American Studies
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Item Roger Williams Park: Providence, Rhode Island's Response to the American Urban Parks Movement, 1868-1892(1988) Barbeau, Laura Jo; Caughry, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)As a result of industrialization and growth, early nineteenth century urbanites began to lose accessible natural environments. Concern among the middle classes and social elite gave birth to the Rural Cemetery Movement in 1831, which spurred the creation of New York's Central Park in 1858. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, it was the nation's first example of what became t he Urban Parks Movement. The movement embraced a new landscape aesthetic and philosophy focusing on man's relation to nature and the moral and social benefits of this relationship. Vital to this framework was a belief in the park's ability to improve the social behavior and artistic sensitivities of the lower and working classes. This case study examines how Providence, Rhode Island experienced the Urban Parks Movement from 1868 to 1892. During a three-phase process of implementation , conflict arose over issues of moral improvement, civic boosterism, and real estate speculation. After public debate concerning its location, Providence's first substantial public park, Roger Williams Park, was officially approved by the city government in 1872. Six years later the park was designed by Horace Cleveland in accordance with the landscape aesthetic of the Urban Parks Movement. Cleveland was an associate of Olmsted and one of the nation's few noteworthy nineteenth century landscape architects. This study has utilized primary sources such as mayoral correspondence , public addresses , annual reports, real estate deeds, and plot maps to trace Providence's park-making process. My study of Roger Williams Park concludes in 1892 with the completion of Cleveland's plan and the addition of three hundred acres to the park. This thesis shows how the development of an urban park is the product of particular social and cultural forces.Item Marguerite Higgins: Journalist 1920-1966(1983) Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney; Lounsbury, Myron O.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the journalistic c areer of Marguerite Higgins from 1940 to 1966, to analyze her notions of news and news writing and of the duties of a journalist, and to assess her contributions to the field of American journalism. Marguerite Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for international reporting. Her award recognized her war correspondence from Korea, where she firmly established the acceptance of women covering the news from the battlefield. Higgins contributed to mid-twentieth century journalism in signficant ways: she wrote hundred of articles for newspapers and periodicals over the twenty-five years of her career. Her work ranged from cub reporting on the Vallejo (California) Times-Herald, to a twenty-one year career with the New York Herald Tribune, to the rank of syndicated columnist with the Newsday Syndicate in the early Sixties. A graduate of the University of California at Berke ley and of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 1942, Higgins demonstrated that a woman could handle the professional demands and responsibilities of fast-paced and often danger-filled journalism. In addition to her front-page newspaper stories, Higgins described events of the times in scores of periodicals and in a number of books that include War in Korea: Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (1951); News Is a Singular Thing (1955); Red Plush and Black Bread (1956); and Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965). In addition in 1962, she wrote a juvenile, Jessie Benton Fremont, and with Peter Lisagor, in 1963, described experiences of some State Department representatives in a collection called Overtime in Heaven: Tales of the Foreign Service.Item Lucy Stone: Speaking out for Equality(1995) Kerr, Andrea Moore; Diner, Hasia; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation attempts a cultural, political, and traditional biography of the abolitionist and feminist leader, Lucy Stone, (1818-1893). It also offers a major revision of nineteenth-century historians' treatment of the schism that occurred immediately after the Civil War in the woman suffrage movement. The issue that divided Stone from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was whether woman suffragists should work to prevent passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Stone led the majority of suffragists in supporting the enfranchisement of freedmen; Stanton and Anthony actively campaigned to defeat black suffrage. The schism that resulted lasted for more than twenty years. During this time, Stone forged the American Woman Suffrage Association into an effective, politically savvy lobbying machine. Its work and its methods formed the model for the organization that would eventually attain woman suffrage in 1920. The dissertation also focuses on Stone's private life, seeing in it both the extraordinary triumph of a singular "public" woman over the restrictions of her time and place, and the desperate personal struggle of the "private" woman, trying to balance marriage, motherhood, and career. Rising from humble, yeoman stock in western Massachusetts, Stone became internationally famous. From her pre-nuptial marriage agreement of 1855 to the unusual conditions of her will written as she lay dying in 1893, Stone attempted to thread her way through a legal, political, and social minefield.Item Encounters with the Goddess: An Ethnographic Study of the Emergence of Feminine Forms of Consciousness(1994) Damron, Bonnie Lucille; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation examines one aspect of how new cultural meanings have developed among some contemporary American women. This particular development concerns a shift in their meaning system