American Studies
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Item Washington's Main Street: Consensus and Conflict on the Capital Beltway, 1952-2001(2002) Korr, Jeremy Louis; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation combines approaches from cultural landscape analysis, ethnography, and planning history to study the Capital Beltway in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. as both a physical artifact and a social institution. Drawing on interviews, survey data, fieldwork, and documentary research, I explore the ways in which the Beltway, its creators and users, and its surrounding natural landscape have affected each other over fifty years. Three research methods underlie this study. First, I introduce an analytical framework for odology, geographer J.B. Jackson’s term for the study of roads, focusing on the beliefs and values roads reveal and create, dynamics of power and access, contributions to normativity, issues of conflict and consensus, and effects on individuals’ lives and identities. Second, I develop and apply a detailed framework model for cultural landscape analysis, building on previous efforts in cultural geography and material culture studies. Third, I draw on and analyze the dynamics and results of a Web survey. The dissertation provides the first detailed discussion of the Capital Beltway's development and construction in Maryland and Virginia, drawing in part on interviews with ten of its original engineers and beginning with an overview of the origins of beltway planning in the United States. It examines the Beltway's effects on individual lives, communities, and the broader metropolitan Washington region, concentrating on conflicts and perceived inequities created by the Beltway's construction, and on both states' efforts to pursue their own agendas and also to redress residents' concerns over the fifty years covered. The study addresses both physical and cognitive manifestations of the Beltway, exploring how the road exists in the minds of the people who use it and how its material and conceptual iterations combine to play an integral role in their lives. It also analyzes how the Beltway serves concurrently as a template through which individuals and groups promote their values and beliefs, as a venue of conflict and community, as a vehicle for the creation of a distinct regional identity, as a site of negotiation between public and private space, and as a site for mediation and compromise in interjurisdictional cooperation.Item Historic Conservation Landscapes on Fort Hood, Texas: The Civilian Conservation Corps and Cultural Landscape Change in Central Texas(2009) Stabler, Jennifer Anne; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was probably the most popular of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Many studies have examined the contribution of the CCC in national and state parks and forests, but less attention has been directed towards soil conservation work performed by enrollees on farms and ranches across the country. This dissertation examines cultural landscapes created by the CCC on farms and ranches in Central Texas that are now part of the Fort Hood Military Reservation. Cultural landscapes created by the CCC in the 1930s are significant because they represent large-scale federal government intervention into farming practices and planning on private land. Dramatic transformations occurred in both the conservation movement and on the land itself. This can be investigated through archaeological sites associated with activities of the CCC on Fort Hood from its period of operation (i.e., from 1933 to 1942). The significance of identified archaeological sites is evaluated based on the Secretary of the Interior's guidelines for evaluating archaeological sites for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Through the CCC, America's civilians transformed millions of acres of land across the United States from 1933 to 1942 in an effort to conserve natural resources that had been severely overexploited in preceding decades. Soil conservation and other New Deal agricultural programs primarily benefited land owners, but research on Fort Hood suggests that some tenants and sharecroppers benefited as well. Soil conservation work performed by the CCC on private land changed the way America's farming population operated their farms and included ordinary farmers in the conservation movement. Conservation was no longer the sole concern of academics, but through the efforts of federal, state, and local governments, became a major concern of ordinary farmers. This study also explores how rural planning efforts involved farmers in the decision-making process more than ever before. The reorganization of the rural landscape of Central Texas attests to the degree to which conservation measures were accepted by individual farmers.Item Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Constructing the Stories and Pathology of Madness/Mental Illness in the Contemporary U.S.