This study analyses and performs a series of histories about a semi-abandoned Victorian house located in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I engage Gregory Ulmers inter-discursive and inter-subjective process of historiography, the mystory, as a way of viewing and doing research. Mystory allows for research through diverse perspectives of professional, popular and personal discourses, which activates the pleasures and problems of knowledge production by urging invention and creative expression. Significance is discovered in less determined, more localized, ways of knowing that avoid fixing the house in terms of predetermined historic values. Material culture and archives like the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps discussed in Chapter Three are viewed as active or performance processes that affect and are affected by the shifting circumstances of history and culture. The partialities of all language forms function as miniatures of what they represent. Texts and performances are constructed through bricolage of the materials gathered. These metonymic expressions call attention to certain details, while eliding or ignoring others, and are essential to the knowledge and structures produced from them. In constructing 310 Convention on the page and stage, I understand performance in Richard Schechners terms as restored behavior, an action or expression that draws on and refers to its past. I call on Martin Heideggers notions of dwelling and building as fundamental states of human experience through which we learn about the world around us, make meaning from it, and understand our place(s) in it. Gaston Bachelard furthers the Heideggerian impulse with topophilia, or the desire to protect and preserve loved spaces if only in imagination. Jacques Derrida provides ways to structure arguments though chora, the spacing of text upon the page, and also contributes to the archive as a site that overflows with excess through its collection, composition, and coding. Through these and other discourses, I discover and produce ways to view this insignificant house differently by acknowledging its many histories. I also recognize how performance on the page and stage, already embedded in loss through what cannot be restored, reflects the possibilities and limitations of its metonymic expression.

This research analyzes changes in the rhetoric of a sustaining myth in order to better assess what happens when a myth is threatened. By examining American sport and its current struggle to withstand the widespread use of steroids, the author investigates how public discourse about the scandal turns athletes from mythical heroes to cheaters. The author begins by explicating the rhetorical construction of the athlete as a moral hero in America and how this myth is perpetuated today. The author then examines how steroids threaten the myth of the moral athlete and uses Major League Baseball as a case study to illustrate the rhetorical justification of their use. Ultimately this research offers a cyclical method of mythical analysis as a new method to analyze threatened myths. Current research offers few methods to explain how myths develop and this cyclical method attempts to provide specificity for one-way myths can survive. It is argued that the cyclical method acts as a way to account for threats to the myth, as well as to allow for rhetorical shifts.

This dissertation examines the rhetoric utilized by Fidel Castro that Castro used in order to maintain his tenure as the sole leader of Cuba for almost 50 years. Castro employs identification through division with an enemy, and he is able to perpetuate this division through an ongoing, dynamically perceived narrative. This narrative takes shape in the form of the revolution, a rhetorical construction designed to create a collective Cuban identity, which, in turn, is furthered through ideology by Castros elimination of competing points of views. Castros unique role as narrator has allowed him to adapt to events and maintain this narrative of revolution.

Existentialism is often viewed as a morbid philosophy but adapting it to a rhetorical framework reveals a consistent interest in the ontological function of communication. The exchange of discourse and symbols is what ties humans together and existentialism examines the meaning that abounds in life as opposed to attempting to discover the meaning of life. As a rhetorical construct, existentialism provides a critical and unique view of agency and edification as a method of rhetorical practice.