away from male-centered symbols towards a meaning system that includes and even emphasizes feminine symbolic forms. From an outsider's point of view, the contemporary "goddess movement" might be seen as a fad, but what does it mean from an insider's perspective? This dissertation presents an ethnographic exploration in depth from the insider's point of view, into the lives of eight women for whom goddess symbols have become an integral part of their meaning systems, their consciousness, and their social worlds. This study explores the emergence of goddess forms in the experience of these informants. It examines what images appear in their consciousness, how they interpret these patterns, and how their interpretations of these patterns affect their daily lives within their social worlds. The theoretical framework consists of two components. The first is the field work component based on ethnographic research methods such as ethnographic interviews, life history research, and self-ethnography from the journals and other writings of informants. The second component is the theoretical framework woven from three distinct disciplines. They are cultural anthropology, the study of myth as it pertains to goddess imagery, and Jungian psychology. Interpretive methods from these three fields assist in describing the process through which these informants have developed new forms of consciousness that derive from goddess mythology and goddess imagery. This research shows how participation in the study of dreams and goddess mythology helped informants reconstruct key elements in their meaning systems from a woman-centered perspective. It also reveals how informants made lifestyle choices in order to cultivate and pursue their relationships to goddess images and other forms of feminine consciousness, and how they have accomplished an integration of inner images with outer dimensions of their social worlds.Item Mining the Museum and the Deconstruction of The Maryland Historical Society(1993) Moure, Michele; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This thesis considers Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson (1992~ 93) and the exhibitions's critical impact on the Maryland Historical Society. A brief consideration of contemporary cultural theory, its relationship to revisions in current museological practices and a summary of the history of the American museum provides a context for this case study. Charged with the collection, interpretation, and exhibition of our cultural heritage, the practices and governing policies of American museums are a continuation of those developed in Europe over 200 years ago. In particular, the museum classification system for objects and cultures, based on an Enlightenment system of knowledge, has perpetuated an exclusionary set of practices, which have marginalized the working class, women, ethnic minorities, and Native Americans. Mining the Museum both reflects and responds to this condition while critically questioning the authority of the museum to define truth as it pertains to our arts, culture and history. Will Wilson's installation have a lasting influence'? Through this examination and consideration of selected responses from the profession, the press, and the public, it will be shown how Mining the Museum has impacted the Maryland Historical Society and how this impact could influence the future of this and other similar institutions.Item "To Remind Us of Who We Are" : An Ethnographic Exploration of Women's Dress and Gender Roles in a Conservative Mennonite Community(1995) Graybill, Beth E.; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Combining ethnographic methodology and feminist theory, this interdisciplinary study explores women's dress and gender roles in the religious culture of Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonites, a conservative Mennonite group concentrated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, that has never been researched before. My study is based on participant observation and qualitative analysis of interviews with 11 women and two men in three church districts. I argue that conservative women's domestic roles in the private sphere and their adherence to strict dress codes create the denomination's primary cultural boundary marker. Although Eastern Pa. Mennonites accept modern technology and most no longer farm, members adhere to a church-wide discipline that forbids "immodest" and "fashionable" clothing, jewelry, and cut hair for women, while prescribing a particular style of women's dress and head covering. (Men's clothing is less regulated.) Religious understandings around women's dress reinforce a gender ideology that is firmly rooted in women's subordination to men. My study explores the multiple meanings that conservative women attach to their clothing. Much like a uniform, women's dress expresses group affiliation, suppresses individual expression, and mutes economic and social distinctions. Moreover, their dress affords them a feeling of protection from harm, offers them an opportunity to witness, and serves as an internal motivation toward religiosity. In sum, their dress both produces and reflects particular gender roles. Finally, I discuss the interpretative challenges of my partial membership status and my use of feminist analysis to frame a discussion about women who would not describe themselves as feminists.Item Defining American Design: A History of the Index of American Design, 1935-1942(1982) Allyn, Nancy E.; Kelly, Gordon; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The Index of American Design was created in the fall of 1935, as one unit of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Although government-sponsored art projects of the New Deal era, and in particular, the Federal Art Project, have been examined extensively by historians of American art and culture, the Index of American Design has received very little attention. Yet, the Index is important because it existed