(2009) Rector, Claudia; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Personal stories are always told in the context of broader cultural narratives. Thus, in the contemporary U.S., stories of personal experience of illness and disability are usually informed by Western notions of health and illness, and a binary classification system of normative/non-normative bodies and behaviors. The emerging field of disability studies represents a socially progressive attempt to interrogate and reconfigure discourses that pathologize and medicalize non-normative bodies, challenging medical discourses with an alternate framework of evidence that emphasizes the personal experiences of individuals who have experienced disability or illness and who conceive of these experiences in different ways. Whose Story Is It Anyway? is an interdisciplinary examination of how the cultural authority of medicine compresses a range of individual experiences into narrow, standardized narratives of the experience of depression, for instance, or other phenomena classified as illness. Specifically, my study makes a three-part argument: first, that biological psychiatry has eclipsed psychoanalysis and that medical definitions of mental illness have become the culturally dominant way of determining what kinds of physical or psychological phenomena are classified as bad, e.g., pathological. Second, these definitions then inform and shape stories of personal experience with such phenomena, enough so that standard narrative formats emerge for describing "individual" experiences of both physical disability and madness/mental illness. The personal stories of madness/mental illness then become, in essence, universalized narratives of illness and recovery that reinforce notions of pathology. Third, this standardization of the personal story often aligns with medical narratives in a way that reflects the storytellers' disempowered position in the medical industry, in that telling the "right" story positions them to receive the benefits of working within the medical system, and telling the "wrong" story becomes an act of political activism. Such de facto coercion has substantial implications for intellectual projects, such as disability studies, that rely heavily on the articulation of personal experience as evidence for the need for change. Finally, this study argues for a re-examination of experience-based, identity-focused activism, and for an invigorated humanities project in science studies.Item Re-Visioning Violence: How Black Youth Advance Critical Understandings of Violence in Climates of Criminalization(2009) McCants, Johonna Rachelle; Struna, Nancy; Woods, Clyde A.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While Black youth are often framed as the perpetrators of violence in the mainstream media and other sites, they are rarely consulted for their views on violence. This dissertation examines how Black youth and other young people of color have used hip hop music and community organizing to publicly articulate their analysis of violence and shape public discourses, ideologies and policies. The project is principally framed by Black feminist theory and Critical Race Theory, and uses discourse analysis, cultural criticism, and historical analysis as its primary methods of analysis. I examine hip hop lyrics and materials produced during community organizing campaigns, alongside a range of sources that reflect dominant frameworks on youth and violence such as television programs and sociological scholarship. This study argues firstly, that there is a discourse of "youth violence"; secondly, that this discourse is central to the criminalization of young people of color; and thirdly, that criminalization facilitates epistemic violence, harm and injury that results from the production of hegemonic knowledge. Finally, I draw on youths' perspectives and social change practices to theorize the concept of epistemic resistance, and show how youth have engaged in epistemic resistance in various ways. Youth have used hip hop music to redefine what counts as violence, who is involved in violence, and why violence among youth occurs; conducted participatory action research projects to influence and change the content of mainstream media; and developed and promoted the discourse of a "war on youth" in organizing campaigns that challenge punitive policy proposals introduced as solutions to "youth violence." This dissertation provides a re-theorized framing of and knowledge about the intellect and agency of marginalized youth. It also provides youth studies scholars with conceptual and methodological approaches for future scholarship on youth, violence, and safety. Lastly, this dissertation informs urban youth policy and grassroots organizing for transformative justice, a vision and practice of attaining safety and justice through personal and social transformation, rather than reliance on the criminal legal system.Item "What is a Black Man Without His Paranoia?" : Clinical Depression and the Politics of African American Anxieties Toward Emotional Vulnerability(2009) Stewart, Tyrone Anthony; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In an interview after his departure from television and a rumored "breakdown," the comedian Dave Chappelle asked Oprah Winfrey, "What is a black man without his paranoia?" This question forms the crux of a dissertation which addresses African Americans' attitudes toward clinical depression, in general, and black men's anxieties toward emotional vulnerability, in specific. Using the concept of "paranoia" as an indicator of a healthy skepticism toward medical authority, this dissertation deconstructs the concept of depression as a discursive construct and moves it out of the bounds of science and into the precincts of cultural emotion theory. Opting for theory over science, this dissertation argues against the erasure of social and cultural narratives and explores how race and gender can inform our interpretation of depression. Using textual readings, historical comparison, and ethnography, this dissertation examines the politics involved in addressing the emotionality of black men. It is concerned with how definitions of blackness, manhood, crisis, worth, and belonging impact black men's understandings of emotional wellness and inform African Americans' attitudes toward the emotional performances of black men. Two popular books on African American's mental health (Black Rage by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (1968) and