New Errands: The Undergraduate Journal of American Studies
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Clifford Case: The Unknown Maverick of the Vietnam War
Full text linkForty years after its conclusion, the war in Vietnam remains fresh in the memory of many Americans. Tens of thousands of young men never returned home; many more returned wounded, disabled, or with permanent psychological damage. The war caused some politicians to completely alter their views of foreign policy, becoming either anti-war, or pro-war. These changes continue to reverberate today. Political scientists, historians, politicians, and people who directly witnessed or were somehow affected by the events of this war, have tried to make sense of what happened fifty years ago abroad, at home, in politics, and in the minds of people. Countless books have been written about presidents, generals, and members of administrations; however, there has been surprisingly little written about a very important member of the United States Senate, the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, Clifford P. Case II. Case also took an early leading role in the debate over Vietnam War. Yet, the point is not merely that Case was an important participant in the debate over the Vietnam War, but also that his positions regarding the war were complex and have not been well understood. In scholarly literature on the American political history of the Vietnam era, there is very little discussion of Case, and what does exist is inadequate to fully grasp the complexities of Case\u27s positions on the issue of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Based primarily on examining a substantial amount of Case\u27s documents from the 1950s into the early 1970s, this paper will shed light on and develop a more complex, sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Clifford Case\u27s positions at different moments in the debate over U.S. intervention in Vietnam. A supporter of the war at first, Case took an increasingly somber view of American involvement in Vietnam as the war progressed
Streamline Moderne Design in Consumer Culture and Transportation Infrastructure: Design for the Twentieth Century
Full text linkSituated in the time between World War I and World War II, the design community sought a new design for a new century, free of the trappings and encumbrances of the past. The impact of this new design idea would be far-reaching and serve as a remarkable milestone in the American experience, ushering in modern contemporary mass-produced consumer culture, and stylistically and philosophically the successor to contemporary design practice. The Art Deco style pioneered in the years following World War I, exhibited at the L\u27Exposition Internationale des Artes Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 (translated to English as the International Exhibition of Modern and Industrial Decorative Arts). Art Deco, while certainly new, but was not entirely free of the ornamental motifs of the past. Additionally, Art Deco prioritized the handcrafted, high-end, and exclusive, providing exceptional design for those who could afford it. Streamline Moderne Design in Consumer Culture and Transportation Infrastructure: Design for the Twentieth Century by William Kowalik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licens
Muggles Practicing Magic: A Digital Ethnography of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text Podcast
Full text linkIt is not uncommon for non-religious people to be drawn to some aspects of religion. There are many diferent religions with followings that are based on fction, both movies and novels. According to Wolfe (2015), a few of these include: Jediism, based on the Star Wars trilogies, Dudeism, based on The Big Lebowski, and The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who refer to themselves as Pastafarians. The Pastafarians are known to have fought for religious rights to be able to practice their religion as freely as those of any other religion. This is an example of a group of people who are interested in an aspect of religion outside of any "God" a religion might be centered around. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licens
Just Mercy\u27s Stories of Unjust Abelism and Racialization
No full textBryan Stevenson is a renowned civil rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Alabama. Stevenson\u27s 2014 book, Just Mercy, recounts his early career as a defense attorney for death row prisoners and his journey to making the Equal Justice Initiative the force it is today. He is passionate about fighting for people on death row and working against the tide of mass incarceration, which he defines as the system by which the nation has disproportionately incarcerated people of color and even profits from the criminalization of people. Mass incarceration fractures and disempowers poor, working-class, and racially-marginalized communities nationwide by holding them in punitive confinement, depriving them of potential workers in their economy, setting additional roadblocks on the path to higher education and employment, and overall inflicting trauma on individuals and communities. The cycle continues as it disproportionally criminalizes people who cannot financially support themselves - be it because of disability, economic depression, and/or systemic racism - for not being able to conform to the societal mold of the "good citizen" who has a job, a place to live, and access to affordable healthcare
