Cultural History Commons^™

Carceral Extractivism, Livelihood Strategies, And “Acting Right” In The U.S. South, Edward L. Bullock

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

Mass incarceration and its effects are well documented and carceral privatization is hotly contested on moral and economic grounds. This dissertation examines the local effects of carceral privatization in the U.S. south in historical context. Tallulah is a small, rural predominately African American town in northeastern Louisiana that endures high rates of poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment. It also hosts four private prisons operated by LaSalle Corrections, LLC. Two primary and overlapping questions guide the research. 1) How has an history of carceral entrepreneurship and mass incarceration impacted the way persons and communities create livelihoods and imagine futures, and …

Twilight Of Newhaven: The Transformation Of An Ancient Fishing Village Into A Modern Neighborhood, Asa James Swan

Theses and Dissertations--History

In 1504, King James IV of Scotland founded the village of Newhaven, three miles north of Edinburgh on the shores of the Firth of Forth. Newhaven rose to prominence as the most well-known of Scotland’s fishing villages and reached its zenith in 1928 with the launching of its last ship, the Reliance. It was the beginning of the end of the Newhavener way of life, their twilight. This is the story of decline and domicide as economic forces and the City of Edinburgh Council transformed the ancient village of Newhaven into a modern neighborhood. This small fishing community, with …

In The Shadows Of Apollo: The Space Age Legacies Of Dispossession In Hancock County, Mississippi, Stuart Simms

Theses and Dissertations--History

In the Piney Woods of Mississippi, John C. Stennis used political connections to displace small communities in a 150,000-acre space in Hancock County, Mississippi for the creation of a rocket test facility for NASA. What became the John C. Stennis Space Center created a narrative that preached of the benefits of the facility in the region while local residents from the displaced communities remember the facility in different terms.

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 …

The Cinematic College Professor: Conceptions And Representations, John C. Fitch Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Depictions of college professors in American films are common, and while a number of studies have investigated various aspects of college life in motion pictures, few have focused exclusively on the cinematic professoriate. In addition to being an indelible part of history, cinematic depictions of college professors are part of the national discourse on the role and function of the faculty and university. An investigation of how college professors have been represented in American films, and how these representations are read and created by real-life college professors and filmmakers may provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular culture …

One Dead Freedman: Everyday Racial Violence, Black Freedom, And American Citizenship, 1863-1871, Jacob Alan Glover

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of “everyday” racial violence in the postbellum South. Taking as its focus the states of Louisiana and Kentucky, One Dead Freedman juxtaposes the practical enactment of black citizenship against daily racial terrorism by incorporating personal, familial, and community testimony left behind by African Americans who had a direct experience with such violence. Within this dissertation, the terminology of “everyday violence” is employed to differentiate the more mundane forms of white violence from the more spectacular forms of Reconstruction-era violence such as lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and race riots. Thus, the definition of …

Strangers With Cameras: The Consequences Of Appalachian Representation In Pop Culture, Chelsea L. Brislin

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, …

"An Everlasting Service": The American And Canadian Legions Remember The First World War, 1919-1941, Mary E. Osborne

Theses and Dissertations--History

The public tends to think of war memorials as fixed monuments, but I argue that the American and Canadian Legions served as living memorials that acknowledged veterans’ war-time service by providing service to veterans and to the public. This dissertation focuses on how Legionnaires interacted with one another and with their local communities during the interwar years to construct memories of the First World War. By analyzing local chapter records from Michigan, New York, and Ontario, Canada, this case study highlights the contrast between the organizations’ national and local activities. The local posts’ and branches’ wide range of activities complicated …

The Language Of Race In Revolutionary France And Saint-Domingue, 1789-1792, Jeffery L. Stanley

Theses and Dissertations--History

This project studies the historical development of racialist language during the French Revolution as politicians, free people of color, and colonial whites debated the political status of France’s free people of color population. It examines the negotiation of a racialist language that bolstered colonial racial hierarchies with an egalitarian language that sought to level the corporate structures of the Old Regime. I look especially at the ways that language served as a management device to articulate and legitimize new relationships of power in the political culture of the French Revolution. I connect developments in France to the colonies by showing …

Building Bridges: Church Women United And Social Reform Work Across The Mid-Twentieth Century, Melinda M. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--History

Church Women United incorporated in December 1941 as an interdenominational and interracial movement of liberal Protestant women committed to social reform. The one hundred organizers represented ten million Protestant women across the United States. They organized with the express purposes of helping to bring peace on Earth and to develop total equality within all humanity.

