American Studies Dissertations and Theses

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WHITE LIBERALISM IN BLACK COMICS: METAPHORICAL MARGINALIZATION AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF AMERICA
(University of Kansas, 2019-12-31) Stucky, Alex; Flores, Ruben; Anatol, Giselle; Chappell, Ben; Kim, Joo Ok; Roediger, David
In the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, Marvel and DC Comics introduced black superheroes into their comic book series. While the comic book editors wanted to reach black audiences, they scrupulously avoided mentioning the Civil Rights Movement. To avoid the perceived controversy that accompanied movements for equal rights, they removed their new black characters from any connection to racial liberation movements. American literature has long constructed the black body as the opposite of white autonomy, authority, and power. Yet, the American superhero also embodies these same qualities. Rather than explore these contradictory identities in a black superhero, comic companies attempted to reconcile them. These reconciliation attempts reflected white fears about Black Power and led to the displacement of black superheroes from an American context through a complex construction of non-human characterizations. This study examines how white liberal comic book authors’ creation of black characters impacted racial hierarchy, exclusion, and vulnerability and how the inclusion of black identities in superhero comics reified the complex constructions of power and race in American culture. Textual and visual analysis of black comics from the 1960s and 1970s comprises a bulk of the research. Textual and visual analysis of the comics from the 60s and 70s shows not only how white authors imagined black identities following the Civil Rights Movement, but also how these writers thought white readers understood black identities. This methodology is bolstered by the inclusion of interviews with writers, artists, and editors, quantitative sales data, and fan feedback provided in each comics’ letters-to-the-editor column, which tell how the public reacted to these new heroes. Paradoxically, white writers’ displacement of black superheroes from a contemporary American context helped these comics to become popular in black communities. While the decision to remove African American superheroes from an American context was made to sanitize comics of potentially controversial political messages, the plot lines still involved the restructuring of identity for the black superhero—which mirrored the renegotiation of identity that was underway following the Civil Rights Movement.
‘Yes, But What Have You Done for Me Lately?’: Intersections of Intellectual Property, Work-for-Hire, and The Struggle of the Creative Precariat in the American Comic Book Industry
(University of Kansas, 2019-08-31) McWilliams, Ora Charles; Chappell, Ben; Esch, Elizabeth; Bial, Henry; Halegoua, Germaine; Kim, Joo-Ok
The comic book industry has significant challenges with intellectual property rights. Comic books have rarely been treated as a serious art form or cultural phenomenon. It used to be that creating a comic book would be considered shameful or something done only as side work. Beginning in the 1990s, some comic creators were able to leverage enough cultural capital to influence more media. In the post-9/11 world, generic elements of superheroes began to resonate with audiences; superheroes fight against injustices and are able to confront the evils in today’s America. This has created a billion dollar, Oscar-award-winning industry of superhero movies, as well as allowed created comic book careers for artists and writers. However, the work-for-hire contracts used by comic book publishers are alienating creators from their content; intellectual properties and derivative works are owned by companies and not the creator, under these contracts. These contracts also create other insecurities for artists and writers by not providing benefits like insurance, retirement funds, and salary wages, something common in the “gig economy.” This is disheartening to the creator, leaving them internalized with the idea that they are “not writing the great American novel… just writing funnybooks.” In some ways the era of social media and crowdfunding is allowing these creatives to challenge this traditional approach of content creation, and raise awareness of these issues. However, these solutions are not perfect either. Although these solutions do away with a lot of gatekeepers, they also do away with quality controls and often times fall short of fulfillment because of the logistic challenges.
