2045 research outputs found
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Corsale, Eugene J. “Gene”. 1999. “An Oral Narrative Recorded by Leona Casey Signor.” West Side Oral Narrative Project: Transcribing Discourse and Diversity in Saratoga Springs, New York, Annotated Transcript No. 3, March 16, 2021
Full text linkEugene J. “Gene” Corsale (1928-2014) grew up in an Italian-American “railroad family” rooted on the West Side of Saratoga Springs. Like other family members, Gene spent his early years working on upstate New York railroads, except for the period he served in the US Navy during the Korean War. Gene’s stories reveal the grandeur and admiration of locomotive technology, along with dangers that resulted in deadly crashes and scarred communities. Gene recounts the heyday and decline of the railroads, railroad work as a teenager on the home front during World War II, and the importance of the railroad for transporting military troops, tourists, and horses. His account touches on changing aspects of West Side life, including neighborhood closeness, conversations from porches, walks to the former high school, and alley shortcuts. Gene also describes his family’s connections to the railroad-crossing shanty that serves as a memorial to railroad workers of Saratoga Springs. [Interview duration: 00:39:43
Fall in Love
No full textThis fictional work attempts to interface with crucial elements of the human experience - love, loss, undertanding, and self-acceptance, filtered through a vignette style narrative centered around a road trip in the western United States
Simulating America: Ludocapitalism of the 1990s in Wall Street Kid and Animal Crossing
Full text linkThe 1990s witnessed a rapid and unprecedented growth in technology. People watched more television and film, conversed with strangers in anonymous chat rooms, messaged each other on personal pagers, and increased their consumption of video games. The 1990s mark the third decade of the video game industry’s existence. Similar to other forms of digital media, the video game industry participated in rapid technological development during the decade. Home and handheld consoles became increasingly widespread, driving players away from the arcades of the past. Genres such as the first person shooter, fighting games, and survival horror started gaining significant popularity. These genres were later brought into the larger cultural discourse after the Columbine High School massacre, the events of which many attributed to violence portrayed in video games. As a result, video games in the 1990s received a sinister reputation as a form of media encouraging players towards acts of degeneracy.
However, I propose that the video games of the 1990s were teaching more than the ideation of violence. This was also the decade within which social simulation games were becoming more prevalent. Social simulation is a genre of video games that focus on the interpersonal interactions between artificial lives, imitating situations that normally occur in the real world. Within the imagined universes of the social simulation game, the player experiences a microcosmic representation of their own society, and by playing rehearses their role within it.
I argue that the social simulation games of the 1990s encapsulate a collective understanding of the cultural and social expectations surrounding race, gender, sexuality, consumerism, and in doing so encourage players to behave a certain way according to those standards. As my primary sources, I examine two popular games produced at opposite ends of the decade-- SOFEL\u27s Wall Street Kid (1990) and Nintendo\u27s Animal Crossing (2001)
Skepticism in HealthCare: An Analyzation of Race Discrimination and Trust in Doctor\u27s Judgement
Full text linkHistorically Black people have experienced extreme experiences of medical mistreatment, one of the most prominent and longest running being the Tuskegee Experiment. Racism is not only apparent in the medical industry it is structurally tied to the foundation of American society and it is non-debatable that Black people are tremendously affected by these structures. Past literature has sought out to examine the connection between Black people and the trust that they have in medical institutions. My research builds on this past work and examines how experience with race discrimination affects the trust that a person may have in their doctor’s judgement. Using data from the General Social Survey (N=638) I conducted a multivariate regression. Results showed that having an experience with discrimination because of race was not statistically associated with the trust that someone has in their doctor’s judgement. Although the results of this research did not show statistical support for my hypothesis the non-significance of it raises other important points and areas in need of research. It is also important to acknowledge that although there is no statistical significance in this study that does not cancel out the possibility that experience with race discrimination has some effect on trust in doctor’s judgement. There is a need to further analyze the causal mechanism behind the difference in Black people and people of colors trust in doctors versus White people
El mar de la Negritud y lo queer a través de la literatura de Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
No full textThis thesis explores the complicated relationships between race, sexuality, gender identity, and colonialism among Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico in particular and Latin American and Latinx communities in general. It takes as its starting point the analysis of two works by Afro-Puerto Rican author Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro: TRANScaribeñx and TodesNosotres. It argues that these works empower marginalized Black Latinx LGBTQ+ individuals by giving them a voice and defy preconceptions about identities at the intersection of Black, Latinx, and queer cultures
