This paper examines the rhetorical history surrounding the “the right to die,” or euthanasia movement, from its beginnings as part of the eugenics movement in the 1920s to the first piece of state legislation guaranteeing the right to die in the early 1990s. By examining rhetoric produced by euthanasia advocates during this time, I demonstrate the complex interactions between political events, public opinion, the right to die movement, and associated rhetoric, as well as how these interactions shaped the creation and conception of the euthanasia movement. In order to conduct my study, I use a qualitative analysis political rhetoric created by different advocacy groups over this 60-year time period, grouping the different rhetoric into the three most prominent themes: medical ethics, religious rhetoric, and ideas around individual suffering and dignity. Data has been collected primarily from archives and newspapers. Exploring the intricate transformation of the “right to die” movement, from its close ties with eugenics to its modern entrenchment within progressive politics, allows insight into the way political events and rhetoric shape movements.

This paper assesses the ways in which Muslim and Jewish women in Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain, during the 10th to 15th centuries demonstrated agency in the public and private aspects of their lives. Women’s perspectives are frequently invisible, especially in medieval histories, as men wrote many of the surviving sources. Through poetry and legal documents, however, we can understand how women expressed their needs and concerns. Poetry written by Muslim and Jewish women exposes the agency and power they had in their relationships because female poets articulated their desires. Fatwas and marriage contracts reveal the agency women had over their economic well-being because they brought forward contentions over their property rights to legal authorities. The experience of Muslim and Jewish women in Al-Andalus, who represent societal extremes as members of the dominant and minority religious groups, respectively, is remarkably similar. Both Muslim and Jewish women were expected to solely occupy positions and responsibilities in the domestic, private sphere, becoming wives and eventually mothers. The prosperity of the Golden Age of Islam did not significantly affect Muslim and Jewish women’s lives. However, further research into the experiences of Christian women is necessary to understand how, if at all, women’s experiences differed depending on the religious group they belonged to.

One of the most prolific sources of medieval Viking literature is the collection of

Icelandic sagas known as the Flateyjarbók . Within this collection, two sagas are known as the Vinland Sagas, as they detail the Vikings’ journeys to the eastern shores of Arctic North America. In these sagas, a historically diverse group of Native Americans appear as a generic tribe known as the Skraelings or S krælingjar . It has been evident in Native American history that the Americas’ indigenous peoples have long been misrepresented, mistreated, and dismissed by white Europeans and their histories. In this paper, I intend to provide evidence for the claim that the racist, ethnocentric rhetoric of European literature is used to denigrate the indigenous people of North America as early as the late Middle Ages.

This capstone project examines the use of rumors, looking specifically at the curse of Tutankhamen’s tomb, as a tool for colonialism. The goal was to determine what the purpose of this rumor was in its colonial context. By focusing on this case study, I challenge the fascination with Egyptian culture, particularly the obsession with mummies and the supernatural. My paper utilizes theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nicholas Daly, and Gregory Dowd to create a framework to view the primary sources, focusing on the economic exploitation and alienation of the Egyptian people. Viewing media as an outlet for this rumor provided the base for my capstone. I use two major media sources: newspapers and film. They are at the core of my analysis and make up the two main components, looking specifically at the language and stylistic choices. Both newspapers and film are unique because of the large audience they can reach. They deliberately spread a narrative that stereotyped Egyptian culture for their own fiscal gain. The rumor of the mummy’s curse perpetuated colonizers’ agenda and helped them maintain control over the people they colonized.

This project examines the many discrete ways in which territorial maps of the Cherokee Nation, focusing on the period between 1824-1939, have been developed almost exclusively within the isolated spheres of the United States federal and state governments. The production of these maps ultimately indicates more about their contributors than they do geography itself. Using the Cherokee Nation as a case study, I provide a digital timeline of ten maps (1824-1939) that illustrate the continually shifting relationship between the United States federal and state governments and the Cherokee Nation specifically, and Native American Nations in general. I pair each of these maps with an analysis of authorship and subsequent commissioning institutions, along with other contextual information, providing a framework for understanding these maps through their institutional history. This project aids in visualizing the vast discontinuities of the institutional entities responsible for Native American relations within the U.S. federal government, which were in a constant state of change during this early period. Although my research concludes in 1939, it is pertinent today as the commissioning institution has not changed since that time.

On October 25, 1963, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah gave a speech commemorating the formal opening of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in which he lamented the current state of academic trends in Ghanaian social sciences and humanities. President Nkrumah argued these were still “largely influenced by the concepts of old style ‘colonial studies’…, remain[ing] under the shadow of colonial ideologies and mentality.” This paper attempts to evaluate Nkrumah’s claim by exploring the state of historiography in the late colonial Gold Coast and early independent Ghana during the decade leading up to this speech, in particular focusing on the Historical Society of Ghana and its journal of publications, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana.

