Brockport History Faculty Publications

 

Recent Submissions

  • Putting on the Garment of Widowhood: Medieval Widows, Monastic Memory, and Historical Writing
    Clark, Katherine; The College at Brockport (2010-01-01)
    The idea of the widow in communal memory and historical writing was a resonant and multi-faceted concept for monastic writers of the Middle Ages. This essay focuses on the function and meaning of widowhood in two examples of early medieval historical writing, by one male and one female author, to illustrate how monastic authors engaged significant and enduring aspects of widowhood during the Western European Middle Ages to construct institutional histories. Images of female memory and widowed piety (especially because the widow represented the Church who awaited her spouse, Christ) were useful in describing the experiences of women who held important associations for monastic institutions: the resonances of the Scriptural vere vidua transformed female founders’ previous experiences with worldly marriage into a sacralized state of chastity and remembrance in widowhood, and facilitated such women’s presence in the community’s historical memory.

  • The Bobsled Controversy and Squaw Valley’s Olympic Winter Games
    Wakefield, Wanda Ellen; The College at Brockport (2006-01-01)
    In 1957, the Squaw Valley Organizing Committee (SVOC) asked to eliminate bobsled due to what it said was the expense of construction and the likelihood that too few nations would enter sleds in the competition to justify the cost. The International Olympic Committee, headed by its President, Avery Brundage, and Chancellor, Otto Mayer, clearly accepted these arguments. They also, in the years between 1957 and 1960, refused to entertain ideas for alternative venues in which the competitions might have been held. Why did they do so? Was there something specific about bobsled that earned their scorn? Was there something about the winter sports in general to which Brundage and Mayer objected? And would the decision to eliminate bobsled races at the 1960 Olympic Winter Games have been different if the bob run had been another field on which to fight the Cold War? The purpose of this paper is to suggest answers to these questions.

  • Review of Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, eds. Cindy Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl
    Clark, Katherine; The College at Brockport (2000-05-01)

  • Lincoln Revealed through the Books He Read
    Daly, John; The College at Brockport (2012-02-01)
    Review of Robert Bray's "Reading with Lincoln".

  • 'The Picture of Health’: The Public Life and Private Ailments of Mary Church Terrell
    Parker, Alison M.; The College at Brockport (2013-04-01)
    THROUGHOUT AMERICAN HISTORY, both in slavery and as free women, African American women have confronted the problem of whether to disclose or hide their bodies’ illnesses and pains. For some, redemptive suffering and pain served as a powerful metaphor that openly inspired their reform activism.2 For others, the risk of disclosure seemed too great, especially if their physical problems had a sexual or reproductive dimension that could be construed in a racist light by the dominant white American society. In this paper, Alison Parker confronts the question of how, when, and why Mary (Mollie) Church Terrell privatized pain and illness.

  • Andalusian Strophic Poetry Between the Spoken and the Written: The Case of the Moroccan Andalusian Music
    Davila, Carl; The College at Brockport (2006-09-01)
    A chapter on Andalusian Strophic Poetry which appears in Muwashshah: Proceedings of the Conference on Arabic and Hebrew Strophic Poetry and its Romance Parallels, School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS], London, 8-10 October 2004

  • Teaching Said: Culture Discourse Meets Culture Critique
    Davila, Carl; The College at Brockport (2010-01-01)
    This chapter from Counterpoints: Edward Said's Legacy discusses teaching Said in an undergraduate setting today.

  • Mothering the Movies: Women Reformers and Popular Culture
    Parker, Alison M.; College at Brockport, State University of New York (2006-01-01)
    From the book Movie Censorship and American Culture, edited by Francis Couvares.

  • The Case for Reform Antecedents for the Woman's Rights Movement
    Parker, Alison M.; The College at Brockport (2002-01-01)

  • Clubwomen, Reformers, Workers, and Feminists of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
    Parker, Alison M.; The College at Brockport (2010-01-01)
    During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, clubwomen, reformers, laborers, and feminists asserted their right to participate in the public, political sphere. Whether they intended to further their education, improve society, gain better working conditions, or control their own bodies, women expanded traditional gender roles and played an important role in transforming their society. Most significantly, the guarantee of voting rights provided by the Nineteenth Amendment marked a major milestone in the history of the struggle for women's rights. While women made important advances in other areas as well, many of the goals of tum-of-the-century reformers and feminists-for economic justice, racial equality, and women's full emancipation- remained unrealized, and would be left for subsequent generations of women to continue to pursue as the 20th century unfolded.

  • What We Do Expect the People Legislatively to Effect
    Parker, Alison M.; College at Brockport, State University of New York (2000-01-01)
    In this chapter, from the book Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, Alison Parker explores the radical political thought of Frances Wright and the implications of reactions to her egalitarianism.

  • Frances Watkins Harper and the Search for Women's Interracial Alliances
    Parker, Alison M.; College at Brockport, State University of New York (2012-01-01)
    A chapter from Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights.

  • Racism in a "Raceless" Society: The Soviet Press and Representations of American Racial Violence at Stalingrad in 1930
    Roman, Meredith; The College at Brockport (2007-01-01)
    In late August 1930, two white American workers from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit were tried for attacking a black American laborer at one of the Soviet Union's prized giants of socialist industry, the Stalingrad Traktorostroi. Soviet trade-union authorities and all-union editors used the near month-long campaign to bring the two assailants to “proletarian justice,” in order to cultivate the image that workers in the USSR valued American technical and industrial knowledge in the construction of the new socialist society, but vehemently rejected American racism. They reinforced this image in publications by juxtaposing visual depictions of Soviet citizens' acceptance of black Americans as equals against those which portrayed the lynching of black workers in the United States.

  • Reading Race through U.S. Women's Biographies
    Parker, Alison M.; The College at Brockport (2012-10-01)
    Alison Parker reviews the following books: Lois Brown. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Kimberley Mangun. A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2010. Julia A. Stem. Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Lea VanderVelde. Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Margaret Washington. Sojourner Truth's America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

  • Twentieth-Century Transformations: Sexualities Defined and Sexual Expression Expanded
    Parker, Alison M.; The College at Brockport (2014-06-01)
    Alison Parker reviews the following books: Margot Canaday. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in TwentiethCentury America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. xiv + 277 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $19.95 (paper). Leigh Ann Wheeler. How Sex. Became a Civil Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xiv + 327 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

  • "Hearts Uplifted and Minds Refreshed'': The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Production of Pure Culture in the United States, 1880-1930
    Parker, Alison M.; The College at Brockport (1999-07-01)
    The Woman's Christian Temperance Union's (WCTU) Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art, established in1883, worked for legal censorship, but also created a "pure" literary, artistic, and popular culture. This WCTU program blurs the distinctions some historians have made between producers of culture and their audience(s) or, alternatively, between repressive censors and creative artists. This article documents the WCTU's publication of its own children's magazine, distribution of cheap reproductions of famous paintings, and promotion and production of educational pro-temperance movies. Moral transformation of youth, activists argued, could only occur through the positive influence of a pure culture. As WCTU women pursued a strategy of supporting and producing culture, they made crucial contributions to shaping the public arena in the United States. Asserting their right to be the arbiters of culture themselves, women reformers insisted upon a tie between art and morals.