Oral History Commons^™

The Impact Of H. L. Hunt's Contribution To The East Texas Oil Boom: Exhibit Planning And Fabrication, Ashley N. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The East Texas Oil Boom was a major event in Texas history that elevated the oil industry in Texas to new levels. It brought new jobs, and a new style of work and living to the state. The boom attracted businessmen such as H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison. H. L. Hunt was a prominent figure in the East Texas Oil Boom, who established a multifaceted corporation and influenced statewide legislation for hot oil and proration. Hunt, who chose to make money at any cost, was often viewed as untrustworthy and deceptive but his business practices were lucrative, and he …

The Creative Writing Pedagogy Of Black Mountain College, Bethany Gareis

Masters Theses

This essay relies on archival evidence and first-person accounts to study the development of creative writing pedagogy at black mountain college. Early accounts of creative writing at Black Mountain College reveal that it was initially an extracurricular activity driven by student interest, but over time, creative writing became a central part of the curriculum, aligning with the broader philosophies of art education at the college. I examine the pedagogical practices of key figures like Richards, Olson, and Wunsch alongside the progressive educational ideals that underpinned Black Mountain College's approach to learning, drawing on the philosophies of thinkers like Porter Sargent …

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Please Believe: Muriel Rukeyser, Mary Mccarthy, And Their Literary Lives, Vivian Noah Hoyden

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature and The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Black Women Who Were Not In American History Books: The Women Of The Black Wall Street Massacre Of 1921, Antoinay Ruby Gwendoyln Collins

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Survivor Accounts Of Sexual Violence In The Holocaust And Rwandan Genocide: A Comparative History, Marisa Silva

Honors Projects

This research seeks to analyze and understand the approach and treatment of victims of sexual assaults stories and accounts using case studies of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Research was conducted by collecting and reading first-hand accounts of survivors and their experiences of sexual assault, then analyzing the historical response following the events. The two case studies are synthesized and compared in this project to understand which attributes of political and social policy effected the reception of stories of victims and witnesses of rape and assault. Both genocides are affected by unique struggles in collecting witness accounts, as well …

The Gray Area: Sexuality And Gender In Wartime Reevaluated, Natalie Pendergraft

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

These three works, two academic papers and one screenplay, challenge traditional notions of gender and sexuality during wartime. Queer Vietnam service members did not all experience oppression, all the time, but rather carved out a space for themselves amongst their peers. Female nurses in the early cold war could keep their careers in the medical field due to its unique gendered history despite demobilization efforts across the country in different industries. Finally, through the medium of historical fiction, a Civil War soldier’s fears and desires are questioned as he experiences the phenomenon of the Angel’s Glow, a blue light that …

The Intermountain West Lgbtq+ Oral History Project: The Folklorization Of Queer Theory, John Priegnitz

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Following the passing of a friend who witnessed firsthand the transformation of Salt Lake City’s Queer community from the 1950s to 2020, I created the Intermountain West LGBTQ+ Oral History Project to document the queer experience within the Intermountain West. Since beginning the project in 2020, I have documented several diverse stories that intersect class, race, sexuality, gender, faith, and politics. By documenting the queer experience, a marginalized community will have their voices heard and preserved for the enlightenment of future generations. This presentation provides an overview of my project and its preliminary findings.

Making And Unmaking Collective Memory Through Food: A Case Study Of Windsor, Ontario’S Yugoslav Diaspora, Amanda Skocic

Major Papers

The preparation and consumption of food is not merely a physical act, but a deeply social one, conveying cultural meaning that functions to tie us to our identity and profoundly influence our memory. Drawing upon interviews done with members of Windsor’s Yugoslav diaspora community, this research seeks to explore the ways in which this group has negotiated its collective memory within the host society through the use of food. I identify four central aspects of food’s relation to collective memory within the diaspora. First, the use of food as a means of connection to the homeland, and therefore, to collective …

The Murder Of George Floyd: A Case Study Examining How The Policing Of Black Men And Grassroots Activism Influence The Will Of Black Women To Lead, Ella Gates-Mahmoud

Doctorate in Education

This study's objective investigates the viewpoints held by Black women in two urban areas of Minnesota about the social upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the last decade, police killings of innocent Black people in the United States have received more attention, and Floyd's death is only one example of this phenomenon. In the U.S., the likelihood of a police officer taking the life of a Black man is higher than that of a White man. Between 2013-2019 there have been 1,641 fatal shootings of defenseless Black men by …

The City With A Bathtub Ring: A Century Of Shared Industrial Identity In Belfast, Maine, Michael Munson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Belfast, Maine, is a small, visitor-friendly city of approximately 6,700 residents located on that state’s picturesque mid-coast. Founded by Ulster Scots descendants in 1770, Belfast’s rich history has allowed its sense of place to evolve as the community’s identity changed from a frontier settlement to a commercial seaport, then an industrial city, and currently a host city for several prominent customer call centers. While now charming, increasingly gentrified and popular with tourists, the city earlier prospered for more than a century as a blue-collar industrial community, which eschewed tourism well into the 1980s. This paper addresses Belfast’s sense of place …

