Digital Commons Network^™

Can I Get A Yee-Haw And An Amen: Collecting And Interpreting Oral Histories Of Texas Cowboy Churches, Jake R. Mcadams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With more than 850 Christian cowboy ministries worldwide and approximately 160 individual cowboy churches in Texas, the cowboy church movement is an immensely important religious movement that speaks volumes about contemporary culture. Cowboy churches' "Low Barriers Model" Christianity attracts many disenchanted with traditional evangelicalism's assumed sterilized and feminized religion. Despite the cowboy church movement's exponential growth since the late-1980s, few outside the movement understand the complexity cowboy churches envelop. Using Cowboy Christians' oral histories, Jake McAdams argues that the cowboy church movement is a suburban seeker church movement centered around the mythic cowboy identity in which participants have a sincere …

Barbary Pirates: Thomas Jefferson, William Eaton, And The Evolution Of U.S. Diplomacy In The Mediterranean, Patrick N. Teye

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes U.S. relations with the Barbary States from 1784 to 1805. After the American Revolution, the young nation found its commerce menaced in the Mediterranean by North African pirates sponsored by the rulers of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. As the U.S. sought to find a solution to end piracy and the practice of paying tributes or ransom to free Americans held captive, Thomas Jefferson proposed several solutions as a diplomat, vice president, and as president when he authorized the Tripolitan War (1801-1805). Thus, this look at U.S. relations with the Barbary States focuses on Jefferson’s evolving foreign …

“The Price Of A Woolworth’S Burger:” The Importance And Overshadowing Of The Nashville Sit-Ins, Aaron M. Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the sit-in demonstrations that used direct action and civil disobedience to target segregation at store lunch counters. The Nashville demonstrations were the last sit-in protests to occur that are discussed in this thesis, which also examines the protests in Wichita and Greensboro. Historians argue that the Wichita and Greensboro sit-ins were the most important demonstrations of their kind. The movement in Wichita was the first protest to end segregation policies at targeted stores, and the Greensboro protests led to a direct action movement in over fifty other cities targeting lunch counters. However, the Nashville based sit-ins surpassed …

Evil Becomes Her: Prostitution's Transition From Necessary To Social Evil In 19th Century America, Jacqueline Shelton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nineteenth-century America witnessed a period of tremendous growth and change as cities flourished, immigration swelled, and industrialization spread. This setting allowed prostitution to thrive and professionalize, and the visibility of such “immoral” activity required Americans to seek a new understanding of morality. Current literature commonly considers prostitution as immediately declared a “social evil” or briefly mentions why Americans assigned it such a role. While correct that it eventually did become a “social evil,” the evolution of discourse relating to prostitution is a bit more complex. This thesis provides a survey of this evolution set against the changing American understanding of …

Never Quite Settled: Southern Plain Folk On The Move, Ronald J. Mccall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the settlement of the Mississippi Territory through the eyes of John Hailes, a Southern yeoman farmer, from 1813 until his death in 1859. This is a family history. As such, the goal of this paper is to reconstruct John’s life to better understand who he was, why he left South Carolina, how he made a living in Mississippi, and to determine a degree of upward mobility.

Local, state, and federal government records provide the general context of this study and accurately track John’s movements and land purchases within the territory. John's frequent movements and the land he …

A Progressive Mind : Louis D. Brandeis And The Origins Of Free Speech., Elizabeth Diane Todd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study argues that Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis played a key role in shaping the jurisprudence of free political speech in the United States. Brandeis's judicial opinions on three freedom of speech cases in the post-World War I era provide the evidence for this argument. This thesis demonstrates how the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I allowed Brandeis the opportunity to reflect and rule on the Founding Fathers' meaning of free speech in a political democracy. Chapter I offers a detailed historiography of the Progressive Era and World War I. Chapter II provides a biography …

