A Case Study: the Role of Women in Creating Community on the Dakota Frontier, 1880 to 1920

ABSTRACT A CASE STUDY: THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN CREATING COMMUNITY ON THE DAKOTA FRONTIER, 1880 TO 1920 by Ruth Page Jones The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015 Under the Supervision of Professor Genevieve G. McBride During the Dakota Boom years of 1878 to 1887, Dakota Territory welcomed droves of new families, adding close to 400,000 people in the 1880s. Creating new homes on the treeless prairie, many people faced the challenge of sustaining life without the benefit of an established community. The conditions were too harsh, the weather too unpredictable, and the economy too fragile for anyone to live in isolation. By researching the history of one rural county, Aurora County, from 1880 to 1920, this study examines how women experienced new lives in that area, and how they participated in shaping their societies and developing community. Aurora County was typical of many South Dakota counties east of the Missouri River that were settled during the “boom” era. The rural character of those counties greatly influenced the experiences of the women and the ways in which they shaped their societies. While documenting a new local history, this study also broadens our understanding of women’s lives and their role in building community as they moved onto the South Dakota frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Dialogic analysis of government social media communication: How commanding and thanking elicit blame

During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to change people’s behaviour (e.g., ‘Stay at home!’) and express thanks to acknowledge the efforts of others and build solidarity. We use specialised datasets of replies to social media posts by government ministers in the United Kingdom during Covid-19 lockdowns to explore how people react to their messages that contain directive speech acts and thanking. Empirically, our corpus-assisted analysis of evaluative language and blaming shows that far from promoting team spirit, thanking may elicit at least as much, if not more blaming language than commands. Methodologically, we demonstrate how to analyse government social media communication dialogically to gain more nuanced insights about online feedback from citizens

Strategies of Blaming on Social Media: An Experimental Study of Linguistic Framing and Retweetability

This article introduces an original theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people’s perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person’s character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a “retweetability paradox” – in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted

School uniform costs are a source of financial and emotional stress for families living on a low income

Geoff Page, Maddy Power, and Ruth Patrick discuss how, for many families, school uniforms represent a financial burden that tips precariously balanced budgets firmly into the red. They call on the government to urgently target families with children for more financial support

The speaking vocabulary of kindergarten, grade I, grade II, and grade III

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit