Register
If you haven’t already, register to start contributing news and events, and to search the Member Directory. Registration is free, but only open to current members of the American Studies Association.
Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Jacobsohn, Diane. "Boston's 'Three-Decker Menace': The Buildings, The Builders and the Dwellers, 1870s-1930," American and New England Studies, Boston University, May 2004.
New England’s three-deckers, built between the 1870s and 1930, are three-story wooden flats that housed one family on each floor. This dissertation examines three-deckers no only as vernacular architecture, but also through the lens of social history, studying the people who built them, lived in them, and opposed them, to depict how a popular multifamily house was transformed into a symbol of bad housing. The study is placed within the larger contexts of the national housing reform movement, the idealization of the single-family suburban house, and the growing professionalism in architecture and city planning, and illustrates how middle-class values associated with housing and lifestyle both inspired and, ultimately, condemned these buildings. Boston provides a unique backdrop because wooden three-deckers were prohibited in the city center by fire limits and were generally not legislated as tenements; Boston also was the home of the movement to ban them.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]