Reading is a complex construct with multiple components that have been theorized and empirically tested. Two multicomponent reading comprehension models were tested in this study to extend understanding of the relation of components skills and to extend prior research by adding a new component of motivation. A battery of reading measures were completed by 172 seventh- and eighth-grade students that consisted of reading comprehension, vocabulary, background knowledge, inference, motivation, and sentence comprehension fluency. This study examined a full sample of students as well as a subset of students identified as struggling readers for those scoring less than the 25th percentile on comprehension. Two models were tested for best fit for the Modified DIME and the Multicomponent Model of Reading Comprehension (MMRC). The Modified DIME Model accounted for 63.1% of total variance in reading comprehension. The MMRC also accounted for 63.5% of total variance in reading comprehension after motivation was included as a component of comprehension. Consistent with prior research, findings corroborated the direct influence of multiple components on reading comprehension; most notably vocabulary and the ability to make inferences. Vocabulary provided the largest direct and overall effect in both models. In the Modified DIME Model, vocabulary made the largest direct (.428) and overall contribution (.654) to reading comprehension; vocabulary also held the largest influence for the MMRC both directly (.429) and in overall influence (.653) to reading comprehension. Inference-making was the second-largest direct and overall contributor for both the Modified DIME (.398) and the MMRC (.390). Findings were consistent for both struggling and typical readers in both models. In this study, there was no direct path from motivation to comprehension; however, when direct and indirect relationships were combined, motivation became the third largest contributor to reading comprehension (.186). Motivation was significantly and directly related to comprehension for typical readers (.171, p < .05), but not for those who struggle to read (-.043, p > .05). The findings suggest typical readers with higher motivation perform better on reading comprehension tasks, but there is no direct relationship for struggling readers. Limitations of the study and implications for future research are also discussed.

This thesis contributes to the cross-domain deterrence literature by examining how states use their various sources of power across its Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic (DIME) instruments in order to determine the outcome of immediate deterrence stand-offs. With the increased complexities nation-states face in the 21st century, an update of the old framework was overdue. This study considers the Taiwan Strait Crisis and the Russian Invasion in Ukraine to expand the military-focused literature to incorporate all different sources of state power. This paper finds that cross-domain signals, through an interaction of the bargaining position and bargaining power, decide the outcome of immediate deterrence cases.

This study examines the ideas and values of late nineteenth century American society through the popular art form of dime novel literature. The works of Prentiss Ingraham, one of the most prolific dime novel authors, with over 600 novels to his credit, and one of the most popular, with-at least one reprint of each title, served as the focus of this study. A reading and analysis of 75 of his novels provided insight into the social ideas of his time.The results of this study show nineteenth century America's perceptions of the ideal society and the romanticization of nineteenth century American beliefs. This ideal society was based on a democratic foundation and thrived on a balance between the ruggedness of the frontier and the refinement of Eastern civilization. Likewise, the ideal American hero possessed the same blending of these characteristics. / Department of History

A la fin de l'Ancien Régime le nord-est du Quercy est une région d'habitat dispersé dont le mas constitue le territoire de base. Les hommes y vivent d'une poly-agriculture traditionnelle. Une fiscalité accablante les assujettit aux pouvoirs englobants de la monarchie et des seigneuries, essentiellement ecclésiastiques. La thèse étudie le comportement de ces populations devant les prélèvements de la taille royale, des rentes seigneuriales et des dîmes. La description de la terre utilise les deux instruments que sont : les compoix communautaires et les terriers seigneuriaux. Faute de plan cadastral, une méthode originale est mise en œuvre pour représenter sous forme de graphes géoréférencés les parcellaires fonciers. La terre et les hommes sont ainsi mis en perspective dans des réseaux de proximités géographique, agraire et sociale. La recherche examine l'organisation des communautés d'habitants en face d'une administration étatique de plus en plus contraignante. De son côté, la seigneurie, forte du « complexum feudale », propriétaire éminente de la terre, prélève à l'intérieur des mas des rentes en nature en vertu des censives indivises et perpétuelles que les emphytéotes lui reconnaissent en échange de leur droit de propriété utile. Enfin, l'Eglise est un élément fédérateur et unificateur dans cette société, qui est encore à moitié protestante, au début du XVIIe siècle. Un vaste corpus démographique permet d'analyser le fonctionnement endogame de cette population qui pratique un système successoral inégalitaire. L'héritage de la terre constitue la seule richesse sur le long terme. Les stratégies de reproduction sociale des élites locales et des paysans sont abordées. / At the end of the « Ancien Regime » the mas (sive village) is the elementary territorial unit in the northeast of the Quercy province. Men in their estate are living from traditional farming. They suffer heavy taxes from the encompassing powers, the monarchy and the ecclesiastical lords. The thesis studies the behavior of the population in front of the different tax levies, property taxes, private incomes, tithes. As maps are not used at that time, the two types of archive documents for land registers, the « compoix » and the lord « terriers », are analyzed by an original method, using geographical referenced graphs. The soil and the human being are represented in geographic, agrarian and social networks. The research focuses on the communities of inhabitants confronted by the growing monarchic state. Consuls designed annually by the farmer's assemblies have the thankless task to collect the royal taxes, the « taille ». On another side the lords, using their property rights known as the « complexum feudale » takes off foodstuffs from the harvests. The church also plays a central role in that society where the beginning of the XVIIth century protestantism is still present. A large demographic corpus allows the study of that endogamous population which practices an unequal inheritance system. The land constitutes the only long term wealth and so directs the social reproduction strategy. The thesis considers how following the individualism growth, the rise of the population, the matrimonial diffusion, the society progressively becomes, on one side, free from the lord domination and on the other side, dutiful to the state power.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2009 Jun 15