The corset, a staple of Western European fashion since the 16th century, was originally

worn almost exclusively by aristocrats. However, British women of all classes widely adopted the corset during the Victorian era (1837-1901). During this time, the corset transformed from a supportive undergarment intended to provide the wearer with good posture into a means of shrinking the wearer’s waist to achieve an exaggeratedly “feminine” silhouette. What caused the corset, a garment which had existed for centuries, to change so dramatically in such a short period of time? The answer lies largely in the effects of the Industrial Revolution - both because technological advances enabled mass production of less expensive corsets, and also because economic changes led to increasingly rigid gender roles. Contemporary propaganda described woman’s natural, God-ordained role as a submissive, dependent wife and mother. This portrayal served the interests of British industrialization, commerce, and consumerism, which required that “proper” women be rendered symbolically, if not literally, helpless. As men became the sole family breadwinners, women were relegated to a domestic sphere in which the goods they consumed and wore - including the tight-laced corset - became a means of displaying their husbands’ prosperity.

In the midst of the demoralizing Great Depression, the United States also dealt with the problem of the emerging “Public Enemy.” To form the organization now known as the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover launched off of the publicity that the crimes of famous outlaws received. Yet these men weren’t the only criminals making the front page. This informative StoryMaps takes the viewer through a journey of the Public Enemy Era (1931-1934) and the public fascination with the “gun moll” or gangster girlfriend. Newspaper clippings and photographs are combined to dive into the reasons these women were so popular with the press and the public, and how the role they played influenced that popularity. I use two strategies: case studies of individual women and an analysis of general article trends. Data have been gathered from newspapers around the country, although the majority of events took place in the Midwest. This presentation discusses the role played by these briefly famous women and creates context for further analysis of gender relations in the Public Enemy Era.

Santa’s current image and character are a work of public imagination, with most of that consolidation occurring in the United States in the last two centuries. Even as Santa’s image was being refined and standardized by artists and writers, his “brand” was used to sell ideas and cultural norms in addition to his long history of endorsing consumer goods, essentially weaving advertising into his character along with his archetypal sleigh and red coat. Two visual artists with the most noticeable impact on Santa’s consolidation, Thomas Nast and Haddon Sundblom, encoded their own ideas about what it meant to be American in their drawings of Santa; Nast, and Santa, took the side of the Union in the American Civil War, while Sundblom illustrated three decades of Coca-Cola Santa Claus advertisements, while espousing within them the coveted return to pre-World War II cultural norms as America adjusted to its status as a world superpower postwar. Santa’s characterization as a paragon of virtue and arbiter of goodness lends a unique credibility to the ideas his image is used to sell by building intense moral associations into those ideas, thus working to define and reinforce said cultural norms. Examining the use of Santa in advertising goods and spreading ideas is a reminder of the multifaceted nature of these norms, the variety of subtle ways in which they become enshrined, and provides a way to recognize the same tactics still in use today.

This capstone is an examination and analysis of how the National Football League’s (NFL) Dallas Cowboys recreated and redefined gendered power during the 1970s in the U.S. It argues that the Cowboys and, on a larger scale, the NFL were able to reconstruct gender ideals through the media which were disrupted by events like the feminist movement and the Vietnam War. I draw on a number of primary sources including national newspapers, Sports Illustrated, and NFL Films highlight reels. The NFL is not just a site to reproduce gender modes but is an active player in reconstructing and imposing gender roles in America, particularly in times of national distress. Some argue that sport is a utopic mirror of the real world. Athletes, coaches, and teams, however, are as influential and visible as politicians and pop culture heroes. During the 1970s, the NFL redefined the masculinized warrior hero archetype. The league also redeveloped the hypersexualized and commodified “pinup girl” mode of femininity in response to second-wave feminism. Through mass media, the Dallas Cowboys and the NFL were able to regenerate gender power structures in the 1970s.

The electric vibrator has been widely studied during two periods of American history: immediately after its invention as a medical device in the late nineteenth century and nearly one hundred years later upon the open acknowledgement of vibrators as sex toys in the 1970s. However, there is a noticeable gap in scholarship regarding the vibrator in the early to mid-twentieth century between the vibrator’s advent and the sexual revolution. The early to mid-twentieth century is perhaps understudied due to a lack of direct primary sources discussing vibrators’ sexual uses, but advertisements, language used surrounding vibrators, and pornography of the era provide a deeper look at vibrators’ use during this time. Through these sources, it becomes apparent that the vibrator’s potential for sexual pleasure was realized by many parts of American society; however, open acknowledgement of female sexual pleasure, and masturbation in particular, was inhibited by the social environment and taboos surrounding female sexuality. Ultimately, vibrators were most likely used as sex toys long before the 1970s given that advertisers and the pornography industry saw their potential for sex, and therefore American women probably did as well.

In the 41 years since autism entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM) as a diagnostic category, its criteria have dramatically shifted away from a narrow model requiring severe impairment towards a broad model that acknowledges a wide spectrum of symptoms and severity. Yet, concurrent with these shifts, the DSM has cyclically introduced adjacent diagnoses meant to catch those cases not counted as “severe enough” to be autism—only to later absorb each of these diagnoses into the autistic category and introduce a new one. This paper examines the official criteria for autism and its adjacent diagnoses in each edition of the DSM as well as context surrounding the origin of the autism diagnosis. It uses this evidence to argue that the cyclical changes to the DSM indicate a deep stigma attached to developmental disability. While a small body of scholarship is beginning to study the social construction of autism and its implications over time, this paper is unique in examining the tensions and adherences between autism and its neighbors within the official diagnostic text. This analysis offers new insight into the the assumptions, challenged and unchallenged, about disability that inform the DSM and by extension the field of psychiatry.