Digital Commons Network^™

Defying Convention: Atypical Perspectives Of Slavery In Antebellum New Orleans, Amanda N. Carr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the first half of the nineteenth century, slavery became a vital economic component upon which the success of the southern states in America rested. Cotton was king, and slavery was the peculiar institution that ensured its dominance in the domestic and international markets of America. Popular portrayals, however, often neglect the complicated dynamics of American slavery and instead depict the institution in simplistic terms. The traditional view has emphasized an image of white southerners as slaveholders and blacks as slaves. In New Orleans, the lives of three men—all of whom were tied to slavery in varying capacities—reveal a much …

Reconciling The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haley V. Manis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the observations of Nancy J. Peterson on historical wounds as a springboard to discuss Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and its use of both white and black characters to reexamine the origins of the historical wounds and why they are so difficult to deal with even today. Other scholarly works will be used to further investigate the importance of each character in the story and what they mean to the wound itself. Specifically, Dana is analyzed alongside the other main characters: Rufus, Alice, and Kevin. Though Dana’s relationships with these characters, Kindred’s version of the past can be …

Petite Politique: The British, French, Iroquois, And Everyday Power In The Lake Ontario Borderlands, 1724-1760, Greg Rogers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the exercise and limitation of power at the interpersonal and intercultural level in the contested borderlands region around Lake Ontario in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Beginning in the 1720s, the region underwent an intensification of geopolitical competition among the British and French empires and the Iroquois Six Nations. During this time that Iroquois Confederacy granted competing trading posts to the British at Oswego and the French at Niagara in an effort to secure goods, balance neighboring rivals, and maintain their own sovereignty. Despite these cessions, the social and diplomatic interests of the Iroquois remained …

"A Part Of, Rather Than Apart From" : Louisville's Black Arts Scene In The Mid-Twentieth Century., Wesley Sawyer Cunningham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the role that three predominantly black art organizations – Gallery Enterprises, the Louisville Arts Workshop, and the West Side Players – played in Louisville, Kentucky’s black community during the mid-twentieth century. Working from the integrated and cooperative nature of the long Black Freedom Struggle in Louisville, Kentucky, local black artists formed integrated organizations around the arts and promoted black identity, inclusivity and creativity through community-building and consciousness-raising. Furthermore, by defining the varying uses of the term “political” in reference to black art, this work shows that the politicization of artwork can best be understood using a spectrum …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

Dead Center: Polarization And The Democratic Party, 1932-2000, Colin S. Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Polarization forced massive changes in the institutions of Washington throughout the 20^th century, and the Democratic Party played a key role throughout. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party formed the powerful New Deal coalition. The coalition faltered in the turbulent 1960s under the pressures of the Vietnam War and racial unrest. The chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago dealt the coalition a mortal wound. Young voters and activists gained an outsized voice in the party. Several crushing defeats in presidential elections followed as the party chose unelectable candidates who appealed to the passions of left-wing activists …

A Nativist Upsurge : Kentucky's Know Nothing Party Of The 1850s., Eric B. Brumfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the rise and fall of the Know Nothing Party in Kentucky. Beginning with the presidential election of 1844, this thesis traces the decline of the Whig Party and the growth of nativism in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to the political shift, the thesis explores the growing immigration numbers of the 1840s and 1850s and the anti-Catholicism that propelled nativist attitudes. While the issue of slavery sank the national Whig Party, this thesis argues that the failure to address concerns over immigration and naturalization largely led to the party’s downfall in Kentucky. Destroying the second party system, …

"Puritan Hypocrisy" And "Conservative Catholicity" : How Roman Catholic Clergy In The Border States Interpreted The U.S. Civil War., Carl C. Creason

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how Roman Catholic clergy in the Border States—Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—interpreted the United States Civil War. Overall, it argues that prelates and priests from the region viewed the war through a religious lens informed by their Catholic worldview. Influenced by their experiences with anti-Catholicism and nativism as well as the arguments of the Catholic apologist movement, the clergy interpreted the war as a product of the ill-effects of Protestantism in the country. In response, the clergy argued that if more Americans had practiced Catholicism then the war could and would have been avoided. Furthermore, this thesis illustrates …

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

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 …

German Pows Make Colorado Home: Coping By Craft And Exchange, Christopher Michael Morine

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From 1943 to 1946, the U.S. government held over 3,000 German POWs at Camp Trinidad in southern Colorado. In 2013 and 2014, archaeological fieldwork, interviews, and archival research were conducted in order to better understand the daily lives of those incarcerated at the camp. The information gathered about artifacts, environmental features, and personal narratives, reveals insights into the lesser known details of the prisoners' lives. Despite the U.S. military rules and regulations and efforts by American personnel within camp, prisoners created goods they wanted or needed. Acquiring the necessary goods was accomplished through modification of available goods, through scavenging the …

The German Hun In The Georgia Sun: German Prisoners Of War In Georgia, Leisa N. Vaughn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Studies of prisoners of war in America have received renewed attention since the opening of the prisoner facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, this is not a new field of scholarship. Since the 1970s, with Arnold Krammer’s Nazi Prisoners of War in America, American treatment of prisoners, especially during WWII,has flourished as a field. Increasingly popular in the 1980s were statewide studies of prisoner of war camps and the captive experience. Despite this focus, Georgia’s role in prisoner of war administration and the captive’s experiences have been overlooked. This thesis seeks to remedy this gap.

Georgia housed prisoners of …

All The News That’S Fit To Sing: Phil Ochs, Vietnam, And The National Press, Thomas C. Waters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Though a prolific topical musician and a prominent figure of the antiwar movement during the 1960s, Phil Ochs remains relatively understudied by scholars due to the lure of more commercially successful folk artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. His music facilitated awareness of pressing, and sometimes controversial, issues that would otherwise have not been discussed. Focusing on Ochs’ most musically productive years from 1964 until 1968, which coincide with the years of increased American involvement in Southeast Asia, this thesis analyzes Ochs in a way that has not been attempted before. It places his anti-Vietnam War songs in …