Graduate

A review of Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey A. Groen, and Sharon M. Brucker

By Christian B. Long | 0 comments |

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In Search of Excitement:

Understanding Boston’s Civil War “Draft Riot”

By Ian Jesse | 0 comments |

On July 14, 1863, a riot broke out in the North End, Boston’s Irish neighborhood. The rioters attacked the armory on Cooper Street and several gun stores within the area. The protesters also assaulted several police officers in the street. The riot was short lived and lasted only several hours. A few days prior to the mêlée in Boston a much larger event began in New York City. The riot in New York was clearly in opposition to the new conscription law which drafted men for the Union army. This riot quickly turned into a full out race and class war. While the riot in Boston looks very different from the one in New York, and both have little in common outside of timing, historians are quick to tie the two events together. The easy answer is to say that the Boston riot occurred in response to the draft thus connecting it to New York. A close review of sources reveals otherwise. Key sources for my research include the Irish Catholic newspaper, The Pilot, which portrayed the Irish as loyal patriots who did not oppose the draft and an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, which attempted to tie Boston’s protest to New York City without much evidence. In addition to these sources I analyze personal accounts of the Boston riot which makes the event seem like a mob with no direction or opposition to the conscription, separating it from the riot in New York.

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Woody Allen and the Golden Age of Kitsch

By Shaun Clarkson | 0 comments |

Remembered primarily as an era of artistic achievement and innovation, the Golden Age of Cinema was, in fact, a period plagued by censorship and formulaic restraints. Though some films transcended this repressive environment, most resorted to easily marketable genres, character types, and plot arcs that resulted in little more than artless kitsch. Most important filmmakers immediately following the Golden Age’s demise wholly disregarded its old-fashioned codes, but Woody Allen has made a career out of simultaneously working within and upending the conventions of this earlier period. Allen takes three broad approaches to critique the old Hollywood style: reducing a complicated story to the mores and traditions of ‘30s and ‘40s cinema (Hannah and Her Sisters), disrupting recognized plots and genres (The Purple Rose of Cairo), and self-reflexively commenting upon the process of artistic creation (Stardust Memories). This article analyzes these three Allen’s films to explore the contradictions inherent to his critique of and tribute to the cinema he grew up watching and illustrates the commercial and artistic perils of such methods.

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The Political Sermon as Cultural Text:

John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and American Identity in the Colonial Era

By Laura McGee | 0 comments |

Scholars of American exceptionalism often suggest that this concept was born from the American Revolution.  This paper argues that this ideology enjoys a longer history, one that can be traced to the sermons of three prominent colonial ministers: John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and Jonathan Edwards.  Through their ‘political sermons’ these men emphasized the exceptionality and divine ordination of the Puritan mission in America.  These men provided the literary foundations from which the national culture derived much of its foundational doctrine.  The ‘city upon a hill’ that Winthrop envisioned, entailed the social, spiritual, and political commitment of the colonists and their descendents, which he and subsequent ministers invoked through a variety of literary devices.  By emphasizing individual and community fulfillment of the spiritual covenant, these sermons explicated and expounded the colony’s exceptionality.  As a source of textual authority, these tracts provided the foundation for a distinct national ideology. 

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The Pied Pipers of Pluralism

Song and Verse During the XYZ Affair

By Geoff Ralston | 0 comments |

Song and verse hold an important position in the realm of political discourse.  When complicated oration and partisan pandering fail to inspire the public conscience, rhymes and prose influence political opinion by disseminating ideas through a popular medium.  Unlike books or newspapers, poetry exchanged through pamphlets or by word of mouth can reach large numbers of people in community meetings, social gatherings, and even in the streets.  During the XYZ Affair of 1797-98, hostile relations with the French Directory following a diplomatic fiasco threatened the stability of the new republic.  With a possible war between the United States and France looming on the horizon, anti-French songs invoked imagery of patriotic revolutionary struggle to support the pro-British Federalists.  Conversely, pro-French poetry decried the trappings of blind patriotism and supported the ideals of the pro-French Democratic-Republicans.  This piece explores several of these songs and poems and their role in disguising partisan rhetoric in the form of attractive alternatives to open attacks against political opponents.  In an age before overt political partisanship, song and verse distilled party platforms into easily recited poetry, a tradition that continues to the present day.