Black Pain by Terri Williams (2008)) are examined within their respective historical and social contexts to track the changing cultural discourse on African Americans' mental health and the role of gender in understanding narratives of wellness. And concepts family, labor, and responsibility are explored as implicit elements in black men's attainment of manhood in a comparative examination of the Sanitation Workers Strike (1968) and the Million Man March (1995).Item Words to the Wives: The Jewish Press, Immigrant Women, and Identity Construction, 1924-1925(2009) Shapiro, Shelby Alan; Kelly, R. Gordon; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how six publications sought to construct Jewish- American identities for Eastern European Jewish immigrant women between 1895 and 1925, beginning in 1895 with the world's first Jewish women's magazine, American Jewess (1895 - 1899), followed by a women's magazine in Yiddish, Di froyen-velt (1913 -1914), and ending with an another Yiddish women's magazine, Der idisher froyen zhurnal (1922-1923). Between 1914 and 1916, three mass circulation Yiddish daily newspapers, Dos yidishes tageblatt, Forverts, and Der tog, started printing women's pages. This study ends in 1925, after Congress passed legislation restricting immigration in 1924. These publications present a variety of viewpoints and identities, that were political, religious and class-based. The three magazines, all in the same genre, held different attitudes on everything from religion to suffrage. The three daily newspapers represented fundamentally different ideologies. Forverts was socialist. Der tog was nationalist-Zionist, and Dos yidishes tageblatt, the oldest publication examined, represented a conservative, traditionally religious viewpoint and supported Zionism. This study examines religious and political ideologies, celebrating religious and civic holidays, attitudes towards women working and learning, Jewish education, women's suffrage and exercising citizenship, as well as women in the public and private spheres of both the Jewish and American worlds. The central question asked is how those involved with these publications endeavored to create particular Jewish-American identities. Not being a reader- response study, I make no assumptions as to these publications' actual influence. The press represented only one institution involved in acculturation. Issues subsumed under the central question include how producers of these publications perceived Americanization and saw Jews in America; and what changes these journals advocated regarding religious practices, gender roles, and citizenship. "Acculturation" implies negotiation in the process of identity formation, as a blending of Old and New World customs, lifestyles, mores, economic and social conditions occurred. This dissertation takes a social constructionist view of ethnicity and identity formation. Based on translations relevant pieces from all issues of the publications under review, this study points to the diversity present on the American "Jewish Street" from 1895 to 1925.Item THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF BALTIMORE'S 19TH-CENTURY WORKING CLASS STONEWARE POTTERS(2009) Kille, John Elliot; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the world of ceramics, too often there is a focus on the "greatness" or "uniqueness" of potters. Traditional approaches involving decorative arts tend to favor rarity or aesthetic qualities of the wares they produced, while archaeological studies often focus on systematic categorizations or classifications of recovered ceramics, with little in the way of interpretation from a humanistic point of view. With regard to Baltimore's 19th-century stoneware potters, portions of their history or narrow related aspects have been studied, but there has been no attempt made to examine the birth, life, and death of an industry that lasted for a century. In order to better understand the vernacular or ordinary existence of these skilled potters a comprehensive study was undertaken to document the dynamic and changing cultural landscape to which they belonged. In addition, the experiences and contributions of these artisans are also placed within the perspective of working class labor history. This research project is concerned with the following three central questions. How did Baltimore's 19th-century stoneware industry shape the city's social, physical, and natural environment? How did the social, physical, and natural environment shape Baltimore's stoneware industry? What key historical circumstances such as industrialization, new technologies, and modern manufacturing methods influenced these dynamic relationships? The framing of research and interrogation of evidence involved a systematic, interdisciplinary cultural landscapes model that creates a three way relationship between humans, artifacts (the built environment), and the natural environment. A systematic social history methodology was also used to recover accessible types of data involving the social/economic and cultural dimensions of urban places, including artifactual evidence. This study reveals a cultural landscape shaped by enduring cultural traditions, a superior transportation system for marketing wares, a shared and restricted urban environment involving pollution and the threat of fire, and industrialization leading to technological advancements in food preservation and storage.Item BUILDING THE VIRTUAL WORLD: SOFTWARE, BETA TESTING, AND THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE SIMS ONLINE(2009) Snyder, Donald I.; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Originally released in 2002, The Sims Online (TSO) was one of the most hyped online games ever brought to market. Many