Cultural History Commons^™

The Renaissance Plutocracy Of Cosimo De’ Medici: How He Used Patronage To His Advantage In 15th Century Florence, Victoria L. Schultz

The Exposition

This paper provides a detailed account of Cosimo de' Medici's patronage practices and the impact they had on the political and cultural landscape of Renaissance Florence. Cosimo consolidated power and influence in Florence, positioning himself as the city's preeminent political and cultural figure. This paper will examine the ways Cosimo leveraged his wealth and connections to establish a Renaissance plutocracy in Florence with a focus on his use of patronage to gain and maintain power.

Reframing Space: Religion, History, And Memory In The Early Documentary Film Of The Yugoslav Space, Milja Radovic

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper examines cinematic representations of religion and religious communities in the early cinema of the Yugoslav space. This paper introduces the readers to the rich heritage of the cinema of the Yugoslav space by providing 1) the first study of the representations of religion and the concepts of faith in the early film, and 2) novel approaches in reading religion and history through film. Film is used as a primary rather than supplementary source in historical research on diverse religious and ethnic communities in this part of the Balkan Peninsula. This is the first study that investigates the importance, …

Dancers Of The Book: Yemenite, Persian, And Kurdish Jewish Dance, Quinn Bicer

Anthós

Despite the cultural significance of dance in Jewish communities around the world, research into Middle Eastern Jewish dance outside of the modern nation-state of Israel is sorely under-researched. This article aims to help rectify this by focusing on Yemenite, Persian/Iranian, and Kurdish Jewish dance and explores how these dancers have functioned and been received within the societies they have been a part of. The methods that have gone into this article are a combination of analyzing primary source recorded dances and existing secondary source research into the dance of these communities. Through these methods, this article reveals how Yemenite, Iranian, …

Silent Voices, Stolen Imagery, And Subjected Violence: Plains Native American Women In Historiography, Bobbie J. Roshone

Graduate Review

This paper delves into the historiography of Indigenous women’s history and experiences on the Great Plains have been recorded. The main question when approaching this subject was, “what does a review of the historiography reveal about how historians have addressed Indigenous women’s history in the Great Plains?” The overwhelming consensus was that Indigenous women’s history of the Great Plains was minimal in regard to articles, however, there was a growth of autobiographies and other historiographical works throughout the same time period. This would lead to a directed look at how individual women in Indigenous Plains history had a larger impact …

The Evolution Of The America Perception Of Lobster From The 17th To The 21st Century, Michael T. Fisher

The Exposition

Lobster early in American history was a low class food commonly served to servants and slaves. Technological advancements, and scarcity during World War II are what facilitated preservation of fresh lobster drove the cultural shift behind the elevated status of the American Lobster.

Wartime Teachers: Stories From The Front, Rachel K. Turner, Eliel Hinojosa Jr.

Educational Considerations

In the early 1990s, Dr. O.L. Davis of the University of Texas at Austin sought evacuee teacher and student recollections in England during World War II. The overarching purpose for Davis was to gain an understanding of the effect on schooling and education, specifically as it relates to the curriculum for students. This article continues where he left off and places focus on teacher evacuees. Of the several hundred responses from student evacuees, we utilized ten of the thirty teacher evacuees who responded to Dr. Davis. The purpose in this research endeavor seeks to discover the impact evacuations in England …

"Sometimes You Have To Be The Leader": A Minnesota Oral History On Fighting Sexual Exploitation, Trudee Able-Peterson

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Prostitution survivor Trudee Able-Peterson used oral histories to research and document the efforts of women and men to respond to the sexual exploitation of women and children in Minnesota. Her findings illustrate the leadership needed to overcome centuries of commercial sexual exploitation to obtain a beginning societal response. Respondents indicated the importance of their interaction with pioneer leaders in other locales. Their comments also illustrate the many issues and challenges still facing the community.

Fashion Under The Swastika: An Analysis Of Women's Fashion During The Third Reich, Ayrika Johnson

Ursidae: The Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Northern Colorado

This paper works to demonstrate women's fashion in Germany during WWII and how it was impacted by Nazi culture. Within Hitler's Germany, there was a desire to create a uniform community separate from the rest of the world, and greater than all others. Fashion is one way to analyze how the Nazis tried to accomplish this goal. The paper relies on speeches, magazines, and their fashion pages, and advertisement clippings to uncover the social, economic, and political factors at play. By using fashion as a means of expressing cultural, societal, economic, and political goals, the desires of the Nazi government …

Photo Synthesis: The Expatriate Family Album As Historiography, Kamayani Sharma Ms

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I want to look at the expatriate family album as a site of history-writing.

Through an examination of three photographs from my childhood in West Asia, I try to think about the idea of historical space and time through the visual narratives available to me of my own family.

This essay will be an exploration of the way in which nostalgia for a personal past gets imbricated within the shared experience of a bygone cultural moment.

