Dissertations / Theses: 'Popular culture – United States – History'

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Hauser, Mark. "Vaudeville, Popular Entertainment and Cultural Division in the Inland Empire, 1880-1914." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/78.

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This paper discusses the emergence of vaudeville in California’s Inland Empire region of San Bernardino and Riverside counties. It will consider the social changes underway in late nineteenth-century America and their impact on attitudes towards popular entertainment. This paper will draw on Lawrence Levine’s observations of cultural hierarchies that emerged during the late nineteenth century and shaped American understandings of culture. Entertainment of the nineteenth century will be examined for the ways it was unable to match urban trends, and contrasted with vaudeville’s appeal to a diverse urban populace. The cities of San Bernardino, Redlands and Riverside were home to a number of opera houses and theaters to serve rapidly growing communities, and a review of the performances offered in these communities and at these venues will demonstrate these shifts in popular entertainment.

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Jozajtis, Krzysztof. "Religion and film in American culture : the birth of a nation." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1501.

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This research addresses an emerging scholarship examining relations between media, religion, and culture in contemporary society. Whilst it acknowledges the value of this growing body of work, the study is based on a recognition that an overwhelming concern with the contemporary scene has resulted in a neglect of the history responsible for the conditions of the present. Given the prominence of America as both a source and an object of this scholarship, moreover, the particular national context in which the institutions and practices of the US media have developed has been taken for granted somewhat. Oriented towards these perceived lacunae, this thesis examines the interaction between religion and film as an influence upon the development of American culture in the twentieth-century. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first of these is devoted to an extended discussion of the scholarly background to the research, and argues that the historical dimension of the interrelationship between religion and film in America is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received. In particular, it stresses the fundamental importance of religion within the discourse of national identity in the United States, and posits the notion of a non-denominational American civil religion as a useful theoretical tool with which to examine Hollywood as a distinctively 'American' form of cinema. Part Two develops this position through a case study of The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, and one of the most famous films of all time. Discussing the picture as a response to a crisis in American Protestantism, the study argues that the race controversy prompted by its Southern viewpoint was, to some extent, a function of Griffith's ambitions to revive the traditional religious bases of U.S. national identity via the medium of film. Furthermore, it suggests that the impact of Birth helped enact a broader transformation of American culture, wherein the cinema became instrumental in sustaining the belief that the United States was a nation uniquely favoured by Providence.

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Basham, Cortney S. "Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth and the Rise of Popular Premillennialism in the 1970s." TopSCHOLAR®, 2012. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1205.

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How people think about the end of the world greatly affects how they live in the present. This thesis examines how popular American thought about “the end of the world” has been greatly affected by Hal Lindsey’s 1970 popular prophecy book The Late, Great Planet Earth. LGPE sold more copies than any other non-fiction book in the 1970s and greatly aided the mainstreaming of “end-times” ideas like the Antichrist, nuclear holocaust, the Rapture, and various other concepts connected with popular end-times thought. These ideas stem from a specific strain of late-nineteenth century Biblical interpretation known as dispensational premillennialism, which has manifested in various schools of premillennial thought over the last 150 years. However, Lindsey translated this complicated system into modern language and connected it with contemporary geopolitics in powerful ways which helped make LGPE incredibly popular and influential in the 1970s and beyond. This paper includes an introduction to some essential concepts and terms related to popular premillennialism followed by a brief history of popular prophecy in America. The second half of this thesis examines the social, religious, and political climate of the 1970s and how Lindsey’s success connects to the culture of the Seventies, specifically conservative reactions to the various social movements of the 1960s. The last major section discusses Lindsey’s malleable theology and the power of interpreting the Bible “literally.” In the 1970s, conservative theologians and denominations won the battle to define certain concepts within Christianity including terms like “literal,” “inerrant,” and related terms, and Lindsey’s treatment of “the end times” reflects these definitions and how they affect Biblical interpretation. Finally, the conclusion fleshes out the appeal of popular premillennialism in the 1970s and into the present day.

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Straw, Will 1954. "Popular music as cultural commodity : the American recorded music industries 1976-1985." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39241.

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This dissertation is an analysis of historical change within those cultural industries involved in the production and dissemination of popular music. Through an analysis of the relationship between the recording and radio industries within the United States, during the period 1976-1985, the manner in which crises within these industries arise and are resolved is traced. The emergence of such musical forms as "disco" and "New Wave", and the manner in which these forms have been integrated within the functioning of the music-related industries, are central concerns of the dissertation. At the same time, more general theoretical hypotheses concerning the role played by taste in the creation of audiences for different categories of popular music are elaborated and employed within the study of specific musical genres.

