Browsing by Subject "American history"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Blackening Character, Imagining Race, and Mapping Morality: Tarring and Feathering in Nineteenth Century American Literature(2013-08-05) Trninic, MarinaThis study examines the ritual of tarring and feathering within specific American cultural contexts and literary works of the nineteenth-century to show how the discourse surrounding the actual and figurative practice functioned as part of a larger process of discursive and visual racialization. The study illustrates how the practice and discourse of blackening white bodies enforced embodiment, stigmatized imagined interiority, and divorced the victims from inalienable rights. To be tarred and feathered was to be marked as anti-social, duplicitous and even anarchic. The study examines the works of major American authors including John Trumbull, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, analyzing how their works evidence a larger national conflation of character, race, and morality. Sometimes drawing on racial imagery implicitly, and sometimes engaging in the issues of race and slavery explicitly, their works feature tarring and feathering to portray their anxieties about social coercion and victimization in the context of the ?experiment? of democracy. Trumbull?s mock-epic genre satirizes the plight of the Tory and diminishes the forms of the revolution; Cooper?s novel works as a rhetorical vehicle to prevent a perceived downfall of the republic; the short fiction of Poe exaggerates the horror of uneven and racialized power relations; and Hawthorne?s body of work ironizes the original parody of tar and feathers to expose the violent nature of democratic foundation. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach, this first, in-depth study of tarring and feathering in America reveals that the ritual is a fertile ground for understanding the multivalent social constructs of the time. Examining tarring and feathering incidents can tell scholars about the status of racial feeling, moral values (including sexual and gender norms), and economic fissures of the context in which they occur. Abjecting the body of the victim, the act rewrites the individual?s relationship to the body politic, and the performance of the ritual reveals the continuously emergent, publically sanctioned forms of belonging to the community and the nation. Moreover, examining the representation of tarring and feathering can tell scholars about an author?s relationship to the ideology of an American way.Item Heroes of the past, readers of the present, stories of the future : continuity, cultural memory, and historical revisionism in superhero comics(2014-05) Friedenthal, Andrew J.; Davis, Janet M.This dissertation is a study of cultural memory, exploring how superhero comic books, and their readers and creators, look back on and make sense of the past, as well as how they use that past in the creation of community and stories today. It is my contention that the superhero comics that exist as part of a long-standing "universe," particularly those published by DC and Marvel, are inextricably linked to a sense of cultural memory which defines both the organization of their fans and the history of their stories, and that cultural memory in comics takes the twinned forms of fandom and continuity. Comic book fandom, from its very inception, has been based around memories of past stories and recollections about favorite moments, creators, characters, etc. Because of this, as many of those fans have gone on to become creators themselves, the stories they have crafted reflect that continual obsession with the histories -- loosely termed "continuity" by creators, fans, and comic book scholars -- of these fictional universes. Often, this obsession translates into an engagement with actual events from the past. In many of these cases, as with much art and ephemera that is immersed in cultural memory, these fans-turned-creators combine their interest in looking at the history of the fictional universe with a working out of actual traumatic events. My case studies focus on superhero comic books that respond to such events, particularly World War II, the Vietnam War, and 9/11.Item The historical development of the public school system in Waxahachie, Texas : exploring a local dialect in the grammar of schooling(2010-05) Kylar, Mark Wesley; Field, Sherry L.; Coulter, Nelson; Davis, Jr., O.L.; Harrison, Louis; O'Doherty, AnnThe history of the Waxahachie public schools from 1884 to 1970 reveals not only the development of the school system itself, and the local, regional, and national trends which influenced public education, but also serves as a case study of what David Tyack and Larry Cuban describe as the grammar of schooling, the inherent and implicit rules for bringing about a “real school” as perceived by its stakeholders. The study provides insights into the effects of local concerns vis a vis the larger movements and events in American history upon the development of this particular local school system. The origins and the subsequent development of the public school system in Waxahachie, a small north-central Texas community located approximately thirty miles south of the Dallas, Texas, is the focus of this dissertation. The chronological history of the Waxahachie public school system, as an early independent school system is examined from its preceding influences, through its tumultuous inception, to its consequent periods of stability, professionalization, and growth. The study encompasses three major superintendencies, equating them to regimes by virtue of their length of tenure, and as a touchstone for depicting the societal trends with which they contended or reflected. Influences of race and religion are examined as primary and secondary animating themes. The manner in which educational philosophies as described by Watras, including Scholar Academic, Social Efficiency, and Learner-Centered, are examined in relation to the historical periods during which each superintendent held office. A detailed history is presented about each superintendent’s term of office, exploring such topics as meeting the needs of a growing school district, accounting for curricular trends and forces at the local, regional, and national level, and navigating the societal terrain in the establishment and maintenance of a “real” school.Item Manufacturing ruin(2013-05) Fassi, Anthony Joseph, III; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-"Manufacturing Ruin" argues that the most important moments in the history of the concept and consciousness of "American ruin" accompany volatile episodes of progress and decline in American manufacturing. This dissertation attends to the construction of "American ruin" in response to the rise of manufacturing in the early to mid-nineteenth century and the decline of industrial capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Americans have manufactured picturesque ruins and spectacular episodes of ruination both to conceal and reveal and to "contain" and "harness" destructive forces inherent to capitalism. In some cases, ruins have been represented in ways that conceal processes of ruination inherent to their own destruction. In other instances, episodes of destruction demonstrate that in attending to particular processes of ruination, Americans have intentionally ignored others.Item Out of many, one : Tin Pan