an analysis of letters, journals, newspapers, and public documents, this dissertation is a study of one …