Intellectual History Commons^™

De Libero Conscientia: Martin Luther’S Rediscovery Of Liberty Of Conscience And Its Synthesis Of The Ancients And The Influence Of The Moderns, Bessie S. Blackburn

Liberty University Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy

One fateful day on March 26, 1521, a lowly Augustinian monk was cited to appear before the Diet of Worms.[1] His habit trailed behind him as he braced for the questioning. He was firm, yet troubled. He boldly proclaimed: “If I am not convinced by proofs from Scripture, or clear theological reasons, I remain convinced by the passages which I have quoted from Scripture, and my conscience is held captive by the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract, for it is neither prudent nor right to go against one’s conscience. So help me God, …

The Russian Research Center At Harvard Versus Cambridge Analytica: Influencing The Public In A Cold War, Robert Joshua Howard

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Humanism In The Americas, Carol W. White

Faculty Contributions to Books

This chapter provides an overview of select trends, ideas, themes, and figures associated with humanism in the Americas, which comprises a diversified set of peoples, cultural traditions, religious orientations, and socio-economic groups. In acknowledging this rich tapestry of human life, the chapter emphasizes the impressive variety of developments in philosophy, the natural sciences, literature, religion, art, social science, and political thought that have contributed to the development of humanism in the Americas. The chapter also features modern usages of humanism that originated in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. In this context, humanism is best viewed as a contested …

Economies Of Security: Foucault And The Genealogy Of Neoliberal Reason, Marshall Scheider

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

Michel Foucault is well-known for his theorizations of institutional power, normativity, and biopolitics. Less well-known is the fact that Foucault developed his analysis of biopolitics in and through his historical investigation of neoliberalism. Today, while critique of neoliberalism has become a commonplace of humanities discourse, and popular resistance to neoliberalization rocks the southern hemisphere, it remains unclear that the historical specificity of neoliberalism is well-understood. In particular, the relation between classical liberalism and neoliberal governance remains murky in popular debate. As Foucault powerfully illustrates, this relation is far from clear-cut, and neoliberalism is not reducible to a simple extension of …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

Paper House: The Revolution, The Disappeared, And The Historicity Of Lebanon, Elsa Saade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will be an attempt to reenact events in relation to the disappeared and the Lebanese civil war, with the help of newspaper cuts, oral history, theories on historical writing, memories, and books on Lebanon. As a prospective historian, the writer will be tapping into the internal event of thought processes and meaning of the past, as advised by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History. (Collingwood, 1946 ) That critical inquiry will only be at the service of understanding the present from the lens of a self-reflecting inquisitor that has faced many silences in a past …

“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 …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Audio Quality As Content: Everyday Criticism Of The Lo-Fi Format, Elizabeth Newton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the matter of authenticity with respect to audio recordings. In the early 1990s, the term “lo-fi” (“low-fidelity”) emerged as a label used to categorize many different types of popular music, indicating widespread fascination with what I call audio quality, the perceived character of an audio recording. I define audio quality as the relationship between content and mediation, which varies greatly by circumstance. My archival research of zines, press releases, and correspondence examines this relationship in three case studies: Wu-Tang Clan, Bratmobile, and Elliott Smith. I posit the lo-fi format as a critical structure that emerged in …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Hannah Arendt’S Vision Of Politics: Exemplary Negativities And The Ostjuden, Jacob E. Pearce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hannah Arendt’s vision of politics is one of the most enigmatic, perplexing, thoroughly analyzed, and potentially generative aspects of her philosophic corpus. It is marked by insightful analysis, cutting deconstructions of pressing moral issues, and confusing vernacular wherein her analytic boundaries, topics, and categories appear obfuscated. Although it has been observed that Arendt’s late-career theory of the political owes a debt to her earlier writings on Jewish history, including her Kantian-influenced theory of political judgment and storytelling, in this thesis I would like to narrow down this debt to a specific trope: The Ostjuden, or the imagined associations with Eastern …

The Spiritual Nature Of The Italian Renaissance, Kaitlyn Kenney

Senior Honors Theses

This study seeks to investigate the influence of faith in the emergence and development of the Italian Renaissance, in both the artwork and writing of the major artists and thinkers of the day, and the impact that new expressions of faith had on the viewing public. While the Renaissance is often labeled as a secular movement by modern scholars, this interpretation is largely due to the political motives of the Medici family who dominated Florence as the center of this artistic rebirth, on and off again throughout the period. On close examination, the philosophical and creative undercurrents of the movement …

Chomsky And Genocide, Adam Jones

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Noam Chomsky may justly be considered the most important public intellectual alive, and the most significant of the post-World War Two era. Despite his scholarly contributions to linguistics, at least three generations know him primarily for his political writings and activism, voicing a left-radical, humanist critique of US foreign policy and other subjects.

