Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 30 of 61

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

"Between The Two Great Battlefields:" Scottish Medical Women's Encounters With The Eastern Front, Fiona Gale Holter Jan 2021

"Between The Two Great Battlefields:" Scottish Medical Women's Encounters With The Eastern Front, Fiona Gale Holter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the role of medical women on the battlefront during the First World War. Using the Scottish Women’s Hospitals as a case study, it argues that frontline medical women occupied a liminal space on the fronts. As both witnesses and participants, they confronted wounds, trauma, and violence wrought by total war. Since this was typically reserved for the combatant, contemporary notions of gender refused to acknowledge medical women’s authority within the war story. This dissertation employs medical women’s wartime experiences to argue that their war story redefines our understandings of combatancy, allowing us to see it as a …


For Country And Company: Consolidating Power Through Development And Company Towns In Saudi Arabia, 1947-1969, Andrew Nicholas Czuzak Jan 2021

For Country And Company: Consolidating Power Through Development And Company Towns In Saudi Arabia, 1947-1969, Andrew Nicholas Czuzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My project demonstrates how the Saudi Arabian government established their control over a dissident Eastern Province. Examining a mixture of ARAMCO, American, and Saudi sources, my thesis aims to expand the historiography of urban history, Saudi Arabia, and company towns in the twentieth century. Through the lens of company towns, urban development, and military modernization, I show how Saudi Arabia was effectively able to disrupt local power structures and replace them with their own. Urban development provides an effective tool through which I assess larger trends in theSaudi-ARAMCO relationship, the ruler-subject relationship, and sedentarization policy during the 1940s through the …


Blood Money: 12th Century Trade Wars And The Fourth Crusade, Alexander Evgeniy Stalowski Jan 2021

Blood Money: 12th Century Trade Wars And The Fourth Crusade, Alexander Evgeniy Stalowski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The historiography of the Fourth Crusade has neglected long-term macroeconomic developments and its influence on the Fourth Crusade within the Byzantine Empire and the Italian states of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. It is well-established that the Venetians rerouted the crusading forces to Constantinople which caused political, religious, and economic challenges that altered the Mediterranean world. Yet, the trend of writing on political events and short-term microeconomics and macroeconomics from 1180 to 1204, has done great disservice to the larger trans-regional disputes that engulfed the Mediterranean during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This thesis will attempt to fill the void of …


Development Or Detriment? The World Bank And Economic Disincentives To Water Conservation: Jordan In The 1960s And 1970s, William Chase Young Jan 2021

Development Or Detriment? The World Bank And Economic Disincentives To Water Conservation: Jordan In The 1960s And 1970s, William Chase Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the impact of World Bank development policies on water shortagesin the Middle East and North Africa. Analyzing primary sources from the World Bank Group Archives, I contend that in funding water development projects in the 1960s and 1970s the World Bank and its subsidiaries, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association, created economic disincentives to water conservation. These disincentives likely made authorities unable to effectively respond to water shortages that developed in the latter half of the 20th century. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is used as a case study, which I …


Midwifery And Medicine In Britain: A Comparative View Of Midwifery And Childbearing In Scotland And England, 1650-1780, Summer Smith Jan 2021

Midwifery And Medicine In Britain: A Comparative View Of Midwifery And Childbearing In Scotland And England, 1650-1780, Summer Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I contend the female midwives and childbearing women did not passively accept the alteration of the experience of birth and the ideology surrounding it in eighteenth-century Britain. While the imposition of the man-midwife and the reframing of birth as a disease to be cured in some ways forced childbearing to shift to a medicalized event, many practices persisted from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, illustrating a vein of consistency in a seemingly tumultuous period. Furthermore, the changes that did take root were not solely the purview of the male medical community, but were influenced by women …


To Sink Our National Character: Slavery And National Character In The U.S. House Of Representatives, 1789-1820, Jessica Johnson Jan 2019

