An “object lesson” is more than a timeworn metaphor used to describe a way of reasoning from the concrete to the abstract. From the 1860s onward, object lessons were classroom exercises organized around the study of material things and were popular across the United States. Using items like penknives and whalebone, teachers employed this methodology to teach children how to perceive their material worlds and to use their heightened observational skills to reason, both critically and morally. “Object Lessons in American Culture” links this historic classroom practice to the ways nineteenth-century Americans came to understand the matter that surrounded them. It argues that the systematic study of material things via object lessons shaped the ways adults and children found meaning in their possessions, considered the connections between objects and pictures, and viewed and talked about race and citizenship. Furthermore, this dissertation establishes object lessons as a historical way of learning from and engaging with objects and pictures. The practice of object lessons parallels and prefigures certain aspects of current material culture scholarship, a connection that historicizes material culture methodologies. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. “Through a Window” I) introduces the practice that would become object lesson pedagogy moving from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzis Swiss schoolroom to the antebellum United States. “Thinking with Things at School” II) examines Civil War-era reforms that crystallized European ideas about object teaching into classroom-ready object lesson pedagogy. “Picture Lessons” III) looks at what object lessons on pictures may reveal about nineteenth-century visual culture. “Object Lessons in Race and Citizenship” IV) considers how African American and Native American students were taught via object lessons and simultaneously described and represented as living object lessons. Finally, “Objects and Ideas” V) investigates the ways politicians, advertisers, and authors employed the concept of the object lesson and what their projects may reveal about object-based epistemology at the end of the century. This dissertation explains how object lessons, as pedagogy and metaphor, patterned the ways many nineteenth-century Americans thought about their material worlds.

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less important. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. This type of literary text, or what I label “con-script,” is not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematizes its own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorows notion of “false documents,” the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and to misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English, Spanish, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novels development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. “The Art of Con-Fessing” juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantors The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Bastos Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiagos Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their “own” personal writing. “Mediations of Media” features Ivan Angelos A Festa, Tomas Eloy Martinezs La novela de Peron, and Ishmael Reeds Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity； the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in “Con-Centering the Archive” via Aguinaldo Silvas No Pais das Sombras, Francisco Simons El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitchs L.C.

This interdisciplinary work examines Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum through the lens of sustainable tourism. It specifically examines the value of integrating the culture and history of the host community into the attraction, and using tourist attractions to provide personal and economic development for locals. Chapter One is titled “‘Can I Live’ on Beale Street,” Chapter Two is titled “Opening the Gates of Graceland,” and Chapter Three is titled “Creating a Public Forum at the National Civil Rights Museum.” Memphis has been predominantly African American since 1986, and African American history was significant in the creation of each attraction. Thus, incorporating the concerns and culture of African American Memphians is essential to the sustainability of each site. Guided by measures at the National Civil Rights Museum and other tourist destinations, this work proposes sustainable tourism practices that could help strengthen relationships between African American Memphians and the tourist attractions Beale Street and Graceland. In turn, these sustainable measures could increase the dollars and time spent by African American Memphians at these tourists attractions.

This research examines the perceptions that international students and scholars from China form of the United States. This thesis tracks the participants’ recollection of their beliefs about the U.S. before arriving and examines the transformations that occurred because of lived circumstances and experiences. The research participants eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to visit and study at American universities, believing that this country had the best there was to offer in terms of educational quality. This perceived superiority of the U.S. was believed to extend into other social and cultural categories as well. Through examining the participant’s imagined ideals of life in the U.S. the objective is to understand the importance individuals and lived experiences play in the reception and interpretation of cultural images, as well as foreground the “individual” as the main site to examine the intersection of the “global” and the “local”. This is meant to elevate the importance of the individual when studying the impact and influence of globalization in the lives of individuals. By using Appadurai’s notion of mediascapes as a means to study popular culture the goal is to understand the local and the global in studying the connection between the imagination and globalization.

