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El Hip-Hop Cubano: An Agent Of Social And Political Change In Cuba?, Margaree Jackson
El Hip-Hop Cubano: An Agent Of Social And Political Change In Cuba?, Margaree Jackson
Honors Theses
Cuba experienced two distinct periods during which Afro-Cubans encountered various constraints and opportunities. During the Revolutionary Period, the Cuban government outlawed all forms of discrimination and created many opportunities for Afro-Cubans to participate in society. However, these new opportunities came with the price of outlawing discussion of racial discrimination and political and social organization along racial lines. Afro-Cubans who still experienced racial inequality faced the threat of political imprisonment if they spoke out against discrimination. In contrast, during the Special Period, Cuban experienced a devastating economic collapse in 1991. Government policies created in response to the collapse removed many of …
Highway 61: Good Roads, Great Migrations, And Delta Blues, Samuel Willcoxon
Highway 61: Good Roads, Great Migrations, And Delta Blues, Samuel Willcoxon
Honors Theses
This thesis analyzes the social and racial factors that contributed to the cultural significance of U.S. Highway 61. First, I explore the background of road building and transportation in the United States. Next I detail the history of convict labor in the South, from convict leasing to convict labor on roads as a result of the Good Roads Movement. Third, I describe how economic and social conditions contributed to the out-migration of southerners during the twentieth century. Lastly, I analyze how social conditions spawned the Mississippi Delta blues, and how Highway 61 became a symbol of opportunity for blues musicians.
A Pro-Life Re-Alignment: Proposing A Shift In Focus Toward Demand-Side Anti-Abortion Advocacy, Dylan Fink
A Pro-Life Re-Alignment: Proposing A Shift In Focus Toward Demand-Side Anti-Abortion Advocacy, Dylan Fink
Honors Theses
The purpose of this thesis is to inspire a change in the conversation within the pro-life community and to create a new approach for anti-abortion proponents to use to reduce the number of abortions in the United States. Based on a supply and demand theory of economics, any pro-life strategy to destroy the market for abortion falls into one of two categories. Until now, the pro-life movement has been focused almost exclusively on limiting the supply of abortion services. While the pro-life movement should continue its efforts to ban and restrict abortion, these efforts will fail to fully end abortion …
To Sink Our National Character: Slavery And National Character In The U.S. House Of Representatives, 1789-1820, Jessica Johnson
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 …
Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey
Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My documentary project focuses on the group of students who planned this event and why they invited Kennedy. The thesis project consists of two parts: a film and a paper. This paper accompanies the documentary thesis film Truth Marching On: Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Mississippi. In this paper, I attempt to do the following: 1) summarize the necessary backstory of Kennedy’s 1966 visit to the university that is central to my film and paper; 2) provide information and analysis of the components that make up the short film, which include interviews, archival materials, and additional film …
Identity, Dissent, And The Roots Of Georgia’S Middle Class, 1848-1865, Thomas Robinson
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
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
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 …
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …
My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism And Mobility In The Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, Christine Antoinette Rizzi
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
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 …
A Balm For The Times: The Origins And Evolution Of The Lost Cause In The South Carolina Low Country, 1830-1876, Andrew Patrick Davis
A Balm For The Times: The Origins And Evolution Of The Lost Cause In The South Carolina Low Country, 1830-1876, Andrew Patrick Davis
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study uses the concept of civil religion as a framework through which to examine the origins and early development of the Lost Cause in the South Carolina Low country. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as American colonists severed their ties with Great Britain and established an independent republic they likewise began forming a civil religion or a set of beliefs regarding the relationship between God and their incipient polity. Prophetic in nature the central tenets of this civil religion held that the Almighty proved actively involved in human history and that Americans represented an especially chosen …
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
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 …
The Wise Women Of Oxford, Jaz Brisack
The Wise Women Of Oxford, Jaz Brisack
Honors Theses
In Fall 2015, a group of women began meeting for lunch. The first meeting was nearly spontaneous: a woman named Eunice Benton emailed a few of her friends, saying that she would prefer to go out to eat with them at one o’clock on a Friday instead of eating alone. From there, the email list Eunice had created began growing and incorporating many new women from a variety of backgrounds, some of whom Eunice knew and then, increasingly, some she didn’t. The list spiked tremendously after the 2016 presidential election, as the group provided comfort to women who were extremely …
Silent Majorities: The Brief History Of A Curious Term, 1920-1980, Jordan R. Holman
Silent Majorities: The Brief History Of A Curious Term, 1920-1980, Jordan R. Holman
Honors Theses
This paper examines the use of the term “the silent majority” from 1920-1980, tracing the term from its roots in the prohibition and moral movements of the 1920s and 1930s, to its resurfacing in the 1950s in connection to race and integration, to finally Nixon’s popularization of the term. The sources in which the term was used as such were located through Google Books, the University of Mississippi’s One Search tool, and the Chronicling America database. The Google Ngram Viewer was also utilized in creating a graph that tracked the usage of “the silent majority” in digitized literature through the …
What We Could Do: Stories, Jacob D. Ferguson
What We Could Do: Stories, Jacob D. Ferguson
Honors Theses
A collection of fiction and creative non-fiction—short stories and personal letters—exploring the lives, fears, anxieties, and joys of characters who grew up gay in southern, religious families. (Under the direction of Beth Spencer)
The Effect Of Instructional Expenditures On Student Outcomes: Evidence From St. Louis-Area Public School Districts, Noah Antle
Honors Theses
This thesis seeks to contribute to the broader conversation over the relationship between school spending and student outcomes. Using twenty-two public school districts in the St. Louis area, annual data on instructional expenditures and two measures of student outcomes (average composite ACT score and the percentage of high school graduates to enroll at a 2- or 4- year college or university within 180 days of graduation) was collected by request from the Missouri Department of Education and Secondary Education. Regression analysis was conducted with this data to determine whether or not raw changes in instructional expenditures per student or the …