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 …

The Nature Of Authentic Governance: A Treatise On Democratic Rhetoric And Rhetorical Democracy, Daniel L. Foster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Democracy is a form of governance that allows for the flourishing of human potentiality. Unfortunately, democracy has become less of a means of governance and more of a rhetorical device to secure the consent of the people to be ruled by the elite few. Thus the current study seeks to disrupt this hegemonic means of control through an explication of authentic governance and democracy in order to demonstrate that the current manifestations of governance associated with democracy are inauthentic. To begin, authentic democracy -direct or as it is constituted here, rhetorical democracy- can foster a citizenry of active and empowered …

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 …

The Grass-Roots Challenges With Administration: Conscription Evasion, Contraband, And Resistance In Napoleonic Europe, Julia A. Lyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The French model of the nineteenth century led the way to modernity in establishing centralized administrative governments throughout Continental Europe. Several Napoleonic policies that led to the establishment of a modern centralized state were not positive in their effects on the local communities. Research widely categorizes resistance to the Napoleonic program as either militarily or economically based. This study uses the French court cases from the Court of Cassation dated 1804 to 1820 to provide a different interpretation to the discussion of local resistance to Napoleonic authority on an international level. Conscription fraud, contraband, and resistance to government officials reveal …

"Queen Of All Islands": The Imagined Cartography Of Matthew Paris's Britain, John Wyatt Greenlee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the middle decade of the thirteenth century, the Benedictine monk and historian Matthew Paris drew four regional maps of Britain. The monk's works stand as the earliest extant maps of the island and mark a distinct shift from the cartographic traditions of medieval Europe. Historians have long considered the version attached to the monk's Abbreviatio Chronicorum – the Claudius map – as the last and most thorough of Paris's images of Britain. However, scholars have focused on the document's limitations as an accurate geographic representation and have failed to consider critically Paris's representation of Britain with an eye towards …

A Problem Of Perception An Analysis Of The Formation, Reception, And Implementation Of National Socialist Ideology In Germany, 1919 To 1939, Derrick Angermeier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to dispel the notion that Nazi ideology was merely an afterthought to numerous actions taken by the Nazis. The first chapter discusses how Nazism’s earliest adherents internalized notions from World War I into an ideology that would motivate the early Nazi Movement to launch the Beer Hall Putsch. The second chapter focuses on the Nazi Party’s electoral tactics and how those actions correlated with entrenched Nazi ideological notions of recognition and community. Finally, the third chapter will seek to demonstrate that the numerous repressive measures implemented by the Third Reich were part of a general plan to …

Contemporary Perceptions Of The Solidarity Movement Held By Polish Nationals, Nathan P. Buhr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Widespread participation in the 1980s Solidarity movement by Polish nationals of both genders, varying ideologies, and differing political backgrounds has led to diverse views of the history and narrative of the movement that today is interpreted in differing ways by groups and individuals. To gain a better understanding of how Poles view this unique time period of their history a survey featuring 54 questions was dispatched to and completed by over 121 Polish nationals. All questions relate to the Solidarity movement in categories covering: Prominent People, Media, Economics, Religion, and Education and concluding with a free-write section for additional comments …

The Forgotten Footnote Of The Second World War: An Examination Of The Historiography Of Scandinavia During World War Ii, Jason C. Phillips

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Anglo-American interpretation of the Second World War has continuously overlooked the significance of the Scandinavian region to the outcome of the war. This thesis seeks to address some of the more glaring errors of omission that have dampened the Anglo-American understanding of the war. Attention will first be paid to Finland and how its war against the Soviet Union in 1939-1940, known as the Winter War, influenced Adolf Hitler and his decision to launch Operation ‘Barbarossa.’ In regards to Sweden, attention will be paid to how critical Swedish iron ore was to the Nazi war economy. Finally, the thesis …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Pietro Bembo’S Bias: Patronage, History, And The Italic Wars, Zachary M. Lizee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Italic Wars, the Italian peninsula experienced foreign invasions and internal discord between rivaling duchies and city-states. Florence and Venice both faced internal and external discord due to the constant wars and political in fighting. Venetian Pietro Bembo wrote historical accounts of this period during the Renaissance. His contemporaries, Marino Sanudo, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini, also wrote historical accounts of this time. My research spotlights Bembo’s history of the Venetian Republic. This history was written in a supposedly objective fashion, yet, scholarship shows that historical writing from this time contained bias. I focused on Bembo because there is …