Given that a human-rights discourse is prominent in Chomsky’s political writing, and given that genocide-related controversies have sometimes swirled around him, it is worthwhile to consider the overall place and framing of genocide in his published output. The present paper undertakes such an inquiry. It employs a …

"The Twilight-Colored Smell Of Honeysuckle:" William Faulkner, The South, And Literature As A Site Of Memory, Emily Innes

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis examines the intersection of literature and historical memory, focusing on William Faulkner’s literature and the construction of memory and identity in the 1920s-1930s American South. Understanding the basic objective of memory as using the past to consolidate a social consciousness rooted in a shared identity and future, I examine how literature contributes to and enriches this process. I argue that because memory is deeply embedded in the social frameworks of a population, and dependent on the population’s cultural, political, and social identity, it is a fundamental component of understanding cultural identity. By interpreting literature through the lens of …

Evolutionary Bioethics Advanced By Ernest Everett Just: Implications For Biology, Ethics, And Theology, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Ernest Everett Just (1883-1941) is an acknowledged “pioneer” in biology, being honored with a Black Heritage postage stamp in 1996. Here we discover that Just also made pioneering contributions to general evolutionary bioethics (distinct from special medical bioethics) by advancing a cell-biology-rooted theory of the origin and continuing evolution of ethical behavior influenced by the “law of environmental dependence.”

See especially “The Origin of Man’s Ethical Behavior (1941, unpublished book manuscript) by Ernest Everett Just and Hedwig Schnetzler Just, discovered in 2018 among the collected papers of E.E. Just at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.

Accordingly, evolution is …

Teaching And Testing Textual Analysis In Reacting To The Past: Thucydides And Jigsaw Method Discussion, Cary Barber

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

The activity this work presents is designed to both strengthen and evaluate students’ ability to think critically about ancient texts within a Reacting to the Past gaming environment (specifically in the game ‘The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.’). The activity is part of a preliminary set of assignments meant to improve students’ sense of the game’s historical, social, political, economic, and religious context. Moreover, the activity helps to ensure that students can incorporate texts appropriately into speeches, writings, and general gameplay.

Using the Jigsaw Method of discussion, I organize students into ‘numbered’ (I, II, III, etc.) groups of …

The Evolution Of Eugenics: The Birth Of A Movement, Caroline Tvardy

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This paper addresses the topic of the intellectual and academic foundations of the eugenics movement in England and the United States. It addresses how this basis formed in the highest levels of the academy and then permeated the rest of society in turn. Through this lens, it explores the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British and American spheres of scientific and pseudoscientific thought, and how many of these unsavory ideas began in the academy and percolated into the masses. This paper argues the work of prominent biologists, mathematicians, and genetic researchers of the time created and pushed the narrative of racial and …

Bangor Revisited: Bishop Benjamin Hoadly And Enlightenment Ecclesiology, Christopher T. Lough

Student Publications

As a Whig and a latitudinarian, Bishop Benjamin Hoadly of Bangor (1676-1761) was a persistent critic of any and all things Tory. His sermon “The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ,” preached before King George I in 1717, touched upon the political and theological controversies that followed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. It also forwarded a radical ecclesiological schema: effectively arguing that the Church of England lacked real moral authority, he advocated for its subsumption under the state’s own auspices. An analysis of Hoadly’s sermon, as well as his conduct throughout the ensuing Bangorian controversy, will …

Bingo! Engaging History Of Science Students With Primary Sources, Leigh Rupinski

Scholarly Papers and Articles

This case study examines the process of creating an interactive and engaging lesson plan for the History of Science course, HSC 201: The Scientific Revolution. History of Science students tend to be undergraduates majoring in science or medical related fields, rather than the humanities, who need to fulfill an intensive writing or general education requirement. For most, if not all of them, this session would be the first time they experienced hands-on interaction with historical resources. Accordingly, the archivist sought to create a less traditional lesson plan that would foster a sense of fun and interest in the materials.

The Rise And Fall Of South Carolina College, Robert D. Cathcart Iii

Senior Theses

Through a thorough examination of the underpinnings of Classical education, as well as the history of South Carolina College, it is clear that the classical system is superior to the later University system imposed upon the College during the Reconstruction period. Classical education began in the Greek philosophic schools, such as the Academy and the Lyceum, and was intended to enrich the soul of its students, as well as to equip them for leadership in the future. But the most important aspect of this education was its universality. It is highly ironic that the original concept of the University …

Rockin' The Church: Vernacular Catholic Musical Practices, Kinga Povedak

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article focuses on the unique dimensions of lived or vernacular Catholicism through the analysis of contemporary congregational music in Hungary. Looking at the musical lives of Hungarian Roman Catholics from the late 1960s to contemporary times can provide us with new understandings of the theological contents and aesthetics, as well as the vernacular religiosity of the community. Christian popular music appeared behind the Iron Curtain relatively early, in 1967 when the first “beat mass” was created and introduced at Budapest. The early Christian popular music sounded astonishingly similar to the songs of the American Folk Mass Movement of the …

Introduction: Consumer Contexts And Divine Presences In Hungarian Catholicism, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to Hungarian Catholicism: Living Faith Across Diverse Social and Intellectual Contexts, highlighting both the specific contributions of the articles to the study of Hungarian Catholicism and situating them within the broad sweep of Hungarian and Catholic Studies.

Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table Of Contents], Roger Mathew Grant

Philosophy & Theory

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to …

Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the history of the references to Buddhism in Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s first and unpublished novel, through the author’s previous writing, his sources, and his context, in order to determine how—if at all—the tradition bore upon his earliest depiction of consciousness. Acknowledging that Joyce habitually revisited and refined earlier ideas and prose, it attends to previous essays, notebooks, book reviews, conversations, letters, epiphanies, poems, and autobiographical prose; to available material, bibliographical, and biographical evidence about the specific volumes and performances to which Joyce had access; to language and paratext—including advertisements, introductions, and appended essays—in those volumes; …

Mandated To Report: The Role Of The Nationalist Press In Reporting Zionist Land Expropriation And Labor Conquest In Palestine During The 1930s, Walaa Alghussein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Print media has been an indelible component of the Palestinian National Movement – playing a critical role in many episodes of its fraught history. Time and again it has formed the discursive and rhetorical spear of various ideological movements and factions, utilizing iconography, poetry, and incendiary political writing to project a unified and popular struggle to the diaspora and the world. Perhaps the most understudied period in the modern Palestinian struggle and the role of the print media in the 1930s – a period of increasing internal political struggle and external material pressures. This is particularly true when it comes …

Spatial Distribution Of Chinese Language Education And Historical Development Of Chinese Language Pedagogy In Higher Education In The United States, Jing Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project includes two major components: an interactive digital map that displays the geographical distribution of Chinese language programs in colleges and universities in the United States, their program starting years, the types of such universities and colleges, and their names and states; and a multimedia essay on the evolution of Chinese language pedagogy in colleges and universities in the United States. Data has been collected on the program start year, school names, states where schools are located, school types, and whether the school had been funded by two federal sponsored language programs: the National Defense Education Act in …

2020 Mlk Keynote Address: Michelle Alexander Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Michelle Alexander, Rosanne Somerson, Matthew Shenoda

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

2020 MLK Series Keynote Michelle Alexander brings audiences profoundly necessary and meaningful insights on the practice of mass incarceration that plagues the US justice system, as well as eye-opening conversation on how we can end racial caste in America. Lecture Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 5:30pm, RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal Walk, Providence, RI.

In her acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander peels back the curtain on systemic racism in the US prison system in a work that the New York Review of Books describes as "striking in the intelligence of her …

Martin Luther King Jr. And Ernest Everett Just - On Evolution Of Ethical Behavior, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. prescribed an evolutionary advance in ethical behavior: the total “abolition of poverty” and the abolition of war throughout “the world house.” Cell biologist Ernest Everett Just advanced the idea that human ethical behavior evolved from cellular origins.

Also, astrobiologists Chandra Wickramasinghe and Sir Fred Hoyle advanced the idea of cosmic biology, including stellar evolution and cosmic evolution. From cells to humans to stars and cosmology, evolutionary natural science converges with natural theology.

The Bioethical Significance Of “The Origin Of Man’S Ethical Behavior” (October 1941, Unpublished) By Ernest Everett Just And Hedwig Anna Schnetzler Just, Theodore Walker Jr.

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

Abstract –

E. E. Just (1883-1941) is an acknowledged “pioneer” in cell biology, and he is perhaps the pioneer in study of egg cell fertilization. Here we discover that Just also made pioneering contributions to general biology and evolutionary bioethics.

Within Just’s published contributions to observational cell biology, there are substantial fragments of his theory of ethical behavior, a theory with roots in cell biology. In addition to such previously available fragments, Just’s fully developed theory is now available. This recently discovered unpublished book-length manuscript argues for the biological origins of ethical behavior (evolving from cells to humans, within a …

Letters From The “Gentlemen Of The Press,” 1810-1845, David E. Latane

English Publications

A collection of letters by men and women associated with the periodical press in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, transcribed, annotated, and presented with scans of the original letters. Notable contributors include Times editors Thomas Barnes and John Delane, Fraser's Magazine writers William Maginn and John Heraud, Charles Molloy Westmacott editor of The Age, Stanley Lees Giffard of The Standard , and Mary Russell Mitford.