The Game of United States Diplomacy Within the Ottoman Empire: How the United States’ Interests in the Ottoman Empire Delayed its Entrance into the Great War

At the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman Empire expanded its diplomatic ties with many world powers, in hopes of remaining the gateway to the Middle East. The empire remained a target for land acquisition by Britain, France, and Russia through their expansion of imperialist interests. The United States at this time was a budding superpower that established a diplomatic tie with the Ottomans through Henry Morgenthau, the United States diplomat to Constantinople. The United States attempted to use its neutrality and diplomacy to keep the Ottoman Empire out of the Great War, prolonging the eventual Ottoman entry into World War I. The United States created a unique bond with the Ottoman Empire due to its lack of interest in Ottoman lands, but with more of an interest in building an economic, social, and political relationship. Scholars have overlooked the history of the United States’ interests within the Ottoman Empire during the few months leading up to the Great War. As such, historians have missed the beginning stages of the United States becoming a global superpower. Using the primary sources from the United States’ National Archives, this essay will discuss the untold history of American interests within the Ottoman Empire

A Glimmer of Light in the Great Depression: Women's Agency at the Southern Highlands Craft Guild in the 1930s and 1940s

During the Great Depression southern women’s economic opportunities were mainly limited to farm work or mill labor, with little to no economic equality or security. The Southern Highland Craft Guild of the Appalachian region was a unique entity made up of individual craft producing centers that hired women equally alongside men. Interest in this area stems from the overlooking of the guild in the southern economic narrative. By examining individual accounts of women working within the guild, this paper explores the experiences of rural women who were able to use this organization to achieve independence through craftwork and contributed to a widespread cultural movement throughout Appalachia

Letters From East Asheville

This collection of personal essays offers some perspectives on life in Asheville, North Carolina, from the viewpoint of a relative newcomer to this rapidly changing mountain city. As a transplant from a major metropolitan area, these pieces explore some of the surprising ways life in Asheville is altering how I view the natural world, other people, and my own sense of self. Offered in a spirit of shared exploration, these essays are also unmistakably influenced by the profound and often disturbing changes taking place in the world

The Development of Identity in Tillie Olsen's "Yonnondio: from the Thirties"

In this paper the author examines Olen's "Yonnondio: from the Thirties", and considers how the author highlights lives often limited by gender, class, or poverty

Alienation and the Grotesque in Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" Poems

The author discusses several poems within Sylvia Path's "Ariel" to emphasize the presence of alienation and how it functions with images of the grotesqu

Absurd Function Upends Familiar Form: Satire, Literary Space-Time, and the Subversion of Deterministic Meta-Narrative in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Time

In The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut’s classic satirical humor peppers a narrative that bounces among the planets Mars, Mercury, and Earth, with the characters finally arriving on Saturn’s moon, Titan. In the novel, Kurt Vonnegut crafts a story that symbolically links American culture’s view of itself with evolving perceptions of space, time, and art. Through the careful use of satire and the depiction of various kinds of time, Vonnegut creates a deliberately self-nullifying (yet palatable) narrative whose only offer of hope in the face of a meaningless world is its multifaceted individualized rejection of humankind’s view of its own lofty destiny. Applying the lenses of the aforementioned contextual situations, this paper analyzes and attempts to describe the rhetorical matrix that Vonnegut uses to convey the thesis he layers deeply within the novel. Through the analysis of Vonnegut’s satire and alternative representations of literary time in Sirens, one can conclude that he is critiquing a specific theory of human narrative that relates to fiction as well as lived reality

Molding of Identity and Community Responsibility in Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly"

The author examines how Kendrick Lamar's album "To Pimp a Butterfly" serves as a continuation of black poetic literary traditions, and a documentation of the Black American Experience

Cornbread

Cornbread is one of the most well-known dishes in Southern foodways, and in this video the author charts its history, and its modern cultural significanc

Unraveling the Articulable: Thinking, Being and Becoming in Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart

Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s debut novel Near to the Wild Heart follows Joana as she tries to make sense of meaning where meaning is mediated through an articulation of language, which seems to always escape or void true meaning itself. Delving into linguistic and phenomenological questions of the “thing-in-itself”, Joana is consistently feeling at odds with herself and the world, and often between herself and herself. She struggles to bridge the distance between two versions of herself: one being the version that has a slight idea that she was, and the other who profoundly was. This sets up a separation between being and knowing, as though even with ourselves there is a distance between who we are, and who-we-are-in-ourselves. Similar to the feeling of things existing beyond and before their verbal articulation, Joana feels that she exists before, beyond and after her attempts to articulate “herselfness.” In this thesis I will argue that Lispector’s rhetorical use of language, structure and narrative places the reader within the same distance between reading and reading as Joana has between herself and herself, or as all objects have between themselves. While the reader is experiencing the act of reading, the structure does not lend itself to a complete immersion of plot, and thus maintains the reader’s (like Joana’s) awareness of themselves. Through this awareness I hope to explore Lispector’s ultimately positive embrace of becoming- beyond and through meaning

The World in Harmony Framed: A Musical Approach to Renaissance Poetics from the Works of Thomas Campion and His Contemporaries

This thesis questions fundamental assumptions about analytical approaches and evaluative procedures relating to the interpretation of early-modern English poetry. In particular it looks at how typical analyses prioritize elements of close reading, such as complexity of diction, syntax, metaphor, which in many ways neglect to account for the full possibility for interpretation. Because this thesis challenges core assumptions about poetry, it will require a reworking of approach that requires that the generative elements of poetry, especially linguistics, phonetics, and prosody, which form the foundation of literature, be considered alongside secondary features, mainly historical perspectives, performative traditions, metaphysical assumptions, and cultural backgrounds. This research will be focalized through Elizabethan poet and musician Thomas Campion and select examples from his contemporaries. Campion’s large body of lyric verse presents a unique challenge to criticism from any literary perspective in that his literature being written simultaneously as music deconstructs fundamental assumptions about the sanctity of the written text. This research uses this inherent deconstruction and its ripple effects as the foundation for an argument towards multi-disciplinary approaches. Conclusions are based upon close considerations of the relationship between music and poetry. This approach is ordered as such: firstly by an establishment of issue and context, secondly by close analysis using modified and interdisciplinary approaches, and thirdly through hermeneutic conclusions positing some potentially rewarding alternatives to traditional analysis and greater insight into English Renaissance Poetics