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Conway, Jordan A. "Living in a Gangsta’s Paradise: Dr. C. DeLores Tucker’s Crusade Against Gansta Rap Music in the 1990s." VCU Scholars Compass, 2015. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/3812.

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This project examines Dr. C. DeLores Tucker’s efforts to abolish the production and distribution of gangsta rap to the American youth. Though her efforts were courageous and daring, they were not sufficient. The thesis will trace Tucker’s crusade beginning in 1992 through the end of the 1990s. It brings together several themes in post-World War II American history, such as the issues of race, gender, popular culture, economics, and the role of government. The first chapter thematically explores Tucker’s crusade, detailing her methodology and highlighting pivotal events throughout the movement. The second chapter discusses how opposition from rap artists, and the music industry, media coverage of Tucker and her followers, and resistance from members of Congress contributed to the failure of her endeavor.

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McMillan, Rachel K. "POPULAR MEDIA AND SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE: INTERPRETING RECENT HISTORICAL TRENDS IN INTERMARRIAGE." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/573.

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This thesis is about measuring social acceptance of the American public on the increasing trend of intermarriage in the United States. It outlines U.S. Census data in the areas of population, educational attainment, regional data, and marriage data. It analyzes popular and influential media from 1960 to 2011 including: marriage of Guy Smith and Peggy Rusk, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Star Trek, Jungle Fever, The Joy Luck Club, and modern television shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, Modern Family, and New Girl.

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Owen, Benedict Novotny. "Cartoon Conceptualism: Periodical Comics and Modernism in the United States." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494086092509444.

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Broxson, Gene Marshall. "A comprehensive examination of the precode horror comic books of the 1950's." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2003. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2429.

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Johnson, Caroline E. ""Archie's Girls?" Betty, Veronica, and the Rise of American Youth Culture, 1941-1950." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1461937477.

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Lua, Angel Granillo. "HISTORY THAT HEMORRHAGES: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE CROSSING, SIMULACRA, AND THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2018. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/636.

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Recollecting the history of the United States, which is inextricably entangled with westward expansionism (Manifest Destiny) and the construction of borders, is also a complex and troubling reexamination of the American identity itself. This is evident in critical perspectives that analyze our violent past and the narratives that continue to govern not only contemporary culture but also the academic sphere as Native scholars have been proposing over the last twenty years. However, what remains vital to this conversation is how to better include the narratives and voices from both native peoples and Mexicans—especially in the southwest borderlands—which also counteract the dominant narratives mentioned above. However, these alternate narratives can be affirmed and authorized as crucial histories by utilizing Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and at the same time, act as a form of resistance. By reevaluating three crucial moments in The Crossing, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and employing a heuristic I will call the rhetoric of violence, I hope to highlight the importance of such marginalized narratives and the voices that occupy them in American history.

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Garcia, Maria E. "Governing Gambling in the United States." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2010. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/3.

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The role risk taking has played in American history has helped shape current legislation concerning gambling. This thesis attempts to explain the discrepancies in legislation regarding distinct forms of gambling. While casinos are heavily regulated by state and federal laws, most statutes dealing with lotteries strive to regulate the activities of other parties instead of those of the lottery institutions. Incidentally, lotteries are the only form of gambling completely managed by the government. It can be inferred that the United States government is more concerned with people exploiting gambling than with the actual practice of wagering. In an effort to more fully understand the gambling debate, whether it should be allowed or banned, I examined different types of sources. Historical sources demonstrate how ingrained in American culture risk taking, the core of gambling, has been since the formation of this nation. Sources dealing with the economic implications of gambling were also studied. Additionally, sources dealings with the political and legal aspects of gambling were essential for this thesis. Legislature has tried to reconcile distinct problems associated with gambling, including corruption. For this reason sports gambling scandals and Mafia connections to gambling have also been examined. The American government has created much needed legislature to address different concerns relating to gambling. It is apparent that statutes will continue to be passed to help regulate the gambling industry. A possible consideration is the legalization of sports wagering to better regulate that sector of the industry.

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Cashion, Katherine. "The Icon Formation of Ruby Bridges Within Hegemonic Memory of the Civil Rights Movement." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1407.

