Blogs have in the last couple of years loomed large in the Western imagination, but the ideas about blogs that have circulated both through the mainstream media and through academia have been extremely limited in scope. In the popular imagination,...
Comic books, strips, etc. - Study and teaching (Higher); Comic books, strips, etc. - Japan; Graphic novels; Storytelling
Comics, like art, are extremely difficult to define and yet, like obscenity, everyone has their own internal definition that they instantly recognize. For better or worse, graphic novels have come of age and have been legitimized not just by the...
Women in the Bible; Matriarchs (Bible); Bible. O.T. Genesis; Bible. O.T. Genesis - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Eve or Lot's wife, Sarah or Hagar, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel - many of the women characters in the book of Genesis are used as archetypes for women until this day. Yet how well do these images, disseminated about these women from everything from...
American Bandstand (Television program); Teenagers; Race discrimination;
From a small studio in 1950's Philadelphia, American Bandstand became the first national television program directed at teenagers. The show brought rock and roll into American living rooms, shaped the way a generation danced and dressed, and...
From the start of The Troubles in 1969 to the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland was the site of a violent conflict fought out between the British State, the Irish Republican Movement, and Loyalist Paramilitary Forces....
Nanotechnology; Nanotechnology - Environmental aspects; Electric batteries; Fuel cells; Power resources;
Fuel cells and batteries are likely to have a dominant role in the development of a sustainable global energy infrastructure. Batteries and fuel cells convert chemical energy to electrical energy through simultaneous electrochemical reactions at...
Midwifery; South Carolina; Twentieth century; Childbirth
How did childbirth, once commonly administered in the household by lay midwives for women, become the domain of the hospital and the state? During the early 20th century, it was common for older African-American women -- Granny Midwives -- to...
How do groups of people engage themselves with a "central and center-ing" text? What does this engagement tell us about how the people express themselves? How do dominant groups interpret this engagement? Seen in the refracting mirror of...
World War, 1939-1945; Japanese - Correspondence; Japanese - Social conditions
If we look at the history of history, we can trace an evolution as it shifted, over a period of centuries, from the chronicles of wars and kings to look more realistically at other players and eventually toward all levels and members of society,...
Depository libraries; Electronic government information; Government publications; United States. National Archives and Records Administration; Madison, James, 1751-1836; Freedom of information
In 1822, James Madison asserted that "a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be...
In 2005 Bob Henderson of the Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority contacted the CGU History department to offer funding for a study of the history of the land that became the Puente Hills preserve. Seven students who took...
Twain, Mark, 1835-1910; Lyon, Isabel, 1863-1958; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 - Relations with women; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 - Last years;
In Mark Twain's last decade, his writings took a sharp turn in tone from colorful satire to outright bitterness. People point to the death of his wife and two of his daughters, but as another possible explanation, Pitzer President Laura Skandera...
American literature; Artists; Authors as artists; Mr. Potato Head (Trademark); Nature; Poetry; Postmodernism; Reality; Self
In the 1980s, the term "postmodernism" was adopted by literary critics to designate what the reigning generation of artists and theorists, figures like Pynchon, Cage, Warhol, and Barthes, had in common. Postmodernists shared an interest in...
Transportation; Local transit; Automobiles; Firestone Tire and Rubber Company; General Motors Corporation; Pacific Electric Railway Company; Standard Oil Company;
In the popular mind, Southern California, with Los Angeles as its epicenter, is the region of the U.S. most associated with the automobile, both its joys and its discontents. From the Beach Boys paean to "fun, fun, fun until her daddy takes the...
Music; Musical notation; Shorthand; Shorthand - Gabelsberger; Language, Universal; Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883; Schumann, Robert, 1810-1856; Berlioz, Hector, 1803-1869; Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus), 1776-1822; Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,...
Innovative stenography systems of the 1830s used the variable thickness of line that was so important in the cursive handwriting of the time to signify differences in phonemes. These systems and their descendants became the dominant shorthand...
Constitution Day and Citizenship Day (U.S.); Constitutional law - United States; Citizenship - United States; Judicial review - United States; Political campaigns - United States;
Leo Flynn (Politics, Pomona), Jean Schroedel (Politics & Policy, CGU), Ken Miller (Government, CMC), Andrew Busch (Government, CMC), Charles Lofgren (History, CMC), and Robert Dawidoff (History, CGU) present their thoughts on "Teaching the...
Joyce, James, 1882-1941; Copyright; Intellectual property; Censorship; Fair use (Copyright); Public domain (Copyright law); Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850;
Literary scholars are familiar with the "Death of the Author," which Roland Barthes announced in 1968. But what happens when authors become undead and walk the earth in the surrogate body of the law? Taking the Estate of James Joyce as an...
Secularism; Religion and sociology; Denmark - Religion; Sweden - Religion;
Many people assume that a society without a strong faith in God would be hell on earth: full of chaos and immorality. Many people also assume that religion is a universal phenomenon because it addresses two essential human needs: the need for...
Kunene, Mazisi; Africa; South Africa; Zulu poetry; Literature and science;
Mazisi Kunene, the revolutionary colleague of Nelson Mandela, was a major academic voice about the literature of Africa. A professor at UCLA, he was Poet Laureate of both South Africa and Africa and perhaps that continent's greatest poet. He...
Memory can be said to deeply connected to our tastes in food -- what we've liked or disliked in the past creates associations that help trigger our current eating behaviors. In what might be seen as a scientific version of the beginning of...