From Necessity To Novelty: Historic Trades In Colonial Williamsburg, Cecelia Rose Eure

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Colonial Williamsburg is a living history museum in Virginia that hosts a large program interpreting and preserving eighteenth-century craft methods. Using ethnographic research methods, this paper evaluates the value of the historic trades program as a means of preserving otherwise lost skills, producing knowledge, and engaging the public in history. I argue that historic trades interpretation connects with audiences more than traditional exhibits, particularly highlighting specialized interpretation, on-the-job discoveries, representation of identity groups, and the ability to utilize online video platforms. Additionally, I address the divide between modern consumption and production, and how visitors can find historic trades that were …

Cultivation Through Excavation: Performing Community And Partnership In The Historic First Baptist Church Project, Eleanor S. Renshaw

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the relationships and partnerships developing around the First Baptist Church -- Nassau Street Archaeology Project in Colonial Williamsburg. Exploring the defining of "descendant community" and the contributions of tourists through the lens of Erving Goffman's stages and participant frameworks, this project looks at the past, present, and future of this project.

Constructing An Interpretive Master Plan For The Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site, Alysha M. Richardson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site is owned and operated by the Texas Historical Commission. Interpretation of the site spans the 1864-1940 period and includes stories of groups that once met there for social events, including the United Confederate Veterans. In recent years, the Confederate Reunion Grounds has seen a decline in visitation as well as a reduction in staff. This capstone project focuses on creating an interpretive master plan to accommodate the change. This interpretive master plan aims to address the changes that have occurred over the past seven years and set staff goals and objectives.

Seeing Forced Isolation Through New Eyes: Covid-19, Anne Frank, And The Violence Of The Nation-State, Anna Raines

CMC Senior Theses

In my senior thesis, I explore the social, political, and cultural effects and consequences of forced isolation. Forced isolation is a strategy adopted by governments in order to deal with a range of issues in contemporary history, often resulting in exclusionary practices, the redefinition or assertion of national sovereignty and nation-state boundaries, contagion, detention, and imprisonment. As a consequence of these varied processes and actions, when an individual or a social group is forced into an isolated space and ostracized from society, they are cast out of routine socialization, and the effects of this can endure even if a return …

An Intergenerational Photo Exploration Of Self Care Actions In Self-Identifying Strong Black Women, Vanessa Patrice Goodar

Dissertations

The current study sought to expand upon the Giscombé Superwoman Schema (2010) specifically exploring the role of vulnerability resistance and help obligation as potential barriers to changing comprehensive self-care health commitments in self-identifying Strong Black Women (SBW). The Superwoman Schema characteristics of vulnerability resistance and help obligation along with socio-economic factors of income, religious affiliation and marital status were assessed in the project using a visual-ethnography approach to Photo Voice methods and five intergenerational focus groups of SBW's born between 1946 and 2002. The collective self-care knowledge of these eighteen participants was analyzed using a participatory action research discussion framework …

The Holocaust In Białystok: Urban, Rural, And Forest Environments As Spaces Of Resistance, Survival, And Persecution, Dakota Gramour

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, thousands of Jews escaped city or ghetto life by seeking refuge within rural villages or fleeing to the forests. Numerous factors shaped individual survivor experiences within these spaces. In particular, gender, age or familial status, environmental factors like weather conditions or terrain, as well as personal politics and language or technical skills, all molded how one could act or was forced to react in these spaces. This study emphasizes the unique two-way relationships between experience and three kinds of environments found in the Białystok District: the city of Białystok, small …

Below-Deck: The Specialist Sailor In World War Ii, Gregory Falcon

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

U.S. Navy ships were made up of many unexpected jobs during World War II. Traditional war histories say little about sailors who rarely saw direct combat below active war decks but instead worked skilled jobs. Specialized sailors were often unseen as they worked below the waterline as, for example, electrician’s mates and boiler room firemen. These jobs were pivotal to keeping the ship running and allowed men to make use of their valuable time in the navy. This thesis argues that, although evolving naval culture led men to enter for various reasons, many entered to enhance their future career during …

Beirut/The Other Side Of The City: The Impact Of Visual Texture Production Of The Lebanese Postmemory Generation, 1989 - Present, Mohamed Moustafa Gameel Ebada

Theses and Dissertations

In 1989, after the Ta'if agreement, the war in Lebanon started to fade, which ended years of one of the most destructive civil conflicts in the region with no decisive winner or loser. The year also marked the birth of a new Lebanese generation who did not experience the war in person. It is a generation of postmemory, a term Maria Hirsch coined to describe the reminisces of those who did not have a personal encounter with past traumatic events. However, it was not before February 2005, when Rafic Al-Hariri's violent assassination occurred, when the postmemory generation started to question …

Victim Impact: The Manson Murders And The Rise Of The Victims’ Rights Movement, Merrill W. Steeg