From The Committee Of 100 To The Committee To Re-Elect The President: The Political Campaigns Of Richard M. Nixon, Niklas Trzaskowski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From the Committee of 100 to the Committee to Re-elect the President: The Political Campaigns of Richard M. Nixon offers the reader a comprehensive biography of Richard M. Nixon through the lens of his political campaigns. This thesis illustrates how Richard Nixon became one of the fiercest campaigners in 20^th century American political history. This thesis, furthermore, examines the key staff and strategy of each campaign Nixon waged. This thesis, additionally, presents to the reader insight on how Nixon often fought his campaigns independently from the Republican Party and how he relied on the help of a few dedicated …

From A Northern Home To A Southern School: Cultural Imperialists Or Just Stubborn Yankees, Janel Janiczek Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the cultural influences on the lives of northern teachers in southern schools. During the 1860s, white, northern, middle-class women traveled to southern homes to begin and maintain schools for the recently freed slaves. Each woman carried with her an independent set of cultural systems that predetermined her perspective for educating the African American students. Furthermore, the northern relief agencies, Freedmen's Bureau agents, southern white citizens, and southern freedmen all had their own opinions for the education of the students. Although much time has elapsed between the 1860s and 2013, the same topics …

There Is A Gnawing Worm Under The Bark Of Our Tree Of Liberty: Anti-Mission Baptists, Religious Liberty, And Local Church Autonomy, John Lindbeck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The schism between American missionary and anti-mission Baptists of the 1820s and 1830s stemmed from an ideological disagreement about how Baptists should interact with the rest of society. While anti-mission Baptists maintained their distance from "worldly" non-Baptist society, missionary Baptists attempted to convert and transform "the world." Anti-mission Baptists feared that large-scale missionary and benevolent societies would slowly accumulate money and influence, and that they would use that influence to infringe on the autonomy of local congregations and the religious liberty of the nation. While histories of this topic often portray anti-mission Baptists as obscure and paranoid of an imagined …

I Won't Be Reconstructed: Good Old Rebels, Civil War Memory, And Popular Song, Joseph Melvin Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis traces the life of a song generally known as “I'm a Good Old Rebel” to explore the impact of popular culture on the creation of Civil War memory. Penned in the aftermath of Lee's surrender and containing lines like, “I hate the Yankee Nation / And everything they do; / I hate the Declaration / Of Independence, too,” the “Good Old Rebel” typifies a certain brand of white southern identity that refuses Confederate defeat and sounds a call to arms for continued rebellion against the federal government. To begin, this study creates a biographical sketch of the …

The Rule Of Three: Federal Courts And Prison Farms In The Post-Segregation South, Gregory Louis Richard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation discusses the United States Federal Court judicial reform of prison farms in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. More specifically, it examines the judicial and legislative history of the historic reform that includes the role of the individual judges that presided over the years of legislation necessary to bring Constitutional reforms to the state prison systems of the South. The judges and states in this study include J. Henley Smith of Arkansas, William C. Keady of Mississippi, and E. Gordon West of Louisiana. The research outlines an important aspect of the court system and the struggle between states and …

Creek Corridors Of Commerce: Converging Empires, Cultural Arbitration, And The Recourse Of Gulf Coast Trade, Kevin T. Harrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract: this dissertation seeks to interpret how the upper creeks used geographic corridors (i.e. rivers and overland paths) to the Gulf of Mexico to offset economic and military dominance from Carolina and Georgia during the eighteenth century. Not only did access to these channels assure their commercial and territorial integrity through the colonial and postcolonial periods, but they also facilitated and empowered specific lineages and factions among the creeks in general. These special interest groups presented a confusing array of political alignment and counter-alignment that permitted the creeks avenues to challenge the coercive effects of outside markets. This is not …

Changing Tactics, Changing Identities: Woman’S Suffrage Protests In Washington, D.C., 1913-1920, Kimberly K. Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the founding of the United States, the task of determining who has the right to political participation has been difficult. As a result, many groups, including women, had to take dramatic steps to ensure their right to suffrage and access to public space. Beginning in 1913 with the first National Demonstration and the pickets that followed in 1917, these women began to claim national public space as a space for protest. This research seeks to determine and understand the evolution of identities embraced by suffragists as correlated with protest tactics used from 1913 to 1920 in Washington, D.C. The …