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Black Power And Neighborhood Organizing In Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Way Community Center, 1966-1971, Sarah Jayne Paulsen

Theses and Dissertations

The Way Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. was a non-­‐profit community center that operated from 1966—1984 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Inspired by the national black power movement that arose in the 1960s, this community center led a local movement for African American equality. This thesis investigates The Way as a unique example of how black power ideology was implemented at the local level, in a city with a statistically small black population, presenting a northern urban context often overlooked by historians. The Way offered a space where aspiring young black musicians could perform, including Prince.

The Lost Ones: The Cold War State, Child Welfare Systems, And The Battles Over The Rosenberg Children, Megan Bennett

Theses and Dissertations

The conspiracy case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was a formative event in the early stages of the Cold War, but it also set their two sons adrift in a domestic climate which emphasized domestic order but feared communists and those connected to communists within their midst. Michael and Robert Rosenberg’s lives remained in various states of instability from their mother’s arrest in August 1950 until they were adopted by Anne and Abel Meeropol in 1958. The placement of the Rosenberg children with the Meeropols came only after years of upheaval and family strife in which the notoriety of the …

A Divisive Community: Race, Nation, And Loyalty In Santo Domingo, 1822 – 1844, Antony Wayne Keane-Dawes

Theses and Dissertations

On 8 February 1822, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer entered Santo Domingo and ended the short-lived experiment of a moderate republic and the triumph of a popular and radical vision of nationhood. For the next two decades, this unified Haitian Republic faced the scrutiny of Spanish, French, and British slave empires, fueled by the accounts and reports of those Dominicans who rejected this change in events. Using government correspondences, reports, pamphlets, and proclamations, this study argues that the Haitian Unification affected Dominican political allegiances and drove white elites to support Spanish monarchy in contrast to those in Santo Domingo who supported …

“I Hope They Fire Me:” Black Teachers In The Fight For Equal Education, 1910-1970, Candace Cunningham

Theses and Dissertations

Despite a growing body of research on African American schoolteachers and their role in the civil rights movement, as well as increased interest in South Carolina’s civil rights movement, few historians have uncovered the contributions black schoolteachers made to the South Carolina movement. Additionally, while many histories have highlighted how integral the NAACP was to the civil rights movement, few have revealed the deliberate relationship they built with black teachers associations. This dissertation uses the NAACP papers, political manuscript collections, oral histories, newspaper and magazine articles, and court documents to address this gap in the historiography. Chapter 1 discusses the …

Perks Of Perkins: Understanding Where Magic And Religion Meet For An Early Modern English Theologian, Kyle Sanders

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft by William Perkins, a prestigious Puritan theologian in Elizabethan England, highlights several themes in his witchcraft discourse which reflect his larger theology and more general trends in English theology: a world with an active Devil, predestination, providence, Biblicism, and anti-Catholicism. These central themes shape his understandings of where witchcraft fits within a world where God dominates everything. Witchcraft is an attempt to steal the dominion from God, even though the Devil only tricks witches into thinking they have power. He also tricks them into thinking he has power, …

Of Cannonades And Battle Cries: Aurality, The Battle Of The Alamo, And Memory, Michelle E. Herbelin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis takes a sensory-historical approach to the 1836 Siege and Battle of the Alamo, its inscription into history and its propagation as a touchstone of Texas’ memory and identity. My focus is on the auditory, an especially important sensory experience to consider. Among the many auditory tactics deployed during the siege, the storming itself took place in the pre-dawn darkness, and many of the survivors’ accounts were from women and children among the garrison, who were sequestered away from the visual experience of the battle. Flooding from the accounts of survivors into the popular imagination of Texans, the sounds …

Reading Material: Personal Libraries And The Cultivation Of Identity In Revolutionary South Carolina, Gabriella Angeloni

