Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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American fascist groups, while varied in motives, methods, and vision of a future society, recruited hundreds of thousands of members in the interwar years from either specific ethnic and immigrant groups or from among “native” Americans. Though most of these groups evaporated following the American entry into the Second World War and thus never came close to achieving any of their wide-ranging political goals, much of their literature and ideology exists and continues to be diffused among present-day members of the far right.
This study seeks to place American fascist movements within the context of their own time, as having emerged alongside European fascism from the same cultural antecedents. In doing so, this study analyzes three of the largest “native” American fascist groups – the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, and the Christian Front – and applies a theoretical model of fascism for comparison to generic European fascist movements. The thesis argues that in viewing fascism as the end result of a “cultural phenomenon,” as historian Zeev Sternhell has argued regarding European fascism, American fascism can similarly be seen as the culmination of several cultural, social, and intellectual antecedents rather than an obscure political aberration. By measuring the significance of American fascist movements only by their (lack of) political effectiveness, historians have overlooked many of the broader implications of such groups not only having existed but also having gained such a large following of adherents.