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In 1960, when Ruby Bridges was six-years-old, she desegregated the formerly all white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. This thesis traces her formation as a Civil Rights icon and how her icon narratives are influenced by, perpetuate, or challenge hegemonic memory of the Civil Rights Movement. The hegemonic narrative situates the Civil Rights Movement as a triumphant moment of the past, and is based upon the belief that it abolished institutionalized racism, leaving us in a world where lingering prejudice is the result of the failings of individuals. Analysis of narratives about Ruby Bridges by Norman Rockwell, Robert Coles, and Bridges herself show that there is a consistent shift over time in which the icon narratives conform to and reinforce the hegemonic narrative. These icon narratives situate Bridges’ story as a historical account of the past that teaches lessons of how to combat instances of interpersonal racism through kindness and tolerance, and obscures Bridges’ lived experience. These reductive stories demonstrate just how powerful the hegemonic narrative is and create a comforting morality tale that pervades dominant culture and prevents us from understanding and finding ways to combat the institutionalized racism and inequality that still exists within the United States.

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Miller, Heather L. "Under the Shadow of the Awful Gallows-Tree: The Murder Trials of Thomas Dula and Ann Melton as a Case Study in Gender and Power in Reconstruction Era Western North Carolina." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2518.

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This is a micro-history that explores everyday life on a small scale by tracing the common, if elusive lives of Thomas Dula, Ann Melton, and Laura Foster, and the communities they lived in, to explore the culture in which they lived—and died. Reactions to the murder unleashed an outpouring of discourse embedded in broader, national debates concerning gender roles. The dominant cultural theme that emerged from the murder trials as reflected in middle-class newspapers maintained that true women did not kill and real men acted as gentlemen and defenders of women’s honor. The project mines a wealth of primary source material: court documents, population censuses, and newspapers. By examining the discourse surrounding Tom Dula’s execution and Ann Melton’s acquittal for the murder of Laura Foster it illuminates the murder narrative as a public forum for discussing gender roles and power in 1860s America.

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Kube, Sven. "Born in the U.S.A. / Made in the G.D.R.: Anglo-American Popular Music and the Westernization of a Communist Record Market." FIU Digital Commons, 2018. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3656.

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Scholars from various disciplines have demonstrated that popular culture factored significantly in Cold War contestation. As a pervasive form of cultural content and unifying medium for baby boomers worldwide, pop music played an important part in the power struggle between the era’s two adversarial camps. Historical studies of the past thirty years have identified initiatives of cultural diplomacy, from radio broadcasting to live concert tours, as key to disseminating Western music in Eastern Bloc societies. This project explains how cultural commerce across the divide of the Iron Curtain familiarized millions of music fans in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with popular sounds from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western democracies. Detailing a process that affected all Bloc states in similar ways, it seeks to enrich the scholarly discourse on the role of pop culture in the twentieth century’s defining ideological conflict. Through analysis of previously unavailable or inaccessible sources, the dissertation reconstructs the economic development of a communist culture industry and measures the commercial significance of Western commodities in one Eastern Bloc marketplace. Drawing on untapped archival files, it traces the evolution of Deutsche Schallplatten (German Records) from a small private firm into a flagship enterprise on the GDR’s cultural circuit. It illuminates how dependency on technology and resources from capitalist countries prompted East Germany’s managers to prioritize the westward export of classical recordings for the purpose of earning hard currencies. Based on oral histories of contemporary witnesses, it documents how the Amiga label through the parent company’s business ties to capitalist partners advanced the import of Western jazz, blues, rock, pop, and dance music to exhaust the purchasing power of the home audience. Empirically evaluating formerly classified production data for a total of 143 million records, it reveals how the state-owned monopolist engineered a de facto takeover of the domestic marketplace by American, British, and West German performers to achieve high profitability. The dissertation argues that intensifying Westernization of its walled-in music market exemplified the GDR’s decision to concede the Cold War battle over cultural preferences and political loyalties of its citizens out of economic necessity.

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Jones, Claire. "An Intersectional Feminist Perspective of Emmett Till in Young Adult Literature." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2018. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3413.

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Emmett Till’s murder inspired many novelists, poets, and artists. Recently, Till has inspired several feminist young adult novelists who are introducing his case in an intersectional way to a new generation of readers. The works that I have studied are A Wreath for Emmett Till (2003) by Marilyn Nelson, The Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010) by Suzanne Collins, and Midnight without a Moon (2017) by Linda Jackson. By examining how the authors employ a feminist perspective, readers can understand how they are striving for a more inclusive, intersectional feminist movement. This is significant because the publishing industry, specifically for Young Adult Literature, is not diverse. These works, while often overlooked by critics, may be the first exposure most young readers have to Emmett Till. Each of these novels could be used to teach readers not only about Till’s case, but also about current events to help foster a multicultural consciousness.

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Purtscher, Lina. "An American Myth in the (Re)Making: The Timeless Fantasy Appeal of 'The King and I'." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2018. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1151.

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It is now well-known that The King and I has little claim to truth. Recent research has exposed the inaccuracy of the “biographical” works on which the musical is based: Anna Leonowens invented many things about her personal background and experiences. Much of her life, then, is a contrived fantasy. Yet her life of fantasy has been resurrected in countless adaptations, including the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and its 2015 revival production, that ceaselessly draw audiences. The fascination of American audiences with Anna’s tale lies their belief in the timeless American ideals that her fantasy employs: those of freedom and equality, which undergird such myths as American exceptionalism and American multiculturalism. The appeal of this cultural fantasy is illuminated by examining the history of the Cold War era in which The King and I was created, as well as the politics of President Trump that define recent years and influence the creation and reception of the revival show (and its 2016-2018 national tour). America today is occupied by the same conflicting desires for integration/internationalism and isolationism of bygone times; today, the idea of a superior America is still upheld by a fear of the Other. Examining how the visual elements, songs, and performances of the original and revival musicals both reinforce and undermine the fantasy of cultural superiority will reveal how Americans continue to fall under the spell of fantasy, and how a connection to the past sheds light on what it means to be an American today.

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Lighty, Shaun Chandler. "The Fall and Rise of Lew Wallace: Gaining Legitimacy Through Popular Culture." Connect to this document online, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1130790468.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2005.
Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], ii, 93 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-93).

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Salem, Elizabeth Ann. "Gendered Bodies and Nervous Minds: Creating Addiction in America, 1770-1910." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1465292474.

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Avila, William Richard. "Representations of HIV/AIDS in Popular American Comic Books, 1981-1996." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1616593578624264.

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Scannell, John School of Media Film &amp Theatre UNSW. "James Brown: apprehending a minor temporality." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Media, Film and Theatre, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/26955.

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This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style invented by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an apprehension of a minor temporality or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a minor culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the literature of the stream of consciousness style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze???s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time the movement-image to a more direct experience of the temporal the time-image, and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived failure of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a minor temporality, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, common sense, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of minorities into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the post-soul eschewing of a narratively driven, common sense view of historical time.

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Guffey, Ensley F. "Fantastic Histories: War and American Memory in Selected Works of Joss Whedon." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2014. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2333.

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This thesis used theories of historical memory studies to examine the ways in which the American writer/director/showrunner Joss Whedon uses American memories, particularly those associated with American experiences in the Civil War and World War II, in his works of fictional, genre television and film. Emphasis was placed on the manner in which Whedon engages in the construction of popular memory, how his work challenges and/or reinforces existing memory narratives, and how Whedon uses historical memories to comment on and influence political, social, and cultural issues in the present. This investigation shows how at least certain productions of American popular culture are increasingly dominant forces in the construction of public memory. The major theoretical underpinnings of this examination are provided by the works of John Bodnar, Richard Slotkin, and Jeanine Basinger.

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Tyson, Elizabeth P. "Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Subversive Storytelling from the Bunchgrass Edge of the World." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/467.

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Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming short story collections, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, tell regional stories that push against the myths surrounding the American West. Elements of Naturalism in her work reverse the paradigm of man’s dominance over the frontier. The cyclical nature of time in her stories shows the unfulfilling nature of nostalgia. She uses folk storytelling techniques to take an insider’s perspective and to utilize the subversive nature of dark humor.

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Allen, Joseph J. "The retina blues : invisibility and cultural visibility." Virtual Press, 1995. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/941584.

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My text formulates a theory of postmodern invisibility while examining the condition of cultural invisibility. As I track strategies of position and space in contemporary American literature and music, I propose a tactic for attaining cultural visibility that draws from Jean Baudrillard's notion of the-more-visible-than-the-visible, postmodern aesthetics and the cultural metaphor of the optics of the vision system.In our technoculture, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and his narrator's choice of an invisible identity, though wonderfully evocative, is no longer a viable solution to the dilemma of cultural invisibility. Later contemporary American fiction, especially Don DeLillo's White Noise, offers a strategy that oscillates between invisibility and visibility and is ineffective in curing cultural invisibility. My project centers on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and her representation of a storytelling ceremony that can cure the problem of cultural invisibility. Silko proposes a narrative mode capable of representing and accomplishing cultural work by reversing the flow of culture. Nathaniel Mackey's jazz-inspired fiction, Dibot Baghostus's Run (1993), expands Silko's magical blueprint by employing a culturally dense, hyper-visible narrative mode.Like Silko and Mackey, cultural theorist Trinh Minh-ha, anthropologist Michael Taussig, and sociologist Stephen Pfohl employ the more-visible-than-the-visible composition strategy of collage. Their writings, as well as the aesthetic of hiphop, serve as a model for my text because in collage, there is room for disorientation, noise, local elements, plurality, recomposition, hyper-visibility, and the sampling of crosscultural artifacts and debris. Experiencing a montage can shock sensory perceptions into novel paradigms of representation and, as Silko and Mackey hope, bring about a meaningful cultural visibility.For Minh-ha, Silko, and Mackey, stories and other cultural artifacts circulate freely like gifts. The pleasure is in transmitting, circulating, and retransmitting the story: the pleasure of making the story more-than-visible. Then the story functions, as Minh-ha states, "as a cure and a protection [that] is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical." While my text strives to represent several of these elements, my theory of postmodern invisibility reflects and transmits a narrative mode that is capable of curing the problem of cultural invisibility.
Department of English

