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Browsing by Author "Cline, David P."

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    A Catalyst for the Development of Human Rights: German Internment Practices in the First World War,1914-1929
    Vick, Alison Marie (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-17)
    This thesis is a transnational study of the military actions and responses related to prisoners of war in World War I. Building on the works human rights scholars, I explore the how the collective rights afforded to prisoners of war under the 1906 Geneva Convention and 1907 Hague Convention served as a precursor to the concept of human rights that emerged after World War II. I argue that German military treated prisoners of war according to national interest, rather than international law. Specifically, I explore how the concepts of "military necessity" and "reciprocity" drove German internment practices, and how German internment practices escalated in violence during the last two years of the war. The violent practices committed by the Germans against prisoners of war produced an international demand to hold the perpetrators of wartime atrocities accountable for their actions in the postwar period.
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    Christiansburg Institute
    Fralin, Scott; Finney, Trevor; Cline, David P.; Ogle, J. Todd; Tucker, Thomas J. (Virginia Tech, 2016-08-22)
    This exhibit features work from Virginia Tech's Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies and computer science, education, and public history programs and an app developed around the history of the CI called CI-Spy. Founded in 1866 with 200 students, the Christiansburg Institute (CI) was a school that educated newly emancipated African Americans. As schools desegregated, fewer students attended the CI, and in the spring of 1966, its final senior class of 22 students graduated. 2016/08/22 - 2016/09/30
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    Consuming Beauty: The Impact of Prescriptive Beauty Literature on College Women, 1940-1950
    Zlokas, Rosemary E. (Virginia Tech, 2015-06-17)
    My thesis looks at prescriptive beauty messages generated during 1940-1950 by using a case study of Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. I look at formal prescriptive beauty messages (advertisements, beauty manuals) and informal beauty messages (college yearbooks, newspapers, and beauty queen campaigns) to see what types of messages were created and why. I situate changes in these messages in a timeline of national culture, as it existed before, during, and after World War II. I then compare these messages by looking at which prescriptions were adapted by MMCC women as a group. I argue that these young women adopted an adapted version of the two prescriptions by following the advice given on a national level but also shaping their appearances based on what was occurring on campus. I infer that one set of prescriptions cannot exist in a vacuum; there will be a set of overarching goals to strive for, as well as a set based on standards within her immediate environment. The digital component to this project is available at www.consumingbeauty.com.
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    Dammed If You Don't: The Palmertown Tragedy of 1924 in Collective Memory
    Bolt, Carmen (Virginia Tech, 2016-06-24)
    On December 24, 1924, a wall of water and alkali muck engulfed Palmertown, a small community in Saltville, Virginia. Houses were swept away and by the time all of the bodies were pulled from the wreckage, the death toll had reached 19-an immense loss for the tight-knit community. A dam, owned by Mathieson Alkali Works, loomed approximately 100 feet above Palmertown, keeping at bay the chemical muck produced by the company plants. Despite the extent of the damage, the flood is largely absent from discourse and no historical marker exists to memorialize the tragedy. Furthermore, Palmertown and neighboring Henrytown were expunged in the mid-twentieth century when Olin Corporation rebuilt the dam overtop of the town sites. Stories of the event have been passed down for generations, immortalizing a specific story of the disaster in the memories of many local residents of Saltville, so why is it not memorialized? The cultural framework of Saltville determined how and why this disaster and others have been remembered or forgotten. In 1924, Saltville residents were accustomed to tragic events; to some extent these events were seen as part and parcel of life in a company town in Appalachia. Yet, nearly a century after the tragedy, the process of unearthing of difficult events can illuminate much of the community's collective history and restore the fragmented communal memory. The memorialization of the Palmertown Tragedy of 1924 establishes a framework for acknowledging an arduous past and identifying the roots of a town's resilience.
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    Indigeneity on Display: Ethnographic Adventure Film in Amazonia
    Attridge, Jeffrey Nathaniel (Virginia Tech, 2017-05-18)
    This paper seeks to explore the early twentieth century trend of ethnographic adventure filmmaking. A subgenre of the ethnographic film, these works blended ethnographic observations with scripted and staged adventure stories, advancing popular tropes of indigenous first contact and the superiority of Western civilization. Focusing on a 1931 expedition to the Amazon which resulted in the creation of the first sync-sound ethnographic adventure film, titled Matto Grosso: The Great Brazilian Wilderness, I argue that despite flaws in its conception, production, and media coverage, this film serves as an example of how non-academic sources of knowledge production can still create important primary documents for indigenous source communities.