The 1993 Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas is a disquieting event in American history because it violates the metanarratives of tolerance and pluralism. My analysis of the secondary literature on Waco illuminates the conditions that made the Branch Davidians targets for regulation: the presumed tolerance of American society towards religious differences and the basic ‘good’ of authentic religion. The Branch Davidians could not be tolerated because of their weapons stockpile, alleged sexual and corporeal abuse of children and practice of polygamy. I argue that these actions contributed to a rescue narrative that justified the government’s intervention, but the significance of how mainstream sexual and gender conventions influence expectations for authentic religion has been overlooked in the secondary literature. I argue that by incorporating themes of sexuality and gender into the study of religion and conflict and American ideas of religious authenticity, a more comprehensive view of American culture emerges.

This dissertation examines the cultural practices of the Peace Corps as an expression of a peculiarly American vision of cosmopolitanism. Founded at the height of American liberalism and amid the global turbulence of decolonization and the cold war, the Peace Corps offered a compelling national story of continuity and coherence at a moment of transition in American society. The depiction of the decolonizing world as a “new frontier,” the testing ground for a new generation of citizens, drew a direct line between the countrys revolutionary republican past and its emergence on the world stage as a military and economic superpower. This vision of a coherent, historically stable national character contained an ideal of citizenship wrought by the intersections of class, race, and gender in U.S. culture and society. The Peace Corps represented an influential, mainstream vision of the American citizens participation on the world stage. The Peace Corps not only made the world newly accessible to individual American travelers, but also produced an array of representational conventions that gave meaning to Peace Corps experiences. Volunteers enacted the successful achievement of American/global citizenship through their adoption and creation of technologies for representing their experiences: in the performance of banality in postcolonial settings； in the elaboration of “non-ugly Americanness”； in the experience of “culture shock”； in narrative performances of self-possession and subjective coherence. I explore both the cultural underpinnings that support the subjectivity of American/global citizenship and the acute contradictions that often attend the position of the volunteer abroad. The dissertation concludes by exploring the Peace Corpss support for liberal arts education as a the basis of American cosmopolitan citizenship. Here I explore the competing articulations of parochialism and worldliness that play out in the Peace Corps and in the internationalization of liberal arts curricula since the 1980s. The promises of “experiential learning” associated with study abroad—often a cornerstone of an international curriculum—offer students of the neo-liberal university an opportunity to fulfill a desire perhaps most richly embodied by the cultural archive of the Peace Corps: an ideal of self-actualized worldly participation was enacted experientially, corporeally, and discursively.

Old Order Amish are a religious group with three languages in its linguistic repertoire: Pennsylvania German PG), American English AE), and Amish High German AHG). A considerable amount of research examined PG-speaking communities, analyzing the causes of language change whether it is caused by language contact or internal processes), the factors determining language choice in situations like family or work, and the spread of linguistic innovations between speech islands. However, few studies examine the language alternation within speech situations, language use in the worship service, or language use at the level of individual utterances discourse level). Furthermore, rural communities are underrepresented in research on PG and few studies exist on areas with a low density of PG-speakers. The present study addresses these research deficits by describing and analyzing an Old Order Amish speech community in Anderson County, Kansas. The speech community is geographically distant from other PG-speakers. Data has been collected through interviews, translation tasks, and participant observation. The present study analyzes four major areas of the Anderson County speech community: First, the study describes the social structure as well as cultural and religious norms of the community. These factors influence language use, linguistic change, and communicative contacts to PG and AE-speakers outside of the speech community. The present study sets out to test with ethnographic methods how many contacts exist to other PG-speakers in geographically distant speech communities. Second, a detailed analysis of the linguistic structure of Anderson County PG will be provided, employing comparative linguistic methods, with focus on language change and contact to AE and other varieties of PG. It will be examined whether changes in Anderson County PG are caused by internal processes or language contact. Third, two theoretical models of language choice, the domain model and the network model, are tested with the data from the Anderson County speech community. Based on these data, limitations of domain and network models are demonstrated. Finally, the sociolinguistic structure of the worship service, its theological and social functions, and the language use in this setting are analyzed with ethnography of speaking and discourse analysis methods. Focus will be on the sermons. The data from Anderson County reveal a communicative problem in the sermons, the “preachers dilemma”: the preachers quote and interpret the scriptures which are in AHG. However, preachers and other congregation members have only limited AHG-proficiency and, thus, do not easily understand all words or phrases used. Switching to AE is restricted by the sociolinguistic norms and PG does not provide the necessary lexical equivalents of the words in questions. The preachers manage this dilemma by employing the communication strategies metalinguistic remarks and self-translations. The analysis of the Anderson County speech community shows that the community has complex contacts to other PG-speaking communities and undergoes a change in the employment structure that causes an increase in AE-contacts. The linguistic data show little AE-influence beyond the lexicon, but ambivalent results regarding the influence from other varieties of PG. The tested models of language choice prove to be suitable for some settings, but not applicable for complex and highly regulated speech situations like the worship service. In the sermons, the role of the preacher and the theological function of the sermons supersede other factors of language choice including sociolinguistic norms. The use of codeswitching-based communication strategies in the sermons shows that violations of sociolinguistic norms are accepted if they serve the main function of the sermons and are kept to the necessary minimum. The communication strategies are necessary repair mechanisms for communicative problems. Thus, both problem and solution are connected to the specific structure of multilingualism in the speech community. Despite the regulated ceremonial setting and in contrast to implication from past research, the sermons prove to be dynamic speech events in which all languages of the repertoire fulfill important functions. The dissertation addresses research deficits in four different areas that have little been addressed in research so far: First, a profile of language structure and language use in a isolated, rural PG-speech community is presented. Second, hypotheses on the sources of language change in PG are tested. Third, the language use in the worship service is described in detail and, fourth, language use on the discourse level is analyzed.

In False Closure: Narratives of Trauma, Healing, and American Nationhood, I examine how officially sanctioned narratives of national healing are employed after moments of acute collective trauma. Narratives of healing are used to de-historicize traumatic events, to divert attention away from the reasons why they occurred, to assuage guilt, and to reinforce national unity. These narratives take shape in a multitude of physical forms, ranging from newspaper commentaries to war memorials, but all are meant to signal closure from trauma. My study critiques such officially sanctioned efforts for closure, while suggesting new forms of remembrance that meet the actual needs of survivors. In this effort, I pose human bodies, memorials, and language as sites of active memory, with the capacity to resist false closure. I will draw upon these sites to prove that as long as survivors of trauma are present to pass on their memories, politically motivated narratives of closure will be limited. My study focuses on the following sites: the atomic bomb scarred bodies of the “Hiroshima maidens,” the Cuarto Centenario memorial in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and testimony by both Japanese and American survivors of atomic destruction. To examine these sites, I employ visual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and literary analysis. This multi-pronged approach adheres to the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies research, and allows for a more comprehensive cultural study of traumatic memory and nationhood to emerge. Specifically, these sites tie together post-nuclear Japan and the American Southwest, highlighting personal narratives of memory in the face of the American military industrial complex. Through this study, I envision a form of national remembrance based on survival, rather than tragic victimry and false closure.

The purpose of this thesis is to encourage teachers to utilize the analysis of material culture in their classroom curriculum. This project examines the theories and methods of material culture studies, explores three specific models of object analysis, and provides a case study of how to apply an analytical framework to redware pottery produced by the Pennsylvania Germans. This investigation provides a definition of material culture, discusses whether material culture is a discipline, a field, or a method； looks at the study of folk art, an weighs the benefits and pitfalls of interpreting artifacts. The three models of material culture analysis serves as a conceptual framework, each guiding the investigator through a systematic study of an object by posing questions and drawing conclusions. All the frameworks identify the physical attributes of an object, its decorative or stylistic qualities, and the functional and cultural significance of the object. The Montgomery model serves as a conceptual framework for organizing data in a chronological and systematic approach when analyzing an object. The Prown model, his approach is primarily interpretive and includes a categorization of an objects aesthetic attributes. The Fleming model has similarities to both Prown and Montgomery, but functions as a repetitive mode of investigation for five main components, history, material, construction, design, and function of an object. The analyzed object is a Pennsylvania German redware plate. This object analysis is conducted with a modified version of Montgomerys model combined with some of the approaches used by both Prown and Fleming. The analysis begins with the preliminary object analysis worksheet. This worksheet is intended for the gathering of information about the object prior to an in-depth analysis. The worksheet provides a foundation for gathering information, and this information is crucial to forming questions for the in-depth object analysis. The intention of this project is to equip educators with a means to approach object analysis that will allow them to utilized material culture as a basis for classroom curriculum development.