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Koneval, Joni L. "A "Peculiar Offence": Legal, Popular, and Gendered Perceptions of Rape in the Early American Republic, 1790-1850." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1339013728.

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Louckx, Audrey. "Empowering voices: testimonial literature and social justice in contemporary American culture." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209257.

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Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented.

The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Rodeheaver, Misty D. "An analysis of the shifts in cultural flows between the United States and Germany, 1890-1929." Morgantown, W. Va. : [West Virginia University Libraries], 2005. https://etd.wvu.edu/etd/controller.jsp?moduleName=documentdata&jsp%5FetdId=3988.

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Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2005.
Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 90 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-87).

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Goldberger, Stephanie. "Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles: Strengthening Their Ethnic Identity Through Chivas USA." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/307.

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A large Mexican-American population already exists in Los Angeles and, with each generation, it continues to rise. This Mexican-American community has maintained its connection to its heritage by playing and watching soccer, Mexico’s top watched sport. In this thesis, I analyze how Major League Soccer's Chivas USA serves as an outlet through which many Mexicans in Los Angeles have developed their ethnic identities. Since the early twentieth century, Mexicans in Los Angeles have created separate residential communities and sports organizations to strengthen their connections with one another. To appeal to Mexican-Americans, Chivas USA has branded itself closely to its sister team Chivas Guadalajara of Mexico. I explore how Chivas USA's Mexican-American fans have responded to the team's arrival in Los Angeles by forming three different supporter groups — Legion 1908, Union Ultras, and Black Army 1850. By interviewing members of the Union Ultras and Black Army 1850, I learned their beliefs towards a range of issues, including: why they support Chivas USA rather than the Los Angeles Galaxy and how they view the poor representation of Mexican-American players on the United States National Soccer Team. As I conclude, these supporter groups have increased in number and diversity as Chivas USA has grown in popularity. To increase its Mexican-American fan base and to sustain professional soccer in Los Angeles, Chivas USA should relocate to a new stadium for the Major League Soccer's 2013 season and consider rebranding its name to "Chivas Los Angeles."

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Pagano, Jennifer Hoolhorst. "The evolution of Sunset Magazine's cooking department: The accommodation of men's and women's cooking in the 1930s." Scholarly Commons, 2019. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/3575.

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The Western regional magazine Sunset has been published under a series of owners and publishers since 1898. In 1928, Sunset was purchased by Lawrence Lane, a Midwestern magazine executive who transformed it from a failing turn-of-the-century, general interest publication about the West, into a successful magazine about living in the West for the Western middle-class. Sunset had always been a magazine for men and women, and one that appealed to both male and female intellectuals at the time Lane purchased it. Lane and his editors attempted to interject more rigid middle-class ideals into a magazine that had espoused ideas that were progressive and less structured. Lane's new strategy to compartmentalize Sunset's content into its four categories—gardening, the home, cooking, and travel—resulted in a magazine that was conventionally gendered. Tension due to this shift played out in the publication's new cooking department. This thesis traces the development of Sunset's cooking department between 1928 and 1938 under the direction of its creator and founding editor Genevieve Callahan through the examination and analysis of Sunset cooking features and oral histories. The original department, structured to model a middle-class domestic ideology, did not accommodate all of Sunset's readers. The Western intellectualism of pre-Lane readers and their tendency to be less bound by conventional gender roles in the kitchen carried over into Sunset's cooking department via reader recipe contributions. These Western cooks included men and women whose foodways deviated from that of the typical middle-class housewife. Callahan experimented throughout the cooking department's first decade by shifting its editorial framework and softening her home economics rigidity to create a department that was inclusive of women and men who cooked both inside and outside the kitchen. The changes made to the department over that decade illustrate how editorial experimentation reconciled a new middle-class-oriented cooking department to accommodate Western cooks less apt to model traditional gender roles.