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    Realms of Remembered Violence: The Emergence of Mass Murder Memorials in the United States, 1986-2012
    Hill, Jordan (Virginia Tech, 2014-10-14)
    This research explores the new tradition of creating mass murder memorials in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Using written and oral history sources in combination with memorial designs, I explore the planning processes undertaken by five different communities: Virginia Tech, Columbine, University of Texas, Oklahoma City and Edmond, OK. I analyze what these case studies reveal about how changing cultural expectations and political needs transformed commemorative practices concerning violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By exposing how the timely interventions of national figures increasingly shaped local commemorative aspirations, my research illuminates how the brief period of national unity in the immediate aftermath has been discursively and materially foregrounded as the heart of national public memory narratives of mass murder. I argue that at the turn of the twenty-first century the memory of victims of mass murders"assuming something akin to the role that fallen soldiers have played for the bulk of American history"are now viewed by a range of political, religious and cultural actors as a highly effective means of bolstering perceptions of local, organizational and national unity. This project contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on commemoration in three ways. First, I challenge the literature on memorials built in the immediate aftermath of violence and tragedy by illustrating how these memory sites are increasingly but the first stage of the material culture of public memory. Second, my theory of a ritualized assemblage develops the existing literature by forwarding a concept well suited to analyze the relationship of between seemingly disparate memory sites. Lastly, the rhetoric of what I call the Myth of the Slaughtered Citizen contributes to the literature on nationalism and commemoration by explaining how the victims of mass murder were culturally substituted into the commemorative role traditionally held by fallen soldiers to promote a sense of local and national unity.
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    To Play Jewish Again: Roots, Counterculture, and the Klezmer Revival
    Gogan, Claire Marissa (Virginia Tech, 2016-06-08)
    Klezmer, a type of Eastern European Jewish secular music brought to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, originally functioned as accompaniment to Jewish wedding ritual celebrations. In the late 1970s, a group of primarily Jewish musicians sought inspiration for a renewal of this early 20th century American klezmer by mining 78 rpm records for influence, and also by seeking out living klezmer musicians as mentors. Why did a group of Jewish musicians in the 1970s through 1990s want to connect with artists and recordings from the early 20th century in order to "revive" this music? What did the music "do" for them and how did it contribute to their senses of both individual and collective identity? How did these musicians perceive the relationship between klezmer, Jewish culture, and Jewish religion? Finally, how was the genesis for the klezmer revival related to the social and cultural climate of its time? I argue that Jewish folk musicians revived klezmer music in the 1970s as a manifestation of both an existential search for authenticity, carrying over from the 1960s counterculture, and a manifestation of a 1970s trend toward ethnic cultural revival. I implicitly argue that both waves of klezmer popularity in America are reflections of the long project of Jews negotiating identities as both American and Jewish—the attempt to fit in from the margins while maintaining or being ascribed certain ethnic differences—in the United States throughout the 20th century.
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    Tributes to the Past, Present, and Future: Confederate Memorialization in Virginia, 1914-1919
    Seabrook, Thomas Rudolph (Virginia Tech, 2015-06-02)
    Between 1914 and 1919, elite white people erected monuments across Virginia, permanently transforming the landscape of their communities with memorials to the Confederacy. Why did these Confederate memorialists continue to build monuments to a conflict their side had lost half a century earlier? This thesis examines this question to extend the study of the Lost Cause past the traditional stopping date of the Civil War semicentennial in 1915 and to add to the study of memorialization as a historical process. Studying the design and language of monuments as well as dedication orations and newspaper coverage of unveiling ceremonies, this thesis focuses on Virginia's Confederate memorials to provide a case study for the whole South. Memorialization is always an act of the present as much as an honoring of the past. Elite white Virginians built memorials to speak to their contemporaries at the same time they claimed to speak for them. Memorialists turned to the Confederacy for support in an effort to maintain their status at the top of post-Reconstruction Southern society. Confederate monuments served as permanent physical role models, continuing sectional reconciliation, encouraging women to maintain prescribed gender roles, and discouraging African Americans from standing up for their rights. American involvement in World War I exacerbated societal changes that threatened the position of the traditional white ruling class. As proponents of the Lost Cause squared off against the transformations of the Progressive era, Virginia's Confederate memorialists imbued monuments throughout the Commonwealth with messages meant to ensure their continued dominance.
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    "The Verdict of History": Defining and Defending James Buchanan through Public Memorialization
    O'Hara, Stephen Patrick (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-30)
    Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, decorum called for the veneration of past presidents as devoted patriots. The terms "sage" and "statesman," which became synonymous with patriotism, riddled the remembrances of every president during this period. The Civil War, however, marked a significant shift in national meanings of patriotism. Civic virtue and morality gave way to post-Civil War ideals of warrior heroism. No longer would presidents simply be expected to maintain virtue and character; rather, they were to exhibit the heroism of Civil War soldiers. For those presidents who did not meet the public's new patriotic criteria, their once untouchable legacies became contested terrain. This thesis explores how changing definitions of patriotism influenced the public's consideration of and relationship with presidents, and how the former leaders — as well as their families and supporters — manipulated the nation's collective memory of their lives and administrations. It specifically focuses on James Buchanan (d. 1 June 1868), whose administration not only preceded the Civil War but also bore the brunt of post-Civil War opprobrium. Buchanan and his descendents repeatedly sought to refute the public's disparaging "verdict of history," which criticized the former president's passivity in response to secession as evidence of his lack of patriotism. Over time, various forms of monuments and memorials arose in an attempt to counteract this criticism. This thesis demonstrates that as the Civil War influenced meanings of patriotism, presidents and their descendants took measures to control public memory via increasingly innovative and elaborate forms of memorialization.
