From Drum Beats To Beach Music: The Development of Music in South Carolina

This thesis examines musical genres present in South Carolina from the time of the Native Americans through 20th century rhythm and blues. Each style of music has combined musical elements over time to create the state’s rich cultural heritage. For thousands of years before the arrival of European explorers, Native American music put a high emphasis on the voice, as the absence of a written language facilitated a strong oral tradition. Free- flowing vocals with rhythmic accompaniment were relied upon to pass down sacred legends of the tribe, stressing vocal musicality as the highest art form. With the arrival of European settlers came the arrival of Western harmonic traditions, and Native American expressionism became overtaken by chordal relationships and careful formal construction. Along with harmonic ideals came new instruments, and their introduction into Native American culture inspired a musical blend that would influence the most prolific styles of American folk music for years to come. As the British established firm control in the colony of Carolina, Charleston began to emerge as the cosmopolitan center of the South, with mixed wealthy elite that supported artistic patronage. One of such establishments was the St. Cecilia Society, a concert series that became a way for a newly formed nation to assert cultural sophistication in the years surrounding the Revolutionary War. While the upper echelon of South Carolina society was attempting to establish musical equality with Europe, the culture of those that they enslaved was blossoming into a combination of African rhythms and Western Christianity. From this mixture, the “negro spiritual” was born; a style which is often credited as being one of the first African American genres of music. Following emancipation, South Carolina slave culture continued to inspire American cultural phenomena, including the music of blues, gospel and jazz. As African American musical influence continued to grow into the rhythm and blues, it became increasingly taboo for whites to listen, and the youth of South Carolina flocked to the coast, becoming curators of a new, aptly named Beach Music genre. Each one of these unique styles has had a direct influence in developing of the rich musical tradition that South Carolina has enjoyed for generations

Inventing the Southwest: How Modernists Shaped an American Regional Experience

This dissertation traces the emergence of the Southwest as a distinct region with significant influence on U.S. literature and popular culture. I argue that modernist-era writers helped to promote the U.S. Southwest and to distinguish it as a unique region in the national imaginary. In addition to writing about the Southwest for modernist publications, these writers had a significant hand in shaping the experience of tourists in the region by working with the tourist industry. Building on the interventions of New Modernist Studies, this project expands the scope of literary studies to consider how writers affiliated with the modernist movement reached large audiences through commercial channels. The introductory chapter of this dissertation situates the project in scholarly conversations about modernism, regionalism, canonicity, and settler colonial studies. The remaining chapters take up case studies related to literary and commercial activity in the Southwest. My first chapter follows the career of author Charles Lummis, who popularized tourism and literature related to Spanish Colonial culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. My second chapter locates the growth of heritage tourism in the 1920s Southwest in projects of author Mary Austin. My third chapter looks at representations of tourism and imperialism in the Southwestern writing of D.H. Lawrence, Jean Toomer, and Lynn Riggs. My fourth chapter recovers the relationship between the modernist little magazine Poetry and the Southwestern tourism industry, showing that Poetry’s Southwestern issues featured poems that were later used in the promotional materials distributed by the Fred Harvey Company, a large tourism and hospitality business in the Southwest. The afterword to this dissertation offers a short close reading of the official brochure for the 1928 Santa Fe Fiesta, which brought together commercial, civic, and creative interests in the promotion of tourism and colonial nostalgia. The afterword also addresses some of the implications of understanding modernism as a literary movement that was partially driven by commercial interests

ParkIndex: Validation and Application of a Pragmatic Measure of Park Access and Use

Composite metrics integrating park availability, features, and quality for a given address or neighborhood are lacking. The purposes of this study were to describe the validation, application, and demonstration of ParkIndex in four diverse communities. This study occurred in Fall 2018 in 128 census block groups within Seattle(WA), Brooklyn(NY), Raleigh(NC), and Greenville County(SC). All parks within a half-mile buffer were audited to calculate a composite park quality score, and select households provided data about use of proximal parks via an online, map-based survey. For each household, the number of parks, total park acreage, and average park quality score within one half-mile were calculated using GIS. Logistic regression was used to identify a parsimonious model predicting park use. ParkIndex values (representing the probability of park use) were mapped for all study areas and after scenarios involving the addition and renovation/improvement of parks. Out of 360 participants, 23.3% reported visiting a park within the past 30 days. The number of parks (OR = 1.36, 95% CI = 1.15–1.62), total park acreage (OR = 1.13, 95% CI = 1.07–1.19), and average park quality score (OR = 1.04, 95% CI = 1.01–1.06) within one half-mile were all associated with park use. Composite ParkIndex values across the study areas ranged from 0 to 100. Hypothetical additions of or renovations to study area parks resulted in ParkIndex increases of 22.7% and 19.2%, respectively. ParkIndex has substantial value for park and urban planners, citizens, and researchers as a common metric to facilitate awareness, decision-making, and intervention planning related to park access, environmental justice, and community health

