The aim of this essay is to analyze the concept of rugged individualism in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This paper will also examine the American Dream since rugged individualism is related to the American Dream. Marxist criticism problematizes rugged individualism and the American Dream. The title character Jay Gatsby is portrayed as an exemplary rugged individualist. Gatsby shows several traits of rugged individualism and he can be used as a representative for both rugged individualism and the American Dream.

Women in the Civil War era engendered new identities that directly opposed traditional female roles set forth by Southern society. Women belonging to the non-elite classes emerged out of the domestic sphere and became enmeshed in political life. This analysis evaluates the political life of white Georgia women of the poor and yeoman class during the Civil War in comparison to the conclusions set forth by Stephanie McCurry in Confederate Reckoning. An introduction of terms and class structures is followed by a discussion on how women impacted public policy in Georgia through writing government officials, petitioning, and rioting. A study of how women affected the rate of their husbands’ desertions provides additional evidence that enriches the existing scholarship on women’s involvement in Civil War politics. The conclusion offers a brief insight into the lives of women after the Civil War and their conscious involvement in post-war public policy.

This thesis uses a number of sources to piece together evidence of working-class reading habits during the period 1850 to 1914: autobiographies, library borrowing records, middle-class contemporary observations, and answers to correspondents pages in popular periodicals. Middle-class dominance of literary production through the publishing industry, librarians, editors, and book reviews helped to shape working class autobiographical representations of reading. Literary conventions of autobiographies limit them as a source. By portraying the authors' life as a success story the genre puts greater emphasis on the reading of accepted classics and canonical works. Studies of two early libraries show how notions of class and gender affected the provision of texts in libraries. Later records prove that reading for leisure purposes had increased dramatically over the period from 1850 to 1914 and that juvenile literature was popular even with adult readers. Changes in the publishing industry and the popularity of genres are reflected in the library stock. An alternative source confirms these trends. The answers to correspondence pages of the London Journal, Reynolds' Newspaper and the Family Herald reveal that a number of common readers wanted to read in order to better themselves socially and intellectually. A popularised version of autodidact culture was both promoted and sought in the pages of popular periodicals. The thesis concludes that two distinct trends in reading are evident through the period: reading for self-improvement subtly shaped by autodidact culture, and an increase in leisure reading

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation examines the relationship between the growth and popularization of psychology in American life in the postwar period and Americans’ belief that theirs is a “classless,” or overwhelmingly middle-class, society. I argue that psychology has, until recently, inadvertently naturalized middle-class norms of self-perception, communication, aspirations, and subjectivity. From the 1950s on, the United States has been what observers call a “therapeutic culture.” Psychological ideas have infused the major arenas of American life, including the educational, judicial, commercial, political, personal, and interpersonal realms. This project examines the origins and development of psychological professionals’ views of class, highlighting the professional, economic, disciplinary, and cultural factors that combined to form those views. I analyze a small but persistent thread of dialogue in the professional literature of the period that questioned mainstream psychological assumptions about class, and I explore how that impulse developed into major mental health policy initiatives in the 1960s, then was undermined by political and social conflicts. I also develop a case history of one mental health project that attempted to transcend psychology’s class biases, only to be contained by structural and disciplinary factors. After examining psychological professionals’ views of various publics, this project investigates a series of publics’ views of psychological practitioners. I draw on popular portrayals of postwar psychological practitioners across various media, including one particular working-class medium, postwar men’s adventure magazines, and employ classic cultural studies readings to analyze the significant differences in the portrayals. / text

This research was conducted to seek answers to these questions: 1. To what extent could historic properties in the city represent a place brand image of that city in the early twenty-first century? 2. Could historic preservation be an effective tool for place branding? Contemporary cities in the world fiercely compete with others nowadays, so cities have wanted to distinguish themselves from others. This phenomenon has encouraged cities to use a conventional commercial marketing strategy, branding. When branding is used to promote a place, we call it place branding. If a fundamental aim of place branding is to distinguish one city from another, the notion of place branding would be closely related to the discussion on contemporary historic preservation's role in urban development. The common target market of twenty-first-century cities is talent, who, in turn, will be a magnet for global industry. As the talent tends to seek diverse urban life, cities have actively made efforts to revitalize and market their downtowns. In this regard, historic preservation can help cities retain their unique character and diversity of urban fabric in downtown areas. Consequently, historic preservation can provide cities a foundation upon which they can develop their unique place brands that attract talent. At the same time, historic properties can be used as a marketing resource for place branding. In addition to the theoretical discussion on the potential for historic preservation as a place branding tool, this thesis incorporates an empirical study on relocation guides officially published by Texas cities, including Austin, Houston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. This study aims to investigate where, how, and to what extent historic properties are represented in the official marketing publications. / text