Theses and Dissertations

In South Carolina, a colony known for its wealth and transatlantic connections, private libraries offer a unique lens through which to explore the culture of reading and book ownership that was an essential part of daily provincial and early national life. Largely overlooked by historians, personal libraries functioned as statements of wellrounded, often cosmopolitan identities before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. A careful reading of newspaper advertisements, probate inventories, loyalist claims, and correspondence, in conjunction with extant books, bookcases, portraiture, and spaces allows us to reconstruct the culture of reading and book-ownership that dominated Lowcountry society before 1800. Doing …

The Popular Education Question In Antebellum South Carolina, 1800-1860, Brian A. Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reviews the struggle for popular education in Antebellum South Carolina. It contends that the failure of popular education in South Carolina was not a foregone conclusion nor was it mistake by school administration or state leaders, but instead, the failure to provide education for the white majority was the result of an intended goal. This project concludes that South Carolina remained without a system of public schools for the majority of citizens because those who opposed general education firmly believed popular education held the seeds of revolution while ignorance the better tool to perpetuate the status quo.

Chapter …

Planters, Merchants, And Revolution: Lobbying Power And The Economic Origins Of Independence In South Carolina, Christian David Lear

Theses and Dissertations

The origins of the American Revolution in South Carolina derived from politicoeconomic factors. Most prominent among those factors was the lobbying power that elite South Carolinians sought within a new confederation. The ruling class of the province looked to the British Caribbean and perceived an immense lobbying power that resulted from the strong economies of sugar islands such as Jamaica. South Carolina simply could not match this power because of the disparate economies. Islands of the British Caribbean enjoyed tremendous clout in shaping imperial policy because of the revenue raised by sugar exports. On the mainland, however, South Carolina enjoyed …

Lamps, Maps, Mud-Machines, And Signal Flags: Science, Technology, And Commerce In The Early United States, James Russell Risk

Theses and Dissertations

As the United States looked forward to its future as an independent nation at the end of the eighteenth century, many saw commerce as a way to secure the nation’s future. American commerce, however, was plagued by a number of commercial problems. Solving these commercial problems facilitated an interest in science and the practical arts as engineers, inventors, mechanics, public officials, and everyday tinkerers innovated new apparatuses to preserve, promote, and protect American commerce. Many of America’s commercial problems in the early nineteenth century, however, resulted from the young nation’s varied geography and environments. Combating the environment’s unrelenting forces often …

From Rice Fields To Duck Marshes: Sport Hunters And Environmental Change On The South Carolina Coast, 1890–1950, Matthew Allen Lockhart

Theses and Dissertations

In part because some historians are ethically opposed to their avocation, sport hunters of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are an understudied group. As environmental actors, they have been virtually ignored. Based on the biological traits of their quarry, one particular subset of sportsmen, waterfowl hunters, were especially disposed to manipulating the environment in which they hunted. Their efforts to attract migratory waterfowl to privately owned wetlands through habitat management, which started nearly a half-century before federal engineers and biologists undertook similar work on the national wildlife refuges in the 1930s, were pioneering. By the midpoint of the twentieth …

Within The House Of Bondage: Constructing And Negotiating The Plantation Landscape In The British Atlantic World, 1670-1820, Erin M. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a comparative study of the plantation landscape in South Carolina, Barbados, and Virginia between 1670 and 1820 that explores how the built environment (landscape, architecture, and material culture) shaped interactions between enslaved people and free, white workers and slaveholders. Instead of simply the home of the planter class, the plantation house was more than a living space or a work space; it was a workshop for the creation of a distinctly American culture.