This is an ethnographic study of tourism at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. I argue that Walden Pond operates as a site that creates tensions among visitors due to the ways that time has transformed the once serene landscape into an overcrowded swimming pool. These tensions, however, fall under the expectation that the State Reservation of Massachusetts (re)creates Thoreaus Walden as suggested in his discourse, but the performance of history is enacted through the creation of meaning among visitors engaging in a dialogue that references the past, talking about a space that has cultural significance. Exploring the touristic experience and the rhetorical performance of Walden Pond as a sublime body of nature, I wanted to see how the performance of tourism was manifesting itself in the gaze of tourists and what they could teach us about tourism. My technique involved a process of close observation, learning about peoples lives, and constructively listening to their perspectives. I first offer an introduction to my study in the first chapter, and then owing the history of Walden Pond to the second chapter in order to provide a context for the social evolution of the site into the twenty-first century. In chapter three I then discuss the tour itself and markers of the pond, including the Thoreau house replica, fence, signs, the embodiment of walking, and the actual house site. Chapter 4 examines the visitors perspectives on: Walden Pond as a sacred location, the house site, a place of nature, and authenticity. By understanding Walden Pond as a representation of itself and as a space to talk about the past, we begin to see less problems, dissatisfaction, and ambivalence that are connected to all the reasons that I list throughout the study, and more performances of history unfolding at the tourist attraction.

Considerable research has been devoted to detailing how news framing structures public opinion. As a major rhetoric device to present information to the public, framing has the capacity of enlightening the public on the costs and benefits of particular policy choices. However, few studies have examined media framing of international trade and its impact on public opinion, and no study to date has connected how framing of international agreements might affect individual investment attentions. This study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining individual responses to pro-trade versus anti-trade and gain versus lose frames. It further extends existing literature by considering the impact of framing on individual investment intentions suggesting that framing has effects beyond opinion and may impact actual behaviors. Even though the frames in communication do influence individual preference choices concerning foreign trade policies, these policy options are also subject to powerful influence of individual pre-existing schemas about international trade. These predispositions could help not only redistribute the scarce resource of attention and construe incoming stimuli, but also orientate public opinion on foreign trade policies and even influence individual behavioral responses.

My study examined how inner-city adults perceive and experience the Internet as a civic engagement tool, and if they view the Internet as a tool for environmental advocacy. Research shows a consistent divide between those with Internet access and those without. Individuals living in low-income minority communities are the least likely groups to be Internet connected. Consequently, the Internet could further separate historically marginalized communities from important government and social resources rather than bringing them closer. Qualitative research methods were used to reveal socially-constructed perceptions of the Internet as a civic engagement tool in the inner city. Grounded theory techniques helped develop a solid final interpretation. My objective was not to compare low-end of the divide users with more affluent users but to broadly explore whether inner city adults perceive the Internet as a tool for environmental advocacy. My findings revealed problems of crime, drugs and violence as a result of persistent unemployment in the inner city far outweigh concerns of environmental risks. Overall,participants were confident in their ability to solve local problems and bridge with local organizations, but they feared retaliation, community apathy, and misplaced priorities would keep them from achieving their goals. Participants preferred face-to-face communication for mobilizing support and media for staying informed. Experienced users viewed the Internet as a valuable information-seeking tool. Participants viewed the Internet in positive and productive ways that helped them with school, employment, and important personal matters. Noticeably absent from the findings was participants view of the Internet as a communication technology. Finally, the primary barriers to Internet access in the community were costs, personal time, insufficient public access, and navigation problems. For important matters, though, participants found ways around barriers by reaching out to social support networks, including friends, family and co-workers. My study contributes to both theory and practice. Diffusion of Innovation predicts adoption of new technologies based on certain attributes. Findings reveal relative advantage and compatibility of the Internet shapes participants view of the Internet. The findings also offer important insight to environmental policy makers and civic leaders for engaging inner city residents in 21st century environmentalism.

In my study, I place concepts and practices of photography and performance in dialogue to enable our understanding of how photographs perform and how performance contains or can contain elements we attribute to photographs. The connection between photography and performance that most intrigues me is how they make memories and when collected or restored in some socially shared way make histories too. My specific aim is to understand how photographs and performance might benefit from each other in how they make and transmit memories and histories. To activate the study, I select and focus on five specific events in which photographs are or have been displayed. I analyze each event in terms of its internal, original, and external or display context (Barrett 96), pertinent concepts and practices of photography, and also those of performance that are similar. By means of a comparative approach, I look at what memories and histories appear to be remembered and forgotten, and how, in each photographic event and the performance practices I draw on. My study is significant because while scholars have discussed the conceptual links between photography and performance, they have not considered the practical links. This study emphasizes the latter and thereby offers methods for doing photography and/in performance that feature rather than minimize how memories and histories are made in both mediums.