Alley and American popular song, 1890-1920(2014-05) Mathieu, Jane Katherine; Carson, Charles, Ph. D.; Miller, Karl Hagstrom, 1968-; Buhler, James; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; O'Meara, CarolineIn the many years since the label and the origin story first emerged, a variety of scholars have used Tin Pan Alley as a means to engage with constructions of national and personal identity. Discussions have primarily focused on sheet music and industry, often discussed as aesthetically vacant products of a hegemonic culture industry. As a result, these studies have generally focused on the ways the industry reaffirmed, rejected, or capitalized on constructions of identity within and through the songs as cultural products. This dissertation builds on this understanding to account for these cultural products as music by exploring the construction, dissemination and performance of song at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, I reorient Tin Pan Alley scholarship away from its current focus on commercial products, and instead towards the people and sounds who collaborated to create the industry and its songs. I argue that song was actively assembled out of diverse musical practices including but not limited to composing, collaborating, arranging, performing, recording, listening, and consuming music. As such, these practices helped to continually form, perform, and reform Tin Pan Alley, as well as the various sounds, objects, and spaces identified with American popular song. Balancing the diverse commercial practices of the publishing and entertainment industries with the creative processes employed to create, perform, and consume these songs in various media formats, spaces, arrangements, and locations, we add another layer to the discourse of Tin Pan Alley. Ultimately, this dissertation is an intervention in the oneness of commercial popular song in the story of Tin Pan Alley, instead offering a broader, networked understanding of song that highlights the many avenues to and through song at the turn of the twentieth century. Refocusing on song rather than the discursive, product-oriented, and marginalized Alley allows a flexibility in both in scope and in view; we are able to, instead, see and hear song in moments of contact, creation, and performance.Item 'A plea for Missouri' : the American Home Missionary Society and the Civil War-era struggle for Missouri and the West(2015-05) Morse, Scott Notley; Jones, Jacqueline, 1948-; Forgie, George BChanges in Calvinist theology led its principal American denominations, the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, in the early nineteenth century to create voluntary societies in order to conduct mission work. Founded in 1826, the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS) was America’s principal domestic missionary society. It sought to spread the Gospel on the western frontier, thereby laying the foundation for an expanded, Godly American republic and the millennium foretold in the Book of Revelation. With its central location and abundant natural resources, Missouri was central to this effort. The AHMS sent missionaries to the frontier to convert in-migrants from the eastern and southern states and foreign immigrants. By so doing, the AHMS would prevent Catholicism, rationalism and enthusiastic religion – primarily the Baptists and Methodists – from taking hold. Foreign immigrants would be assimilated. They would embrace American virtues including temperance and Sabbath observance. This would be accomplished through moral suasion or, failing that, by force of law. The AHMS encouraged the in-migration of New Englanders – in its view, the exemplars of the highest possible virtue – in the hope of replicating the New England way of life in Missouri. The AHMS long sought to avoid the issue of slavery for fear of alienating Southerners. While most of its Missouri missionaries were northern, anti-slavery clergymen, they also tended to avoid the issue for fear of offending their congregants. In December 1856, pressure from northern donors forced the AHMS to begin withholding financial support from churches with slaveholding members. This led to a rupture in relations between the AHMS and its Missouri auxiliary and to the AHMS discontinuing mission work there during the late 1850s. When it returned in the early part of the Civil War, the AHMS, and its newly recruited missionaries, were overtly abolitionist. The traditional animosity in Missouri toward Congregationalism as northern and abolitionist caused the AHMS to conduct its pre-war mission work through New School Presbyterian churches. In 1861, the New School Presbyterians withdrew from the AHMS and it became a solely Congregationalist society. As the Civil War ended, the AHMS devoted considerable effort to establishing Congregationalism in Missouri. However, competition from, among others, the Methodists and Baptists, and the unwillingness of foreign immigrants to abandon their Catholicism, largely prevented long-term success.Item Substance of the sun : the cultural history of radium medicines in America(2010-08) Holmes, Robert Wendell, 1980-; Oshinsky, David M., 1944-; Hunt, Bruce J.; Kraut, Alan M.; Meikle, Jeffrey L.; Stoff, Michael B.From the moment Marie Curie announced the existence of radium, the strange new element captured the imagination of the American public. Radium, it seemed, could do anything. It gave off its own light and heat and appeared to realize the ancient alchemical dream of transmutation. It also showed promise as a medicine. The press ran with the idea that radium was a panacea that would cure everything from cancer to wife-beating. Soon it became impossible for the public to know what to believe when it came to radium and its effects on the body. Patent medicine companies exploited the murkiness surrounding ideas about radium, marketing a slew of products that claimed to harness the element’s healing and energizing powers. Meanwhile, physicians made slow, careful progress in defining the parameters of radium therapy, narrowing their focus to cancer. The popularity of radium patent medicines peaked in the 1920’s when hundreds of thousands of Americans purchased one or more of the dozens of radium products that proliferated at the time. Government regulators and members of the medical establishment sought to push these products from the market, but loopholes in the regulatory apparatus created under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 allowed many of these companies to operate freely. Two scandals—the saga of the “Radium Girls” and the death of Eben Byers, a well-known industrialist who died after drinking over 1000 bottles of a radioactive tonic called Radithor—damaged radium’s image in the 1920’s and 1930’s. By the late 1930’s, strengthened regulatory laws helped push radioactive products from the marketplace. During World War II, scientists discovered artificial isotopes that proved more effective and less expensive than radium in the treatment of disease. For decades Americans had struggled to make sense of a scientific discovery that seemed to challenge fundamental ideas about the nature of the body and its relationship to the physical world. The ambiguities surrounding the element posed a unique challenge to progressive ideals of expertise and professionalization while providing a malleable image of energy and health that a variety of commercial interests could deploy.