The vastly different houses built in each colony reflect the transformation of the built environment in the New World that began during the second …

Odor And Power In The Americas: Olfactory Consciousness From Columbus To Emancipation, Andrew Kettler

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes discourses concerning odor within the Atlantic World from approximately 1492 until 1838. Numerous historians and philosophers have described how the Reformation’s emphasis on texts and an increased concentration on visual science during the Enlightenment influenced Western Europeans to heighten the importance of the eye to the detriment of the lower sense of smell. This dissertation begins by thinking about materialist contours of this olfactory decline through a linguistic analysis of sulfur within seventeenth century England. It then proceeds to examine how in the early Americas such a repudiation of the sense of smell did not occur. The …

Sex And The State: Sexual Politics In South Carolina In The 1970s, Jennifer Holman Gunter

Theses and Dissertations

Sex and the State: Sexual Politics in South Carolina is an investigation of the interactions of feminists and the state from 1966 through 1985. Nationally, women cooperated with officials of state agencies to push their agenda of self-sovereignty. Using South Carolina as a case study highlights the inherent power struggles inherent in these maneuverings. Inspired by the Second Wave of the women’s movement, activists across South Carolina, in both small towns and urban settings, worked with the state and manipulated state reactions to suit their needs. The work focuses on four key aspects of the women’s movement including: the abortion …

Rebirth Of The House Museum: Commemorating Reconstruction At The Woodrow Wilson Family Home, Jennifer Whitmer Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

Rebirth of a House Museum traces the transformation of the Woodrow Wilson Family Home (WWFH) in Columbia, South Carolina from an eighty year-old presidential shrine to the nation’s first museum of Reconstruction. A semi-guided house tour with limited objects and grounded in a specific time and place modernized an outdated historic house museum (HHM). The house became the primary artifact, supported by a panel exhibit and five original Wilson family objects. Critical to the exhibit’s success were the docents, who also steer this manuscript via their oral histories and fill a void in public history literature. Like Reconstruction, the reinterpretation …

Buy For The Sake Of Your Baby: Guardian Consumerism In Twentieth Century America, Mark Vandriel

Theses and Dissertations

“Buy For the Sake of Your Baby” argues that consumerism for infants in twentieth century America was an exceptional type of consumer society. Because the parents who bought the consumer goods could not effectively communicate with their children who used these products, parents frequently purchased items for their babies as acts of good parenting. These parent consumers wanted to do what was right for their children, but because they could not effectively communicate with their children, they were particularly susceptible to influence from outside groups. Businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and the federal government recognized throughout the twentieth century how to effectively …

G.I. Joe V. Jim Crow: Legal Battles Over Off-Base School Segregation Of Military Children In The American South, 1962-1964, Randall George Owens

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1962 and 1964, the U.S. Justice Department, African American military members stationed on southern military bases, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed six federal civil suits to end off-base segregation of military children in public schools. These cases took place in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. Plaintiffs sought to bring civilian cities near federal military bases into compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision. The presence of federal military bases, which had been integrated since a 1948 Executive Order issued by President Harry S. Truman, provided leverage against ongoing …

Proslavery Thinking In Antebellum South Carolina: Higher Education, Transatlantic Encounters, And The Life Of The Mind, Jamie Diane Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Eminent antebellum intellectuals Thomas Cooper, James Henley Thornwell, William Campbell Preston, and Francis Lieber, not only shaped their sociocultural milieu as published authors, compelling speakers, and powerful politicians, but also created a greenhouse environment of proslavery instruction at South Carolina College (SCC), today the University of South Carolina. As professors and presidents of the state’s landmark institution of learning, they produced some of the South’s most radical proslavery thinkers during the forty crucial years preceding the Civil War. SCC alumni, fresh from the four professors’ hothouse, became seminal figures in fomenting secession, fighting the Civil War, and firing Southerners’ frenzy …

Ahead Of Their Time: Black Teachers And Their Community In The Immediate Post- Brown Years, Candace Cunningham

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores a 1956 case study in which over twenty African American teachers at one school were either dismissed or did not have their contracts renewed due to their refusal to confirm or deny their membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Through newspapers, magazines, oral histories, as well as the correspondence of the NAACP, White Citizens Councils, and other organizations, this study argues that African American teachers possessed a sociopolitical currency that white segregationists found threatening and were eager to stymie. This thesis further argues that the Elloree teachers’ case and the larger …

A Culture Of Commodification: Hemispheric And Intercolonial Migrations In The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660-1807, Neal D. Polhemus