critics believed its connection to The Sims would ensure its success. However, this potential was never reached, and in August of 2008, EA/Maxis shut down TSO, terminating users' accounts and removing all traces of it from the Internet. Despite its failure, TSO remains an interesting text for analysis, especially as a case study of the growing importance of virtual worlds on the Internet, and as a cautionary tale for future virtual world development. Combining a cultural studies approach with the emerging media studies' subfields of "ludology" and "software studies" this dissertation examines the formative period of TSO's development--how was the game developed, created, and used in its earliest stages (especially its beta test, in which users play the game before the official release in order to uncover problems with the software). Whereas previous examples of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) genre were fantasy-based, TSO fashioned a world very much modeled on the familiar; players would navigate their Sim avatar through a landscape filled with simulacrums of the material artifacts, cultural rituals, and social practices that are common in American culture. TSO was not a game about battle and conquest--it was a game about the meaning of production and consumption in our lives and leisure. The dissertation focuses on the overlapping and even blurring meaning of consumption and production in users' experience of TSO, as well as in the architecture of the game. The analysis of the crucial beta test phase provides a particularly focused examination of the collision of these terms.Item "Don't Believe the Hype": The Polemics of Hip Hop and the Poetics of Resistance and Resilience in Black Girlhood(2009) Oliver, Chyann Latrel; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At a time when Hip Hop is mired in masculinity, and scholars are "struggling for the soul of this movement" through excavating legacies in a black nationalist past, black girls and women continue to be bombarded with incessant, one-dimensional, images of black women who are reduced solely to sum of their sexual parts. Without the presence of a counter narrative on black womanhood and femininity in Hip Hop, black girls who are growing up encountering Hip Hop are left to define and negotiate their identities as emerging black women within a sexualized context. This dissertation asks: how can black girls, and more specifically, working class black girls, who are faced with inequities because of their race, class, and gender find new ways to define themselves, and name their experiences, in their own words and on their own terms? How can black girls develop ways of being resistant and resilient in the face of adversity, and in the midst of this Hip Hop "attack on black womanhood?" Using myriad forms of writing and fusing genres of critical essay, poetry, prose, ethnography, and life history, this dissertation, as a feminist, artistic, cultural, and political Hip Hop intervention, seeks to address the aforementioned issues by demonstrating the importance of black women's vocality in Hip Hop. It examines how black women in Hip Hop have negotiated race, class, gender, and sexuality from 1979 to the present. It addresses the disappearance or hiatus of the black female rapper and the subsequent rise and reign of the video vixen, and the implications this has for black girls coming of age during this hyper-commercialization of Hip Hop. It discusses how creative writing workshops, which teach black girls between the ages of 12-17 about the importance of vocality and feminist resistance through poetry/spoken word, can become a new method for investigating black girlhood and exploring issues of resistance and resilience.Item The Long Tradition: Black Women and Mothers in Public Discourses(2009) Sanders, Tammy L.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document THE LONG TRADITION: BLACK WOMEN AND MOTHERS IN POPULAR DISCOURSES Tammy Sanders, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Chair and Professor Nancy Struna Department of American Studies With her insightful analysis, Nancy Lurkins in &ldquoYou are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:&rdquo Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community (2008), asserts &ldquo(past) black leaders promoted the ideal of black domesticity and moral motherhood as a counterstrategy to white attacks. Over time, appreciating and even desiring black motherhood came to be identified with black communal pride and as a result black women became responsible for upholding the entire race&rdquo (47). Similarly, recent history has proved to be no different when it comes to the responsibility of black mothers. This dissertation will explore how public discourses involving the social sciences, films, and novels historicize, represent, and re-envision black motherhood. It will investigate how these discourses about motherhood are shaped by the historical moment of their occurrence and what they tell us about the attitudes of those establishing critical thought. By examining texts like the Moynihan Report, Ann Petry's The Street, Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, and the 1974 film Claudine, this project will analyze the rhetoric of scholars about black motherhood alongside popular images of black mothers to illustrate how they overlap and how black women's bodies are consistently at the nexus of academic, social, cultural and political conversations. In an attempt to further complicate mothering studies by using black feminist thought as my lens, this dissertation seeks to tease out the interconnectedness of historical moments and discourses without perpetuating traditional gender norms as it relates to black female identities.