The suburban house, in its mass produced state of replication, represents a condensation of what we as an American culture want, need and look for in a house. This project dwells in the relationship between the function and representation of these ideas, somewhere in the space between the function and the icon of the pitched roof. Houses are composed of iconic elements, each possessing a functional as well as an effectual quality. These iconic elements are distinct in the suburban house, and through its prevalence, has called into question the need for architecture. This relationship between function and representation and the need for Architecture/Design in the making of a house was explored through the design of three houses on typical suburban lots in typical suburban developments.

<p> This study explores the lived experience of civilian nontherapists who voluntarily bear witness to veterans' first-person narratives of war in the United States. Mythology and anthropology demonstrate that listening to warriors' war stories was a common practice in many ancient and aboriginal societies. A growing body of contemporary study suggests today's veterans are best served by returning to civilian societies who listen to veterans and know their experiences. This research sought to document and understand the experience of civilian witnessing, its impact on witnesses, and whether or not the experience was valuable or perspective changing for the witnesses. The research deepens the understanding of the relationship between war veterans and civilian society and the communal holding of war memories. </p><p> Ethnographic, autoethnographic, and hermeneutic phenomenological methodological approaches were used, with the research process and data being viewed through the lenses of depth psychology and liberation psychology. Subjects for ethnographic study and opportunities for autoethnographic study were found through Soldier's Heart, a small nonprofit organization that regularly brings together civilians and veterans in retreat settings and in journeys that take veterans and civilian to places where wars were fought. Data were gathered through observation, conversation, formal interview, and the experiences of the researcher. </p><p> Bearing witness to the first-person narratives of veterans was a powerful and valuable experience for the witnesses represented in this study. Witnesses described the experience as a journey in which they moved from not listening to listening, from listening to hearing, from hearing to recognition, and from recognition to bearing witness. Witnesses reported gaining new insights about war, veterans, themselves, psyche, society and the importance of community. Witnesses reported new or deeper connections to veterans. For most witnesses, the experience challenged contemporary beliefs and practices about the relationship between veterans and civilians, and it brought new perspectives on the role nontherapists may play in veteran homecoming. While witnesses reported that the experience was at times difficult and painful, all found the experience personally valuable and saw the need for more civilians to become involved in listening to veterans. Keywords: witness, witnessing, bearing witness, veterans, narratives, storytelling, civilians.</p>

<p> Composer Howard Hanson played a pivotal role in both the development and promotion of American concert music in the twentieth century. Born in Wahoo, Nebraska, to Swedish immigrants, Hanson grew up surrounded by people who followed Swedish customs (including folk song and dance), yet exhibited strong feelings of American patriotism. Hanson's earliest works, left unpublished, display the influence of Swedish folk music traditions in either direct quotation or stylistic imitation. </p><p> As the winner of the first American Prix de Rome, Hanson traveled to Italy to study at the American Academy, affording him the opportunity to travel for the first time to Sweden. While in Europe Hanson wrote some of his most important compositions, including the Scandinavian-inspired First Symphony ("Nordic") and the symphonic poem <i>North and West.</i> The former pulls heavily from Swedish folk music, and the latter is autobiographical, representative of the composer's identity struggles as he explored the role his heritage should play in what he increasingly realized was Americanist music. </p><p> After he assumed the directorship of the Eastman School of Music, a position he held for forty years, Hanson's music lost explicit programmatic elements inspired by Scandinavia. Hanson wrote hundreds of articles and speeches about the importance of furthering American music, became a community leader in Rochester and on a national level, and transformed Eastman into a vital center for the promotion of American composers. His affinity for Swedish music continued to be an important factor in his compositional process, as evidenced by his Third Symphony and the popular comparison of his music to that of Jan Sibelius. Despite this association Hanson is remembered as a transformative figure in American music.</p>

<p> My dissertation is a critical philosophical interpretation of selected constructs of Haudenosaunee culture addressing barriers to liberation from colonialism; the decolonization of the disruption of the original humanistic constructs rooted within Onkweh&oacute;nweneha; and what transformation means in the 21^st century. I also explore the contemporary realities of Haudenosaunee life from the Seven Spans paradigm of standards established by the Kaianerekowa &ndash; The Great Law of Peace; Gaiwiio &ndash; the Teachings of Handsome Lake; Indigenous deconstructive methodology framed by cultural transformation; and the construct of "extending the rafters" as a critical analysis of the Haudenosaunee from within. </p><p> Haudenosaunee culture is growing and flourishing, and in recent years, the young people who are driven by identity are seeking more understanding from life and culture. They are often met with resistance by self-appointed doorkeepers of the culture who are protectionist, and, in their attempts to protect, they discourage people. Their family's lack of activity in the longhouse community is often cited as reasonable cause. This is contrary to the original birthright of every Haudenosaunee person with respect to their culture. To challenge this issue, I advocate for more written cultural knowledge to be produced by Indigenous scholars as one critical step to cultural inclusion. </p><p> How we think, why we dream, how we solve problems, and what is important to a Haudenosaunee person are accumulating notions of cultural knowledge being forgotten as the Elders, the wisdom-keepers of repository knowledge, make their journey back to the Skyworld. It is vital that we explore these ideas in a process of decolonizing and experiential cultural learning connected to the important stories of the culture. This is an attempt at focusing that challenge with cause for dialogue.</p>