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    'What are ye, little mannie?': the Persistence of Fairy Culture in Scotland,1572-1703 and 1811-1927
    Hight, Alison Marie (Virginia Tech, 2014-06-09)
    This thesis is a chronologically comparative study of fairy culture and belief in early modern and Victorian Scotland. Using fairy culture as a case study, I examine the adaptability of folk culture by exploring whether beliefs and legends surrounding fairies in the early modern era continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a single culture system, or whether the Victorian fairy revival was a distinct cultural phenomenon. Based on contextual, physical, and behavioral comparisons, this thesis argues the former; while select aspects of fairy culture developed and adapted to serve the needs and values of Victorian society, its resurgence and popularization was largely predicated on the notion that it was a remnant of the past, therefore directly linking the nineteenth century interpretation to the early modern. In each era, fairy culture serves as a window into the major tensions complicating Scottish identity formation. In the early modern era, these largely centered around witchcraft, theology, and the Reformation, while notions of cultural heritage, national mythology, and escapist fantasy dominated Victorian fairy discourse. A comparative study on fairy culture demonstrates how cultural traditions can help link vastly different time periods and complicate traditional conceptions about periodization. Ultimately, this thesis reveals how issues of class impacted the popularization and persistence of fairy culture across both eras, reflecting ongoing discussions about Scottish identity.
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    The Wind Goes On: 'Gone with the Wind' and the Imagined Geographies of the American South
    Edmondson, Taulby (Virginia Tech, 2018-04-20)
    Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind achieved massive literary success before being adapted into a motion picture of the same name in 1939. The novel and film have amassed numerous accolades, inspired frequent reissues, and sustained mass popularity. This dissertation analyzes evidence of audience reception in order to assess the effects of Gone with the Wind's version of Lost Cause collective memory on the construction of the Old South, Civil War, and Lost Cause in the American imagination from 1936 to 2016. By utilizing the concept of prosthetic memory in conjunction with older, still-existing forms of collective cultural memory, Gone with the Wind is framed as a newly theorized mass cultural phenomenon that perpetuates Lost Cause historical narratives by reaching those who not only identify closely with it, but also by informing what nonidentifying consumers seeking historical authenticity think about the Old South and Civil War. In so doing, this dissertation argues that Gone with the Wind is both an artifact of the Lost Cause collective memory that it, more than anything else, legitimized in the twentieth century and a multi-faceted site where memory of the South and Civil War is still created. My research is grounded in the field of memory studies, in particular the work of Pierre Nora, Eric Hobsbawn, Andreas Huyssen, Michael Kammen, and Alison Landsberg. In chapter one, I track the reception of Gone with the Wind among white American audiences and define the phenomenon as rooted in Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation. I further argue that Gone with the Wind's Lost Causism provided white national subjects with a collective memory of slavery and the Civil War that made sense of continuing racial tensions during Jim Crow and justified white resistance to African American equality. Gone with the Wind, in other words, reconciled the lingering ideological divisions between white northerners and southerners who then were more concerned with protecting white supremacy. In chapter two and three, I analyze Gone with the Wind's continuing popularity throughout the twentieth century and its significant influence on other sites of national memory. Chapter four uses contemporary user reviews of Gone with the Wind DVD and Blu-ray collector's editions to reveal that the phenomenon remains popular. Throughout this study I analyze the history of black resistance to the Gone with the Wind phenomenon. For African Americans, Gone with the Wind's Lost Causism has always been understood as justification for racism, imbuing the white national conscious with a mythological history of slavery and black inferiority. As I argue, black protestors to Gone with the Wind were correct, as the phenomenon has always resonated most during moments of increased racial tension such as during the civil rights era and following the Charleston Church Massacre in 2015.
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    Won, but Not One: The Construction of Union Veteranhood, 1861-1917
    Caprice, Kevin Ryne (Virginia Tech, 2017-06-07)
    Fifteen years following the end of the American Civil War, the identity of the Union veteran was in crisis. In 1879 Congress passed the Arrears Act, an immediately expensive pension bill that muddied the public's perception of veterans. Once considered heroes, the former soldiers of the Civil War became drains on the federal budget. At the same time, the membership of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans' organization, was increasing exponentially, making visible veterans commonplace. No longer was the Union veteran rare and honorable; by the 1880s the veteran was common and expensive. In response to the degradation of veteranhood, some former soldiers felt the blanket term 'veteran' needed to be reconsidered. These men went about creating the identity of "true"veteranhood in an attempt to reclaim the level of status attached to veterans immediately following the Civil War. Not all veterans were accepting of this "true" veteranhood, and actively fought back, forwarding instead a notion of inclusive veteranhood in which all former soldiers were represented. Neither side proved convincing, and the debate only ended in the early twentieth century as Union veterans died off and new veterans took their place. Through this debate, though, we can see the importance and complexity attached to identities, and the ways in which people actively reconsider themselves to cling to these identities in response to changes in their surroundings.