This study of myth and sexuality in the novels of Caribbean-American women includes works by Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Cristina Garcia, and Michelle Cliff. The first chapter elucidates previously unpublished correlations between Naylors <em>The Women of Brewster Place</em> and Marshalls <em>Praisesong for the Widow</em> and a zombification trope. Similarly, Chapter Two delineates a formerly unremarked phoenix pattern in Garcias <em>Dreaming in Cuban</em>. In contrast to the previous chapters, Chapter Three outlines Cliffs characterization of historical production as mythmaking in <em>Free Enterprise</em>. The selected novels uses of myth illustrate Carine M. Mardorossians views about the changing nature of contemporary postcolonial fiction from an aesthetic of difference to one of an inclusive relation identity.

This thesis sets out to confront drug and alcohol abuse by American Servicemen during the Vietnam War, previously defying in depth historical analysis. New oral histories available within the last few years have shed new light on a previously elusive subject. Harnessing medical literature, government documents, oral histories and secondary sources this work seeks to explain the widespread alcohol and drug abuse the Vietnam War became infamous for. Factors contributing to abuse and elaborated upon include widespread availability of drugs and alcohol, military machismo, the inability of military leadership to cope with the burgeoning substance abuse problems and the rise of the domestic drug scene domestically.

The purpose of this dissertation is to uncover and record the history of gambling and its accompanying vices in Northern Kentucky during the period 1790-2000. The treatment begins with a general overview of the existence of gambling and corruption in the region from the town's founding, identifying the key characteristics that established Northern Kentucky as regional vice center. It then details the ways in which gambling developed through the years from loosely organized, locally-run gaming halls into well-funded and strategically managed branches of nationally syndicated crime organizations. In its final chapters, this history describes the fantastic series of events that effectively drove large-scale gambling operations from the area in the 1960s and then evaluates the aftermath of that reform effort at the turn of the century. By examining private papers, in addition to news reports, oral interviews, leading reform organizations' literature and meeting minutes, police reports, court cases and governmental reports on crime, the dissertation provides the first complete academic assessment of the region's much-fabled history of vice and gambling. As Northern Kentucky citizens seek in the 21st century to reinvent themselves socially and economically, their history could serve to inform current debates regarding the moral, social and economic impact of both illicit and legalized gambling.

Learning disabled college writers may not have traditional academic skills, but they still have strengths that can be nurtured in the composition classroom. This thesis attempts to make composition scholars aware of a pedagogy geared to the strengths of learning disabled students--a pedagogy which could ultimately provide a more inclusive classroom space. One way to assess the potential benefits of inclusive teaching methods is to examine an institution that has successfully taught generations of learning disabled college students. Landmark College in Putney, Vermont, solely accepts learning disabled students. The teaching methods and assistive technology utilized in the Landmark composition classroom are valuable examples for interested composition scholars.

In the antebellum period, single women in McLennan County survived by working, managing inherited estates, or relying on male relatives. In contrast, married women rarely worked outside of the home, hence they occupied a hidden place in the county's economy. During the war, married women, now left alone without their husbands, joined their single counterparts by participating in the market in a variety of ways. They managed plantations, opened businesses, worked in Waco, initiated land trades, and advertised publicly. I argue in this paper that the Civil War and the coinciding urbanization of Waco provided the opportunity for large numbers of women to engage in the market. In addition, these women continued to actively work, trade, and negotiate within the market during the 1870s. Society encouraged this participation through praising editorials, patronage of women-owned businesses, partnership in female-initiated land trades, and a constant supply of work opportunities for women.

In her most successful novel, Thornicrofts Model (1873), Margaret Hunt fictionalizes the Pre-Raphaelite couple Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal, as well as other historical artists and models, in order to voice her own critique of art and society. Hunt engages with popular modes of art criticism and participates in conversations surrounding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the women they depicted in their paintings. Framed as a biography of the artist and his model, Hunts novel questions the fidelity of the brotherhoods truth to nature, exposing that the artists erase the agency of the female model and render her invisible. Read alongside contemporary art criticism, historical studies of art and the figure of the model, Thornicrofts Model depicts the constraints that nineteenth-century women encountered, and in the end, Thornicrofts Model is a feminist intervention on behalf of all women participating in art.