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Ladies First: The Ways Women And Girls Affected Change In The Civil Rights Movement In New Orleans, Terri R. Rushing

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

New Orleans Historical is a project of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies in the History Department of the University of New Orleans. This thesis and tour presents and discusses the “Ladies First” tour which contains seven tour stops on New Orleans Historical. The tour chronicles seven women and girls who have advanced the cause of equal rights and justice in the metropolitan region of New Orleans, Louisiana between 1950 and 1975. This thesis examines the work of seven key figures: Rosa Keller, Doratha “Dodie” Simmons, Marie Ortiz, Sybil Morial, and Dorothy Mae Taylor; and participants in the Civil …

Don’T Be Myth-Taken: The Perpetuation Of Historical Myths In New Orleans Tourism, Madeleine R. Roach

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The mythology that surrounds the city of New Orleans is expansive. In a city well known for its ghosts and culture, the tourism industry utilizes stories and mythology to entice tourists to visit the city. However, the perpetuation of myths as historical facts or as actual events to an unknowing public can cause more harm than good to the city and the understanding of its past. This essay utilizes interviews with current New Orleans Tour Guides to examines how the tourism industry in New Orleans presents mythology and historical evidence to tourists. This essay examines tours and tourism materials to …

The Roosevelt School: A Tiger's Place In The History Of Public-School Integration, Kenya L. Lane

Graduate Theses

South Carolina, like many southern states, spent fifteen years avoiding complete compliance with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling to desegregate schools. Despite the statewide attempts to keep schools segregated, some South Carolina school districts slowly made strides to integrate with little resistance. By the mid 1960s, the Clover School District, even with trepidation, began to integrate its schools. These efforts to give African American students equal access often came at a cost. The process of integration often involved diminishing the value and very presence of traditionally all-black public schools.

The Roosevelt School, Clover’s only all-black …

Stories From Both Sides Of The Hedge: A History Of And Digital Exhibit For The National Hansen's Disease Museum, Laura Turner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The national leprosarium of the United States, located in Carville, Louisiana, started as the Louisiana Leper Home in 1894. Since Louisiana contained the largest endemic population in the contiguous United States of people suffering from leprosy, or Hansen’s disease as it would later be known, and maintained a successful institution dedicated to the care of such patients, the federal government purchased the leprosarium for national use in 1921. Although the national leprosarium was closed as a hospital in 1999, a small analog museum located on site preserves the history of the facility, the lives of the former patients, and tireless …

Making Earth, Making Home: Technoscientific Citizenship And Ecological Domesticity In An Age Of Limits, Emma Schroeder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the post-WWII era, concerns over Earth’s finite resources and technology’s destructive capacity shaped ideas of a global environment. This dissertation focuses on transnational grassroots social movements that attempted to find solutions to earthly vulnerability. It looks at women’s nuclear disarmament campaigns in the early 1960s, the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s, Canada’s conserver society program, and the emergence of feminist technoscientific critique and ecological activism in the early 1980s. In each case study, it shows how the ability to critique and produce technoscientific knowledge expanded women’s political identities, what I call technoscientific citizenship. Simultaneously, these groups promoted ecological …

Racial Terror Lynching In Northwest Arkansas: Recounting Of The Story Of Three Enslaved Males Lynched In 1856 In Washington County - Documentary, Obed Lamy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While Northwest Arkansas is considered as diverse and progressive today, it also shares a common history of racial violence, and yet almost unknown, with the Southern United-States. Little is being said about the slave plantations in Elkins, racial cleansing in Springdale, or public spectacle lynchings in Fayetteville. This is because white people who hold political and economic power also control how history is written and decide what is to be learned from their perspectives. Marginalized communities, especially Black people, have not always had agency to tell their own stories. The lynchings of three enslaved males, Anthony, Aaron, and Randall, in …

The Past As "Ahead": A Circular History Of Modern Chamorro Activism, Gabby Lupola

Pomona Senior Theses

This is not a traditional thesis of the Pomona College History Department. Spanning over a century from start to finish, this work tracks the history of Guam’s political status from 1898 to 2021. To support such a lengthy timeline, snapshots of key events and trends are recounted each chapter. Chapter 1 focuses on the Spanish-American War and the local struggle for acting governorship. Chapter 2 documents the impact of World War II, the Organic Act of Guam, modernization and early Chamorro activism on island. Chapter 3 depicts the evolution of late 20^th century Chamorro activism through a model of …

Whitewashed: A Look Into The Evolution Of Race Conversations In American Classrooms, Lily M. Walters

Senior Independent Study Theses

This paper seeks to follow the evolution of race conversations in the classroom through generations of people after the Civil War. My thesis is that curriculum excluded positive mentions of Black people after the Civil War until the Civil Rights Movement, when Black individuals crafted a more accurate and impartial curriculum. American curriculum’s exclusion of positive Black representation left white people unable to have positive race conversations in general. Additionally, through a case study of my family, I examine how generations of people shaped their ideas on race through conversations. The written portion of my IS begins with curriculum from …

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 …

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.