How Medical Marijuana Policies Reproduce the Status Quo
Full text linkPublic attitudes have dramatically transformed from stigmatization to acceptance of medical marijuana legalization. However, the federal government upholds its Schedule I Classification, preventing medical access and barring scientific research. States rapidly working towards the legalization of medical marijuana points to progressive future policies, but as long as the federal government fails to acknowledge marijuana’s medicinal properties and continues the War on Drugs, legal changes remain at a standstill. This paper uses the umbrella term conflict paradigm to incorporate common ideological tenets of conflict theories. In relation to medical marijuana legislation, the law is viewed as repressive via differential law enforcement. In addition, the law is not considered value-neutral in relation to economic accessibility seemingly skewed toward the wealthy. Lastly, the law functions as a tool for the powerful elite as noted through discarded scientific research and links to special interest groups. As illustrated by the conflict paradigm, racist legal prejudices, economic burdens, and the politicized federal hesitancy to legalize medical marijuana portray how current medical marijuana laws reproduce social hegemony. In utilizing this theoretical framework to evaluate Pennsylvania’s Medical Marijuana Program, this review argues that without movement on the federal level, states’ medical marijuana policies will fail to provide relief to many vulnerable populations and reproduce social inequalities
Front Matter
No full textFront Mattter for New Errands Volume 10, Issues 1 - 2 (Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
The Virtual Validation of Occulture : An Introduction
No full textOne of the effects of modernity and globalization has been argued by some scholars to be the creation of a worldwide “marketplace” of cultural, spiritual, and religious practices. I argue that the members of the r/AstralProjection forum have informally formed a virtual folk group that has created “acceptable” folk narratives, beliefs, and opinions to be posted and discussed on the forum board. Even if there are no religious or cultural institutions to “monitor” or create taboo topics for group members to avoid, there are still the informal “folk” mechanisms of creating “normative” narratives of astral projection and “non-normative” narratives and explanations for the proliferation of these “non-normative” accounts
Facebook Folklore: Subtle Asian Traits During the Age of COVID-19
Full text linkThe ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has sparked significantly increased incidents of xenophobia, racism, and discrimination against people of East Asian appearance and descent. Initial investigations done in Wuhan, China, where the virus first appeared, suggested that bats were responsible for the initial outbreak. This led to a slew of anti-Asian memes across social media that portrayed Chinese people as bat eaters and Asian food as being “dirty.” In response, this research paper investigates how the online Asian diaspora community has used social media to engage in mutual care, discourse, and cultural expression amid increasing scrutiny and aggression around Asians and Asian cuisine. Specifically, it identifies and analyzes food memes and posts created and shared to the Facebook group, Subtle Asian Traits (SAT). This research aims to not only analyze the posts themselves as a form of folklore, but also investigate what role they play in the construction of group identity and cultural dialogue within SAT during Covid
Web Sleuthing: Collective Intelligence in Practice
Full text linkTowards the end of the 20th century, the internet has made information more accessible than ever before. People have found places—networked spaces and communities—where they belonged and engaged with activities that aligned with their passions and interests. Among the many spaces that exist on the internet, web sleuthing has, in recent years, gained an increasing number of participants. Web sleuthing refers to the way ordinary people interact online to engage in activities such as collecting and analyzing clues, pointing out details in a case, matching missing person’s reports to unidentified bodies, and theorizing who the perpetrator is in order toattempt to solve a case. It is important to note that most of what web sleuths do is entirely unrelated to the official investigations that criminal investigators and detectives perform, though web sleuths often rely on the information provided by police departments or official law enforcement organizations. To many people, the term “web sleuth” is synonymous with armchair detective, “cyber detective” or “digital vigilante.” Many web sleuths take part in web sleuthing not because they gain any sort of compensation—whether that is fame or money—but because they genuinely view it as a pastime
Folklore Studies in Digital Worlds: An Introduction
Full text linkRunning from the maintenance of group boundaries, to the social production of knowledge, to the use of traditional forms to engage in sustaining care against outside injury or incursion, these essays offer a fascinating and suggestive set of possibilities for the study of folklore and digital technologies, by demonstrating the complex relationships between the development and use of traditional forms, the development of vernacular social interactional structures, and the underlying shared beliefs and values that sustain them