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 …

The Bane Of Liberty: Opposition To Standing Armies As The Basis Of Antifederalist Thought, Charles Brand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The severely neglected subject of Antifederalism is the focal point of this project. As the framing ideology opposed to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Antifederalism has not been treated with the same historical care as Federalism, the successful and currently operational ideology. This is both an intellectual and ethical mistake that ignores the role that Antifederalism played in procuring the Bill of Rights, and still plays in the sphere of political dissent. The de facto successors to the Revolutionary mentality, Antifederalists took it upon themselves to conclusively secure the American conception of liberty, already wrested from British hands, from …

The Red Scare And The Bi's Quest For Power: The Soviet Ark As Political Theater, Austin Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Red Scare of 1919-1920 has been presented as a wave of anti-Radical hysteria that swept post WWI America; a hysteria to which the state reluctantly capitulated to by arresting Radicals and deporting those alien Radicals they deemed most threatening. This presentation, however, is ludicrous when the motivations of the state and its conservative allies are examined. The truth of the matter was that almost all of the people targeted by the Red Scare represented no significant threat to the institutions of the United States and were merely targeted for holding Leftwing ideas, or being connected to a group that …

From Skeptical Disinterest To Ideological Crusade: The Road To American Participation In The Greek Civil War, 1943-1949, Stephen Villiotis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way in which the United States formulated its policy toward Greece during the Greek civil war (1943-1949). It asserts that U.S. intervention in Greece was based on circumstantial evidence and the assumption of Soviet global intentions, rather than on dispatches from the field which consistently reported from 1943-1946 that the Soviets were not involved in that country’s affairs. It also maintains that the post-Truman Doctrine American policy in Greece was in essence, a continuation of British policy there from 1943-1946, which meant to impose an unpopular government on the people of Greece, and tolerated unlawful violence …

Too Few Voices, Too Many Distractions, Too Little Concern, Too Little Understanding: The American Media During The Rwandan Genocide Of 1994, Skip-Thomas Parrish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Upwards of one million people died during the Genocide, Civil War, and Refugee Crisis in Rwanda and surrounding nations, during one of the fastest Genocides to occur in modern history. Even though the United Nations and its member states had a legal mandate to intervene in cases of Genocide due to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the world chose not to. While there were a myriad of reasons for this the media played a part in this situation. Using the coverage of US print magazine articles, this thesis argues that the media missed the …

Captain John Smith And American Identity: Evolutions Of Constructed Narratives And Myths In The 20th And 21st Centuries, Joseph Corbett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historical narratives and anecdotes concerning Captain John Smith have been told and retold throughout the entire history the United States of America, and they have proved to be sacred, influential, and contested elements in the construction of the individual, sectional, regional, and national identity of many. In this thesis, I first outline some of the history of how narratives and discourses surrounding Captain John Smith were directly connected with the identity of many Americans during the 18th and 19th century, especially Virginians and Southerners. Then I outline how these narratives and discourses from the 18th and 19th centuries have continued …

The Politics Of The Righteous: A Religious And Political History Of Conservative Neo-Evangelicals In Central Florida, Rustin Lloyd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1953 a small, seemingly insignificant, church was founded in Winter Park, Florida. By the early 1970s, Calvary Assembly of God, a church that had started with a dirt floor, was declared one of the fastest growing churches in America with membership easily reaching over several thousands.1 In the late 1970s and 1980s, it became a major religious and political force in central Florida so much so that it had received visits from then presidential hopefuls Pat Robertson and Vice President George Bush. The changes that took place at Calvary Assembly, both politically and religiously, provided a microcosm of the …