“An Organ of the Irish Race on the Continent”: The Pilot, Irish Immigration, and Irish-American Identity, 1851-66
(University of Kansas, 2018-08-31) KATI GUMUS, GAMZE; Lester, Cheryl B.; Roediger, David; Graham, Maryemma; Perreira, Christopher M.; Mielke, Laura
This dissertation analyzes the history of the Pilot, an ethnic newspaper for the Irish Catholic, and its fictional and non-fictional printed material from the period between 1851 and 1866. The Great Famine (1845-1851) and the Civil War (1861-1865) act as milestones for this study, as its aim is to understand the evolution of the Famine immigrant into a naturalized citizen fighting in the ranks of the Union. The Pilot assumed a prominent place within the immigrant guidance tradition of the mid-nineteenth century as it aimed to construct Irish-American citizens out of immigrants. The transformation of the Irish immigrant into an Irish-American citizen mirrors the simultaneous transformation of the Pilot from an immigrant newspaper into an ethnic newspaper, and highlights the value of the Pilot as an institution working to elevate the standards and representation of the Irish race in the States. In order to break down the transformation of the immigrant, this study focuses on three questions in relation to the immigrant’s identity: how to be an ideal immigrant on the way to assimilation and naturalization; how to be an ideal laborer elevating the representation of the Irish race as a whole; finally, how to be an ideal Irish-American citizen proving the national belonging of the Irish to the Union. In an attempt to answer these questions and understand how the Irish acquired their white identity and racially charged discourse through print culture, this study derives greatly from whiteness studies, and examines the Pilot in order to understand how it situates the black man as the nemesis of the Irish. This dissertation examines the guidance offered by the Pilot to Irish immigrants on their way to becoming ideal immigrants, an ideal labor force, and ideal citizens; and it studies the paper’s role as the platform of an imagined community for Irish-Americans where they could come together under shared values of Catholicism, Irishness, Americanness, and whiteness.
Community of Counter-Conduct: Politics and Practices of LGBTQ Christian Activism in Evangelicalism
(University of Kansas, 2018-05-31) Burrow-Branine, Jonathan; Chappell, Ben; Tucker, Sherrie; Bial, Henry; Davidman, Lynn; Tell, Dave
Scholars working at the intersections of American religious studies and gender and sexuality studies have broadened our understanding of the overlapping histories of faith communities and LGBTQ social movements in the US. Despite recent contributions to the history of LGBTQ activism in American religious traditions, this scholarship tends to overlook LGBTQ Christian identity work and activism in conservative Christian communities. Based on participant observation fieldwork with a faith-based nonprofit called The Reformation Project (TRP), this dissertation is an ethnography of how some LGBTQ Christians negotiate identity and difference and seek to create change within evangelicalism. TRP is a national parachurch organization with Kansas roots working to change, through grassroots organizing and theological training, mainly conservative evangelical attitudes and teaching about LGBTQ people. The material for the project is drawn from fieldwork with TRP at church services, conferences, organizing meetings, and other places over a twelve-month period beginning in late 2014. While mostly about the strategies and conversations specific to TRP's efforts to foster change, I also use TRP as a window into broader conversations underway in evangelicalism about what it means to be LGBTQ and Christian. I make two main arguments throughout the dissertation. First, I argue that the LGBTQ Christian activism I studied can be understood as constituting a community of counter-conduct. Drawing on a concept proposed by Michel Foucault to describe movements of resistance that arise within regimes of power, I show how LGBTQ Christian activism in conservative evangelical spaces is productive of new ethical and political possibilities and ways of being. Second, I describe how the LGBTQ and ally Christians I met attempt to create meaningful inclusivity, while wrestling with not only the exclusionary politics of conservative evangelicalism but also their own assumptions about what it means to be LGBTQ and a Christian. By doing so, this project provides fuller accounts of the overlapping relationship between evangelical and LGBTQ social movements and the everyday negotiation of identity, politics, and democratic values in religious spaces.
Pacifist Battlegrounds: Violence, Community, and the Struggle for LGBTQ Justice in the Mennonite Church USA
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31) Krehbiel, Stephanie Joan; Jelks, Randal M; Tucker, Sherrie; Chappell, Benjamin; Takeyama, Akiko; Janzen, Marike
This dissertation focuses on the movement for LGBTQ inclusion within the Mennonite Church USA, a Christian denomination of just under 100,000 members. Mennonites are part of a nearly five century Christian tradition known as Anabaptism, known for an ethic of nonviolence. Yet Mennonite communities and institutions have been and continue to be sites of intense patriarchal and gendered interpersonal violence. While LGBTQ Mennonites and their supporters have been engaged in visible advocacy and grassroots organizing for the past forty years, they continue to struggle for recognition and acceptance within a denomination that mirrors many other U.S. Christian groups in its sharp divisions over sexual politics. Mennonites’ polity tends towards congregational rather then hierarchical arrangements, and church policies are determined and debated at congregational, regional, and national levels through processes known as “discernment.” Discernment is seen as a peaceful approach to settling communal conflict. But LGBTQ Mennonites often experience such processes as abusive and violent. Thus Mennonite conflicts over LGBTQ inclusion are also struggles over how violence should be defined. This study draws on interviews, oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival evidence from the past four decades, arguing that LGBTQ Mennonites and their allies have played an integral role in subverting and revealing the hidden abuses of power enabled by Mennonite communal discourses. It brings together a feminist and queer theory-based analysis of discursive violence with a critique of de-historicized multiculturalism in institutional life.