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“The People We Found There Are Tall and Well-Built”

Visions of Native Americans by a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Conquistador

By M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo | 0 comments |

The grandson of a conquistador, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca surely wanted to emulate his forebearer’s success when he was appointed treasurer to the Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition to Florida in 1527. However, much as he wanted to be a conquistador, the failure of the expedition prevented him from fulfilling such aspirations. Instead, he became a captive of the Native Americans, totally dependent upon their protection to survive. Finding himself in the role of slave, merchant, physician, and almost a god to the Native Americans, he soon abandoned his prejudices about Native Americans and got a first-hand experience. With this, he grasped a better understanding of American reality and the manners of the Native Americans that he communicated to others in his Account. From being a man who knew nothing of either America or its inhabitants prior to the expedition, he subsequently became the best source of first hand information for generations of authors and expeditions to the area. Also, different from other analyses of Cabeza de Vaca’s treatment of Native Americans that are limited to his experiences in Florida, this essay also explores Cabeza de Vaca’s attitude towards Native Americans as governor of Argentina later on.

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Disputably a Woman

Recovering Incoherence in Sarah Piatt’s Poetry

By Ben Bagocius | 0 comments |

Within the past twenty years, many scholars have begun to “recover” nineteenth-century American women’s “sentimental” poetry that New Critics and their aesthetics have overlooked.  Sarah Piatt’s poetry in particular has garnered contemporary critical attention as a result of the important “recovery” efforts of scholars such as Paula Bernat Bennett, who celebrate Piatt as a proto-modern feminist who is thus, according to Bennett, “indisputably a woman.”  My article, however, brings Piatt’s “womanhood” and recent criticism’s affirmation of it into dispute.  After charting out the ambivalent rather than coherent discourses surrounding literary “recovery,” sentimentality, modernism, and gender, the lenses usually used through which to read Piatt’s work, I offer a reading of Piatt’s most anthologized poem, “The Palace-Burner.”  My reading aligns Piatt not with a completely legible proto-feminist politics, but with a politics of the ambiguity of identity itself.  Ultimately, my study hopes to encourage a “recovery” method that reads a poet’s political and social identities as propitiously mysterious and open to conjecture rather than subsumes a writer into contemporary discursive allegiances.

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Adolescence, Literature and Censorship:

Unpacking the Controversy Surrounding Judy Blume

By Mallory Szymanski | 0 comments |

While discussing the history of “book banning” and more recent debates on the idea of censorship, the author argues that Judy Blume’s work stands as a point of familiarity, comfort and understanding amongst adolescents. The paper finds its primary focus in Blume’s exploration of the idea of sexual normativity and acceptance amongst peers, but also speaks to broader issues that Blume explores in her texts – diseases, abnormalities, parental association and peer-pressure. Overall, the author asks that both readers and critics re-examine the social, environmental and literary value of Blume’s work within, what the author argues, is an unaccepting, often sceptical social milieu. Blume’s work has been pivotal as a tool for social affirmation and growth among adolescents by citing letters, opinions and critiques who responses reaffirm their love for Blume’s work.

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Jack Kerouac´s and Brenda Frazer´s Shared ‘Romantic Primitivism’:

A Comparative Study of On the Road and For Love of Ray

By Heike Mlakar | 0 comments |

This paper traces the problematic role of racial mythologizing from the hierarchical stance of the romanticizing the Beats. In Jack Kerouac´s On the Road (1957) and Brenda Frazer´s For Love of Ray (1971),the story of her tragic relationship with Beat poet Ray Bremser, the narrators of both works are presented as ‘romantic racialists’ following the steps of Oswald Spengler´s controversial theories of the apocalypse of Western civilization. Living with the suppressed Mexican fellahin population, both authors completely deny the harsh reality of living a life of poverty and social degradation. Instead, the Native Mexican population is depicted as uncorrupted, truly happy, and authentic, while the U.S. represents failing humanity. By juxtaposing Frazer´s female experience of Mexican life against the experiences of Kerouac, this paper argues for a gendered reading of Beat literature as both an anti-American escape and the tendency of Western Orientalizing and fetishizing.

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Dissenting Americans or Disloyal Deviants?:

New Left "Anti-Americanism" in America (1962-1975)

By Lindsey Churchill | 0 comments |

The impartial jury has remained an important goal of the American judicial system throughout the republic’s history.  That ideal has shared its staying power with ancient procedures still used in the jury selection process, the most important example being voir dire.  Originally a guarantee that defendants would face juries devoid of prejudiced individuals, voir dire allows the parties—i.e. the lawyers—of a trail to inspect the pool of jurors, lobbying for and selecting individuals they hope will give a fair hearing.  Many modern observers doubt that the end results are impartial juries.  Rather, the history of voir dire often includes lawyers systematically excluding racial and ideological minority groups, and women.  This paper explores the problems encountered in the voir dire process, and the solutions that have been proposed and implemented over the past century.  Further, the question is raised whether voir dire can possibly live alongside the modern desire for juries that are both impartial and fairly representative of the community’s population.

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