Southern History on Screen

Hollywood films have been influential in the portrayal and representation of race relations in the South and how African Americans are cinematically depicted in history, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Help (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). With an ability to reach mass audiences, films represent the power to influence and shape the public\u27s understanding of our country\u27s past, creating lasting images—both real and imagined—in American culture. In Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016, editor Bryan Jack brings together essays from an international roster of scholars to provide new critical perspectives on Hollywood\u27s relationships between historical films, Southern history, identity, and the portrayal of Jim Crow–era segregation. This collection analyzes films through the lens of religion, politics, race, sex, and class, building a comprehensive look at the South as seen on screen. By illuminating depictions of the southern belle in Gone with the Wind, the religious rhetoric of southern white Christians and the progressive identity of the white heroes in A Time to Kill (1996) and Mississippi Burning (1988), as well as many other archetypes found across films, this book explores the intersection between film, historical memory, and southern identity.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_cr/1016/thumbnail.jp

Learning plan networks in conversational video games

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-123).We look forward to a future where robots collaborate with humans in the home and workplace, and virtual agents collaborate with humans in games and training simulations. A representation of common ground for everyday scenarios is essential for these agents if they are to be effective collaborators and communicators. Effective collaborators can infer a partner's goals and predict future actions. Effective communicators can infer the meaning of utterances based on semantic context. This thesis introduces a computational cognitive model of common ground called a Plan Network. A Plan Network is a statistical model that provides representations of social roles, object affordances, and expected patterns of behavior and language. I describe a methodology for unsupervised learning of a Plan Network using a multiplayer video game, visualization of this network, and evaluation of the learned model with respect to human judgment of typical behavior. Specifically, I describe learning the Restaurant Plan Network from data collected from over 5,000 players of an online game called The Restaurant Game.by Jeffrey David Orkin.S.M

“Southern by the grace of God:” religion and race in Hollywood’s South since the 1960s

This thesis examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South, focusing primarily on Hollywood’s civil rights narratives, from the 1960s to the present. It argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used to define the region’s presumed exceptionalism. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of over a dozen films, the thesis deploys methodologies drawn from history, film, literary, and cultural studies. It questions why scholars have seldom acknowledged the role of religion in popular, especially cinematic, constructions of the South, before providing detailed case studies of specific films that utilize southern religiosity to negotiate regional and national anxieties around race, class, and gender. Though scholars have recognized the intersections of race, class, and gender evident in the media’s construction of southern white segregationist, this thesis contends that religion adds further interrogative value to existing analyses of civil rights cinema in particular, and of Hollywood’s representations of southern race, class, and gender identities more generally. The thesis argues that the perceived religious zealotry of many segregationists supports Hollywood’s recurring presentation of the South as an irrational region, where religiosity and rabid racism cloud all judgment. The perceived ‘southernization’ of America through the culture wars of the late twentieth-century encouraged many Americans to reconsider the legacy of the civil rights era, a movement that was being concurrently reshaped in the popular imagination by Hollywood dramas such as Mississippi Burning, A Time to Kill, and Ghosts of Mississippi among many other films. Examining the presentation of both white and black Christianity in these films, the thesis illuminates how cinema has routinely fabricated a simplistic binary of good and evil that pits a noble, yet reductive and static, religious African American community against zealous white trash and fundamentalists operating on the margins of society. So often to blame for the incendiary racial violence that marks such movies, these white villains are often associated with fundamentalism, in both rhetoric and actions, enabling filmmakers to offer a clear culprit for the South’s, and therefore the nation’s, legacy of racial intolerance and violence

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

If Selma Were Heaven: Economic Transformation and Black Freedom Struggles in the Alabama Black Belt, 1901 - 2000

<p>In Selma, Alabama in 1965, local African Americans partnered with civil rights organizations to stage a movement for voting rights. The beating of peaceful black marchers by white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that March catapulted the city and black demands for the ballot into the national spotlight. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later, it cemented Selma as a symbol of voting rights. Since then, Selma has become a triumphal moment in the grand narrative of American democracy and citizenship. However, the years after the voting rights movement failed to bring economic opportunities and justice for black citizens in Selma. At the end of the twentieth century, numbing unemployment, gutted houses, and government transfer payments attested to barriers left unbroken by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How, then, did Selma become the site of a nationally-geared campaign for voting rights, and why was the right to vote not enough to bring economic justice for African Americans?</p><p>This dissertation is a local study that spans the course of century, one that looks at Selma and Dallas County as a place with a long history shaped by white supremacy and agricultural transformation, as well as local relationships and national developments. It begins in 1901, the year that the newly-passed Alabama constitution took the ballot away from nearly every African American in the state, and ends in 2000, when Selma's residents elected their first black mayor. Using newspapers and magazines, personal papers, organizational records, municipal records, federal publications, and oral histories, it examines how municipal, state, and national politics, as well as enormous economic shifts, intersected with and altered the lives of black and white residents in Dallas County, Alabama. </p><p>The multifaceted struggle of African Americans for freedom in Dallas County unfolded within the context of a century-long agricultural revolution in the Black Belt. African Americans' overlapping demands for economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, quality education, and meaningful political representation reflected and responded to local economic shifts from cotton to cattle to industry. The semi-autonomous community black Dallas County residents forged through farmers' organizations, schools, and societies under segregation later helped them mount a frontal challenge to the ramparts of white supremacy. The civil rights movement, however, grew to maturity at exactly the moment when cattle had usurped cotton's reign over the fields, altering the Black Belt's economic and social fabric. </p><p>Political rights for African Americans in Dallas County did not solve the postwar economic challenges of vanishing farms and the rise of low-wage industry. Meanwhile, local white officials vigorously fought to maintain political control in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their calculated intransigence delayed the meaningful participation of black residents in the economic and political life of Selma. The rise of the Sunbelt South and globalization further siphoned resources away from the struggling Black Belt. As the federal government retracted and nearby military bases closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, rural areas like Dallas County were left without resources in a new economy that favored high-skilled workers in urban centers. Examining black freedom struggles and economic transformation side-by-side illuminates how voting rights alone did not alter the regional network that concentrated both resources and poverty in an uneven process of development. </p><p>The vote brought political power, but it did not bring the economic justice, security, or quality education that made up the other half of African Americans' demands for freedom. By singularly focusing on the securing of voting rights, Selma became a pivotal moment in the story of American democracy, but black Dallas County residents' parallel demands for equal economic opportunities remained long after African Americans had won the vote. The triumphal narrative ignores the economic transformation that fundamentally altered the Black Belt. From cotton to cattle, industry to unemployment checks, black citizens perpetually found themselves on the losing end of economic change. At the end of the century, nearly four decades of federal divestment and globalization had sapped Dallas County of jobs, and the government's presence was felt mainly in the form of disability checks and food assistance. The political rights black Dallas County citizens had shed blood for in 1965 could not alone undo this legacy of economic inequality.</p>Dissertatio