This work offers a new interpretation of the life of Jerónimo Limaylla (1622-1678?), previously identified as a famous ethnic lord of the Peruvian Andes, a transatlantic traveler to the Spanish royal court, an advocate of the indigenous populations, and a legal claimant to the Andean chiefdom of Luringuanca in the Peruvian central highlands. The alleged Jerónimo was in fact a trickster, a common Indian from the coast by the name of Lorenzo Ayun Chifo. His early Christian education and religious training, his highly hispanicized manners, and his striking legal abilities allowed Lorenzo to pass off as the real Jerónimo and almost become lord of Luringuanca. The political support he received in Peru stemmed from the transformative power embraced in his transatlantic experience, which shaped Lorenzos evolving identity from a common Indian to a fictitious lord at the court of the Spanish King. The Franciscans, with whom Lorenzo traveled, acted as the paramount model of his identity, that of a Christian traveling lord, an advocate of the Indians, and a fierce denouncer of the abuses against the natives of colonial Peru.

Macrofungi represents a diverse group of taxa which play an important role in nutrient cycling. This study was designed to evaluate the diversity, composition, and ecological importance of macromycetes belonging to the Basidiomycota and Ascomycota at a lowland Amazonian rainforest area in the southeastern region of Peru, Madre de Dios province. The study was divided into two parts: (1) an inventory involving opportunistic collections, and (2) a quantitative comparison between the three major habitats: primary high-terrace forest, secondary high-terrace forest, and primary floodplain forest. Three hundred and five morphospecies were collected from Los Amigos Biological Station indicating a high diversity. The fungal family composition found in the area was typical of Neotropical areas. Forty eight species are presented as new records for the country. Similarity indexes showed that the species composition varied among habitats; however all of them were mainly composed of three families: Tricholomataceae, Polyporaceae, and Xylariaceae.

Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel were Irish nationalists who escaped to America from a British penal colony in the early 1850s. Meagher settled in New York and became a patriotic American. Mitchel eventually settled in Tennessee where he became a polemicist for Southern independence. During the Civil War, Meagher raised a brigade of Irish-Americans to fight for the Union while Mitchel edited two Richmond newspapers. After the War, Meagher became the acting-governor of the Montana Territory while Mitchel was imprisoned by the United States Army. After his release, Mitchel turned his attention solely to the Irish independence movement. Meagher died in 1867 when he fell off a riverboat in Montana. Mitchel died in 1875 after returning triumphantly to Ireland where he was elected to Parliament as a protest candidate. America made Meagher an American; it did not do the same for Mitchel, who remained an Irishman at heart.

This work deals with the growing trend among many American universities to relegate basic writing instruction and other remedial courses to community colleges and the problems contingent with such a trend. While American community colleges were initially founded to give students a foundation of coursework that could then be transferred to a baccalaureate-awarding university, recent decades have seen community colleges grow away from this transfer function and toward vocational training and a stratification of the American population that further marginalizes basic writing and basic writers. Additionally, the placement instruments currently used to gauge a students ability to handle university-level coursework can, at times, give an unfair assessment of a students true ability, thereby forcing that student into a recurring cycle of remedial classes from which he or she may never emerge to finish a baccalaureate (or even an associates) degree. This work also looks at basic writing programs at Texas community colleges as a representative of the types of basic writing instruction currently being undertaken at the community college level across the country as well as at the problems that arise within these programs and the practices that contradict existing basic writing pedagogy and theory. In contrast to this, the work details the beginning of a basic writing course at the University of Texas-Tyler, the theoretical foundations for that course (as opposed to the practices currently in place at the community college level), and a case study of five students in the inaugural offering of this course and how the methods employed in the course helped these students address issues such as their perceptions of themselves as students and scholars and their perceptions of the difficulties they faced in handling university-level writing assignments. Finally, this work looks at some recommendations for basic writing instruction in the present and implications for basic writing research in the future.