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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
Kocks, Dorothee E. "Champions of Place: Politics and Landscape in the 1930s and 1980s," American Civilization Program, Brown University, January 1993. Advisor: John L. Thomas (2, 8, 9)
This dissertation argues that nature has been constructed in the twentieth century U.S. as a scientific source for a better politics. Specifically, comparisons of the “West” and the “family farm” in works by selected historians and novelists in the 1930s and 1980s reveal how nature’s guise changes to accommodate a retreat from a liberal faith in human agency. Methodologically, the dissertation disputes that myth differs plainly from professional history, seeing the enlistment of place as an “objective” source of value as an historical response to the secularization of academe. Authors considered are Frederick Jackson Turner, Mari Sandoz, Walter Prescott Webb, Josephine Johnson, Donald Worster, and Larry McMurtry.
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