To Sink Our National Character: Slavery And National Character In The U.S. House Of Representatives, 1789-1820, Jessica Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1790 1804 and 1819 the U.S. House of Representatives debated measures intended to restrict slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. During these three debates slaveholding representatives primarily from the Lower South attempted to call into question the general government’s right to discuss and legislate on slavery contending that except for in a few specific instances outlined in the Constitution slavery was purely a state matter not a national one. Their opponents employed a variety of tactics to counter this idea. One particularly effective approach was an expression of concern for the impact of slavery and the slave trade on …


Identity, Dissent, And The Roots Of Georgia’S Middle Class, 1848-1865, Thomas Robinson Jan 2019

Identity, Dissent, And The Roots Of Georgia’S Middle Class, 1848-1865, Thomas Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, which focuses on Georgia from 1848 until 1865, argues that a middle class formed in the state during the antebellum period. By the time secession occurred, the class coalesced around an ideology based upon modernization, industrialization, reform, occupation, politics, and northern influence. These factors led the doctors, lawyers, merchants, ministers, shopkeepers, and artisans who made up Georgia’s middle class to view themselves as different than Georgians above or below them on the economic scale. The feeling was often mutual, as the rich viethe middle class as a threat due to their income and education level while the poor …


Courtroom Wars: Constitutional Battles Over Conscription In The Civil War North, Nicholas Matthew Mosvick Jan 2019

Courtroom Wars: Constitutional Battles Over Conscription In The Civil War North, Nicholas Matthew Mosvick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In February 1863, Congress considered a bill to create for the first-time conscription at the national level. Democratic politicians vigorously protested that the proposed act was unconstitutional and destroyed the state militias. When Congress passed the Enrollment Act, commonly known as the “Conscription Act,” on March 3, 1863, outcry from Democrats about the unconstitutionality of national conscription immediately followed. In New York and Pennsylvania, Democratic newspaper editors and politicians decreed the act the worst among the Lincoln war measures in threatening to subvert the constitutional republic and to transform the United States into a despotism under the control of an …


Whistle Before You Work: Defining Paid Labor In The New Deal State, 1938-1947, Thomas Porter Jan 2019

Whistle Before You Work: Defining Paid Labor In The New Deal State, 1938-1947, Thomas Porter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the conceptualization of work from the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) through the Portal-To-Portal Pay Act of 1947. I argue that the FLSA created a new framework for industrial laborers to define what constituted work. This enables an understanding of work as defined by those in mines and on the industrial plants floor, allowing those who were closest to toil and exertion to create their own definitions. By 1946, Congress heeded to the complaints of the military and capitalists and codified their definition of work and the work week. This restricted the broadly …


My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism And Mobility In The Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, Christine Antoinette Rizzi Jan 2019

My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism And Mobility In The Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, Christine Antoinette Rizzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and …


A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett Jan 2019

A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dollar General Corporation has grown into a retail titan with more than 15 000 stores across the continental United States. The first chapter of this thesis traces the history of this multibillion-dollar firm since its founding as a family-run business in Scottsville Kentucky in the late 1930s. Situating Dollar General’s history within the evolving contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries illustrates that Dollar General Stores succeed when the economy staggers. Neoliberalism and global finance capitalism have only exacerbated the geographic expansion and profitability of the company as the second chapter begins to explore. Although Dollar General Stores open at …


Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young Jan 2019

Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …


A Church Adrift: Virginia's Church Of England, 1607-1677, Katherine Gray Blank Jan 2018

A Church Adrift: Virginia's Church Of England, 1607-1677, Katherine Gray Blank

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Church of England in the Virginia colony is an institution which has been much overlooked in historiography. Traditionally, historians have focused upon the weakness of the church, with its lack of a complete hierarchy and dearth of ministers. These weaknesses, combined with some of the more unsavory attitudes and actions of early colonists, have led many scholars to postulate that religion did not play much of a role in the Virginia colony. While the early colonists did struggle, and the church was weak, historians have overlooked the fact that most Virginians were seventeenth-century Englishmen, and inhabited a world that …


I'M Gonna Stay Right Here Until They Tear This Barrelhouse Down: Black Power And The Origins Of Blues Tourism In Greenville, Mississippi, Tyler Dewayne Moore Jan 2018