Television impacts the shape of our common culture by depicting our societal fears, myths and hopes in a constantly shifting and negotiated manner. There is a glaring lack of research regarding media representations of children/adolescents in poverty. The study of this intersection is critically important for understanding societal discourse around education, healthcare, government assistance programs and even the opinions and practices of teachers and administrators. Children under 18 years of age represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty in the United States. Among all children, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. In this thesis, I trace discourse in the mainstream news and popular culture regarding children and poverty through welfare debates and policy changes in the U.S. from the 1990s and 2000s through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Subsequently, I analyze the construction of this discourse on narrative television in the shows My So Called Life (ABC, 1994-1995) The O.C. (FOX, 2003-2007) and Shameless (Showtime, 2011-). Through this mapping, I examine how gender, sexuality, race, and age are mobilized in constructing televisual representations of poverty; as well as how shifting discourses and depictions make transparent society’s anxieties regarding poverty. / text

Degradation of membrane proteins in the vacuole/lysosome is dependent on their prior sorting into the multivesicular body (MVB) pathway. This sorting process involves incorporation of proteins into vesicles that are formed by budding of the limiting membrane of the endosome into the lumen of the organelle. The MVB sorting process on the whole is highly conserved from yeast to human, and depends on the Vps27/Hrs, ESCRT-I, -II, and -III protein complexes functioning sequentially on the endosomal membrane, as well as on additional factors, such as the ubiquitinating enzyme Rsp5/Nedd4. It has now been established that ubiquitin serves as a sorting signal for many cargoes into the MVB pathway. In this thesis work, we provide evidence that Bro1 is not required for protein ubiquitination or early steps of endocytosis, but functions at the late endosome level as an integral component of the MVB pathway. Similarly to its human homologue Alix, Bro1 interacts with components of the ESCRT-I and ESCRT-III complexes. The putative role of Bro1/Alix in bridging an interaction between ESCRT-I and –III might be important to strengthen an association of these protein complexes to allow efficient sorting of cargo proteins. Deficiency in Bro1 results in recycling of the endocytosed Gap1 permease back to the plasma membrane, a process coupled to deubiquitination of the permease. This recycling is a non-classical phenotype for cells impaired in MVB pathway thus suggesting Bro1 to have a particular role in this sorting process. Furthermore, the conserved C-terminal proline-rich domain (PRD) of Bro1 is specifically important for MVB sorting of cargo proteins that are subject to ubiquitination. We show Bro1 (via its PRD) to play a highly important role in recruitment of the deubiquitinating enzyme Doa4 to the endosome. Consistent with this, Bro1 is required for deubiquitination of cargo proteins, a step occurring just before cargo incorporation into the endosomal vesicles, and similarly to Doa4, for ubiquitin recycling. In contrast to previous interpretations, we show that Doa4 has a direct role in sorting of ubiquitinated cargo proteins into the MVB pathway. We propose that Doa4 – via its association to Bro1 - achieves this role by catalyzing deubiquitination of cargo proteins and/or some components of the MVB sorting machinery. We further show Bro1 to interact with the ubiquitin ligase Rsp5, which, in addition to being required for cargo protein ubiquitination at the plasma membrane, apparently contributes to multiple steps of endocytosis and MVB sorting. Also the Bro1-Rsp5 interaction is dependent on the C-terminal PRD region of Bro1. We propose that this interaction is conserved. A role for ubiquitin in regulation of the MVB sorting machinery is emerging: the function of factors recognizing and sorting ubiquitinated cargo proteins in the MVB pathway is suggested to be coupled to their cycling between ubiquitinated and deubiquitinated stages. A growing body of evidence indicates that ubiquitin ligases of the Rsp5/Nedd4 family play a central role in this regulation. We speculate the Bro1/Alix protein, through its ability to simultaneously interact with factors of the MVB sorting machinery and with ubiquitinating and deubiquitinating enzymes to play a central role in the successive rounds of ubiquitination and deubiquitination of specific factors along the MVB pathway.

No description available.

No description available.