Matching Items (439)
Description
Baseball is the quintessential American game. To understand the country one must also understand the role baseball played in the nation's maturation process. Embedded in baseball's history are (among other things) the stories of America's struggles with issues of race, gender, immigration, organized labor, drug abuse, and rampant consumerism. Over the better part of two centuries, the national pastime both reflected changes to American culture and helped shape them as well. Documenting these changes and packaging them for consumption is the responsibility of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Founded as a tourist attraction promoting largely patriotic values, in recent decades the Baseball Hall of Fame made a concerted effort to transform itself into a respected member of the history museum community--dedicated to displaying American history through the lens of baseball. This dissertation explores the evolution of the Baseball Hall of Fame from celebratory shrine to history museum through an analysis of public history practice within the museum. In particular, this study examines the ways the Hall both reflected and reinforced changes to American values and ideologies through the evolution of public history practice in the museum. The primary focus of this study is the museum's exhibits and analyzing what their content and presentation convey about the social climate during the various stages of the Baseball Hall of Fame's evolution. The principal resources utilized to identify these stages include promotional materials, exhibit reviews, periodicals, and photographic records, as well as interviews with past and present Hall-of-Fame staff. What this research uncovers is the story of an institution in the midst of a slow transition. Throughout the past half century, the Hall of Fame staff struggled with a variety of obstacles to change (including the museum's traditionally conservative roots, the unquestioning devotion Americans display for baseball and its mythology, and the Hall of Fame's idyllic setting in a quaint corner of small-town America) that undermined their efforts to become the type of socially relevant institution many envisioned. Contending with these challenges continues to characterize much of the museum's operations today.
ContributorsMangan, Gregory (Author) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Thesis advisor) / Szuter, Christine (Committee member) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation makes the case to reclaim the typically negative term, coterie, as a poetic method and offers the epithalamium as a valuable object for the study of coterie conditions and values. This examination of the historical poetics of the epithalamium shows how the form was reappropriated by gay postwar poets and those in related social circumstances. This study applies and builds on theories developed by Arthur Marotti (John Donne: Coterie Poet), and Lytle Shaw (Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie) and subsequent critics to develop a coterie poetics, the markers and terms for which I have arranged here to demonstrate conscious "sociable" poetics. It is thus to our advantage to study coterie conditions and methods to open readers to insights into twentieth-century poets that have deliberately exploited reception among those in private and public spheres, just as their Early-Modern precursors did--often as a matter of survival, but also as formative practice. The key figures in this study wrote significant epithalamia or made major theoretical claims for coterie poetics: John Donne (1572-1631), W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Paul Goodman (1910-1972), and Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). O'Hara's poetry is approached as the apex of coterie poetics; his personal immediacy and obscure personal references should alienate and exclude--yet, they invite.
ContributorsEisenberg, Jeremy (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is.
ContributorsHardman, Katherine (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study looks at Geoffrey Chaucer's use of the color green as it appears in regards to the settings and antagonists of three of the Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Friar's Tale, and the Merchant's Tale. Following the allegorical approach, it argues that the color green in these tales is symbolic of Fortune, modeled upon Boethian philosophy and the allegory of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's thirteenth century French poem, The Romance of the Rose. It suggests, furthermore, that Fortune is a potential overarching theme of the Canterbury Tales, and that the tales, in turn, should be read as a cohesive unit.
ContributorsLemman, Krista (Author) / Sturges, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Corse, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers.
ContributorsSwann, Alaya (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
In the United States, there is a national agenda to increase the number of qualified science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) professionals and a movement to promote science literacy among the general public. This project explores the association between formal human evolutionary biology education (HEB) and high school science class enrollment, academic achievement, interest in a STEM degree program, motivation to pursue a STEM career, and socioscientific decision–making for a sample of students enrolled full–time at Arizona State University. Given a lack of a priori knowledge of these relationships, the Grounded Theory Method was used and was the foundation for a mixed–methods analysis involving qualitative and quantitative data from one–on–one interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and an online survey. Theory development and hypothesis generation were based on data from 44 students. The survey instrument, developed to test the hypotheses, was completed by 486 undergraduates, age 18–22, who graduated from U.S. public high schools. The results showed that higher exposure to HEB was correlated with greater high school science class enrollment, particularly for advanced biological science classes, and that, for some students, HEB exposure may have influenced their enrollment, because the students found the content interesting and relevant. The results also suggested that students with higher K–12 HEB exposure felt more prepared for undergraduate science coursework. There was a positive correlation between HEB exposure and interest in a STEM degree and an indirect relationship between higher HEB exposure and motivation to pursue a STEM career. Regarding a number of socioscientific issues, including but not limited to climate change, homosexuality, and stem cell research, students' behaviors and decision–making more closely reflected a scientific viewpoint—or less–closely aligned to a religion–based perspective—when students had greater HEB exposure, but this was sometimes contingent on students' lifetime exposure to religious doctrine and acceptance of general evolution or human evolution. This study has implications for K–12 and higher education and justifies a paradigm shift in evolution education research, such that more emphasis is placed on students' interests, perceived preparation for continued learning, professional goals and potential contributions to society rather than just their knowledge and acceptance.
ContributorsSchrein, Caitlin M (Author) / Toon, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Johanson, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Hackett, Edward (Committee member) / Molina-Walters, Debra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The general field of interest of this study was art education in the context of art museums in the United States. The vehicle of a mixed method, descriptive research design was used to investigate whether museum educator and curator participants had tendencies to use personal or communal approaches (Barrett, 2000) to teaching art interpretation to adult visitors. While the personal approach to art interpretation focused on individuals' responses to artworks, the communal approach emphasized the community of art scholars' shared understandings of artworks.
