Strange Company : Victor Hugo, the Saigon Flag, and Santa Claus on Vietnamese Altars

departmental bulletin pape

A Study on the Influencing Factors of Social Media in the Communication of Cultural Heritage Education: A Systematic Literature Review

This study examined the impact of social media on disseminating cultural heritage education. After reviewing two databases, 29 articles met our inclusion criteria. This study found that social media can expand the educational scope of cultural heritage and increase public awareness and interest in cultural heritage tourism sites and museums. However, social media is only a publicity channel. It is necessary to consider five influencing factors in social media: the subject of information distribution, the motivation of distribution, the purpose of distribution, the content of distribution, and the method of distribution, and to analyze the specific practices of social media in disseminating cultural heritage education. Therefore, more research is needed to explore the influence of social media on cultural heritage education dissemination, to explore the educational nature of social media in cultural heritage education communication, and to provide a theoretical basis for social media to promote cultural heritage education dissemination

WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND Kristen A. Williams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Nancy L. Struna Department of American Studies My dissertation examines the relationship between heritage sites, urban culture, and civic life in present-day Rhode Island, evaluating how residents' identities and patterns of civic engagement are informed by site-specific tourist narratives of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century labor histories. Considering the adaptive reuse of former places of maritime trade and industry as contemporary sites of leisure, I analyze the role that historic tourism plays in local and regional economic urban redevelopment. I argue that the mythscapes of exceptionalism mobilized at Rhode Island's heritage sites create usable pasts in the present for current residents and visitors alike, alternatively foregrounding and obscuring intersectional categories of difference according to contemporaneous political climates at the local, national and transnational levels. This study is divided into two parts, organized chronologically and geographically. While Part I examines the dominant tourist narratives associated with Newport County, located in the southeast of the state and including Aquidneck Island (also known as Rhode Island), Part II takes the historic tourism associated with mainland Providence Plantations as its case study and focuses exclusively on Providence County, covering the middle and northern ends of the state. In each of these sections, I explore, challenge, and re-contextualize the politics of narratives which reference the earliest Anglophone settlers of Rhode Island as religious refugees and members of what scholar Robin Cohen refers to as a "victim diaspora" against the rich co-constitutive histories of im/migrant groups that, either by force or choice, relocated to Rhode Island for work and thus constitute a "labour diaspora." The existence of these two or more populations living in close proximity to each other in areas of Newport and Providence, I argue, produced what Denis Byrne calls a "nervous landscape" fraught with cultural, economic and political tensions which exists even as narratives of the pasts associated with each group are mobilized in the contemporary urban environs of each city and its tourist attractions

Memories of Asian America: Present Realities, Collective Pasts

While observing how ethnographic practices complement oral history practices during an internship at the Museum of Chinese in America in summer 2017, I was inspired to draw from ethnographic approaches to articulate the connectivity between historical records and experienced realities in representations of history. Memories of Asian America is an installation that offers a glimpse at how I see my personal experiences as building upon a long history of the presence of Asians in America. Through multiple media forms displayed in a living room-like setting, the installation space illustrates my take on what it means to have become aware of a collective memory that I am a part of as a Chinese Asian American, and to come to understand my personal memories in the context of the collective. While the historical narrative I have chosen for the installation reflects the way I have arranged Asian American history and experience in my mind as of now, which is in terms of exclusion and othering, assimilation and the Model Minority, and resistance and activism, the viewer is free to explore it on their own terms, reflect critically, and keep in mind that collective and personal memory both are changing and impermanent

In silence we remember : the historical archaeology of Finnish cemeteries in Saskatchewan

Above-ground archaeological techniques are used to study six Finnish cemeteries in Saskatchewan as a material record of the way that Finnish immigrants saw themselves - individually, collectively, and within the larger society. Findings are overlaid with data about the social identity of Saskatchewan Finns drawn from oral and documentary records. Variations in the expressions of social identity provided by the different Finnish cemeteries are identified and explored. Also, four areas in which major changes in social identity occurred over time are identified and discussed: family structure and relationships, ethnicity, views of death, and social values and beliefs. Finally, a four-stage pattern of change in social identity over time that took place in all the Finnish cemeteries is described, and it is suggested that this pattern may be one that was shared by other immigrants to the western plains. A fuller understanding is developed of the immigrant experience, the nature of ethnicity, the factors affecting social identity, and the processes of cultural change in the settlement of Canada's prairie region

An organizational study of the Christian Woman\u27s Exchange and Hermann-Grima/Gallier historic houses