I'M Gonna Stay Right Here Until They Tear This Barrelhouse Down: Black Power And The Origins Of Blues Tourism In Greenville, Mississippi, Tyler Dewayne Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation connects and comments on the historiography of the black freedom struggle as well as studies of the blues and blues tourism. To blues studies, it recognizes the artists discovered by Worth Long as well as his field research and festival production in the 1970s. It moves away from the social constructions of authenticity and segregation of sound, and it emphasizes black agency. My dissertation also contributes to the historiography of the black freedom struggle by providing a much-needed examination of rural economic and community development in 1970s Mississippi. For studies of blues tourism, it announces a revisionist account …


Slavery's Holy Profits: Religion And Capitalism In The Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley, John Lindbeck Jan 2018

Slavery's Holy Profits: Religion And Capitalism In The Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley, John Lindbeck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the antebellum lower Mississippi Valley, a place in which white Americans identified the commercial progress of the slave-based cotton kingdom with the manifestation of God’s will. It reconciles the two different “Souths” described by recent historians of slavery and capitalism and scholars of antebellum southern evangelicalism. The dissertation begins with the early years of white settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley, when the connection between commercial prosperity and God’s providence was not clear. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, these twin ideals merged as one. In those decades, churches and ministers provided stable centers of faith …


Native Music And Regular Gigs: A History Of The Maple Leaf Bar, Pieter Frank Kossen Jan 2017

Native Music And Regular Gigs: A History Of The Maple Leaf Bar, Pieter Frank Kossen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this work is to construct a history of the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans, Louisiana in order to determine its place and establish its importance in the musical history of New Orleans. Opened in early 1974, the Maple Leaf Bar is the oldest continually-functioning music club in the city of New Orleans outside of the French Quarter, and is accorded a share of the credit for the current popularity in New Orleans of the roots music of New Orleans and Louisiana. This will be accomplished by identifying and examining comtraits the Maple Leaf Bar shares with …


Succeeding King: Ralph David Abernathy, Sclc, And The Long Civil Rights Movement, Scott Blusiewicz Jan 2017

Succeeding King: Ralph David Abernathy, Sclc, And The Long Civil Rights Movement, Scott Blusiewicz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as America’s most prominent civil rights activist during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Due to his eloquent speeches and ability to organize large-scale nonviolent protests, King inspired numerous individuals to participate in a grassroots movement for equal rights. After earning two landmark victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King and his SCLC colleagues shifted the focus of their work to improving economic opportunities for America’s poor citizens. To combat poverty, King planned an ambitious …


Beyond Isolation: The Mississippi Delta In A Global World, Stella D. Lindsey Jan 2017

Beyond Isolation: The Mississippi Delta In A Global World, Stella D. Lindsey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the paradoxes and complexities of the Mississippi Delta through an international lens. The fundamental premise guiding the research is that goods, people, ideas, technology, and capital cross national borders; therefore, local transformations can only be fully understood within a global context. The study concentrates on the evolution of the reciprocal, complex relationship between the region and the international community, along with the local and global consequences of a series of transnational exchanges. With a primary focus on agribusinesses, the research challenges traditional visions of the Delta as an isolated and provincial region immune to modernization. Instead the …


The Corruption Of Promise: The Insane Asylum In Mississippi, 1848-1910, Whitney E. Barringer Jan 2016

The Corruption Of Promise: The Insane Asylum In Mississippi, 1848-1910, Whitney E. Barringer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ideology of insane asylum reform, which emphasized the Enlightenment language of human rights and the humane treatment of the mentally ill, reached American shores in the early-mid-nineteenth century. When asylum reform began to disseminate throughout the United States, forward-thinking Mississippians latched onto the idea of the reformed asylum as a humane way to treat mentally ill Mississippians and to bolster the humanitarian image of a Southern slave society to its Northern critics. When the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened in 1855, its superintendents were optimistic about the power of the state to meet mental healthcare needs. While Mississippi slave …


Cavaliers And Crackers: Landless Whites In The Mind Of The Elite Antebellum South, Jeffrey Glossner Jan 2016

Cavaliers And Crackers: Landless Whites In The Mind Of The Elite Antebellum South, Jeffrey Glossner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to their marginalized role in southern society, landless white southerners have often been overlooked by historians who study social class, politics and intellectual culture in the antebellum south. But depictions of landless white southerners were prominent in contemporary elite literature and their place was debated extensively by social commentators. These depictions marginalized landless whites from southern honor culture and marked them as a people who were not quite white in a social and biological sense. This characterization was both a cause and effect of elite southern unease with the presence of a class of poor landless whites. This unease …


The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Russell James Henderson Jan 2016

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Russell James Henderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a history of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Passed by Congress in 1971, it set the national suffrage age at eighteen for all state and federal elections. It remains the last federal amendment to broaden voting rights and the most quickly ratified amendment to the Constitution. Those few scholars who have written about the 18-vote law uniformly explain that it emerged as recompense for patriotic duty; i.e. if teenagers were old enough to fight for America in Vietnam, they were also old enough to vote in U.S. elections. This dissertation agrees that young Americans …


The Bawdy Bluff: Prostitution In Memphis, Tennessee, 1820-1900, Aran Tyson Smith Jan 2016

The Bawdy Bluff: Prostitution In Memphis, Tennessee, 1820-1900, Aran Tyson Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “Bawdy Bluff” is a study of prostitution in Memphis, Tennessee, between the city’s founding and the end of the nineteenth century. Its focus is on the relationship of prostitutes to the wider community as well as their lived experience. The bulk of scholarship on prostitution in nineteenth century America examines Northeastern cities and Western mining camps. Outside of New Orleans, there is a dearth of research into prostitution in the urban South. This dissertation seeks to correct this oversight. By examining prostitution through the lenses of race, class, and gender, the “Bawdy Bluff” illuminates the ways power operated in …


Take The Mountain: The International Order Of Twelve Knights And Daughters Of Tabor And The Black Health Care Initiative In The Mississippi Delta, 1938 – 1983, Katrina Rochelle Sims Jan 2016

Take The Mountain: The International Order Of Twelve Knights And Daughters Of Tabor And The Black Health Care Initiative In The Mississippi Delta, 1938 – 1983, Katrina Rochelle Sims

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation explores the intersection of black racial uplift strategies, black women’s entry and marginalization within distinctly male-dominated spaces such as fraternal orders, and institutional racism, specifically the implementation of regulatory policies to hinder predominately black communities from accessing state programs and funding resources. It demonstrates how African Americans in the Mississippi Delta circumvented Jim Crow practices that restricted black Mississippians access to facilities and funding. It acknowledges the comprehensive health care initiative that provided African Americans with autonomous medical care. It complicates the narrative that defined civil rights strictly within the framework of the franchise and integration of public …


The Design Of The Southern Future: The Struggle To Build White Democracy At The University Of Mississippi, 1890-1948, Thomas John Carey Jan 2016

The Design Of The Southern Future: The Struggle To Build White Democracy At The University Of Mississippi, 1890-1948, Thomas John Carey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how ideas about the future and the past shaped the meaning and role of Mississippi’s flagship state university during the Jim Crow period. “The Design of the Southern Future” is a story of contingency and contestation, of struggles over expansion and democratization, and of the burdens of founding myths and myths of the founding. It reveals the interior dynamics that shaped the University of Mississippi’s development from the birth of Jim Crow until just before the desegregation crises of the 1950s and 1960s. These internal processes allothe institution to overcome problems of exclusivity and class tension, but …


The Fly In The Buttermilk: The History, Perceptions And Principles Of Black Greek Lettered Organizations At Ole Miss, Ashley F. G. Norwood Jan 2016

The Fly In The Buttermilk: The History, Perceptions And Principles Of Black Greek Lettered Organizations At Ole Miss, Ashley F. G. Norwood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