<p> During the last half of the nineteenth century, American sportsmen-artists painted hunting-related images that were designed to promote the ideals of sporting behavior, conservationist thought, and the interests of elite sportsmen against non-elite hunters. Upper-class American attitudes regarding common hunters and trappers, the politics of land use, and the role of conservation in recreational hunting played a significant part in the construction of visual art forms during this period, art which, in turn, helped shape national dialogue on the protection and acceptable uses of wildlife. </p><p> This dissertation takes issues critical to mid-century American conservation thought and agendas, and investigates how they were embodied in American hunting art of the time. Beginning with depictions of recreational sportsmen during the era of conservationist club formation (mid-1840s), the discussion moves to representations of the lone trapper at mid-century. These figures were initially represented as a beneficial force in the conquest of the American frontier, but trappers and backwoodsmen became increasingly problematic due to an apparent disregard for game law and order. I explore the ways in which market hunting was depicted, and how it was contrasted with acceptable "sportsmanlike" hunting methods. Subsequent chapters consider the portrayal of the boy hunter, an essential feature to the sportsman's culture and its continuance, and the tumultuous relationship between elite sportsmen and their guides, who were known to illegally hunt off-season. The last chapters address the subject of the wild animal as heroic protagonist and dead game still life paintings, a pictorial type that represented the lifestyle of sportsmen and their concern for conservative catches and adherence to game law. Developments in conservation during the period were significantly tied to class and elitist aspirations, and artist-sportsmen merged these social prejudices with their agenda for game conservation. Their representations of hunting art both responded to and promoted the conservationist cause.</p>

<p> Music scholarship has failed to fully assess the impact of the American composer George Frederick Root beyond his work in the church, classroom, and home. Most famous for composing "The Battle Cry of Freedom" and acting as music education pioneer Lowell Mason's associate, Root's other contributions to American music are often overlooked, particularly his body of secular cantatas for amateur choirs. This paper examines the commonly relayed biography of Root, Root's place in American historiography, and the advantages of examining his own autobiography. Finally, this paper presents a case study of <i> The Haymakers</i> and its possible place in future studies of Root. By better examining his career, we see that George Frederick Root was a typical nineteenth-century American man and that he was also a composer notable for his ability to serve the musical needs of his audience. Root pioneered large-scale choral works targeted at amateur performers with his secular cantatas and, consequently, served a wider swath of American performers and listeners.</p>

AIDS has become the most controversial issue to enter the American public discourse in the recent past. AIDS arouses a passionate response in Houston as elsewhere because it lies at the intersection between competing discourses. Contemporary debates on sexual identity, gay politics, sex education, drug use, and health care are changing the shape of public discourses on sexuality, identity, Christianity, public health, and law. The founders of the AIDS Foundation of Houston recognized the need to create a way of speaking about and understanding AIDS which could challenge unsympathetic points of view. The AIDS Foundation of Houston began its organizing and educational activities in 1981. It has become a key player in local political battles over what course Houston's response to the AIDS epidemic would take. As part of their efforts, local groups like the Foundation use a counter-discourse which portrays PWA's not as dangerous sources of contamination or AIDS victims but honestly represented as caring, responsible people who are actively involved in decision making and shaping public policy. This essay explores several aspects of this counter-discourse including both its oral and written aspects. Volunteers and staff at the AIDS Foundation speak about AIDS with a Foundation "etiquette" which protects the secrecy and dignity of persons with AIDS (PWA's) while loudly insisting on a more caring response by the city and state. PWA's, their lovers, friends, and family publicly talk about what it is like to have AIDS in oral narratives as well as through written autobiography and biography. These narratives express the suffering and passion of people with AIDS while also speaking to the political nature of life-threatening illness. These stories confront negative representations with a language of compassion and acceptance. The AIDS Foundation also has a more conventional form of public discourse which is less emotionally intense but is persistent in demanding improved services and AIDS education. The AIDS Foundation of Houston has been successful in creating alternate forms of AIDS discourses, challenging unsympathetic discourses, expanding local services, and teaching their way of speaking to people from all walks of life.