An organizational analysis of the Christian Woman\u27s Exchange and the Hermann-Grima/Gallier Historic Houses with an emphasis on the organizational structure, organizational history, programmmg, membership, and volunteerism at the organization. Includes an evaluation of organizational goals and objectives, an internship description with an impact analysis, and recommendations for the future

Cokato Through August Akerlund\u27s Lens

Swedish immigrant turned United States citizen August (Gust) Akerlund captured Cokato’s history through his photography from 1902-1950. Today, Akerlund’s photography studio and 14,019 negative collection are preserved due to the care of Akerlund’s family, the staff of the Cokato Museum, and the community of Cokato. Although Akerlund’s collection and studio provides a window into Cokato’s past, the few published works that mention Cokato do not utilize both Akerlund’s life and his photographs as complementary sources. This thesis is an attempt to rectify this neglect by using Akerlund’s resources (including his photographs, life story, and studio) to question the popular perception of small rural American communities like Cokato as secluded, unified, and homogeneous. In the process, this work will highlight Akerlund’s contributions to the region and enrich in our understanding of Cokato’s dynamic. In doing so, Akerlund shows how individuals, like himself, advanced urban influence on rural Cokato through their early fascination with photography, radios, automobiles, agricultural developments and industrial technology. In addition, Akerlund’s perspective and photographs both reinforce and complicate Cokato’s general identity as a primarily Northern European Protestant, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Old-Stock American ethnic and religious background. Finally, he reveals how the ideologies of Cokato’s most dominant ethnicities, classes, and religions were contested, even in victory, over the alcohol controversy

Tenement Tales: The Fashioning of 97 Orchard Street

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a popular New York tourist destination, intimately reflects its famed immigrant neighborhood's history in tours of 97 Orchard Street's reconstructed ethnic household apartments. Its landmarked tenement building's immigrant spaces are interpreted to provide a visitor experience designed to invoke the Lower East Side's ethnic enclaves. The immigrant past recreated at its historic tenement creates a picture of multi-ethnicity in service of a diverse U.S. immigrant present. One overall message is that for today's newcomers as well as those of the past, hardship precedes multi-generational success. Tracing these reconstructions in the light of the Museum's archives affords insight into its active reconstruction of the past. The Museum's interpretations oscillate among different scales of representation (building, neighborhood, and nation), while working at different registers to harness Jewish collective memory of a place once known as the Great New York Ghetto. I ask how the Museum's uses of history in representing an ethnic immigrant urban past connect it to the present, including to its contemporaneous neighborhood, and vice versa. One way I do so is by examining how its building's interpretive schemes and initial residential stories simultaneously failed to give full voice to a fuller range of the neighborhood's groups (historic and post-1935) even as they undercut its earlier Jewish specificity of place. An overt use of history raises larger interdisciplinary debates about migration, memory, historicity and heritage, the urban built environment, and immigrant acculturation in space as well as time. In this case study, I trace a spatial politics of memory by asking how and where do the Museum's stories of local "historic" ethnic and living communities get told? The acquisition of a tenement building affected the Museum's choice of which groups to represent, since it chose an interpretative strategy that emphasized the affective personal stories of past building residents. Subsequent real estate conflicts with Fujianese neighborhood residents spilled into questions of representation, showing how an activist museum found it hard to cordon off a local immigrant present from a historic past re-created in place expressly for visitors. The question of whose story gets told in 97 Orchard's privileged residential spaces has again shifted as a post-9/11 Lower East Side hollows out into a place of memory, with hyper-gentrification accompanying Downtown's shift into an entertainment hub. Lastly, I ask how the Museum's discursive and material practices change and persist in the course of acquiring and interpreting a tenement building to tell a history of American immigration. More broadly, this thesis uses 97 Orchard Street as a prism to trace and interrogate how history is produced, displayed, received and interpreted spatially through a Lower East Side immigrant building whose tours provide a material window into discursive practices of place. Interpretive layers expose how narratives accrete and get reused, making them harder to later dislodge. Following de Certeau, it documents how associated narratives of 97 Orchard Street eventually become seen as inevitable and "stick to place" in a building whose commodified tours of past Lower East Side ethnicity re-inscribe collective memories today. I trace here how a common poor tenement building was transformed into an American national landmark (thus touching on the role of the state in promoting museums, heritage and citizenship), as a new site of memory at a time when gentrification permits the tenement to be newly presented as precious and authentic.Doctor of Philosoph

Mirabile Dictu: The Bryn Mawr College Library Newsletter 3 (1999)

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/mirabile/1002/thumbnail.jp

Mirabile Dictu: The Bryn Mawr College Library Newsletter 3 (1999)

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/mirabile/1002/thumbnail.jp