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Remse, Christian. "Vodou and the U.S. Counterculture." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1368710585.

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Haynes-Clark, Jennifer Lynn. "American Belly Dance and the Invention of the New Exotic: Orientalism, Feminism, and Popular Culture." PDXScholar, 2010. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/20.

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Belly dance classes have become increasingly popular in recent decades in the United States. Many of the predominantly white, middle-class American women who belly dance proclaim that it is a source of feminist identity and empowerment that brings deeper meaning to their lives. American practitioners of this art form commonly explain that it originated from ritual-based dances of ancient Middle Eastern cultures and regard their participation as a link in a continuous lineage of female dancers. In contrast to the stigmatization and marginalization of public dance performers in the Middle East today, the favorable meaning that American dancers attribute to belly dance may indicate an imagined history of this dance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the West Coast of the United States and Morocco in 2008-2009, I explore American belly dance utilizing theoretical contributions from feminism, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and postmodernism. I argue that an anthropological investigation of American belly dance reveals that its imagery and concepts draw from a larger discourse of Orientalism, connected to a colonial legacy that defines West against East, a process of othering that continues to inform global politics and perpetuates cultural imperialism. But the creative identity construction that American women explore through belly dance is a multi-layered and complex process. I disrupt the binary assumptions of Orientalist thinking, highlighting the heterogeneity and dynamic quality of this dance community and exploring emergent types of American belly dance. Rather than pretending to be the exotic Other, American belly dancers are inventing a new exotic Self. This cultural anthropological study contributes to a greater understanding of identity and society by demonstrating ways that American belly dancers act as agents, creatively and strategically utilizing discursive motifs to accomplish social and personal goals.

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Sullivan, Rebecca. "Revolution in the convent : women religious and American popular culture, 1950-1971." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0020/NQ55383.pdf.

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Stepanek, Ellyn M. "Pop-culture artifacts." Cleveland, Ohio : Cleveland State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1209741511.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Cleveland State University, 2008.
Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 11, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-44). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center. Also available in print.

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Huck, Jennifer E. "Poisoned Poppies: Popular Images of the Witch in the United States." Connect to this document online, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1114021857.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2005.
Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [7], 53 p. : ill. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-53).

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Turner-Reed, Laura. "'Gimme That Ole Time Religion': Traditionalism, Progressivism and Popular Media." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2002. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3202/.

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This thesis examines the role of Christianity in contemporary American culture using 1990s popular media as cultural artifacts. Building on theories of ideological analysis and hegemony, this project uncovers a balance between progressive and traditionalist ideologies in American culture with progressive ideologies most often superficially acknowledged and incorporated into dominant traditionalist Christian ideologies through hegemonic negotiation. An analysis of the popular Hollywood films The Last Temptation of Christ, Leap of Faith, Michael, City of Angels, Dogma and Keeping the Faith, illustrates this process by addressing Christian dominance in multicultural America, a backlash against feminism constructed through patriarchal and “family values” ideologies, and an integration of popular culture and traditionalist Christianity.

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Paskvan, Liam Joseph. "Charleston's Artisans and their Tea Parties: Popular Action and Empowerment in the Colonial South's Largest Seaport, 1773-1774." W&M ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626514.

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Johnson, Alfred B. "Fascination machine : a study of pop music, mass mediation, and cultural iconography." Virtual Press, 1998. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1185429.

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The mediation of popular musicians in the twentieth century results in the construction of cultural formations-mass mediated pop musician icons-that are, to various degrees, weighted down by the ideologies and concerns of those who receive them as mediated texts. In passing judgment on these cultural icons, the public engages in a massive act of reading, and in the process the icons become sites of personal and cultural signification. This study examines the nature of signification in and through mass mediated popular music icons by exploring the processes by which popular music icons are produced, circulated, and read as texts; and it examines, when appropriate, the significant content of these icons.

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Cook, Elizabeth. "Art, Mystery, and Occupation: Building Culture in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, Virginia." W&M ScholarWorks, 2010. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626629.

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Hatley, Aaron Robertson. "Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467285.

