Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, English

This thesis describes a study that investigates the assumptions, rhetorical strategies, and genre characteristics demonstrated by online petitions and two websites that host them—We the People and MoveOn Petitions. Chapter One consists of a literature review of democratic and public sphere theories, as well as a description of the two websites of interest. Chapter Two investigates the impact of digital circulation on the function and form of the genre. Chapter Three describes a visual analysis of the home pages and creation templates of each site, while Chapter Four contains a critical discourse analysis of a sample of petitions. The project concludes with a chapter that outlines the findings of the study, supplemented by a discussion of the affordances and constraints of the genre. I argue that online petitions are complex digital texts that reveal varied and often complicated attitudes towards democracy, and that online petitions are their own genre due to their circulation patterns. Ultimately, this project provides insight on a form of digital public writing valuable in a variety of contexts, including first-year composition classrooms.

Committee: Michele Simmons (Committee Chair); Jason Palmeri (Committee Member); James Porter (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2020, History

This thesis examines the life of an engineer and professor Gustav Trinkler under the Imperial and Soviet Russia. By using archival materials, such as letters, certificates, reports, questionnaires, and a memoir, it explores his living conditions and interactions with authorities before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Trinkler was born in 1876 to a prosperous family of a predominantly German ethnicity. Despite his origins, he identified as a Russian throughout his life. Before the 1917 Revolution, Trinkler enjoyed cultivating his estate, sent his family on vacation to the south and petitioned his superiors requesting positions and financial assistance. After 1917, Trinkler aspired to maintain his living standards and re-engineered the life he knew: he obtained a new summer house, enjoyed family vacations in the south and kept sending petitions asking new, Soviet, authorities for assistance and benefits based on his technical skills. He managed to manufacture a Soviet life that was strikingly similar to his Imperial one even after his imprisonment as a "bourgeois" specialist in 1930. Using Trinkler's biography as a microhistory, this thesis points to the need to examine individuals' lives before 1917 to better understand the Soviet system and what constituted novel, "Soviet," behaviors.

Committee: Stephen Norris PhD (Advisor); Scott Kenworthy PhD (Committee Member); Francesca Silano PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Russian History

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2009, Department of Languages

Eleven times in the history of the United States has a President gone before Congress, asked for a declaration of war against a sovereign foreign state, and received it. This thesis contends that although there may be valid reasons to justify a petition for war, those reasons, if they exist, are secondary to propaganda that appeals to a public's fears, weaknesses, collective history, and desire for authoritative leadership. Chapter I of this study is an overview of propaganda – its origin as a device of the Roman Catholic Church for propagating the gospel of Christ throughout Europe and the Americas, its evolution into a device for promoting war, and its acquisition of sinister connotations in the 20th century. Also discussed will be the Aristotelian concept of classical rhetoric, and the not so easy to define differences between rhetorical persuasion and propagandistic persuasion. Chapters II, III, and IV examine the discourse of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and George W. Bush, and function to identify and extract the propagandistic rhetoric in the context of a rhetorical problem. And the final chapter will discuss the recurring micro and macro level manifestations of Presidential crisis rhetoric, the Historical American, fear inducing rhetoric, and the placement of the enemy in an ideological context for the overall purpose of gaining public support for Presidential calls to arms.

Committee: Jay Gordon PhD (Advisor); Steven Brown PhD (Committee Member); Jeffrey Buchanan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Political Science; Rhetoric