19th century dime museums were a North American phenomenon that flourished in urban centres from the mid- to late-1800s. Named thusly due to their low admission cost, dime museums provided democratic entertainment that was promoted to all classes as affordable and respectable. The resulting facilities were crammed with art, artifacts, rarities, living human curiosities, theatre performances, menageries, and technological marvels. The exhibition Dr. Soanes’ Odditorium of Wonders strives to recapture the spirit and aesthetic of the dime museum to invoke wonder in the viewer and to combine art, artifacts, and oddities to provoke questions about the boundary between education and amusement. Both the academic and curatorial texts utilize a mix of methodological approaches appropriate to museology, art history and cultural history: theoretical research into historiographical issues concerning theories of display and spectacle; archival research and discourse analysis of historical documents, and material culture analysis (including the semiotics of display). / iv, 60 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [301]-318).

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Notre étude porte le western crépusculaire et cherche plus précisément à extraire le « crépusculaire » du genre. L'épithète « crépusculaire », héritée du vocabulaire critique des années 1960 et 1970, définit généralement un nombre relativement restreint d'œuvres dont le récit met en scène des cowboys vieillissants dans un style qui privilégie un réalisme esthétique et psychologique, fréquemment associé à un révisionnisme historique, voire au « western pro-indien », mais qui se démarque par sa propension à filmer des protagonistes fatigués et dépassés par la marche de l'Histoire. Par un détour sur les formes littéraires ayant comme contexte diégétique l’Ouest américain (dime-novel et romans de la frontière), nous effectuons des allers et retours entre les formes épique et romanesque, entre l’Histoire et son mythe, entre le littéraire et le filmique pour mieux saisir la relation dyadique qu’entretient le western avec l’écriture, d’une part monumentale et d’autre part critique, de l’Histoire. Moins intéressée à l’esthétique des images qu’aux aspects narratologiques du film pris comme texte, notre approche tire profit des analyses littéraires pour remettre en cause les classifications étanches qui ont marqué l’évolution du western cinématographique. Nous étudions, à partir des intuitions d’André Bazin au sujet du sur-western, les modulations narratives du western ainsi que l’émergence d’une conscience critique à partir de ses héros mythologiques (notamment le cow-boy). Notre approche est à la fois épistémologique et transhistorique en ce qu’elle cherche à dégager du western crépusculaire un genre au-delà des genres, fondé sur une incitation à la narrativisation crépusculaire de la part du spectateur. Cette dernière, concentrée par une approche deleuzienne de l’image-cristal, renvoie non plus seulement à une conception existentialiste du personnage dans l’Histoire, mais aussi à une mise en relief pointue du hors-cadre du cinéma, moment de clairvoyance à la fois pragmatique et historicisant que nous définissons comme une image-fin, une image chronogénétique relevant de la contemporanéité de ses figures et de leurs auteurs. / Our study is centered on the “Twilight western” (western crépusculaire) and is more precisely concerned with the “Twilight” aspect of the genre. The "Twilight" epithet, inherited from the French critical vocabulary of the 1960s and 1970s, encompasses a relatively restrained number of works whose stories, often associated with revisionist discourses, or as “pro-indian westerns”, are dedicated to aging cowboys with a style where aesthetical and psychological realism is put forward in favor of showing how these tired protagonists feel outdated and outmarched by History. By a turn on the literary forms that have for their diegetic background the American West (dime-novels and novels more generally contextualized at the border), our research is structured by a back and forth between the epic and romantic forms of narration, between History and its myths, and moreover between the literary form and the filmic form for a better grasp of the dyadic relationship that the West entertain with its writing of History, both with its more monumental and critical approaches. Less interested towards the aesthetic of these “Twilight” images than the narratological aspects of the film considered as text, our approach is founded on literary analysis to better challenge the classifications which have marked the evolution of the Western film. Based on the intuitions of film critic André Bazin on the “sur-western” (high western), we study the narrative modulations of the genre as much as the emergence of a critical awareness from its mythological heroes (mostly the cowboy). Our approach is epistemological as it is transhistorical since it seeks to conceptualize “Twilight western” as a genre beyond genres, not established on a collection of semantical observations, but on the incitement of a twilight narrativization that emerges from the viewer. We concentrate this narrativization alongside the deleuzian crystal-image as not only an existentialist conception of the western genre in regards to History, but also as a highlighting of cinema’s “hors-cadre” (beyond-frame) perceived as an enlightenment that is both pragmatic and historicizing. We define this precise kind of historiographical image as an “image-fin” (end-image), a chronogenetic image axed on the contemporaneity of theses mythological figures and their authors.

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