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“Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942” is an interdisciplinary cultural history combining close analyses of print and broadcast media, music and dance, technology, and built environments to argue that Henry Ford, one of the most popular modernizers in American history, actually espoused and popularized a personal philosophy that was distinctly antimodern. “Tin Lizzie Dreams” shows how Henry Ford’s cultural projects, most often discussed as a side item or supplement to his career as an automaker and industrialist, were in fact indicative of an essential antipathy and even resistance toward the modernity he was helping to create through the rise of the Ford Motor Company and Model T. With projects such as the renovation of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and the practice of holding weekly “old fashioned dances” in Dearborn, Ford created a working antimodern philosophy related to that which T.J. Jackson Lears first traced among East Coast elites at the turn of the twentieth century. Ford then brought his anti-intellectual slant on antimodernism to a mass audience with the creation of the popular Edison Institute museum and Greenfield Village, opened in 1929, and the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio show, which reached 10 million listeners a week at the height of its 1934-1942 broadcast run. The wider argument of “Tin Lizzie Dreams” is that antimodernism, as an American cultural phenomenon, was not only the purview of Gilded Age elites but also enjoyed broad popular appeal until the outbreak of World War II.
American Studies

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Thomas, Sarah E. "Community and Culture: Material Life in Shenandoah County, Virginia, 1750-1850." W&M ScholarWorks, 2018. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1530192713.

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This dissertation explores material life in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia from 1750 to 1850 through extant objects and those found in the documentary record. In the process, it highlights diverse processes of community formation that took place among artisans in Shenandoah County. This work provides three different perspectives on the processes of community formation in Shenandoah County, focusing on the impermanent buildings of early settlers, the growth of permanence at an ironworking community at Redwell Furnace and Pine Forge, and cultural markers in the furniture and material life of artisans Godfrey Wilkin and Johannes Spitler. The project brings together ideas about the development of a community with its own distinct regional culture by exploring the material life of Shenandoah County’s residents. There was a transition from distinct ethnicities to more homogenous regionalism that occurred from the earliest settlements beginning in the 1730s to generations later in the 1850s with a growth of a regional culture distinctive to the Shenandoah Valley. A major contribution of this work is that people, not their buildings or objects, have an active voice in a rich and detailed history of material life. Objects, buildings, and landscape, both extant and long gone, allow historians to explore the everyday life of people that have often been overlooked and previously inaccessible. This dissertation thus provides a snapshot of the varied material life of a community of artisans and consumers in Virginia’s northern Shenandoah Valley.

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Lee, Sang-Dawn. "Big brother, little brother : the American influence on Korean culture in the Lyndon B. Johnson years /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3008378.

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Scharff, Virginia Joy. "Reinventing the wheel: American women and the automobile in the early car culture." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184279.

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This dissertation examines the interplay between gender ideology, women's actions, and automotive technology in the United States from the beginning of the automotive era through the 1920's. Looking at cultural ideology as a strong yet fragmented and malleable historical force, I have analyzed the effect of popular conceptions of masculinity and femininity on the design, marketing, and use of automobiles. At the same time, I have attempted to show how motorcars, often employed as vehicles of social ideals, promoted some reinterpretation of men's and women's proper roles and places. The auto indeed served as a focus for discourse about the contingent relation between social and political emancipation. While some observers expected the automobile to liberate women from domesticity and subordination, others insisted on the congruence between automobility and domestic life. Though some women would use cars as tools of social or political nonconformity, the auto ultimately transformed and extended women's spatial and temporal province, while preserving the home as the ideal hub of women's activities. Still, the car culture revision of gender ideology had profound consequences for the way the private family car would emerge as a primary transportation mode, facilitating new manners and morals, new commercial and political possibilities, and a revolution in urban development.

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David, James Corbett. "Dunmore's new world: Political culture in the British Empire, 1745--1796." W&M ScholarWorks, 2010. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623561.

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Despite his participation in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, eventually became royal governor of New York (1770-1771), Virginia (17711783), and the Bahama Islands (1787-1796). His life in the British Empire exposed him to an extraordinary range of political experience, including border disputes, land speculation, frontier warfare and diplomacy, sexual scandal, slave emancipation, naval combat, loyalist advocacy, Amerindian slavery, and trans-imperial filibusters, to say nothing of his proximity to the Haitian Revolution or his role in the defense of the British West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Quick to break with convention on behalf of the system that ensured his privilege, Dunmore was an usually transgressive imperialist whose career can be used to explore the boundaries of what was possible in the political cultures of the Anglo-Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century.;Remarkably, Lord Dunmore has not been the subject of a book-length study in more than seventy years. With a few exceptions (the work of African American historians notable among them), modern scholars have dismissed him as a greedy incompetent. While challenging this characterization, the dissertation makes several arguments about the weakness of royal authority in pre-Revolutionary New York and Virginia, the prominent and problematic role of the land grant as a mechanism of political consent, the importance of Dunmore's proclamation of emancipation, and the endurance of British ambition in North America after 1783. It seeks to make a methodological contribution as well. By positioning Dunmore as the epicenter of a web of interrelations, one reflected in a variety of historical texts and involving people at all levels of the imperial social structure, the dissertation suffuses a host of elements and actors within a single biographical narrative. This integrated approach can serve to counter the excessive compartmentalization that has marked some academic history in recent decades.