Validation of Results from Knowledge Discovery: Mass Density as a Predictor of Breast Cancer

The purpose of our study is to identify and quantify the association between high breast mass density and breast malignancy using inductive logic programming (ILP) and conditional probabilities, and validate this association in an independent dataset. We ran our ILP algorithm on 62,219 mammographic abnormalities. We set the Aleph ILP system to generate 10,000 rules per malignant finding with a recall >5% and precision >25%. Aleph reported the best rule for each malignant finding. A total of 80 unique rules were learned. A radiologist reviewed all rules and identified potentially interesting rules. High breast mass density appeared in 24% of the learned rules. We confirmed each interesting rule by calculating the probability of malignancy given each mammographic descriptor. High mass density was the fifth highest ranked predictor. To validate the association between mass density and malignancy in an independent dataset, we collected data from 180 consecutive breast biopsies performed between 2005 and 2007. We created a logistic model with benign or malignant outcome as the dependent variable while controlling for potentially confounding factors. We calculated odds ratios based on dichomotized variables. In our logistic regression model, the independent predictors high breast mass density (OR 6.6, CI 2.5–17.6), irregular mass shape (OR 10.0, CI 3.4–29.5), spiculated mass margin (OR 20.4, CI 1.9–222.8), and subject age (β = 0.09, p < 0.0001) significantly predicted malignancy. Both ILP and conditional probabilities show that high breast mass density is an important adjunct predictor of malignancy, and this association is confirmed in an independent data set of prospectively collected mammographic findings

Description of the data from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) and single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping for Genetic Analysis Workshop 14

The data provided to the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 (GAW 14) was the result of a collaboration among several different groups, catalyzed by Elizabeth Pugh from The Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR) and the organizers of GAW 14, Jean MacCluer and Laura Almasy. The DNA, phenotypic characterization, and microsatellite genomic survey were provided by the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), a nine-site national collaboration funded by the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) with the overarching goal of identifying and characterizing genes that affect the susceptibility to develop alcohol dependence and related phenotypes. CIDR, Affymetrix, and Illumina provided single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping of a large subset of the COGA subjects. This article briefly describes the dataset that was provided

Natural and Vaccine-Mediated Immunity to Salmonella Typhimurium is Impaired by the Helminth Nippostrongylus brasiliensis

The impact of exposure to multiple pathogens concurrently or consecutively on immune function is unclear. Here, immune responses induced by combinations of the bacterium Salmonella Typhimurium (STm) and the helminth Nippostrongylus brasiliensis (Nb), which causes a murine hookworm infection and an experimental porin protein vaccine against STm, were examined. Mice infected with both STm and Nb induced similar numbers of Th1 and Th2 lymphocytes compared with singly infected mice, as determined by flow cytometry, although lower levels of secreted Th2, but not Th1 cytokines were detected by ELISA after re-stimulation of splenocytes. Furthermore, the density of FoxP3+ T cells in the T zone of co-infected mice was lower compared to mice that only received Nb, but was greater than those that received STm. This reflected the intermediate levels of IL-10 detected from splenocytes. Co-infection compromised clearance of both pathogens, with worms still detectable in mice weeks after they were cleared in the control group. Despite altered control of bacterial and helminth colonization in co-infected mice, robust extrafollicular Th1 and Th2-reflecting immunoglobulin-switching profiles were detected, with IgG2a, IgG1 and IgE plasma cells all detected in parallel. Whilst extrafollicular antibody responses were maintained in the first weeks after co-infection, the GC response was less than that in mice infected with Nb only. Nb infection resulted in some abrogation of the longer-term development of anti-STm IgG responses. This suggested that prior Nb infection may modulate the induction of protective antibody responses to vaccination. To assess this we immunized mice with porins, which confer protection in an antibody-dependent manner, before challenging with STm. Mice that had resolved a Nb infection prior to immunization induced less anti-porin IgG and had compromised protection against infection. These findings demonstrate that co-infection can radically alter the development of protective immunity during natural infection and in response to immunization