I Play To Beat The Machine: Masculinity And The Video Game Industry In The United States, Anne Mcdivitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the video game industry within the United States from the first game that was created in 1958 until the shift to Japanese dominance of the industry in 1985, and how white, middle class masculinity was reflected through the sphere of video gaming. The first section examines the projections of white, middle class masculinity in U.S. culture and how that affected the types of video games that the developers created. The second section examines reflections of this masculine culture that surrounded video gaming in the 1970s and 1980s in the developers, gamers, and the media, while demonstrating how …

Imperial Japan's Human Experiments Before And During World War Two, Alan Vanderbrook

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, Ishii Shiro created Unit 731 and began testing biological weapons on unwilling human test subjects. The history of Imperial Japan’s human experiments was one in which Ishii and Unit 731 was the principal actor, but Unit 731 operated in a much larger context. The network in which 731 operated consisted of Unit 731 and all its sub-units, nearly every major Japanese university, as well as many people in Japan’s scientific and medical community, military hospitals, military and civilian laboratories, and the Japanese military as a whole. Japan’s racist ultra-nationalist movement heavily influenced these institutions …

Pompey's Organization Of The East, Joshua Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis illustrates how Pompey’s annexations and organizing of the eastern provinces for Rome were more pragmatic than imperialistic. Greek and Eastern specialists are used in order to give a better back story than the imperialist thesis offers in its reasoning for the annexations. By adding more detail from the Greek and Eastern perspective, other dimensions are opened that shed new light upon the subject of Pompey’s eastern settlements. Through this method, the pirate campaign and the annexation of Syria are greatly developed, especially in concern to changes in culture that Pompey’s settlements forced. The culture of piracy and banditry …

The African-American Islamic Renaissance And The Rise Of The Nation Of Islam, Patrick Denis Bowen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines African-American Islamic culture from 1920 through 1959, a period I label the "African-American Islamic Renaissance" (AAIR). The AAIR is characterized by a significant increase in interest in Islam, extreme diversity in views about Islam, and the absence of a single organization dominating African-American Islamic culture for a significant amount of time. Previous works dealing with African-American Islam in this period have failed to fully recognize these features, particularly the last of these. As a result, explanations for the rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI) have not satisfactorily explained why it was only the NOI--and not other …

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 …

The Fearful State Of England: The Amalgamation Of Fin-De-Siècle Anxieties And Anarchist Outrages In The Public Deconstruction Of The Liberal State, 1892-1911, David R. Speicher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes a series of Anarchist crimes, occurring in England from 1892-1911, and concentrates on the public dialogue that emerged in the popular press as a result of these crimes. British newspapers and periodicals published extensively on the crimes, and the crimes became a way for the British public to discuss wide-ranging topics, such as liberalism, labor, immigration, poverty and national degeneration. Many Britons believed that these crimes had revealed an Anarchist danger hidden within England, and, as a result, many Englanders perceived Britain's social and political customs to be outdated and unsafe. These crimes occurred at a time …

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 …

John Brown, Martyer For The Cause Of The Blacks: John Brown, The Haitian Revolution, And The Death Of American Slavery, Wes Trueblood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Haitian Revolution changed John Brown to a degree not recognized by scholars. Brown lived in an America largely shaped by the revolt, and it is no surprise that it shaped him as well. While preoccupied with debt, Brown did not consider the Haitian Revolution at length. Released from debt in 1842, however, Brown began reflecting on the revolt and, consequently, on his pacifism. Brown could not reconcile the two. Less than five years after his insolvency Brown had abandoned pacifism, and, in 1847, he revealed to Frederick Douglass that he planned to employ the bloody lessons of the Haitian …

Prairie, Property, And Promise: Black Migrants And Farmers In Kansas, 1860-1885, Keith Dennis Mccall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black migrants transformed Kansas in the 1860s and 1870s. This thesis focuses on Franklin County, Kansas, as an unit of analysis that is demographically and geographically representative of the black migrant experience in the state between 1860 and 1885. This work demonstrates that black migrants gained a secure economic footing in the county by helping to develop prairie into productive farms. Their agricultural labors turned grassland into fertile fields, and their crop yields aided in attracting agriculturally-related industries to the region. As successful farmers who accumulated wealth and property, black migrants created a social space for themselves in Kansas. They …