during the 1930s as a popular and well-known endeavor. On however small or conservative a scale, it reflects a constellation of thought and activity which was the result of the specific circumstances of that decade. In the following thesis I will outline a history of the Index project as it was part of the Federal Art Project, and as it was part of the growing movements of decorative arts and folk arts collecting during the 1930s. I will examine the ideas of three Index administrators: Holger Cahill, director of the Federal Art Project, Constance Rourke, Editor of the Index, and Ruth Reeves, field supervisor of the Index, in order to identify some of the underlying ideals which shaped the project. In addition, an examination of how the Index interacted with two specific audiences: collectors of decorative arts and the artists themselves, will reveal how the Index idea was turned into reality.Item Frances R. Donovan and The Chicago School of Sociology: A Case Study in Marginality(1982) Kurent, Heather Paul; Wise, Gene; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This work examines the Chicago School's contribution to sociological analysis using the life and works of one of its marginal figures, Frances R. Donovan. A "reflexive" approach to the history of sociology turns the early Chicago School's study of "the other" upon itself. Frances Donovan, an English teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, wrote three studies of working women: The Woman Who Waits (1920); The Saleslady (1929) and The School Ma'am (1939). The Saleslady was part of The Chicago Sociology Series. Edited by Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, this series included The Hobo, The Ghetto and The Gold Coast and The Slum, among other publications now regarded as early classics in urban ethnography. These studies also are known for their middle class preoccupation with marginal "types" and deviant subcultures, as well as a neglect of studies on women. Therefore, Frances Donovan's own marginal status and unique research interests offer a different perspective on the Chicago School's treatment of other outsiders. Chapter One traces the development of the concept of marginality within the Chicago School from its founding in 1892 until the late 1930's, Georg Simmel's role theory, specifically that of "the stranger," maverick personalities in the department and women's isolated status in academics are included as evidence. Chapter Two is a biographical sketch of Frances Donovan, drawing on unpublished manuscripts and contacts with those who knew her before her death in 1968. Given the dearth of information on early women in sociology, the life of Frances Donovan gives evidence of a kind of woman who worked independently with no credentials, network, or funding to do her research. Chapter Three places Donovan's studies in the context of other works of the Sociology Series. Finally, Chapter Four explores her unique methodology of "disguised" participant-observation. As a waitress, saleswoman and teacher-critic, Donovan raises an important question regarding the relationship between the observer and the observed in social science. Furthermore, Donovan's motivations and personal rewards for doing her own brand of sociology are located in a larger participant-observation tradition including the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Hortense Powdermaker. The studies of "muckrakers" of the Progressive period also provide a historical context for women's role-playing. Besides marginality, this last chapter emphasizes a second major theme of this inquiry: the transformative nature of the fieldwork experience.Item Vietnam Veterans and American Mass Media: The Politics of the Image(1995) Sherry, Douglas Marshall; Lounsbury, Myron; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This is an interdisciplinary examination of the image of the Vietnam veteran as contested cultural and ideological terrain in recent America. Drawing on Gramscian theories of ideology and hegemony, as well as conceptualizations of semiotic appropriation and bricolage employed in cultural studies, the study explores the complex manner in which print media and Hollywood film function as the primary discursive arenas wherein public images of the returned Vietnam veteran are constructed, contested and transformed in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras. The shifting nature of these images has had, and continues to have, a profound influence on public conceptions of the Vietnam war, the divisions, challenges and oppositions the war generated in American society, and the very nature of cultural myths of war and the returned warrior as consensual ideological dynamics in recent American culture. Specific attention is devoted to the veterans' antiwar movement of the 1970s, the ways in which this movement actively courted media attention to publicly project an oppositional antiwar image of the returned warrior, and the manner in which this antiwar image was selectively appropriated and reconstructed by Hollywood across three decades – from Billy Jack and Coming Home in the 1970s, Rambo and Born On the Fourth of July in the 1980s, to Forrest Gump in the wake of the Gulf War in the 1990s – with the ultimate implication being the assuaging of the ideological disruptions of the Vietnam era.Item The Vietnam Veteran: A Victim of the War's Rhetorical Failure(1988-02-22) Hollihan, Thomas A.; Klumpp, James F.Argues that from defense and media coverage of the Vietnam War, an image of the character and activities of those fighting the war emerged. Within the defense of the war two justifications fought for dominance: a romantic call to idealism and a pragmatic materialist call to complete a task started. These contradictory motivations for the war colored the image of the soldier who fought the war as he became a concrete symbols caught in the contradiction. After the war, survivors had to then struggle with this image produced to defend the war.