At the University of Mississippi, engaging across racial and cultural lines is still something many find difficult, or they simply don’t want to do it. Over the years, the university has chartered a variety of culture specific organizations, counsels and groups. In 1973, the first black Greek-lettered organization chartered at the university. The presence of black fraternalism is culturally different from the white Greeks that have been established on campus as early as the 1850s. This thesis studies the chartering of the nine black Greek-lettered organizations at the university, the past and present perceptions of these groups and the principles …


Please Don't Forget About Me: African American Women, Mississippi, And The History Of Crime And Punishment In Parchman Prison, 1890-1980, Telisha Dionne Bailey Jan 2015

Please Don't Forget About Me: African American Women, Mississippi, And The History Of Crime And Punishment In Parchman Prison, 1890-1980, Telisha Dionne Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite the vast amount of research covering incarcerated men in the southern prison system from the beginning of the nineteenth century to present, the incarceration of women has gone almost unexamined. As the forgotten offender, historians, criminologist, and others interested in Mississippi carceral studies have failed to include a historical study that focuses on the incarceration of African American women in Mississippi. To date, there are two major historical works that explore Mississippi penology and its notorious Parchman Penitentiary. David Oshinsky’s, Worse Than Slavery and William Banks Taylor’s, Down on Parchman Farm, are the two pivotal historical works that examine …


Missouri! Bright Land Of The West: Civil War Memory And Western Identity In Missouri, Amy Fluker Jan 2015

Missouri! Bright Land Of The West: Civil War Memory And Western Identity In Missouri, Amy Fluker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project argues that Missouri’s singular position as a border state not only between the North and South, but also between the East and West shaped the state’s Civil War experience as well as its memory of the conflict. During the Civil War, Missouri was a slaveholding border state on the western frontier and home to a diverse and divided population. Neither wholly Union nor Confederate, Missouri’s Civil War was bitterly divisive. In its aftermath, Missourians struggled to come to terms with what it had been about. They found no place within the national narratives of Civil War commemoration emerging …


Transformation Of The American Mafia, 1880-1960, Connor Anthony Hagan Jan 2015

Transformation Of The American Mafia, 1880-1960, Connor Anthony Hagan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to discover how the American Cosa Nostra transformed in the early 20th century. The goal of this project is to show how the American mafia’s interactions with the US government evolved the mafia from a group of discriminated immigrants into consummate insiders who adapted to the American historical landscape. To explore this transformation and evolving relationship, this thesis analyzed numerous sources from US government archives and personal testimonies of American Cosa Nostra members. The American Cosa Nostra operated as a shadowy, yet powerful organization throughout much of the 20th century. During this time, the American mafia influenced …


The Costs Of Cuba Libre: U.S. Neo-Imperialism, Tourism In Cuba, And The Habana Hilton, Lauren Elizabeth Holt Jan 2015

The Costs Of Cuba Libre: U.S. Neo-Imperialism, Tourism In Cuba, And The Habana Hilton, Lauren Elizabeth Holt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an investigation into North American tourism in Cuba between the “Spanish-American War” in 1898 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The research it presents was prompted by a set of photographs taken at the grand opening of the Habana Hilton in March 1958, part of the Bern and Franke Keating Collection, held in the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi. Many of these photos are also included throughout the text of the paper. I begin with an overview of the relationship between Cuba and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, …


Sectionalism, Nationalism, And The Agrarian Revolt, 1877-1892, Benjamin Houston Turner Purvis Jan 2014

Sectionalism, Nationalism, And The Agrarian Revolt, 1877-1892, Benjamin Houston Turner Purvis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Southern Farmers' Alliance led the largest coalition of late-nineteenth-century farmers' and urban reformers. The reform movement called for laws opposing speculation on agricultural prices, restricting the powers of business trusts, regulating railroad freight rates, and increasing the circulation of currency based on silver. Advocates also strongly opposed the proponents of sectionalism who emphasized differences and conflicts between the primary sections of the country, the North and the South. Differences between the North and South largely revolved around the issue of slavery and emerged shortly after the founding of the nation. Tension accelerated in the years following the Mexican-American War …