Building Bridges Across Cultures: A Case Study of the People-to-People Campaign, 1956-1975
(University of Kansas, 2014-08-31) Serj, Battsetseg; Wilson, Theodore A.; Tucker, Sherrie J.; Jahanbani, Sheyda; Greene, Megan; Donovan, Brian
This study traces origins, operation, successes and failures of the People-to-People program featured during the second term of the Eisenhower presidency. The program was a product of and a reaction to the Cold War international conflicts that emanated from diametrically opposed ideologies of democracies and the communist world. U.S. claims to the superiority of democracy over communism were rooted in immediate post-war America's quest for world leadership. The People-to-People campaign was a government-backed popular movement, which spread in the 1950s and expanded into the 1960s. It was partially coordinated and partially funded by the United States Information Agency during its first few years, with the expectation that it would attract private as well as grassroots support once it was launched. This dissertation explores People-to-People's various programs and projects including the Sister-Cities and the University chapter as models for secular voluntary movements of ordinary citizens who were committed to improving mutual understanding between peoples from different cultures. The idealistic nature of people-to-people diplomacy, along with a wide variety of personal and social stakes associated with international travel and relations, made the People-to-People University program one of the most popular student organizations on college campuses in the 1960s. People-to-People's popularity and ideals at that time attracted young Americans and provided them with both the opportunity and the enthusiasm to interact with foreign peoples at the grassroots level. It also gave them a sense of belonging to a broader, constructive human network, which promoted an appreciation of diverse cultures and a way to contribute to building the "bonds of solidarity" among people of many nations during the contested period of the Cold War.
Intimate Collisions: Identity, Community, and Place in the Kansas Dirt-Track Auto Racing Sphere
(University of Kansas, 2016-05-31) Marston, Steve Booth; Chappell, Ben; Bial, Henry; Tucker, Sherrie; Hamer, Jennifer; Swindell, Jon
Dirt-track auto racing, spread across the U.S. and concentrated in the nation’s Heartland, is largely unexplored territory within the cultural studies field. In turn, this project addresses contemporary Kansas-centered auto racing as a cultural sphere composed of spaces, objects, and practices derived from the “action” on the dirt oval. Participant-observation ethnography comprised the bulk of research, conducted over three years in garages, museums, and other spaces in which racing-related practice took place. Research and analysis were driven by an identity-based inquiry: How do participants construct senses of self in relation to the Kansas dirt-track racing community? On one hand, I trace processes of reproduction within the racing sphere. Identity ideologies and organizations have long reflected male dominance of competitive spaces, as well as the ubiquity of Whiteness among participants in general. Gendered organization appeared to result, in part, from the patrilineal routes through which men socialized boys into mechanical and operational familiarity with race cars. As a result, locally hegemonic masculinity was constructed around automotive-mechanical competency, competitiveness, and “rugged” engagement with speed and objects that threaten bodily harm. On the other hand, I address the ways in which racing practice entails reformulations of dominant cultural structures. When articulating the appeal of dirt-track racing, participants emphasized variety and disruption, especially in regards to “exciting” on-track “action,” which was contrasted against the mass culture of corporatized NASCAR. Furthermore, drivers embraced the opportunity to enact industrial productivity through their small-group racing operations; in doing so, they exercised power and sovereignty not typically present in their predominantly working-class occupations. As a whole, contextualized within a culturally shifting Kansas, participants converged within the racing sphere to find a sense of localistic community, thus engaging in “intimate collisions” both on and around the track.