This dissertation establishes gift exchanges as a key concern of numerous nineteenth-century U.S. texts. An ideology of the free gift developed in the nineteenth century as both a defense against the market's perceived threat to personal relationships and as a means of reconceptualizing these relationships in terms consistent with such capitalist tenets as possessive individualism and voluntary contract. My introduction synthesizes multiple models of gift exchange offered by contemporary theory. I resist both idealizations of the gift that overlook important continuities between gift and commodity transactions and equally simplistic demystifications that ignore crucial distinctions: (1) the form of reciprocity each entails, and (2) their respective capacities for reproducing social relationships. Chapter one compares Ralph Waldo Emerson's arguments about gifts' threat to individual autonomy and Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. Melville, in contradistinction to Emerson, concentrates on gift rituals' facilitating role within market transactions and suggests that individual autonomy might lie in self-consciously performing, not avoiding, gift exchange's obligations. Chapter two examines the frequent depictions of gift-giving in popular domestic novels. Regardless of whether particular authors, such as Susan Warner and Maria Cummins, naturalize the dichotomy between private and public economic transactions by treating gift and commodity exchange as specifically gendered practices, or whether, in the case of Fanny Fern and William Dean Howells, they problematize such oppositions, domestic fiction illustrates that gift practices shape commodity transactions as powerfully as such transactions transform social relations. The concluding chapter examines Harriet Jacobs's, Frances Harper's, and W. E. B. Du Bois's attempts to critique possessive individualism and a racist discourse of paternalism by constructing gift-based concepts of identity and citizenship. Because gift transactions generate a community's sense of mutual obligation, gift exchange's obligatory reciprocity provides an indispensable, if often problematic, metaphor for conceptualizing a national community. The material practices of gift exchange thus provided the nineteenth-century U.S. with a powerful tool for theorizing-and for forging an apparent continuity between---a multitude of concepts, such as individualism, the relationship between private and public life, race relations, and citizenship.

This dissertation explores, ethnographically, what the terms "family," "home," and "place" mean for individuals in a specific place, the Texas Hill Country. Contemporary mobility makes the meanings of these terms complex and crucial. While most academic research dismisses nostalgia, I argue that it continues to have powerful familial, regional, national, and even transnational attraction. Such nostalgia suggests a longing for connectedness to the stories and memories embedded in places. It relies especially on rural, or marginalized areas to convey some feeling of richness and fullness, what theorists identify as an "aura of authenticity," for modern urban culture. Through storytelling I evoke local practices that create a sense of place. I also show how rural places like the Texas Hill Country become identified as places of tradition and rootedness to the earth where mobile, urban Americans eagerly seek connection by purchasing antiques and sacred objects. This dissertation lays intellectual and emotional groundwork by orienting the reader to the place and people of the Texas Hill Country, then continues with several narratives focused on a single site to explore how "place" can become a container for memory and story. Subsequent sections include a more essayistic grappling with family, home, and place; a life history of an 80-year old native of Blanco County, Texas; and an examination of the problematics of the social construction of Fredericksburg, Texas, as a "home" and place of history. While I partially focus on narratives of history and how they are constructed, I also tell stories about people of my own times--about how we live in cities created either as placeless, ahistorical malls, or in towns self-consciously constructed as tourist sites; what we do with a commodified history; what life is like in a problematic world of questions regarding our places.

A study of twentieth-century U.S. literature must take into consideration the way in which the South has been posited as a distinct, gothic region within or, at times, outside of the nation as a whole. Unlike other regions of the U.S., which might signify progress and freedom (the North and Northeast) or expansion and hope (the West), the South always signifies either the horrors of slavery and its legacy or, at best, a place of comic backwardness. But what happens when the constructed divide between the South and the nation collapses? When essential differences between the South and the nation are difficult to "tell"? My dissertation is not about a traditional split between the American North and South, but rather interrogates the ideological distinctions between the South and the nation itself. By focusing on how bodies absorb or expel extreme and everyday forms of violence and impurity in literary, cultural, and historical texts, my dissertation works to blur the border between the nation and what stands as its abject, internal other. From narratives of eugenics to narratives of lynching, agrarian manhood to the function of the National Guard, I articulate how stories about paranoia, physical injury, and bodily interiors interfere with the smooth functioning of "America" as an imagined community. In my analyses of works by Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison (among others), I closely read moments of corporeal and categorical indeterminacy to show how the relation between the South and the nation is always a gothic one, one that can never fully be "told."