Van Dorn, Edith Marie Luce. 1999. “An Oral Narrative Recorded by Mary Ann Cardillo Fitzgerald.” West Side Oral Narrative Project: Transcribing Discourse and Diversity in Saratoga Springs, New York, Annotated Transcript No. 4, March 16, 2021
Full text linkEdith Van Dorn Luce (1928-2009) was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, to a family with ties to settlers who had arrived in the area as earlier as 1796. In this conversation, she warmly shares memories of her youth on the West Side, including attending School No. 1, ice skating, roller skating, winter sleigh rides, dancing, and swimming at King’s water hole. She mentions significant people in her life—including her childhood friend Roy Luce whom she married during World War II—and cherished places within the tight-knit West Side neighborhood where she and her husband raised four children in a house they owned for over forty years. Edith also discusses working as a switchboard operator at the New York Telephone Company, and she shares how she has pursued a lifelong passion for creating arts and crafts, including paintings of historic buildings and places of the city she loved. [Interview duration: 0:47:40
Twistin’ the Night Away: Perverted Nostalgia in How I Learned to Drive
Full text linkThis paper situates Paula Vogel\u27s 1997 play How I Learned to Drive as an American memory play that is representative of 1990s cultural and political discourses rooted in nostalgia for the 1960s. By examining each character--the Greek Chorus, Peck, and Li\u27l Bit--within Lauren Berlant\u27s \u27intimate public sphere,\u27 1960s iconography, and memory practices, I argue that Vogel offers an allegory in Drive that characterizes this nostalgia as perverted and traumatizing rather than idyllic
Preserving the color of silver nanoparticles from solution into PVA films using silica coatings
No full textSilver nanoparticles are a tiny but mighty innovation for the field of material science. Their unique properties make them a powerful tool for the development of optical sensors but controlling the color when embedding the particles into a useful matrix poses many challenges due to high sensitivity to changes in refractive index. Here we explored how silica shells can be used to encase silver particles and reduce the sensitivity to environmental changes. Using a Plackett-Burman experimental design, the critical parameter of the silica shell synthesis, the concentration of tetraethyl orthosilicate, was determined and used to tune the thickness of silica shells. When silica coated nanoparticles were embedded in polyvinyl alcohol, thicker shells led to smaller shifts of the localized surface plasmon resonance, thus preserving the color. This process helps to control changes in the λmax of silver nanoparticles, making them more effective choices for the development of optical sensors
How American Democracy Failed: Off Center COVID-19 Politics and Policy Making
Full text linkThis paper assesses the COVID-19 relief response of the federal government. How well was the response created and implemented to satisfy the demonstrated needs of the majority of the people? If the relief response of the federal government did not address the needs of the majority of the people, why did that happen? Who benefited instead? To answer these questions we will examine and analyze a case study of the implementation of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was created under the S.3548 - CARES Act passed by the Senate to provide relief to small businesses across the United States.
Research, examination, and analysis of the creation and implementation of the Paycheck Protection Program find that the federal COVID-19 relief response of the federal government did not satisfy the needs of the American people and was the result of off-center policymaking. Despite clearly demonstrated preferences of a bipartisan majority of Americans for how, when, and to whom relief should be distributed, the federal government’s COVID relief plans and policies were skewed to benefit the interests of wealthy corporations and America’s wealthiest citizens. Until the 2020 election, which gave Democrats control of all three branches of government, Republicans - specifically President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin- were largely in control of the federal government’s COVID-19 relief response. Republican control of the Senate, the Presidency, and consequently key offices in the executive branch gave the political upper hand to the GOP in agenda setting, policy negotiations, and implementation of economic relief policy. Although the Democratic party has not always best represented the will of the people, the Republican party has a long history of implementing unpopular policies that work to benefit large corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans at the expense of the interests of the majority of Americans, including their own constituents. The research and analysis in this paper find that members of the Republican party implemented unpopular policies under the guise of relief packages that they asserted would help the majority of people and were created in direct response to the demonstrated needs of the people. However, when these policies were implemented, the actual intentions of our Republican-led federal government to benefit large corporations, already wealthy industries, and the 1 percent were revealed
Men Will Be Boys: Regressive Nostalgia in The Virgin Suicides
Full text linkThe Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is widely considered a cult-classic novel. However, the text reveals much deeper concepts that at first may miss the eye. The first-person plural narration of the male narrators unveils a regressive nostalgia where they cannot move on from the suicides of the Lisbon sisters, which occurred in the 1970s, twenty years prior. This paper describes the gendered relationship between the present day of the novel, the 1990s, as a male possessiveness over the 1970s as a female past