American Studies Dissertations and Theses: Recent submissions
Now showing items 1-20 of 52
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WHITE LIBERALISM IN BLACK COMICS: METAPHORICAL MARGINALIZATION AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF AMERICA
(University of Kansas, 2019-12-31)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 ... -
‘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)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 ... -
“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)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 ... -
Community of Counter-Conduct: Politics and Practices of LGBTQ Christian Activism in Evangelicalism
(University of Kansas, 2018-05-31)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. ... -
Pacifist Battlegrounds: Violence, Community, and the Struggle for LGBTQ Justice in the Mennonite Church USA
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31)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 ... -
Building Bridges Across Cultures: A Case Study of the People-to-People Campaign, 1956-1975
(University of Kansas, 2014-08-31)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 ... -
Intimate Collisions: Identity, Community, and Place in the Kansas Dirt-Track Auto Racing Sphere
(University of Kansas, 2016-05-31)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 ... -
"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)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, ... -
TRANSFORMATION AND RESILIENCE AT SHURI-JO: DEFINING A GENOME OF PLACE
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31)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 ... -
Firing the Canon: Multiple Insularities in Jazz Criticism
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31)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 ... -
Digital Loa and Faith You Can Taste: Hoodoo in the American Imagination
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31)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. ... -
The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31)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 ... -
CRAFTING A NEW SELF IN DIASPORA: A STUDY OF THE 1.5 GENERATION OF VIETNAMESE AMERICANS
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31)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 ... -
Weird Bodily Noises: Improvising Race, Gender, and Jazz History
(University of Kansas, 2013-08-31)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 ... -
Senses of Taste: Duncan Hines and American Gastronomy, 1931-1962
(University of Kansas, 2013-08-31)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 ... -
Race, Place, and Family: Narratives of the Civil Rights Movement in Brownsville, Tennessee, and the Nation
(University of Kansas, 2011-12-31)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, ... -
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)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 ... -
THE "DEAR DIANE" LETTERS AND THE ENCOUNTER OF CHINESE YOUNG WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
(University of Kansas, 2012-08-31)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 ... -
Sheepdogs and Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Grazing on the High Plains
(University of Kansas, 2010-05-31)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 ...