Employment Training Policies and Politics, 1980-1982 : The Transition from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982
(University of Kansas, 1985) Collins, A. Michael
"Soft, Glossy Tresses": Shampoo Advertisements, White Women's Hair, and the Late- and Post- World War II Domestic Ideal
(University of Kansas, 2015-08-31) Liljequist, Angela G.; Schofield, Ann; Warren, Kim; Batza, Katie; Wilson, Laurel; Innocenti, Beth
This dissertation explores how shampoo advertisements inserted white women’s hair in a late- and post-World War II conceptualization of ideal American domesticity. Rather than merely advertising mid-century hygiene products, I argue that shampoo ads characterized a racialized standard of beauty that naturalized whiteness in the representation of ideal late- and post-war domesticity. Using three prevalent brands as case studies, I situate this analysis between the years 1944 and 1952, a time period I refer to as the Shampoo Revolution. Concurrent with this period during which America transitioned from a wartime to postwar economy was the rapid expansion of the shampoo industry which had profound consequences on popular discourse, elevating a narrow representation of hair as a requisite component of American domesticity. The chapters of this dissertation provide an analysis of the emerging hair culture that was by the mid-1940s, a prominent aspect of popular media and beauty industry interests. Additionally, chapters provide a critical analysis of three leading shampoo brands – Drene, Breck, and Lustre-Crème, their respective advertisements, and ads’ placement in two popular magazines. Ultimately, this study contributes to an understanding of the growing national consciousness, and emphasis on the American home front, as the nation transitioned from war to peacetime.
TRANSFORMATION AND RESILIENCE AT SHURI-JO: DEFINING A GENOME OF PLACE
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31) Shreve, John Patrick; Lester, Cheryl; Domer, Dennis; Esch, Elizabeth; Hofstra, Phillip; Krishtalka, Leonard; Lang, Clarence; Soberon, Jorge
The 1970s is widely regarded as the decade of environmental awakening in America. But many of the critical variables that later informed this ongoing conversation were mobilized in the faraway island of Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture that became a new territory of the United States by virtue of their victory in World War II (WWII). The same powerful military machine that destroyed much of Japan reorganized itself into a nation-building enterprise focused on restoring and reorienting the country into a model democracy. This dissertation will construct an interactive design framework that focuses on the creation of Okinawa's new university as a microcosm of the exchanges that redefined the island's most important cultural icon. In addition to the military government, I will illustrate how visiting professors from Michigan State University interacted with Okinawan educators to shape the University of the Ryukyus (Ryudai), a new land-grant university that produced transformative changes that reached far beyond the campus boundaries. I will demonstrate that Ryudai's post-war redevelopment period, however, takes on more profound implications of sustainability if contextualized within a "genome of place" that explores biotic, abiotic, social, and economic influences across space and time. Built on the sacred grounds of Shuri-jo, the destroyed 14th century castle, the Ryudai campus was eventually dismantled and relocated to a larger site when Okinawa reverted to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. This dissertation argues that the resilience of post-war Okinawa was symbolized by the radical transformation of the Shuri-jo site and that by disentangling the many layers of this palimpsest, its meaning may transcend its short timeframe. A critical inquiry of textual and visual materials will articulate how Shuri-jo became an iconic Cold War site where Eastern and Western cultures intersected, modernism and traditionalism converged, and natural and human systems collided. By locating the mid-century university experiment within a centuries-old context, I will also illustrate how its successes and failures may inform Okinawa's political future as it inherits several decommissioned military sites from the U.S. government.
Firing the Canon: Multiple Insularities in Jazz Criticism
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31) Robinson, Christopher; Tucker, Sherrie; Jelks, Randal; Gennari, John; Bolden, Tony; Harris, William
Whereas many jazz scholars focus on jazz criticism's construction and implications of a single, or insular, jazz canon, this dissertation argues that what many jazz critics do is precisely the opposite. These critics disrupt the sense of a singular and insular jazz canon by challenging it through the creation of what I call an insularity, which is a bounded collection of artists and music with a definable tradition, values and established criteria which regulates what is suitable for inclusion. This dissertation argues that jazz does not consist of a single canon and music that exists beyond the canon's boundaries; rather, jazz contains multiple insularities that challenge the canon and vie for the opportunity to overthrow the canon in order to reach canonical status. This dissertation conceptualizes jazz critics as cultural authorities who create or deconstruct insularities through a variety of race, gender and nation projects. It examines the criticism of Leonard Feather, Val Wilmer and Nathaniel Mackey to highlight the numerous ways in which critics engage with multiple insularities. Feather believed that jazz was university and that it transcended social difference. As such, he worked to create an insularity where female musicians deserved acceptance by the jazz world. Wilmer emphasizes that jazz is a social practice and that it belongs to those who created it. Working to counter the marginalization of African American musicians, she constructed an insularity that showed musicians as real people as opposed to mythological figures. Mackey rejects the concept of insularities and this dissertation shows how his novel Bedouin Hornbook works to deconstruct insularities. Feather's, Wilmer's and Mackey's criticism attempts to solve perceived social exclusion marginalization wrought by the jazz canon. Multiple insularities in jazz criticism exist as a byproduct of the complexity of jazz's cultural space, the problems which exist in that space, and the multitude of ways in which critics attempt to address these problems. A heterodox practice involving innumerable methods and strategies to address social problems, jazz criticism, itself a diverse practice involving people of many social backgrounds and experiences, manifests itself in the construction and challenging of multiple insularities.
