University of Richmond--Masters Theses.

"A Change Has Swept Over Our Land": American Moravians and the Civil War

When they first came to North America, the Moravians--a pietistic, Germanic Christian sect--settled in isolated communities where only a few people ventured out to do missionary work for the community. They separated themselves from their non-Moravian neighbors, one missionary community serving the North from its seat in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the other serving the South from Salem, North Carolina, and neither participating in civic or military life.

Looking into the Mind of the Mother: Pup Exposure and Reactivation of Maternal Circuits

The female rat, among other species, undergoes a fundamental brain re-modeling as a consequence of experiencing the normal and natural events of pregnancy and offspring stimulation. Compelling data show that maternal experiences produce neurobiological modifications in the female leading to specific maternal behaviors, affective states, and the basic underlying female neurobiology necessary to raise viable offspring. This study aims to evaluate the number, quality and selective activation of neurons that develop during the maternal experience.

The Engendered Representation of Sexual Violence in Sarah Kane's Blasted

In Blasted, Kane represents how incidents of rape highlight, exacerbate and solidify the unevenness of power distribution between men and women in the modern world and provides a new perspective at what we might call à à à à à à ¢ rape in generalà à à à à à ¢ - a transhistorical phenomenon of rape as a practice of violence towards the female victim.

Robert Munford & Mercy Otis Warren : How Gender, Geography, and Goals Affected their Playwrighting

This thesis analyzes the Revolutionary-era plays of Robert Munford and Mercy Otis Warren. Munford's two comedies, The Candidates and The Patriots, are compared to Warren's three earliest satires, The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Group, in an effort to explain some of the differences between these two authors. The original printings of these plays from the Early American Imprints series, as well as more recent scholarship on Munford and Warren, are used to investigate the plays and lives of these playwrights.

The Reluctant Colonization of the Falkland Islands, 1833-1851 : A Study of British Imperialism in the Southwest Atlantic

After the Napoleonic Wars, British leaders increasingly objected to large burdensome formal annexations. Hence, when South American markets opened in the 1820s British leaders considered using nearby island bases to ward off regional rivals. Britain therefore occupied the Falkland Islands in 1833. Despite governing the world's strongest industrial and naval power however, British leaders neglected the Falklands' progress as a colony from 1833 to 1851.

Putting On the Armor of the Lord: the Role of Virginia Methodists During the Civil War

This thesis covers the involvement and influence of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in Virginia during the Civil War. Because the Methodists were the largest religious denomination in the South at the onset of the war, the Church was in a position to offer support and to shape the opinions of the Confederate people. Using sermons, religious tracts, newspapers, and letters, this study demonstrates that the majority of the Church supported the Confederacy and its aims.

A Defense of the 63rd New York State Volunteer Regiment of the Irish Brigade

During the American Civil War, New York State’s irrepressible Irish Brigade was alternately composed of a number of infantry regiments hailing both from within New York City and from within and without the state, not all of them Irish, or even predominantly so. The Brigade’s core structure, however, remained constant throughout the war years and consisted of three all-Irish volunteer regiments with names corresponding to fighting units made famous in the annuals of Ireland’s history: the 69th, the 88th, and the 63rd.

Reworking "Seeming Trust" Into "Excellent Falsehood" : The Lying Heroes of William Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets and Antony and Cleopatra

William Shakespeare reinvents the speaker of his Dark Lady sonnets as Antony of Antony and Cleopatra, with the former’s hesitant appreciation of the benefits of a “lying,” lustful relationship reconfigured into the latter’s total embrace of an edifying, creative mutuality. This represents an important philosophical shift in Shakespeare’s view of aesthetics: where in the Dark Lady sonnets, the speaker chastises himself for feeding his desire with lies and self delusions, Antony, his parallel, believes that the love he and his queen have created is somehow noble, even ideal.

Reconsidering African-American Identity: Aesthetic Experiments by Post-Soul Artists

The present study attempts to offer an overview of the Post-Soul aesthetic and its role in re-writing African-American identity and focuses explicitly on three authors: Spike Lee, Touré, and Suzan-Lori Parks. My premise is that Post-Soul art is a direct result of the sweeping changes brought by the post-Civil Rights era in the African-American mentality, which inaugurated a new age in African-American art. Thus, the Post-Soul generation represents blackness as diverse, free to define itself in its own terms; they promote a critical take on black nationalism, and new perspectives on slavery.

Intricacies of Development: The Impact of Maternal Experience and Isolation on the Social Development of Juvenile Male Rats

Reproductive experience induces changes in females. Parity-related differences in maternal treatment of offspring can induce enduring changes in offspring. The relationships between maternal experience, early social isolation, and development were explored in rodents in this experiment. Male rats were weaned from multiparous (MP) and primiparous (PP) mothers and placed into isolation or social housing for four weeks. They were then observed in a social-interaction test.