Understanding the communities of practice of the participants was integral to the discovery of meaning in the study's findings. Wenger (1998) introduced the theory of community of practice to explain how individuals, who are united in a particular context, shared similar perspectives, learned socially from each other, and gained a sense of identity through their routines and interactions. The study examined how museum educators' and curators' separate communities of practice influenced their members' teaching approaches through the development of distinct teacher personae. Teacher personae reflected the educational values and priorities of museum educators' and curators' communities of practice. And, teacher personae had tendencies to adopt personal or communal approaches to art interpretation.
Understanding the communities of practice of the participants was integral to the discovery of meaning in the study's findings. Wenger (1998) introduced the theory of community of practice to explain how individuals, who are united in a particular context, shared similar perspectives, learned socially from each other, and gained a sense of identity through their routines and interactions. The study examined how museum educators' and curators' separate communities of practice influenced their members' teaching approaches through the development of distinct teacher personae. Teacher personae reflected the educational values and priorities of museum educators' and curators' communities of practice. And, teacher personae had tendencies to adopt personal or communal approaches to art interpretation.
ContributorsSchmitt, Rory (Author) / Erickson, Mary L (Thesis advisor) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Young, Bernard (Committee member) / Held, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The display methods of the gallery, "Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision," makes the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, unique among modern art institutions in the United States. It is also an anomaly within the Menil Collection itself. The "Witnesses" room is located near the back of the wing that houses the museum's large Surrealism collection. Both objects that the Surrealists owned and objects similar to those they collected are showcased in the gallery by means of an array of eclectically displayed ethnographic objects and other curiosities. Curated by anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, this single-room exhibition seems to recreate a surrealist collection. "Witnesses" is a permanent exhibition within the Menil's Surrealism collection and not an independent wing or gallery. All of the objects contained in "Witnesses" belonged either to the curator Edmund Carpenter or to the de Menils, whose larger collection of ethnographic objects are displayed in separate African, Oceanic, and Pacific Northwest Coast galleries within the museum. The Surrealists often utilized a heterogeneous style of both collecting and display, which the de Menils also took up. They mixed surrealist art freely with ethnographic and other types of found objects. This style of collecting and display contrasts sharply with the modern display methods that are standard to American art museums, and which are dictated by a hierarchy based on the cultural provenance of each object as high art. This thesis examines Carpenter's "Witnesses" exhibition in the Menil Collection to establish its display as a legacy of surrealist collecting--a close connection which is not seen in the permanent collections of any other art museum in the United States. Thus, by noting and annotating the Surrealists' collecting and display methods that can be located in Carpenter's installation of "Witnesses," I argue that Carpenter challenges many of the formal qualities typical of museum institutional practices and radically expands its very definition of what constitutes art, even in our own time.
ContributorsStrange, Kristen (Author) / Mesch, Ulrike (Thesis advisor) / Swensen, Thomas (Committee member) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
In 1999, Geneviève Hasenohr announced the discovery of a fragment of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des Simples Ames, a work condemned by the Church at the University of Paris in 1310, hidden in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque municipale in Valenciennes. The fragment corresponds with roughly two chapters in the only extant French version of the manuscript (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS F XIV 26), and when compared with other editions of the Mirouer, it appears to be composed in what might have been Marguerite Porete's native dialect. The discovery changed scholars' perceptions of the weight of the various versions and translations - the Chantilly manuscript had been used previously to settle any questions of discrepancy, but now it appears that the Continental Latin and Middle English translations should be the arbiters. This discovery has elevated the Middle English editions, and has made the question of the translator's identity - he is known only by his initials M.N. - and background more imperative to an understanding of why a work with such a dubious history would be translated and harbored by English Carthusians in the century that followed its condemnation. The only candidate suggested for translator of the Mirouer has been Michael Northburgh (d. 1361), the Bishop of London and co-founder of the London Charterhouse, where two of the three remaining copies of the translation were once owned, but the language of the text and Northburgh's own position and interests do not fit this suggestion. My argument is that the content of the book, the method of its translation, its selection as a work for a Latin-illiterate audience, all fit within the interests of a circle of writers based in Yorkshire at the end of the fourteenth century. By beginning among the Yorkshire circle, and widening the search to include writers with a non-traditional contemplative audience, one that exists outside of the cloister - writers like Walter Hilton, the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and the Chastising of God's Children, and Nicholas Love - we may have a better chance of locating and understanding the motives of the Middle English translator of the Mirouer.
ContributorsStauffer, Robert F (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The Neue Galerie in New York City includes some of the most impressive and culturally-specific artwork from Ronald S. Lauder's private art collection. The Neue's permanent exhibitions showcase pieces from the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) and Wiener Werkstätte (Applied Arts of Vienna) in an environment that also employs replicas and period specific motifs to evoke the interiors of the private homes in which affluent fin-de-siècle Viennese art patrons lived, displayed influential modernist work, and held culturally important salons. Gustav Klimt's celebrated Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is arguably the museum's most prized artwork. It serves as an icon that immortalizes Ronald Lauder as private collector. The figure of Adele Bloch-Bauer has also become an important emblem, whose story epitomizes the complexities of Jewish identity and its influence upon Viennese modern art. This thesis explores how the Neue Galerie's physical layout represents a specific model of modernism. By focusing on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, I urge a rethinking of the museum's relationship to modern art as an interpretation of the past. The themes that surround Adele Bloch-Bauer I have shaped Lauder's agenda as the leading private collector of the art of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
ContributorsFindling, Heather (Author) / Mesch, Ulrike (Thesis advisor) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012