State Highlights 12/17/1952

This is the student newspaper from Western State High School, the high school that was on the campus of Western Michigan University, then called State Highlights, in 1952. This should be Volume 15

The Zombie in American Culture

My research explores how the oft-maligned zombie genre reveals deep-seated American cultural tendencies drawn from the nation's history with colonization and imperialism. The zombie genre is a quintessentially American construct that has been flourishing in popular culture for nearly 60 years. Since George A. Romero first pioneered the genre with 1968's Night of the Living Dead, zombie narratives have demonstrated a persistent resilience in American culture to emerge as the ultimate American horror icon. First serving as a method to exploit and react to cultural anxieties in the 1960s, the zombie genre met the decade's tumultuous violence in international conflicts like the Vietnam War and domestic revolutions like the Civil Rights Movement. It adapted in the 1970s to expose a perceived excess in consumer culture before reflecting apocalyptic fears at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s. Following a period of rest in the relatively peaceful 1990s, the genre re-emerged in the early 2000s to reflect cultural anxieties spurred on by the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the subsequent resurgence of war those attacks inspired. Its ability to grow with American culture and reflect the relevant crises of the age in which each narrative is conceived suggests the genre can act as a barometer of cultural and social change and unrest. The zombie genre is ultimately an American construct as it is the only folkloric monster born of an American imagination. Romero's re-envisioning of the genre to an apocalyptic siege narrative rather than an icon of Haitian lore presented American audiences with a perfect outlet to embrace survivalist fantasies that hearken back to the nations birth on the frontier. It can be aligned alongside the plight of early settlers, as its characters find themselves displaced between a lost concept of society and the need to rebuild in a new, hostile environment. An environment which allows the return of iconic frontier figures like Daniel Boone, while redefining the role of the family to suit the needs of such an environment. It provides scenarios in which the nation can be regenerated through violence as the emergence of an antagonistic foe devoid of morality and consciousness must be met with extreme prejudice. It strips the antagonist of personality and thought, allowing audiences to return to an imperialistic conquest of a conquerable foe while eliminating any guilt associated with the act of colonization. In doing so, the genre glorifies the American past, allowing the reopening of the frontier in the zombie apocalypse as a method of escaping current cultural anxieties and romanticising concepts like the Indian hunter while stripping them of negative association. This thesis will suggest that the zombie has emerged as the ultimate American horror icon, and that it will continue to remain as such so long as there are instances of tumult and instability in the American cultural zeitgeist to which it can react

Spartan Daily, April 20, 1989

Volume 92, Issue 53https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7843/thumbnail.jp

Crisis and Masculinity on Contemporary Cable Television: Tracing the Western Hero in "Breaking Bad", "The Walking Dead" and "Hell on Wheels"

Both the “crisis of masculinity” and “quality TV” have been popular discourses in academia in recent years. Many of these contemporary quality TV series feature male anti-heroes at the center of their narratives. This dissertation argues that the constructions of masculinity in series such as "Breaking Bad" and "The Walking Dead" are informed by the Western hero. Furthermore, the dissertation links this recourse to an arguably outmoded model of masculinity to recent crisis tendencies in the USA, most notably the recent economic downturn and the aftermath of September 11 2001. Moreover, the return of the Western hero can be understood as a process of remasculinization in light of the crisis of masculinity

Trees as supplementary material in the elementary school curriculum in art, science, and resource use

The need for out-of-school materiel to integrate with in-school material is recognized by many elementary school teachers. Gerald S. Craig emphasizes this need when he declares that thinking in terms of subject matter is being eliminated in favor of thinking in terms of certain areas of experience which contribute to the pupil's development in directions useful to himself and to society. He affirms that the end of teaching is no longer the mastery of content but the total growth of the child as a result of his interaction with his environment. Consequently, the teacher is obligated to go outside the schoolroom and make use of those factors which will meet the demands of the curriculum

Sixth-Grade Map and Globe Skills Curriculum

There has been much concern recently about the lack of basic map and globe skills among America\u27s youth. Map and globe skills are a basic tool of social studies used throughout the rest of students\u27 academic, professional and personal lives. These skills incorporate the development of problem-solving and critical thinking skills. The focus of this project was to develop a map and globe skills curriculum for teaching these skills to sixth-graders in Putnam County, Florida, when they first encounter daily social studies classes