Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drew University, 1989. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-328).

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / When the Shakers arrived in revolutionary America, colonists regarded them with suspicion and hostility. A century later, Americans viewed Shakers as models of agricultural excellence, morality, and healthy living. Although Shaker material culture has long been a subject of fascination for cultural historians, much of the scholarship has focused on Shaker furniture, crafts, and architecture. This dissertation examines the primacy of food in the establishment and growth of Shakerism. Drawing on relatively untapped Shaker sources, including newsletters and advertising collateral, as well as cookbooks, daily journals, and visitor accounts, it demonstrates how food provided the economic basis for their communities and established the Shaker reputation for excellence. Moreover, it underscores the importance of food in developing Americans' regard and respect for the Shakers, despite the sect's unusual lifestyle and unorthodox beliefs. [TRUNCATED]

The dissertation analyzes the history of tourism at Shaker communities from their foundation to the present. Tourism is presented as an interaction between the host Shakers and the visitors. The culture, expectations, and activities of both parties affect their relationship to each other. Historically, tourists and other visitors have gradually dominated the relationship, shifting from hostility based on religion to acceptance based on a romantic view of the Shakers. This relationship has spilled over into related cultural phenomena, notably fiction and antique collecting. Overall, the analysis extends contemporary tourism theory and integrates Shaker history with the broader course of American history.

Thesis (M. Min.)--Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-115).

M. Tech. Industrial Engineering / The ability to respond to changes and uncertainty in production demands currently constitutes a crisis in small and medium scale mining industries in South Africa. The case study of various mining and mineral processing site visits which was carried out revealed that the existing conventional screening methods are not scalable or able to be integrated and have limited processing capacity, which constitutes a high production cost on a long-term basis. In view of this, the Reconfigurable Vibrating Screen machine was designed and manufactured with the intension of eliminating these challenges faced by small and medium scale mining industries. The newly developed vibrating screen utilizes the concept of re-configurability, making it simple to attain full capacity processing production on the same machine. The design of a reconfigurable vibrating screen is based on the idea of enhancing the processing capacity by adjustable width and length of the screen structure with regard to the desired processing output.

Thesis (M. Min.)--Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-115).

Thesis (M. Min.)--Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-115).

In my dissertation, I intend to focus on the way that supernaturalism was produced and disseminated as a cultural category in 19th-century American fiction and non-fiction. In particular, my argument will be that 19th-century authors incorporated supernaturalism in their work to a large degree because of changing death practices at the time, ranging from the use of embalming to shifts in accepted mourning rituals to the ability to record the voices of the dead, and that these supernatural narratives are coded ways for these authors to rethink and grapple with the complexities of these shifting practices. Using Poe's "A Tale of Ragged Mountains" (1844) and Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Alcott's Little Women (1868), Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (1851), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Brockden Brown's Weiland (1798), Phelps' short fiction, Shaker religious writings, and other texts, I will argue that 19th-century narration, instead of being merely aligned with an emerging public sphere and the development of oratory, relied heavily on thanatoptic or deceased narrators, the successive movement of the 18th-century British graveyard poets. For writers who focused on mesmerism and mesmerized subjects, the supernatural became a vehicle for creating a type of "negative freedom," or coded, limitless space from which writers such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Martineau could imagine their own death and do so without being scandalous. The 19th-century Shaker "visitations," whereby spirits of the dead were purported to speak through certain Shaker religionists, present a unique supernatural phenomenon, since this discrete culture also engaged with coded ways for rethinking death practices and rituals through their supernatural narratives. Meanwhile, such shifting cultural practices associated with death and its rituals also lead, I will argue, to the development of a new literary trope: the disembodied child narrator, as used first in Brockden Brown's novel and then in Melville's fiction, for example. Finally, I will finish my dissertation with a chapter that, while also considering how thanatoptic narrative is used in literary supernaturalism, will focus more on spaces, mazes, and, to use Benjamin's term in The Arcades Project (tran. 1999), arcades that marked 19th-century culture and architecture and how this change in space - and subsequent thanatoptic geography in 19th-century fiction - was at least partially correlated to shifting death practices. I see this project as contributing to 19th-century American scholarship on death practices and literature, including those by Ann Douglas, Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Russ Castronovo, but doing so by arguing that the literary mechanism of supernaturalism and the gothic acted as categories or vehicles for rethinking and reconsidering actual death practices, funeral rituals, and related haunted technology (recordings, daguerreotypes) at the time. / English

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