New Errands: The Undergraduate Journal of American Studies
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Dynamics of Free Speech on Modern College Campuses
Full text linkIn March 2017, Charles Murray--a highly controversial author and academic--visited Vermont\u27s Middlebury College. His visit was met with students protests; the protesters shouted Murray down, and, ultimately became violent, attacking Murray and injuring a Middlebury professor. The administration doled out discipline to 67 students.Some felt the Middlebury Administration lost control of the situation, and their efforts to reign in the chaos amounted to little more than a semi-random disciplinary response that fell short of imparting societal values on students in need of such a lesson. A Middlebury political science professor, critical of the college\u27s response stated: "[this] was an institutional failure...Students do not understand the value of free speech" (Saul 2017). After the penalties were handed down, Charles Murray criticized the leniency of the sanctions saying, "They will not deter anyone. They\u27re a statement to students that if you shut down a lecture, nothing will happen to you."
Rage Against the Machine in the Garden: Television, Voyeurism, and Hyperrealism in American Suburban Film
Full text linkFollowing the Second World War, living in the suburbs was connected to the American Dream. The suburbs appeared to be the perfect place to raise a family and enjoy the benefits of both urban and rural conveniences without the exposure to harmful influences of the city. However, some people realized that reality did not live up to the project\u27s utopian expectations. The magnet that drew them to the suburbs in the first place began to tear them apart through conformity, social pressures, and paranoia. This article explores the American suburban movie from the post-WWII era until 9/11 to analyze how screenwriters and directors grappled with the conflicting disparity of the utopian vision versus reality of the suburbs and how they produced a picture of the faulty design and constructed-ness of the middle landscape. This design not only subordinated nature, but also subverted and deconstructed human nature by the introduction of technology. That is, the introduction of artificial structures in a natural environment caused human nature to become artificial and mechanical itself
Political Failure, Ideological Victory: Ida Wells and Her Early Work
Full text linkThe long Gilded Age, beginning at the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, ended with a nadir in American race relations and the height of white supremacist activity. This period also saw the beginning of empowerment for American women, who by the end of the age had earned the right to vote and had expanded the amount of wage-earning women in the workforce more than two-fold. One of the figures cutting across both trends is Ida B. Wells, a prominent yet often-forgotten African-American female writer. Beginning with her journalism and anti-lynching crusades into her work with feminism, Wells was an intellectual radical whose ideas on race, gender, and acceptable behavior would not enter the political norm until decades after her death. As a consequence, Wells\u27s work was subject to widespread condemnation or avoidance and one of the foremost minds on race relations died with her work suppressed – often deliberately – by not only the white community but other black leaders. Her early work is focused on as illustrative of two historical trends: first, the tendency for "radical" thought to become more mainstream over time, especially on issues of race and gender, and second, the difficulty faced by non-whites and non-males to gain any attention for their work.Political Failure, Ideological Victory: Ida Wells and Her Early Work by Matthew Schilling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licens
Collegiate Masculinity and the Rise of American Youth: Culture During the Roaring Twenties
Full text linkDuring the 1920s, youth symbolized modernity, progress, and development as a young generation of Americans espoused new values and served as a lightning rod for social change. College men became emblematic of these transformations as they confronted the values of their educational institutions and asserted unique aspects of their identities, which they believed made them separate and distinct from the previous generation.4 Through on-campus protests, open defiance of Prohibition, and a cavalier attitude towards academics, collegiates defined a new type of masculinity that challenged authority and prioritized peer approval. In addition to these changes, historians cite the increased prominence of college sports (particularly football) and fraternities as evidence of a dramatic transition from an internal, character-based model of masculinity to an external, personality-based model.5 However, a close examination of college records and student publications reveals that many young men attending Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania in this decade sought to retain key aspects of character-based masculinity (such as honor, integrity, and self-sacrifice) while incorporating features of the more modernized version (such as social popularity, physical appearance, and self-indulgence). Their lived experiences call into question the existing historiography by suggesting that notions of masculinity did not shift in an abrupt or absolute manner in the 1920s.6 Campus activities that promoted male bonding and school spirit became more significant in this era but were present in previous decades, showing a continuity in forms of masculine affiliation and rituals across generations. Further, many young men at elite universities struggled to incorporate disparate and opposing notions of masculinity into their identities, adopting a complex, multifaceted construct that simultaneously anchored them to the past and allowed them to embrace the new values of a modernized society. Gin, Gentlemen, and Generational Conflict by Chloe Nurik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licens