Digital Loa and Faith You Can Taste: Hoodoo in the American Imagination
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31) Boson, Crystal Michelle; Jelks, Randal M; Anatol, Giselle; Canady, Darren; Hamer, Jennifer; Mack, Beverly; Tucker, Sherrie
Utilizing popular culture mediums and artifacts, this dissertation examines the ways in which the American imaginary plasticizes the faith of Hoodoo and continually strips it of its religious, historic, and cultural impacts. Rather than being acknowledged as a religion, Hoodoo is presented in cultural mediums as something inherently consumable, commercial, and capable of endless, identical reproductions. The artifacts produced around this plastic representation are contemporary reproductions of racist, colonial, and paternalistic historic narratives that have damaging effects both on the religion and Black bodies. The dissertation argues that larger American culture perpetually reproduces these representations to profit from covert racism and religious paternalism while simultaneously erasing its history of Black culture and American colonialism.
The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31) Bishop, William; Carothers, James B; Earle, Jonathan; Chappell, Ben; Bial, Henry; Marsh, Charles
The New York Yankees baseball club, arguably the United States' most successful and well-known sports franchise, have acquired many cultural connotations over the years, meanings transcending the immediate world of on-field sporting contest. This study argues that by the 1940s, the Yankee's success in the previous decades and their representation in popular culture caused a coherent set of cultural meanings to crystallize around the club to create an American icon. This icon served as an emblem for a set of interrelated mid-century mainstream American values, namely the American dream of upward mobility, heroic masculinity, and a narrative of national success. The meanings, perspectives on, and uses of this mid-century Yankees cultural icon have not been homogenous, but have shifted generally with the team's on-field performance and broader historic changes, as well as with the perspectives of individual cultural producers and audiences. In particular, increasingly throughout the 1950s and `60s, a general shift towards a negative perspective on the Yankees icon emerged in cultural texts of the era, one that increasingly saw the American values they embodied in a negative light. In these texts, representations of the Yankees as elitist, greedy, racist, too-tradition-bound, and overly-corporate are utilized to convey a critique of these values. This general shift in perceptions and uses of the Yankees icon parallels and is part of the broader cultural conflict and shift occurring between World War II and the end of the 1960s. Methodologically, this study draws on Roland Barthes application of semiotic theory to cultural communication in a broader sense. It draws on baseball history and general cultural history and seeks historical readings of texts from literature, film, popular music, journalism, and sports fan culture. In particular, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Joe DiMaggio's autobiography Lucky to Be a Yankee (1947), Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Mark Harris's The Southpaw (1953), Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), Damn Yankees (1955 Broadway, '58 film), Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (1968) and Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) are analyzed for the way they represent and use the Yankees.
CRAFTING A NEW SELF IN DIASPORA: A STUDY OF THE 1.5 GENERATION OF VIETNAMESE AMERICANS
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31) Cao, Thanh Hai Le; Tucker, Sherrie; Davidman, Lynn; Chappell, Ben; Ngo, Fiona; Caminero-Santangelo, Marta
This dissertation is a study on the identity construction process of members of the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese Americans by examining their personal narratives. With a focus on strategies used by informants when crafting their narratives instead of looking at narratives as evidence of experience, this project has significant contribution to migration studies, transnational studies, and Asian American Studies because it provides a different approach to narratives and narrative analysis in studying identity and identity formation. The findings show that to members of the 1.5 generation narratives serve as sites where they can make sense of their disrupted and chaotic life, and where they highlight their struggles to survive in a new homeland with a haunting past. Narrative is a process of identity formation. To members of the 1.5 generation, it is an especially important site for making sense of disrupted and chaotic lives, in order to survive in a new homeland with a haunting past.
