In the autumn of 1921, silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of a model and actress named Virginia Rappé. The ensuing scandal created a firestorm of controversy not just around Arbuckle but the entire motion picture industry. Religious and moral reformers seized upon the scandal to decry the decline of “traditional” moral values taking place throughout American society in the aftermath of World War I. The scandal created a common objective for an anti-film coalition representing diverse social and religious groups, all dedicated to bringing about change in the motion picture industry through public pressure, boycotts, and censorship legislation. In the face of this threat, the film industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, with Republican strategist Will Hays as its president. Hays worked to incorporate moral reformers into his new organization, giving them an outlet for their complaints while simultaneously co-opting and defusing their reform agenda. Hays’ use of public relations as the means to institute self-regulation within the motion picture industry enabled Hollywood to survive the Arbuckle scandal and continue to thrive. It also set up the mechanism by which the industry has effectively negotiated public discontent ever since.

This thesis examines the ways in which popular media forms explore ideas of national identity, citizenship, and the politics of representation with regards to queer Xicana women, especially those residing in Los Angeles. Specifically, through an analysis of the television show The L Word, Cherrie Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman and Aurora Guerrero’s film Mosquita y Mari, this thesis argues that the queer Xicana experience is best represented in popular culture by queer Xicanas themselves.

This thesis, a biography of the French actress, Anna Held (1873-1918), is an attempt to place her in proper perspective in American history. Essentially a record of Miss Held from birth to death, it highlights many events that made her famous. Included are examples of publicity generated by her manager-husband, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. Much credit can be awarded Ziegfeld for his expertise in publicity stunts and promotion. Undue praise, however, has been attributed to him for the origin of the Ziegfeld Follies and the success of Anna Held. Anna was a Continental success long before she met him. His promotion introduced her to the American public, but her prodding and financing made Ziegfeld and the Follies a success. Through the years the name "Anna Held" has almost been forgotten. The research was contingent upon examination of primary source material in Los Angeles, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The eighty-five year old surviving daughter of the famous actress graciously consented to interviews that proved indispensable to the research. The research methodology involved assemblage of material, including news clippings, articles and books. The fortunate personal contact provided a clearing house for verifying or disaffirming information. As a famous personality, the truth about Anna Held is hidden in the legend. Her daughter, Liane Carrera, has suggested that this treatise be titled: "What They Said About Anna Held."

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The freak played a significant role in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, but its significance extended beyond such venues as sideshows and minstrel shows. This dissertation examines the freak as an avatar emblematic of several issues, such as class and race, traditionally focused on in studies of Turn-of-the Century American literature and culture. Disability and freakishness are explored as central to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Americans’ identity. Freakishness is applied to a series of ways in which Americans in this period constructed their identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic class, showing the dual role that the freak played for many white, able-bodied, upper-class American men. Freaks threatened such men’s sense of their own disability, triggering such complexes as Wounded Southernness or white masculinity. But contrasting themselves with freaks also solidified their visions of themselves as models of American normalcy. Besides freak shows, they encountered freakishness in a variety of arenas, including lynchings, slums, and early horror films. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s fascination with freakishness is situated as an outgrowth of that period’s eugenics movement, showing how the entwined concepts of eugenics and normalcy traversed ground that went much further than studies of physical aberration and chronic illness. This extended notion of the freak is discussed by analyzing various literary texts, especially the novels of William Dean Howells and Jack London. The autobiographies of Booker T. Washington and Helen Keller exemplify how double consciousness can serve as a means of enfreakment. Further, all these texts are situated culturally by medicalizing a series of historical events, including specific lynchings, as well as laws that reconfigured urban landscapes. The final chapter focuses on early horror film, arguing that film became the new American sideshow and in the process changed the definition of freak to something far more monstrous. In short, this dissertation demonstrates how the freak show pervaded America at the turn of the twentieth century and turned the country into one large dime museum.

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist. In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, and its spin-off, The Originals—and closely read them to identify patterns in their representations of gender and sexuality and how they connect to the source texts. Taking a dialogic “both/and” approach, I argue that critics claiming that slash is often not subversive are right to a point, but miss a key potential of fan fiction: its ability to evoke possibility—for new endings, relationships, and sexualities. Heteronormativity often asserts itself in endings; queerness plays in the middles and margins. So, too, does fan fiction. While some individual fics may reinforce elements of heteronormativity, many also actively question and transgress norms of gender, sexuality and love. Further, they embrace fluidity and possibility, and engage with the source texts and larger culture around them in a way that provides a subversive interpretation of both and offers insight into the function of the constructed nature of institutionalized heterosexuality.

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated American thought. This thesis also argues that the conscious use of British literature, Shakespeare in particular, by abolitionists constitutes a critique of the unfulfilled American ideals they believe slavery undermines. In addressing depictions of slave revolts and black masculinity in this period, this thesis explores how allusions to Shakespeare helped frame the historiography surrounding how slave revolts in America were and are remembered.

As the medium cost of conventional housing rises, many people unable to incur such an expense look for alternative forms of adequate housing. In rural areas surrounding Bowling Green, Kentucky, several families have utilized the mobile home as a base to expand, embellish, and personalize, creating a larger more conventional-looking home. Many of these altered homes possess gabled roofs, rock exterior walls, and expansive interior space. Of primary concern is: why have these families undertaken a project of this nature? As material culture scholars and folklorists examine our built environment, they find relationship between construction and the builders. What can the altered mobile home tell us about these individual builders? A contextual analysis examining the surrounding landscape, economic dilemmas, and personal aesthetics and values help elucidate each altered mobile home. Also, by examining the individual builder’s work technique, materials, and values associated with housing, one can understand how each mobile home is a direct reflection of its owner. Since the mobile home’s creation, the public’s conception of the form has led to claims that it is not a housing form, but rather an accessory for the automobile. Steadfast values associated with housing have not adhered to the image of the mobile home. Because of this ambiguity, the mobile home is an ideal form for individuals to mold and alter, thereby creating a form imbued with personal aesthetics and personal values concerning housing. These ideas are examined through analysis of four families.

This essay will use the views of two African American newspaper columnists, E. Belfield Spriggins of the Louisiana Weekly and Dave Peyton of the Chicago Defender, to argue that though New Orleans and Chicago both occupied a primary place in the history of jazz, in many ways jazz was initially met with ambivalence and suspicion. The struggle between the desire to highlight black achievement in music and the effort to adhere to tenets of middle class respectability play out in their columns. Despite historiographical writings to the contrary, these issues of the influence of jazz music on society were not limited to the white community. Tracing these columnists through the years of 1925-1929, a critical point in the popularity of jazz, reveals how considerations of black innovation and economic autonomy helped alter their opinions from criticism to ownership.

This is a micro-history that explores everyday life on a small scale by tracing the common, if elusive lives of Thomas Dula, Ann Melton, and Laura Foster, and the communities they lived in, to explore the culture in which they lived—and died. Reactions to the murder unleashed an outpouring of discourse embedded in broader, national debates concerning gender roles. The dominant cultural theme that emerged from the murder trials as reflected in middle-class newspapers maintained that true women did not kill and real men acted as gentlemen and defenders of women’s honor. The project mines a wealth of primary source material: court documents, population censuses, and newspapers. By examining the discourse surrounding Tom Dula’s execution and Ann Melton’s acquittal for the murder of Laura Foster it illuminates the murder narrative as a public forum for discussing gender roles and power in 1860s America.