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