Weird Bodily Noises: Improvising Race, Gender, and Jazz History
(University of Kansas, 2013-08-31) Williams, Peter; Tucker, Sherrie; Hodges Persley, Nicole; Wong, Ketty; Dohoney, Ryan; Heffner Hayes, Michelle
This dissertation explores avant-garde jazz in Kansas City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to find out how they both reproduce and complicate narratives of jazz history and norms of race and gender. Working in a city associated with an historical subgenre--"Kansas City Jazz"--and in a style whose histories limit avant-garde activity largely to New York City, these musicians pay respect to that history even while their performances complicate it. As practices of improvisation that use music, dance, costumes, and visual art, their performances highlight the embodied aspects of identity--the ways that bodies move with and against norms of race and gender and through space. My dissertation thus seeks to show how local, avant-garde, improvised performances can speak about power relations on a broader scale. The title of my dissertation indicates three primary questions for this study: How do experimental performances that seem "weird" both challenge and reproduce normative ways of thinking about race, gender, and power? In what ways are bodies constrained aesthetically, socially, and historically, and how do they improvise within those constraints? How do avant-garde performances complicate the dominant history of jazz, making it "noisy"? This interdisciplinary study relies on several methodologies, including ethnographic interviews and participant-observation, oral history, and archival research. Chapter One establishes historical precedent for avant-garde jazz in Kansas City by examining performances and performers in the 1960's, showing how local musicians in the scene both complicated and reproduced dominant historical narratives about one of the "cradles of jazz." Chapter Two analyzes several recent performances in Kansas City that use humor and the bodily noise of laughter to point out and critique social inequities while also reproducing social hierarchies. Chapter Three explores the complex questions of appropriation, cultural borrowing, and influence that arise when three white musicians in Kansas City cross imaginary racial lines to perform avant-garde music. Chapter Four looks closely at several performers associated with musician Mark Southerland, whose "wearable horn sculptures" highlight the role of the body in improvisation while they both reinforce and complicate normative gender roles.
Senses of Taste: Duncan Hines and American Gastronomy, 1931-1962
(University of Kansas, 2013-08-31) Talbott, Damon Lee; Schofield, Ann; Chappell, Ben; Forth, Christopher E; Rath, Eric C; Smith Fischer, Iris
Duncan Hines was the first national restaurant critic in American history and a significant tastemaker in popular culture. This dissertation is an accounting of how senses of taste were formed in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States and how Duncan Hines aided this process. Conceiving of taste as a conjoining of physical sensations and cultural sense by mediators, I argue that Hines guided consumers and producers through the practice of making sense of momentous changes in society that influenced Americans' eating habits as well as their awareness of American foodways. Hines gained and maintained cultural authority because his criticism networked developing mid-century trends including automobility, consumerism, middlebrow criticism, regionalism, suburbanization, the popularity of "eating out," the professionalization of restaurants, the nationalization of media, the discourse of authenticity, and the continued evolution of technologies for the growing, processing, shipping, selling, and cooking of food. From the farm to the fork, American gastronomy is thus predicated on technology, commerce, and media intersecting to offer mediators, like Hines, resources with which to make sense of the tastes occurring within a context. Since these relationships change, I contend that taste is neither an object to be acquired nor a state of being to be achieved, but instead an on-going and contingent activity, a temporary association of things formed in reaction to the context in which it is configured.
Race, Place, and Family: Narratives of the Civil Rights Movement in Brownsville, Tennessee, and the Nation
(University of Kansas, 2011-12-31) Bond, Jo Zanice; Tuttle, Bill; Tucker, Sherrie; Jelks, Randal M.; Warren, Kim; O'Brien, Sharon
This dissertation examines the Civil Rights Movement through the experiences of primarily two African American families with roots in Brownsville, Tennessee. This study, based on archival research and oral histories, chronicles three generations of citizens affiliated with the NAACP whose translocal civil rights struggles include both the South and urban North. It highlights various tactics individuals used to secure their rights and identifies African American entrepreneurship as a form of non-violent protest, focusing on the African American funeral home as a gateway enterprise which contributed to the establishment of other businesses or "staple institutions" that helped to sustain the Black community during segregation.
