Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This study is based on the premise that navigating boundaries of the self is a historical, ideological process. Up until the turn of the century, categories of race, class, and gender were seen as fixed constructions that grounded individual selves within non-negotiable spheres. The advent of modernity, however, witnessed a number of political, economic, and social changes. Reformers in the early 1900s were thus able to renegotiate the structures of American public life, using education as their primary means. By combining accepted, unifying, pragmatic principles with more radical ideas of social revolution, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and W.E.B. Du Bois were able to rethink class, gender, and race and thereby attempt to mold anew the identity of the American public. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Searching for materials addressing the social issue concerns of a specific era, including our own? Need materials which promote social justice, equality, and personal responsibility? Ease the search via Jane Addams Children’s Book winning titles, receiving associated database instruction, collaborative lesson plans and discussion guides.

This study examines the functions of the term “community” in American social and political rhetoric. I contend that community serves as a god-term, or expression of value and order, which rhetors use to motivate actions, endorse values, include/exclude persons, and compensate for modern losses. Informed by the philosophy of Kenneth Burke, I explore the general features of “rhetorics of community,” including community’s ambiguity and status as an automatic good, the relationship between community and modernity, the myth of communal loss, and the uses of community as a site of political unity and contest. I analyze the writings of John Humphrey Noyes, Jane Addams, and the Southern Agrarians as paradigm cases of utopian, progressive, and traditionalist rhetorics respectively, and I discuss how community is constructed in order to navigate the tension between self and society, correct for the failures of modern individualism, and propose competing visions of the social order.

<p>This dissertation examines whether democratic citizens are responsible for the behavior of their governments. Through careful analysis of the political theory and practice of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Addams, I demonstrate that notions of democracy that are distinctly modern in their emphasis upon plurality and individuality can instill in citizens a sense of responsibility for public life. My analysis also calls attention to several challenges that make ethical democratic citizenship a demanding undertaking. In the final chapters, I construct an account of responsible democratic citizenship that addresses these challenges, drawing upon lessons learned from my discussion of Thoreau and Addams, as well as from more contemporary thinkers. Democratic citizens, I argue, do not fully control the circumstances in which they act, and thus they often become implicated in outcomes to which they have not explicitly consented. If they aspire to be self-ruling, however, they must accept some responsibility for political outcomes that affect their own wellbeing and are affected by their behavior. Furthermore, I argue that citizens are unlikely to recognize and discharge their shared responsibilities unless they cultivate particular attitudes, including curiosity, flexibility, sympathy, humility and courage. These attitudes enable citizens to learn about the problems for which they are responsible and cooperate with others to solve shared problems.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-236). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3024513.

Uppsatsen har som utgångspunkt att familjenormer har förändrats under 1900-talet och att detta borde visa sig i framställningen även av en familj som inte är tidstypisk: Familjen Addams. Genom att undersöka hur adaptioner av familjen påverkas genom förändringar i medier, tidsperiod, samtida kultur och normer vill jag besvara om samtida familjenormer har varit en stor faktor i hur framställningen förändrats. För att genomföra detta använder jag Linda Hutcheons perspektiv på mediespecificitet  och ”modes of engagement” för att studera hur medieskiften påverkar adaptionen. Representationsstudier används för att studera hur historisk kontext och samtida kultur påverkar framställningen av familjen. Materialet är Charles Addams skämtteckningar, ABCs tv-serie och Barry Sonnenfelds film. Resultatet verkar vara att samtida normer har haft en mycket större effekt på framställningen av den ursprungliga tv-serien än filmen, och att de båda har formats till en stor del av mediespecifika drag, men att vissa normer som har varit långlivade ändå haft en markant effekt även på filmen, främst det Sharon Hays kallar den permissiva eran.

This thesis examines the three most popular and acclaimed live-action versions of The AddamsFamily, those being the 1964-1966 sitcom The Addams Family, the 1993 film Addams FamilyValues, and Netflix’s 2022 series Wednesday, to understand how these popular culture textsnegotiate dominant norms and culture in American society. These iterations cover sixty years of cultural negotiation on non-conformity and each attend to a specific politics of conformity in their time. Drawing from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Dick Hebdige among others understandings of culture, power, hegemony, and resistance, I form a theoretical basis through which the techniques these iterations use to negotiate aspects of the dominant culture can be analyzed. For each production, paratextual evidence is located to identify the specific negotiatory aims. The different genres, aesthetics, and references made to contemporary political discourses, are then explored and dismantled to ascertain how this negotiation occurs and what the implications are. This thesis concludes with a discussion comparing the iterations and exploring the role that experience of marginalization potentially played in how the creators chose to create negotiatory texts. This thesis ultimately finds that specific genres and techniques of negotiation, particularly satire and camp, facilitate the capacity for popular culture material to critique, transform and unsettle dominant norms.

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In "American Callings" I argue that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism contains a strand that sought to rectify the potentially oppressive shortcomings of humanitarian practice. The authors whose work I examine--novelists William Dean Howells and Albion Tourgeé, reformer Jane Addams, humorist George Ade, and memoirists Mary Fee and George Freer--grappled in their writing with two reciprocal questions. First, they meditated on how humanitarianism shapes, changes, and constitutes the self. Second, they theorized how increased self-awareness and self-criticism might help the humanitarian actor avoid the pitfalls of humanitarian practice that critics, in their time and ours, have seized upon. "American Callings" thus challenges three critiques that have been instrumental to American literary studies for decades: critiques of sentimental humanitarianism's complicity in projects of cultural domination, realism's investment in the status quo, and reform's role in maintaining social discipline through surveillance. The dissertation disputes the prevalent assertion that literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism constitutes a sentimental, imperialistic, and ultimately violent discourse. I accomplish this by looking to instances of what Gregory Eiselein (1996) has called "eccentric" reform, efforts articulated from within a culture but in opposition to certain aspects of it. Drawing on narratives of what I call "humanitarian selfhood" in three historical contexts--industrializing urban centers in the North, the South during Reconstruction, and the Philippines during the U.S. occupation--"American Callings" traces an "eccentric" literary genealogy, one that offers up the humanitarian dynamic as a heuristic wherein the humanitarian agent arrives at a new kind of self-understanding by way of wrestling with the questions raised by service to others. The literature written by and about these humanitarians, I suggest, then provides an opportunity for readers to be transformed, as well. / text

This paper explores how changing conceptions of religion, race, and gender at the beginning of the twentieth century promoted transnational anti-systemic movements and increased cooperation between progressive intellectuals and political activists. Using the cases of Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Jane Addams, and Sylvia Pankhurst, this paper chronicles and analyzes protest to the First World War and objection to the organization of the world-system.