Born January 8, 1809, George Luther Stearns was from an old New England family. His father's death forced him to enter the business world at an early age. He rose from a clerk to a linseed oil manufacturer for the shipbuilders of his native Medford, Massachusetts. Later, the lead pipe factory he started solidified his wealth and standing in the manufacturing community. A conservative businessman, Stearns kept half his earnings in gold. From the Compromise of 1850 on, Stearns became increasingly active in antislavery efforts and involved with the Concord literati, including Emerson and Alcott. With slowness of speech, Stearns preferred working behind the scenes, allowing his money to speak for him. Although he did not join radical antislavery groups and other reform movements, in the cause of Kansas, he used his managerial skills effectively, eventually becoming chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. About this time, Stearns met John Brown, became involved with his commitment to free blacks in America, and emerged as chief financial backer for Brown's Harper's Ferry plan. After this episode, Stearns helped organize the Emancipation League and recruited the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. His success led Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to ask him to recruit blacks for the Union armies. As Assistant Adjutant-General for the Recruitment of Colored Troops, Major Stearns was most productive in Nashville, Tennessee, where he met Andrew Johnson. Sympathetic to the plight of "Contraband," Stearns also organized hospitals and schools, stopped impressment, and organized Unionists into a lobby for the emancipation of slaves in their state. Sensitive and quick-tempered, Stearns ran afoul of Stanton and resigned. He then channeled his energy into a civil rights movement and organized the Impartial Suffrage Association. After the Civil War, Stearns continued his efforts on behalf of blacks, sending out pamphlets and publishing a paper, The Right Way, to advance the cause. Finally his strength gave way, and Stearns, who suffered from bronchial problems, died of pneumonia in New York in April 1867.

The Rev. John Brown's story makes a useful addition to the history of American public address. As a mainstream Colonial evangelical Calvinist who was deeply influenced by the Great Awakening, he held a Presbyterian ministry of forty-two years in the Valley of Virginia (1753-1795). He operated schools, helped establish two presbyteries and a synod, and raised a remarkable family. Brown never published, but his surviving "Memorandum Book," contains approximately sixteen of his sermons, most of them in the somewhat illegible, abbreviated notes typical of Colonial ministers. Painstaking scrutiny of the notes reveals the first four sermons in the book to consist of two occasional pieces (a fast sermon and a fragmentary lecture sermon) and two standard Sunday calls to salvation. Each piece follows a typical pattern of explication and application of scripture and generally avoids mention of immediate circumstances. The style is plain, but some features of Donne-like eloquence appear. Conclusions drawn from Brown's biography and the presentation of four of his sermons include the finding of his having been subject to the fallacy of "historicism," the claiming to understand God's will in events. Evidence of Brown's warmth and wit, however, serves to counter stereotypes of dour Calvinists. He seems, moreover, to have reflected Scotch-Irish assimilation in America; the Southern traditions identified by Richard Weaver; the unifying nature of Colonial Calvinism; the Presbyterian stumbling block of ministerial education; and the American frontiersman's various strengths and weaknesses. His limitations in leadership appear to have been his greatest liability. Brown's was a career rich in historical, rhetorical, and spiritual implications. Studying it reaps the rewards of understanding that Harry S. Stout notes only the unpublished, non-esoteric texts of Colonial ministers can provide.

The specific purposes of this study were to identify and highlight the many and varied contributions Black people made in providing schooling for their children in the South from 1865 to 1954, and thereby, make a significant contribution to the literature on this subject. This study added weight to the historical importance Blacks have placed on the education of their children. Ignorance of this history affects how Black children are viewed, treated, taught, encouraged, or discouraged in the process of acquiring an education in this society. Fifty-one autobiographies were used as the primary data source. They spanned three major periods--Reconstruction, Post-Reconstruction and the period after World War I to the Brown decision. They were selected on the following criteria: the life of individuals who lived in the Southern region of the United States; and, individuals whose own personal experiences related to formal schooling as students, parents, teachers or community activists. This research, historical and largely descriptive, was designed to investigate the role Black parents and the Black community played in providing schooling for Black children in the South, from 1865 to 1954. These authors, in their own words, reported that their parents and communities placed high value on education and made many sacrifices in order to have their children acquire an education. It is clear from this study that the white authorities in control of the education of all children in America were primarily interested in the education of white children and this fact adversely affected the education of Black children. The research demonstrated that across the periods studied Black children did not have the same educational advantages that white school children had. Further, this study suggests the need to re-examine the issues related to why Black children are not given an equal educational opportunity. To monitor this process, Black parents, as the first teachers, must become more involved in the education of Black children. However, in order to do that the schools must bring Black parents into the system.