Kansas Grows the Best Wheat and the Best Race Women: Black Women's Club Movement in Kansas 1900-30
(University of Kansas, 2011-12-31) Williams, Doretha; Katzman, David M.; Jelks, Randal M.; Graham, Maryemma; Dandridge, Deborah; Hart, Tanya; Dorsey, Allison
The rise of club women in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries challenged established definitions of true womanhood, redefined leadership roles in Black communities, and questioned the complexities of economic class status. According to Deborah Gray White's analysis, Black women "with full knowledge of the ravages being wrought, proclaimed the advent of the `woman's era' and came forth with a plan that made Black women the primary leaders of the race, a plan based on the promise of equality between Black men and women." Although club women's histories abound, most take concern with women in southern states, northern cities, and east coast urban centers who were battling urbanization, Jim Crow, and economic blight, all while ushering in a new middle class generation. Unlike the well represented areas of the nation, there is no book-length discussion examining club women in Kansas. Nevertheless, I argue that the women participating in the greater Kansas club movement tailored their programs to strengthen their communities. Out-migration became a constant problem for Black communities in Kansas, causing leaders to search for ways to attract and retain potential citizens. Neighborhoods struggled to bridge rural life and an emerging urban society. Finally, Blacks worked to bring about the reality of full citizenship within the state and the region. Monitoring the ebb and flow of unstable migration patterns, addressing the needs of rural women, and re-visioning the failed and unfulfilled promises of the state, Kansas women accomplished more than just incorporated art clubs; they strengthened a community in transition, setting in motion the construction of a Black middle class. The significance of my work lies in its exploration of the wide-ranging work of the little known women's club phenomenon in the Central Plains, but perhaps more importantly in the inclusion of resources that document this history in order to map a more complex picture of the intersections of race, class, gender, and region. My research is a significant contribution to the study of the Great Migration, examining movement patterns of African Americans in and out of the Central Plains beyond the Exodusters saga or narratives of the western frontier. Often neglected for southern, northern or western studies, Black populations in the Central Plains in the early twentieth century tell of a people in search of full citizenship, land and opportunity. Analyzing African Americans in the Central Plains illustrates the agricultural roots of the region and how the process of urbanization influenced their communities, a transition repeated throughout the nation during a time of migration and industrialization. While many African Americans left Kansas for points farther west, Oklahoma or even northeast, studying those who remained in the region is important to the complexity of the larger narrative of African American history. Interdisciplinary in nature, my research engages historical scholarship, archival collections, Black feminist theory, literary studies and material culture to provide a rich source of information to better understand the role of "women's work" in the development African American communities in Kansas.
THE "DEAR DIANE" LETTERS AND THE ENCOUNTER OF CHINESE YOUNG WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
(University of Kansas, 2012-08-31) Cai, Hong; Katzman, David M.; Lester, Cheryl B.; Yetman, Norman R.; Tuttle, William; Cotton-Spreckelmeyer, Antha; Greene, J.Megan
Abstract Focusing on the "Dear Diane" advice letters, both the English and Chinese texts, this dissertation explores a group of young Chinese immigrant women as they encounter American culture as Chinese Americans were reshaped by new immigration and radical demographic changes in the 1980s. By utilizing assimilation theory as a framework for analyzing Chinese immigration, this work examines several important dimensions and aspects of young Chinese American women's adaptation to American life. This study also compares the "Dear Diane" letters with the Jewish "Bintel Brief" letters in order to explore some common characteristics of the female immigrant experience in the United States. The writer identifies a number of issues that young Chinese American women including the intensifying generational conflict and identity dislocation. Moreover, the writer finds that both groups of letters reveal that Chinese young women faced similar issues as their counterparts--other ethnic Asian and Jewish women. With a strong desire to Americanize, young Chinese American women often faced conflict with both their parents and mainstream society. Therefore, assimilation for young Chinese women was problematic, painstaking, and a prolonged process.
Sheepdogs and Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Grazing on the High Plains
(University of Kansas, 2010-05-31) Kerr, Daniel Stewart; Brooks, Karl B.; Worster, Donald; Flores, Ruben; Golash Boza, Tanya; Brown, Chris
An environmental history of High Plains grazing that focused on transhumant sheepherding of New Mexico, watershed cattle ranching of the open range, and barbed-wire stock-farming of the privatized plains--all systems of agroecology practiced on and about the semiarid plains of Texas during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Drew insights from the natural and social sciences as well as from critical race theory to contextualize novel primary sources and to reexamine primary sources that environmental historians had yet to bring to bear on the field. Research focused on the financial records of the XIT ranch held in the archives of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, land records held at the General Land Office of Texas in Austin, and the trail of newspaper coverage, army records, and census documents that track the Romero family from Mora, New Mexico, to Tascosa, Texas, to Dodge City, Kansas, and back again. Corrected long-held misconceptions about Texas history.

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