Church Women United was the bridge between the First and Second Wave of Feminism and the bridge between the Social Gospel and Social Justice Movements. Additionally they connected laterally with numerous social and religious groups across American society. As such, they exemplify the continuity and …

Foreign Affairs: Policy, Culture, And The Making Of Love And War In Vietnam, Amanda C. Boczar

Theses and Dissertations--History

Foreign Affairs: Policy, Culture, and the Making of Love and War in Vietnam investigates the interplay between war and society leading to and during the Vietnam War. This project intertwines histories of foreign relations, popular culture, and gender and sexuality as lenses for understanding international power relations during the global Cold War more broadly. By examining sexual encounters between American service members and Vietnamese civilian women, this dissertation argues that relationships ranging from prostitution to dating, marriage, and rape played a significant role in the diplomacy, logistics, and international reception of the war. American disregard for South Vietnamese morality laws …

Knowing And Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, And Adolescent Girlhood In Midcentury American Film, Michael Todd Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of …

Edward Steichen And Hollywood Glamour, Alisa Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

As a word, glamour is hard to define, but is instantly recognizable. Its association with Hollywood movie stars fully emerged in the 1930s in the close-up celebrity portraits by photographers like George Hurrell. The aesthetic properties in these images that help create glamour are characterized by the Modernist style, known for sharp focus, high contrast, seductive poses, and the close-up (tight framing). My essay will explore the origins of the visual aesthetics of glamour, arguing that their roots can be found in the still life photographs of the 1910s, produced by fine art photographers such as Edward Steichen. This essay …

Honor, Reputation, And Conflict: George Of Trebizond And Humanist Acts Of Self-Presentation, Karl R. Alexander

Theses and Dissertations--History

The present study investigates the verbal strategies of self-presentation that humanist scholars employed in contests of honor during the early fifteenth century. The focus of this study is George of Trebizond (1395-1472/3), a Cretan scholar who emigrated to Italy in 1416, taught in Venice, Vicenza, and elsewhere, served as an apostolic secretary in Rome, and composed the first major humanist treatise on rhetoric, his Rhetoricorum libri quinque, in 1433/34. Trebizond feuded with many prominent humanists during his career, including Guarino of Verona (1374-1460) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). His quarrels with both men illustrate how humanist conflicts were the sites upon …

Instruments Of Righteousness: The Intersections Of Black Power And Anti-Vietnam War Activism In The United States, 1964-1972, Amanda L. Higgins

Theses and Dissertations--History

Instruments of Righteousness investigates the class-, race-, and gender-based identities and intersections of women and men in the Black Power movement and their various organizing activities to gain certain and defined concessions from federal, state, and local governments. It argues that the intersections of Black Power and anti-Vietnam War activism created changing definitions of black masculinity and femininity, expressed through anti-draft and anti-war work. Black Power and anti-war activism cannot and should not be investigated separate from one another. The experiences of Black Power soldiers, antiwar members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the …

More Than An "Immoderate Superstition": Christian Identity In The First Three Centuries, Edward Mason

Theses and Dissertations--History

Only recently have scholars given particular attention to the development of the racial discourse present in early Christian apologetics. This study is aimed at understanding the Latin and Greek literary antecedents to the development of a Christian discourse on race and identity and examining in detail the apex of this discourse in the work of third century apologist Origen of Alexandria. Origen’s work represented the apex of an evolving discourse that, while continuing to use traditional vocabulary, became increasingly universalizing with the growth of the Roman Empire. By understanding how Christians in the first three centuries shaped their attitudes on …

Whiteness In Africa: Americo-Liberians And The Transformative Geographies Of Race, Robert P. Murray

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation examines the constructed racial identities of African American settlers in colonial Liberia as they traversed the Atlantic between the United States and West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. In one of the great testaments that race is a social construction, the West African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia, who conceived of themselves as “black,” recognized the significant cultural differences between themselves and these newly-arrived Americans and racially categorized the newcomers as “white.” This project examines the ramifications for these African American settlers of becoming simultaneously white and black through their Atlantic mobility. This is …

Gastronomy And Otherness In Alphonso X’S Works: Food Identities In Cartography, Dianne Burke Moneypenny

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis investigates Alphonso X's General Estoria, Estoria de Espanna, Cantigas de Santa María, Siete Partidas, and other writings in the alphonsine corpus to illustrate the concept of classification through diet. The work of this thesis is to reveal the gastronomic connections between central and peripheral relations in cartography. Through food symbolism and dietary behaviors, cuisine functions as the purveyor of an unrivalled sketch of a text’s characters and the social conditions of the text’s production. Once unraveled, these highly socialized norms of consumption confirm that diet and identity are inextricably linked and lead to a greater understanding of medieval …

Border Crossings: Us Contributions To Saskatchewan Education, 1905-1937, Kerry Alcorn

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Traditional histories of Canadian education pursue an east/west perspective, with progress accompanying settlement westward from Ontario. This history of Saskatchewan education posits, instead, a north-south perspective, embracing the US cultural routes for the province’s educational development from 1905 until 1937. I emphasize the transplantation of US Midwestern and Plains culture to the province of Saskatchewan through cultural transfer of agrarian movements, political forms of revolt, and through adopting shared meanings of democracy and the relationship of the West relative to the East. Physiographic similarities between Saskatchewan and the American Plains fostered similar moralistic political cultures and largely identical solutions to …