The sister-figure that appears in the works of the turn-of-the-century Austrian poet, Georg Trakl (1887-1914) has been the source of speculation and analysis in numerous secondary works, beginning already less than ten years after Trakl's suicide in a military hospital in Cracow. Although current research is generally in agreement that Trakl had an incestuous bond with his younger sister, Margarethe Langen-Trakl (1891-1917), the relationship between Trakl's poetic creation of the sister-figure and his own sister Grete continues to be a contentious issue within the secondary literature. In my study of the development of Trakl's sister-figure, I show that this figure appears at times of crisis or emotional turmoil with Grete. Through creation of the sister-figure, Trakl found a means of expressing the conflicting emotions of attraction and repulsion and guilt that arose out of his relationship to Grete. In the poems and particularly in the unedited dramas, the sister-figure is represented as fragmented, both physically and psychically. The image of the sister as both victim and aggressor, both male and female eventually gives way to a mythical representation of the sister. After Trakl's death, many of his friends and acquaintances had contact with Grete Langen-Trakl. In their depictions of her, they measure her explicitly against her brother and find her lacking in positive qualities, polarizing Georg and Grete into extremes of good and evil. Implicitly, their negative portrayals of Grete are based on Trakl's implication of the sister-figure in an incest scene. Contemporary depictions of her behavior and relationship to her brother frequently employ words expressing disgust and abhorrence or make references to her fate of tragic suffering. As a result of these early attempts to obscure the incest, most secondary works establish a stance of either accepting or rejecting the importance of the incest and the sister-figure in Trakl's oeuvre. I argue that many of these secondary works adopt the tone of the contemporary depictions of Grete Langen-Trakl, which they then apply to their analysis of Trakl's sister-figure. In particular, biographical sketches of Trakl and his sister borrow heavily from the contemporary descriptions of Grete Langen-Trakl and Trakl's representation of a sister-figure.

Student Number : 0204500X - PhD Thesis - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This thesis is a study of the Sasa Sema’s Lion Series of biographies written for young readers. The Sasa Sema project is concerned with archiving the stories of famous historical figures and contemporary heroes. The research examines the shifts or the trends these biographies take as compared to what has been in existence in discourses on children’s writing in Kenya in the past. I argue that the issues that these biographies are concerned with are a novelty in Kenyan children’s literature. By writing biographies of historical figures in Kenya, the authors are not only making an intervention by creating new models for children’s literature, but they also show that the story of the nation cannot be enacted outside the heroic struggles of its peoples. I further argue that the Sasa Sema project is significant because many writers of children’s literature in Kenya, and in East Africa in general, write mostly about childhood stories rather than historical figures. Also, the characters used in the biographies are adult characters rather than young fictional animal and human characters that have characterized children’s literature in the past. I conclude that these changes broaden the scope of children’s literature in Kenya. The changes in writing for children in Kenya, evident in the biographies under study are examined across the chapters that make up this thesis. Chapter One attempts to locate the biographies under study within Kenya’s children’s literary tradition by looking at the trajectory this literature has taken from pre-colonial time to the present. Chapter Two examines how orality as a stylistic device is used in the texts under study first, to create literary appreciation and secondly, as a means of summoning literature from different cultural backgrounds in which the texts are based. The chapter argues that the use of oral art forms evokes identity and signals cultural diversity in the Kenyan society. Chapter Three addresses the question of female heroism and gender stereotypes in children’s literature. This chapter intimates that biographies, whose narratives draw from real life situations, help in revising the representation of the female character in children’s literature. Chapter Four examines how individual stories are used to narrate Kenya’s history of decolonization for the children. This chapter also avows that the process of colonization created heroes through colonialist institutions such as schools and prisons. Chapter Five examines how the Sasa Sema project argues for the recognition of minority groups that have been marginalized in narratives of nation formation, while Chapter Six discusses the biography of Dedan Kimathi a Mau Mau freedom fighter. The female narrator in Kimathi’s biography, who is also positioned as a participant in the war portrays children’s literature as a vehicle for paying homage to women’s role in the Mau Mau war. In Chapter Seven, I attempt to harmonize the conclusions reached in the previous chapters.

Dissertation Ph. D.--Philosophy--Stockholm University, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. 172-184.

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Magister Artium - MA

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Marshall University, 2009. / Includes abstract. Document formatted into pages: contains 159 p. Title from document title page. Includes bibliographical references (p.74-99)

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