Taking up the role of laughter in society, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse Audience, had to formulate a method for making the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor.Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity-how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized. Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them-including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens-and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.

As with our first two issues, the third volume of Proto: An Undergraduate Humanities Journal features some of the finest writing and scholarship among undergraduate students in the Maryland and mid-Atlantic region. This year, as in the past, about half of the issue is devoted to the top papers from the annual Undergraduate Conference held at Stevenson University. Unfortunately, Stevenson University has decided to put the conference on indefinite hiatus. The journal will carry on despite this setback; we hope this disappointing news will not deter Proto's efforts to publish the insights and ideas of today's emerging scholars. As a sign of the journal's continuing development, we now have a website At www.protojournal.org, visitors can browse essays from previous years, download submission guidelines, contact members of the advisory board, find out more about our publisher-Loyola University's student-run Apprentice House Publishing-and link to ordering information for both current and back issues. We encourage you to visit the site. In this issue, readers should again be surprised and pleased with the style and erudition with which students engage a variety of themes. This year's Undergraduate Conference topic was "Realities-Discovered, Created, Envisioned." One of the most compelling presentations was by Tim Powling, whose essay describes the kind of friendship possible between a dog and a soldier at war. Callie Ingram artfully examines the complexities of communication in David Foster Wallace's labyrinthine novel Infinite Jest. Then we turn to Megan Franey, who argues that the dynamics of the possible realities of family and self are often best told through the stories we tell one another. Do we discover or create minds? How we answer this, writes Amanda Brenner in her lucid essay, points to contrasting approaches to the idea of artificial intelligence. In the Open Submissions section, Nathan Dennies focuses on two major writers, Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway, in order to account for the significance of shifts in our consciousness. Edward Lasher presents an imaginative and fragmented reflection about a perplexing figure named Briley. And Christina Murphy concludes this issue with a scholarly analysis-in French-of the Spanish film La Vida Perra de Juanita Narboni. Each accepted admission is reviewed by at least two members on the editorial board, which consists of humanities professors from mid-Atlantic colleges and universities. Guidelines for submission are provided at the end of this issue as well as on the website. We hope you enjoy this issue, and we look forward to hearing from you. The Editors: Jean Lee Cole, Department of English, Loyola University Maryland; Alex Hooke, Department of Philosophy, Stevenson University

This year's theme is "Men and Women in the Medieval Era." Katherine Pierpont leads off Volume 4 with a scholarly analysis of the subtle ways prostitution was condoned and regulated in medieval Europe. In the subsequent essay, Kathryn Brossa explains how competing notions of the male and female artist are represented in Tennyson's medievalesque poem, "The Lady of Shalott." That men cry is hardly a modern phenomenon, as Colleen Mitchell insightfully discusses in the context of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. We also include five additional thoughtful and erudite essays in this volume. David Gyllenhaal investigates the functions and symbolic significance of the modern-day shaman. Using the conceptual tools of French philosopher Michel Foucault, Madeline Collins examines the discourse underlying the rhetoric and narrative of the IRA Green Book. While the "Lolita phenomenon" has been widely addressed, Rosemary Clark offers new insights through her careful accounts of Nabokov and his anti-hero, Humbert Humbert. Casey Dunn presents a fresh perspective on the so-called American Dream by looking at two writers who were deeply concerned with it: Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. Finally, Ben Tarr completes this volume with personal reflections and meditations on the scope of art and is relation to human spirituality. Each published essay is reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board, which consists of humanities professors from mid-Atlantic colleges and universities. Guidelines for submissions are provided at the end of this issue as well as on the website. We continue to be inspired by the number of undergraduate students who research and write about such a variety of topics and perspectives. Enjoy the contributions; we look forward to hearing from you.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Proto, an annual, humanities-centered journal that will disseminate undergraduate scholarship from institutions in the mid-Atlantic region. The journal's title expresses its ethos. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the prefix proto- connotes something that is the "earliest, original; at an early stage of development, primitive; incipient, potential." At its best, undergraduate scholarship embodies all of these qualities. While it almost certainly constitutes scholarship at an early stage of development, it also has the potential to be original and innovative; the seeds of future thought often take root during the undergraduate years. We see this journal as a site for this process of germination and growth.

Included in this issue: Shift Happens: The Discourse Shift and Its Implications for Society Sara Mohler, Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) What the Hack?: Communication Dysfunction in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 Jacqueline Boualavong, Honors College, Towson University (Towson, Maryland) Disobedience, Generational Gaps, and Warren's Court in Andrea Lee's Sarah Phillips Nathan Dize, University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland) Grimm Lessons: Animals and a Child's Vicarious Landscape Christina Elaine Miles, Stevenson University (Stevenson, Maryland) The Shifting Gaze in Stephen Crane's "The Monster" Abigail Wagner, Loyola University Maryland (Baltimore, Maryland) Nausica, Miyazaki's Great Heroine Kelly Thompson, Howard Community College (Columbia, Maryland) Les Morceaux de ma M re (Bits and Pieces of My Mother) Sophia Laurenne Altenor, Goucher College (Towson, Maryland) Tolstoy: An Incomplete Conversion Diana Walsh, University of Baltimore (Baltimore, Maryland)

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army's first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged ""grape"" and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman's army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either. Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner's youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society. Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

This fully edited volume contains nine of Zora Neale Hurston's unpublished plays at the Library of Congress, including three of her full-length plays: Polk County, Cold Keener and De Turkey and De Law. This book is expected be a major contribution to American literary scholarship as it portrays customary African American life in the 20th century through a highly nonconformist African American lens. Zora Neale Hurston is a world-renowned author, best known for her fiction and folklore, including her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road (1942).

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army's first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged ""grape"" and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman's army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either. Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner's youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society. Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

Taking up the role of laughter in society, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse Audience, had to formulate a method for making the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor. Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity-how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized. Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them-including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens-and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.

Madame Butterfly (1898) and A Japanese Nightingale (1901) both appeared at the height of fin-de-siecle American fascination with Japanese culture, which was in part spurred by the Japanese exhibits on display at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. These two novellas -- usually dismissed by literary critics and scholars because of their stereotypical treatment of Asian women -- are paired here together for the first time to show how they defined and redefined (often subversively) contemporary misconceptions of the "Orient." This is the first reprinting of A Japanese Nightingale since its 1901 appearance, when it propelled Winnifred Eaton to fame.

John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly introduced American readers to the figure of the tragic geisha who falls in love with, and then is rejected by, a dashing American man. Although Long emphasized the insensitivity of Westerners in their dealings with Asian people, the self-annihilating, ever-faithful Cho-Cho-San typified Asian subservience and Western dominance in ways that audiences continue to find appealing even today. Eaton's A Japanese Nightingale, in contrast, has been long forgotten. Yet it provides present-day readers with a fascinating counterimage of the suicidal geisha: Eaton's heroine is powerful in her own right and is loved on her own terms. Eaton's novel is also significant for its hidden personal nature. Although she wrote under the Japanese pen name of Onoto Watanna, Eaton was half Chinese. Living in a society that was virulently anti-Chinese, she used a Japanese screen for her own problematic identity.