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Woodworth, Elizabeth Deloris. "Baseball and American culture: The mythology, the metaphor and the language." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/819.

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Hall, Karen J. "War games and imperial postures: Spectacles of combat in United States popular culture, 1942--2001." Related Electronic Resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.

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Moyer, Paul Benjamin. "A Riot of Devils: Indian Imagery and Popular Protest in the Northeastern Backcountry, 1760-1845." W&M ScholarWorks, 1994. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625915.

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McCleskey, Nathaniel Turk. "Across the first divide: Frontiers of settlement and culture in Augusta County, Virginia, 1738-1770." W&M ScholarWorks, 1990. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623794.

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This is a history of a frontier county in late colonial Virginia. Augusta County was created in 1738 and subdivided for the first time in 1770. During the intervening years it encompassed most of Virginia's claims to land west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.;As drawn by Virginians, the borders of Augusta County simultaneously encompassed two types of frontiers: a frontier of settlement on which white immigrants created a new society, and a frontier of culture in which those settlers interacted with a variety of Indians. This study examines both types of frontier experiences.;On the settlement frontier, white immigrants rapidly created a deferential and hierarchical society identical in its major features to contemporary counties throughout colonial Virginia. The aspects of white society examined by this dissertation include landholding, control of labor, religious diversity, and resistance to magisterial authority.;In the cultural frontier, Indian-white relations included routinely peaceful contacts as well as occasional violent outbursts. Cherokees responded to white expansion primarily with diplomacy and accommodation, while the tribes of the upper Ohio River Valley chose more militant resistance.;For contemporary whites and Indians, the complex frontier that was colonial Augusta County seemed at times to offer great rewards. Red or white, individual successes in realizing those rewards varied widely, depending partly on chance and larger historical events beyond local control. One constant continually influenced both destinies--the form and function of white society. That society, simultaneously conservative and dynamic, supported the expansion of colonial Virginia into the North American interior.

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Rhodes, Molly Rae. "Doctoring culture : literary intellectuals, psychology and mass culture in the twentieth-century United States /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9809139.

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Chin, Carol Chuan-loh. "Power, culture, and national identity : the United States, China, and Japan, 1895-1920 /." The Ohio State University, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486399160104784.

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Montijo, Virginia L. "Reprinting Culture: Book Publishing in the Early Republic." W&M ScholarWorks, 2001. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626318.

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Breton, Douglas. ""By the Dear, Immortal Memory of Washington"/The Baptists, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." W&M ScholarWorks, 2018. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1550153829.

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"By the Dear, Immortal Memory of Washington" Americans have long used the Founding Fathers as symbols of patriotism, invoking their names and using their images whenever they wish to demonstrate that a particular way of thinking or acting is true to American ideals. The vague patriotic image of the founders tends to eclipse their actual character, allowing diverse and competing movements to all use them. This has been especially true of George Washington, who long enjoyed a preeminent and almost mythic status among the founders. During the 1860s, both secessionists and unionists claimed him as their own in order to show that America's chief founder would have supported them. Politicians freely tossed his name about in their speeches, and ordinary citizens in the North and South wrote about carrying forth his legacy once the Civil War began. For this reason, Washington's symbolic status is a significant but frequently ignored factor in understanding American thought at the time of the Civil War. The Baptists, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Virginia Throughout Virginia's colonial existence, the only established church was the Church of England. By law, all Virginians had to be baptized into it and had to pay taxes to maintain it. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, the colony had acquired a sizeable population of Protestant dissenters. While they disliked the restrictions that the government had placed on their faith, most were content to submit to the law in order to enjoy the benefits of toleration. The Baptists, however, resolutely refused to submit to any law which attempted to control their "God-given" rights to preach and assemble as they felt proper. Rather than moving to the margins of society, the Baptists repeatedly engaged with the Anglican-dominated culture around them, seeking to transform society and bring it more in line with the principles they held sacred. Foremost among these was the conviction that no sincere faith could exist if church membership was compulsory. Throughout the Revolutionary era, the Baptists led the fight for religious freedom, bringing about a complete separation of church and state.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Popular culture – United States – History'

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