This study examines the cultural performances of the parade community in one of the oldest and largest parades in the country: the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The modern parade celebration consists of groups of mostly working-class white men from South Philadelphia who dress up in extravagant sequined and feathered costumes and, beginning in South Philadelphia, march toward City Hall on one of the largest streets in the city on New Years Day. The parade is competitive and marked by performance competitions at the end of each parade. The parades history in the city of Philadelphia is extensive but contested. Many locals know little about the parade and its community, while others debate its history and the positionality of its community within Philadelphia. Therefore, the parade community holds a precarious position in the larger Philadelphia community, which results in many questions and concerns about the role and function of the parade in contemporary Philadelphia. This study examines the cultural performances of the parade community in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. By tracking the histories of three specific sets of performances those of race, gender, and class this work analyzes how both parade participants and members of the larger Philadelphia community attempt to make sense of the parade. In choosing the performances of race, gender, and class, the study looks at ways the parade community relates to these identities at various points in history, and it argues that the Mummers perform these histories, often unconsciously, on and off the parade stage. By using a cultural performance perspective, and ethnographic and historiographic methods, I assert that in this performance of history the Mummers attempt to make sense of their own identity as a community, with potentially problematic results. Through the research stemming from the unofficial theme song, Oh, Dem Golden Slippers, the study finds that the Mummers use a kind of strategic invisibility to distance the parade community from problematic issues in its history while maintaining legitimacy with other bits of the history. In the history of gender, a paradox with a passing form of female impersonation on one hand and an all-male performance tradition on the other causes trouble with Philadelphians understandings of gender in the parade. Lastly, the city adoption of the parade in 1901 focused the parade community on the socially acceptable performances involving the financial expense and commoditization of the parade, which results in a struggle between the working class history of the community and the financial focus of the contemporary parade. The study, therefore, reveals the significance of history in the performance of community in the Philadelphia Mummers Community.

This dissertation is an in depth study of the structures, actors, and policy communities associated with U.S. public diplomacy toward Iran. Since 2006, the U.S. government has spent more than $200 million for its Iran-related public diplomacy via State Department "democracy promotion" programs, National Endowment for Democracy, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. These initiatives promoted regime change in Iran, ignoring a substantial majority of Irans population opposed to U.S.-sponsored interventions. The study finds U.S. public diplomacy as it relates to Iran fits with the two-way asymmetrical model of public relations. The dissertation identifies 182 individuals who participated in the Iran policy debate between January 2008 and January 2009. Based on the policy recommendations these members of the Iran issue network propose, the study uncovers the existence of the following four policy communities: Punitive Nonengagement, Hawkish Engagement, Strategic Engagement, and Fundamental Change. While regime change is the ultimate objective of both the Punitive Nonengagement and the Hawkish Engagement policy communities, only the latter believes that negotiation is a useful tactic in gaining compliance from Iran. Both, however, view Iran as a major threat to U.S. and Israeli interests and see no role for Iran in solving regional challenges. The Strategic Engagement policy community does not share this abysmal appraisal of Iran; rather, its members see meaningful cooperation between the United States and Iran on key regional issues as viable if their relationship is based on mutual respect. The Fundamental Change policy community finds the underlying assumptions of U.S. Iran policy vitally flawed and believes that all policy options short of an overhaul of U.S. international behavior lack ethical and legal legitimacy. Both the Strategic Engagement and Fundamental Change policy communities argue America should cease its pursuit of regime change in Iran and abide by its obligations under the Algiers Accord. Public diplomacy recommendations proposed by the Punitive Nonengagement and the Hawkish Engagement communities correlate with policies adopted by the Bush administration, with those of the former doing so more readily. The Obama administration is expected to adopt policies resembling the recommendations of the Hawkish Engagement policy community.