I am interested in how an encounter with visual material from private archives initiates memory work and how these traces from the past can …

She Would Not Be Silenced: Mae West's Struggle Against Censorship, Charlotte N. Toledo

The Downtown Review

Mae West, an actress during Hollywood's Golden Age, used her fame on stage, in films, and on the radio to offer social commentary on relationships between men and women in society. Her irreverent style of addressing issues of female sexuality and power certainly caught peoples attention and made them think about these issues in new ways. At the same time, her racy delivery made her a target of stage, film, and radio censorship. She refused to be silenced and continually pushed against restrictions to deliver he message of empowerment in her trademark provocative manner.

Windows To The Divine: The Development Of Byzantine Art, Sam Klein

Tenor of Our Times

Byzantine art took significant inspiration form its Greco-Roman heritage but then distinguished itself through a shift in focus away from Hellenic realism and towards formal abstractions of Christian motifs. These conventions developed alongside political and theological turbulence to eventually influence a vast area of Asia Minor and Eastern Europe.

Shifting Understandings Of Lesbianism In Imperial And Weimar Germany, Meghan C. Paradis

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

This paper seeks to understand how, and why, understandings of lesbianism shifted in Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of both popular cultural productions and medical and psychological texts produced within the context of Imperial and Weimar Germany, this paper explores the changing nature of understandings of homosexuality in women, arguing that over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant conceptualization of lesbianism transformed from an understanding of lesbians that was rooted in biology and viewed lesbians as physically masculine “gender inverts”, to one that was …

Underground Fieldwork – A Cultural And Social History Of Cave Cartography And Surveying Instruments In The 19th And At The Beginning Of The 20th Century, Johannes Mattes

International Journal of Speleology

At the turn of the 20^th century, the practical examination of caves went through a radical change. Governmental organizations and private clubs were founded in an attempt to establish speleology as an independent academic subject. In contrast to earlier cave visitors, travelers began entering underground areas and attributing the names of “explorers” or “researchers” to themselves. Fieldwork—especially cave surveying and cartography—became common practice in speleology and such work provided important clues on speleogenesis, which was a controversial issue in the first half of the 20^th century. Due to the fact that speleologists began separating themselves from ordinary …

Memory In Paintings Of Quattrocentro Renaissance Florence: Religious Paintings And Secular Portraits, Ashley Matcheck

Psi Sigma Siren

Collective memory studies as a field has always been the interdisciplinary study of how and why memories have been created. The difference between collective or cultural memory studies and that of a strictly historical study is often discussed and debated as people question whether memory or history is more valuable regarding past events. Jan Assmann explains that “in the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes. Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered.” Assmann has …

Buildings At The Center: Reasons For Building Tabernacles, Aaron Mcarthur

Psi Sigma Siren

There were generally three different motivations for the construction of a tabernacle in a specific community. The first was that the leadership of the Church in Salt Lake directed communities to build one. Leaders did this in settlements that they believed were to become important central communities for gatherings and large meetings. The decision was also made in areas that the Church desired to strengthen their claim to, legally and emotionally. In 1863, Brigham Young decided that the struggling cotton mission in St. George needed a shot in the arm. To rally the community, he determined that a tabernacle would …

Germans In Sacramento, 1850-1859, Carole C. Terry

Psi Sigma Siren

During the 1850s in Sacramento, German-born immigrants banded together in an ethnically based neighborhood where they created a sub-culture of "German-ness," practicing their own particular rituals and customs. At the same time, these foreign-born joined the Anglo-American majority to addresses the chaos and disorder brought on by the dramatic increase in Sacramento's population due to the discovery of gold in 1849. Contemporary accounts such as newspapers, directories, histories and unpublished manuscripts confirm the existence of this strong community and its attempts to duplicate institutions they remembered in Germany and ethnic settlements in America. Despite their small numbers, they influenced the …

The Duke’S Devil And Doctor Lambe’S Darling: A Case Study Of The Male Witch In Early Modern England, Karin Amundsen

Psi Sigma Siren

The witch-hunt in early modern England has been the subject of much scholarly research in the last several decades. While much of this research focuses on the political, religious, economic, and social aspects of the witch-hunts, the role of gender in the trials has recently come under more scrutiny, though much of it focuses on women. Although the role of women in the witch-hunts is unquestionably important given that accusations primarily targeted them, historians should not ignore male witches or simply dismiss them as spouses or relatives of female witches. Compounding the exclusion of male witches from historical consideration is …

Die Deutschen Von Marysville: The Germans Of Marysville, 1850-11860., Carole C. Terry

Psi Sigma Siren

Histories of California addressing the years after the discovery of gold neglect the impact of European-born ethnic minorities on their new residences, particularly those living in the smaller cities that grew to meet the demands of the gold miners. The white newcomers to California during the gold rush years were not a homogeneous collection of Anglo-Saxon protestants. German immigrants, despite their small numbers, were a significant presence in the growing permanent cities of California such as Marysville. In that City, the third largest in California during the 1850s, the number of Germans who came and permanently stayed grew over the …