Our 2023 undergraduate honors candidates are undertaking some ambitious research projects this year, and we are excited to share their thesis abstracts with you. We look forward to learning more about their discoveries at our Honors Colloquium in April!
Alternative Deutschland: Music, Material Culture, and the
Underground of Punk in the GDR, 1979-1989
Ellie Wasson
During the last decade of the GDR (German Democratic Republic), a number of alternative subcultures proliferated in opposition to the increased oppression and surveillance by the Ministry for State Security (MfS), commonly referred to as the Stasi. By the early 1980s, the Stasi had identified punk rock as the number one threat to the future of socialism because of its Western roots and its grip on the country’s youngest generation. British and American punk music and style resonated with the young East Germans who were disillusioned with the future laid out for them by the state. However, the social and political circumstances within which they lived made it necessary for East German punks to take the anti-authoritarian and do-it-yourself mentality of punk to an unprecedented level. Through an examination of fashion, music, and physical space, I will contend that GDR punks’ response to these extreme social and political pressures resulted in the creation of a uniquely East German subculture of punk and repertoire of music. While GDR punks took inspiration from the West, they never idealized Western capitalism, and their goal as a community was to fundamentally change their country in a way that would improve “real-existing socialism,” calling for the destruction of the Stasi, the Wall, and the laws against freedom of expression which they felt were poor representations of true socialism.
The Feminine Sublime: Margaret Fuller's American Aesthetic in Poetry and Prose
Anna Grace Wenger
Born in 1810 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Margaret Fuller was a pioneer of women’s rights and public academic duties. She edited a major literary magazine out of New York City, became staff on the New York Tribune, traveled the world as a news correspondent, and published groundbreaking work of social reform, all while proudly defending her femininity. Fuller belonged to the Transcendentalist movement, frequently writing on nature and the relationship between the self and what is outside of the self. In this movement came the American sublime; the philosophical idea of transcendent beauty and emotional power took a new role in American theory as the relationships between the self and the other were questioned by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. However, I believe that there is a parallel movement of the American feminine sublime that engages the femininity of the self and therefore warps preceding notions of what the sublime should be. The purpose of this work is to define the American feminine sublime as an explicitly different philosophical concept from the preexisting American sublime as held by her male Transcendentalists contemporaries. Margaret Fuller, as a prominent feminist and scholar, acts as the founder of this theory through her poetry and prose, including her feminist theories and nature journals.
Origins of American Identity: Native Appropriation & the Making of Frontier Mythology
Molly Raichle
At the turn of the 20th century, Americans had two uniquely intertwined preoccupations: one centered around the Indian and the other around the Child. 1890, a pivotal year in American history, marked both the end of the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, a young Wisconsin historian, illuminated the significance of the frontier’s closing during a speech he delivered at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner’s deeply felt frontier nostalgia, coupled with Buffalo Bill Cody’s dramatic Wild West renderings of cowboys and Indians–both of which were showcased at the Columbian Exposition–gripped the American imagination at the dawning of the 20th century. Together Turner and Cody facilitated an ideological shift that recast the frontier from a brutal, unforgiving foe to be conquered to an idyllic wilderness that fostered American grit. In so doing, Turner and Cody, among others, represented Native Americans as a vanishing race, a people unable to acculturate into modern American society, a people forever confined to the primitive and the past. Such sentiments underscored the novel and aggressive assimilation policies for Native Americans, namely the opening of off-reservation Indian boarding schools. But while these boarding schools determined to strip Native children of their language, culture, and religion, white boys and girls from affluent families dawned feather headdresses, gathered around council fires, and ‘played Indian’ at newly established American summer camps. The following thesis attempts to analyze the 20th-century cultural landscape that fostered an enduring association between the Indian and the modern American Child–an association manifested in elaborate displays of Indian play at American summer camps of the early 20th century and to this day. Each chapter centers around two particularly significant leaders of this movement: Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles (Ohiyesa) Eastman. Seton and Eastman established summer camps, the Woodcraft Indians and Camp Oahe, where Indian iconography and play factored significantly into children’s daily activities. Ultimately, each case study serves to highlight the complex and enduring elements of modern American cross-cultural settler-colonial relationships, which have profoundly informed and molded American identity for the entirety of our young nation’s history.
The Spirit of New Orleans: The Emergence of a Unique Cultural Creolization from 1803–1812 Born from French Loyalists, Haitian Refugees, and Free People of Color Megan Emery
In considering Louisiana’s history, the decade from 1803-1812 emerges as an ambiguous era with respect to national and cultural identity. In focusing on New Orleans in particular, we maneuver the vehicle of a greater Atlantic network, in which Louisiana was inextricably bound. As the conclusion of the Haitian Revolution coincided with the Louisiana Purchase, both resident Americans and Haitian refugees sought a home in New Orleans. While the former population would not necessarily carry trends from the greater American south, the latter, through forced migration—composed of equal thirds white colonists, free people of color, and enslaved people—transported the lifestyles in which they were accustomed. A process of creolization ensued in which the refugee community along with the New Orleanians worked within and across cultural boundaries to forge a milieu specific to, and only possible in New Orleans. I will argue that this “creolization” was not as much of a strategic attempt to identify as “creole” as an organic development, resulting in an assertion of a collective group consciousness to resist the encroachment of America. By manipulating physical spaces, perpetuating interracial customs, transcending linguistic barriers, and promoting religious syncretism, an exceptional culture emerged such that Louisiana’s acquisition of statehood in 1812 was merely nominal. This decade-long interregnum period established the foundation for the cultural infrastructure that would keep New Orleans culture distinguishable from the rest of the United States into the 1840s.