Zara Neale Purston has re-emerged as an author of promise due to the re-appraisal of her works led by Alice Walker and Robert Hemenway. In both literary and folklore academic circles, Hurston's work has been reclaimed by African-American female scholars and writers, but still a significant study has yet to be done about her ethnographic contributions to folklore and her farsightedness in fieldwork methodology. This thesis seeks to validate her work as a folklorist, thereby dismissing the charges of popularization and amateurishness by re-examining her work. Mules and Men and Jonah's Gourd Vine are Hurston's two most influential folklore texts and will be evaluated for their approach and contribution to the study of ethnography.

This study examined the predictive validity of the WAIS in an academic setting. Traditional WAIS IQ scores and subtests of 127 male and 163 female college students were correlated with Grade Point Averages at the end of four semesters and within five academic areas. Five groups were examined including the total group, male group, female group, black group, and white group. The academic University's general and Communication of areas investigated corresponded to the education requirements; Organization Ideas, Humanities, Social and Behavioral Studies, Natural Science and Mathematics, and Physical Development. Results indicated that dictor of both semester GPA and five groups. Full Scale IQ was Verbal IQ was the best preacademic area GPA for the the second best overall indicator. Verbal IQ for blacks was a better predictor of success in college than it was for whites. Verbal abilities appeared more important for blacks than whites in terms of how well they did in school. WAIS IQ tended to best predict first semester GPA and the areas of Social and Behavioral Studies, Organization and Communication of Ideas, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Humanities and Physical Development, in that order. WAIS Verbal subtests were more efficient predictors than were the Performance subtests. The Digit Span and Arithmetic subtests of the Verbal scale and all five of the Performance subtests appeared to be of negligible value in predicting academic achievement. The highest correlations were found in the Vocabulary subtest, then Similarities and Information, and finally Comprehension. The female group had consistently higher correlation coefficients in every Performance subtest across all semesters and in each of the five academic areas.

The educational quality of Erie County and Buffalo, New York, as represented by school district performance was examined and the relationship between school district performance and the social environment was analyzed. Socioeconomic status, social stability and race were all found to be strongly correlated to school district performance. Within Erie County, Buffalo has the poorest school performance levels while Snyder and Williamsville, two high status suburban districts, have the highest school performance levels. The overall spatial pattern of school district performance based on the PEP test results for 1974 reveal a strong correspondence between school district performance and the social structure of Erie County. The distribution of Regents Scholarship winners within Erie County also straws the strong relationship between social status and school performance. The performance of the Buffalo schools schools a strong relationship to the social structure of the city. The performance of third, sixth and ninth grade pupils on reading and math PEP tests reveals an inner city-periphery contrast in school performance, especially for the elementary schools. The low-achieving schools are located in the inner city, especially the black ghetto, and the high-achieving schools are located on the periphery of the city. Elementary school performance is strongly correlated to income (SES), minority enrollment (race) and the percentage of broken hares (family stability).

The purpose of this study is to examine attitude change toward a particularly salient political and social issue "over time." A second purpose is the examination of the perception of party differences in their positions toward the aforementioned issues "over time."

Analysis of theme, style and structure of the chanted sermons of a Virginia preacher shows that the chanted sermon is a powerful ritualistic expression in certain communities. As practiced among Afro-American groups the chanted sermon is a ritual expression which serves to resolve conflicts, affirm values, and meet certain socio-psychological needs.

This thesis delves into the role of women in the Zapatista movement and how that role has changed over time in the private, public and political spheres. It also draws parallels between the struggle for female liberation within Zapatismo and the struggles of working-class, women of color movements in the United States. Chapters are focused on topics including women's involvement in the San Andrés Accords, the Women's Revolutionary Law, the Other Campaign and Marichuy's electoral campaign as well as personal observations from time spent in Oventik, a Zapatista caracol. As complement to the text, the thesis includes a visual zine.

This dissertation studies identity formation and race informed by the discipline Whiteness Studies. As such this dissertation conceptualizes Spanish Whiteness historically and analyzes its representation in Spanish narrative in prose and film. This research responds to two questions: 1) How has Spanish culture historically instrumentalized Blackness thus contributing to the creation of the Western’s conceptualization of Whiteness? 2) What does Spanish representation of Empire say about its Whiteness? In an effort to answer these questions, this study is divided into two parts that correspond to the conceptualization and representation of what are termed ‘Situational Whiteness’ and ‘Imperial Spanish Orientalism.’ I argue that both are the result of a Spanish differential exceptionalism based on Orientalist cultural practices of tactical assimilation, by means of which the Black experience is subsumed on the margins as a part of Spanish Whiteness. To prove this hypothesis, Spanish Whiteness is conceptualized for the purpose of exploring the strategies of tactical assimilation of the Spanish Orientalism (Hispanism, Arabism, Africanism, Hispanotropicalism) towards its former colonies in Latin America and Africa. In addition, the contrasting cases of instrumentalization of Blackness as resistance in José Martí and Fernando Ortiz’s notion of Cuban racial ‘counterpoint’ as well as and the racial ‘particularism’ of Joan Maragall and Blas Infante inform cultural notions of Spanish Whiteness as well as its fragmentation. In the second part of this dissertation, the analysis focuses on understudied cases of the Spanish Imperial Whiteness’s representation in relation to Equatorial Guinean and Afro-Cuban Blackness. The overall propose of this research is, on the one hand, to explain how the situational nature of Spanish Whiteness is present throughout foundational moments in diverse forms of Spanish Orientalism; and, on the other hand, to inform Whiteness Studies from a different cultural angle thus providing the discipline with a transnational bridge towards a better understanding of white processes of racial formation, historical strategies and cultural forms of structural domination.

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In spite of its common designation as an outmoded classic of sentimental middlebrow literature, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath remains relevant as a milestone in an extended liminal stage between the failing cultural myths of the past and the founding of newly relevant shared stories. This stage begins with the Enlightenment and continues to present-day conflicts over identity, labor, migrants, notions of truth itself, the function and responsibilities of government, and our shared ecological destiny. Arriving near the end of the Depression and its concurrent economic and environmental disasters, The Grapes of Wrath reflects a particularly chaotic stage in mythological disintegration and regeneration. While critics routinely note the structure of myths within the narrative, they too often fail to note the ways said structures fail, providing for the oppressive tone of the narrative, which ironically leaves space for the rise of new myths.

Eugenic discourse is apparent in the work of many writers in the early 20th century, but is especially explicit in D.H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as his private letters. A close reading of these works illustrates Lawrence's attempts to grapple with his advocacy of eugenic.