The Frozen Formula: A Reading of the Film\u27s Calculated Rise to National Popularity
Full text linkOnce upon a time there was a man with an odd sounding name. This man loved to tell stories and dreamed of bringing happiness to all the world, especially its children. The man started his own company and as he grew in success his company also grew. From this company came many stories and songs. These stories and songs gave the world joy and wonder. One day, this man\u27s company, long after he was gone, created a story and songs so wonderful it took the world by storm- a snowstorm as a matter of fact. This creation, so intense, so satisfying, amassed immense popularity with old and young alike. People everywhere were so taken by the company\u27s new masterpiece that they couldn\u27t control themselves; they couldn\u27t let it go. But why? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licens
Remarks on Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity
Full text linkThe following essay addresses the several questions relating the Chester Cornett and other craftsmen operating in southeastern Kentucky during the 1960s, the subject of Michael Owen Jones\u27s Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity. The first pertains to how Chester Cornett generated the designs of his chairs, referencing his innovative design process and his grounding in historical designs and processes. The second brings into question Chester Cornett\u27s financial, aesthetic and emotional motivations for chairmaking and compares and contrasts his motivations with those of fellow chairmaker, Verge. The third speaks to what Chester\u27s work in chair-making reveals about humanity from an aesthetic viewpoint, expanding the notion of folk art beyond something that is "old-fashioned" and towards something we can understand as innovative, creative and artistic. It also opens the relation between "art" and "usefulness." The last deliberates on which of Chester\u27s works are best-suited to exhibition in an art museum, based on aesthetic, historical, and psychological reasoning
Front Matter
No full textThe Eastern American Studies Association and the American Studies Program at Penn State Harrisburg are pleased to present the sixth issue of New Errands, an online journal that publishes exemplary American Studies work by undergraduate students
Bans off our Bodies: Categorizing and Analyzing Reproductive Justice Street Art Across the United States (June 2022 to June 2023)
Full text linkJune 24th, 2022 marked the controversial overturn of the case Roe v Wade which had previously ensured the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. This landmark decision was marked by public protest, lawsuits, concern over the decision\u27s future implications, and street art and graffiti. In the year following the Dobbs decision, reproductive choice messaging in the form of sanctioned and unsanctioned street art, including but not limited to stickers, pasted posters, and spraypainted works appeared on billboards, street signs, and walls across the United States. Contemporary scholarship recognizes the importance of a society’s visual culture in social movements. Recognizing the importance of documentation and analysis of street art and how it can contribute to a movement, this article categorizes the ways in which street art has appeared across the United States from June 2022 to June 2023. Through the intertwining of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the categories of didactic abortion resource stickers, crisis pregnancy center tags, billboards of exchange, and “abort” messages were extrapolated. These categories, reflective of a need to disseminate information, protest, and empower individuals post-Roe, are significant as their recognition and documentation will help to preserve these ephemeral creations.
Articulating an American Art Form: A Transnational Study of Abstract Expressionism
Full text linkWhile America had long been considered a cultural backwater compared to Europe, following the Second World War, a movement of loosely associated abstract painters gained prominence on the world stage, with critics like Greenberg eventually declaring that New York, instead of Paris, had become the new center of the art world. With this heightened attention on American art, Americans became increasingly concerned about the reputation of their country abroad, with the spotlight shining brightly on the new global superpower. As a movement, Abstract Expressionism was the perfect target for those wishing to project certain values. The artists were generally politically neutral, the absence of recognizable figures and objects lent itself to a wide variety of interpretations, and it was perceived to be a totally American style, free from influence from abroad. Accordingly, government officials began organizing exhibitions explicitlyaimed at foreign audiences to display American art. While the new art was abstract, gestural, and to many incomprehensible or even offensive, it was useful because it could be said to display one key value of importance to America: freedom
Charlesgate: Palimpsest of Urban Planning
Full text linkBetween Boston\u27s Back Bay and Kenmore neighborhoods, a small park branched off from the Charles River. This park, once a salty bog, was transformed into a tranquil urban oasis: Charlesgate Park. Today it is again a wasteland, albeit one capped by a highway overpass