Theses and Dissertations

Beginning in the sixteenth century, as large quantities of produce were unloaded at ports throughout Northern Europe, consumer consumption of West Indies commodities drove demand for captive African labor. As a result, from 1556 to 1867, Europeans transported some 12 million West Africans to the Americas. Based on primary sources from over three countries and more than thirty archives, this study explores the structure and organization of the transatlantic slave trade to analyze the transformation of relationships and the commercial operation of the trade in West Africa, the circum-Caribbean, and more broadly the Atlantic world. This study of the transatlantic …

Radioactive Dixie: A History Of Nuclear Power And Nuclear Waste In The American South, 1950-1990, Caroline Rose Peyton

Theses and Dissertations

“Radioactive Dixie: A History of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Waste in the American South, 1950-1990,” examines the political, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and technological dimensions of the nuclear industry in the American South. Today, the US South contains more nuclear reactors than any other region and much of the nation’s radioactive waste. In “Radioactive Dixie,” I argue that this regional distinction resulted from a decades-long effort by southern politicians, industry figures, and government officials to transform the American South into a nuclear-oriented region. Waving the atomic talisman, the nuclear industry served as one pivotal part in a larger project of …

Colonialism Unraveling: Race, Religion, And National Belonging In Santo Domingo During The Age Of Revolutions, Charlton W. Yingling

Theses and Dissertations

Santo Domingo, the first European colony in the Americas, was the original thread at the edge of an expansively woven Spanish imperial tapestry. From 1784-1822 this hem frayed, threatening to unbind the most basic stitches that tied Caribbean colonies to Spanish imperial power. My dissertation analyzes colonial Santo Domingo's cultural, racial, political trajectories amidst influences of the Haitian and French revolutions, Spanish reaction, African Diaspora, and Latin American independence movements. A uniquely Dominican cultural politics of race and nation were born at the intersections of these social and cultural forces, unraveled colonialism, and set terms of engagement with their Haitian …

Knowing In America: The Enlightenment, Science, And The Early Republic, Timothy K. Minella

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes practices of science and technology in the early United States as windows onto the American Enlightenment. Although scholars have emphasized the important impact of Enlightenment thought on the American founding, the historiography tends to argue for the decreasing influence of the Enlightenment on American culture as the nineteenth century progressed. In addition, scholars tend to see a decline in American science after Benjamin Franklin as nineteenth-century Americans began to focus primarily on the practical problems of everyday life. I question these interpretations by connecting scientific practice in the Early Republic with transatlantic Enlightenment thought and analyzing American …

Boundary Stones: Morbid Concretions And The Chemistry Of Early Nineteenth Century Medicine, Edward Allen Driggers Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is the story of communities of physicians seeking to understand the morbid concretion of the body using the new chemistry from the late eighteenth century. Morbid concretions, or calculi, were occurred in the urinary passages, lungs, joints, pancreas, uterus, and other areas of the body. At the turn of the nineteenth century, some physicians saw analytical chemistry, emerging out of the so-called chemical revolution, as applicable in understanding and treating stone-based diseases. However, some physicians and surgeons saw the treatment of stones with chemistry as evidence of the need to return to older practices of medicine, like humoral …

The Fancy Trade And The Commodification Of Rape In The Sexual Economy Of 19th Century U.S. Slavery, Tiye A. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine the Fancy Trade—the buying and selling of mixed-race enslaved women for the primary purpose of prostitution and concubinage—through an intersectionality lens. Therefore, I will explore a culture of rape through the lived experiences of fancy maids, the women who were sold as sex commodities in the 19th century domestic slave trade. Who was she? Using an intersectionality framework to answer the proposed questions will achieve the following. First, it will highlight the social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality within the 19th century southern context. Secondly, an intersectional methodology will explore the …

The Sensory Environments Of Civil War Prisons, Evan A. Kutzler

Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation explores the experiences of four hundred thousand Union and Confederate prisoners during the American Civil War. While much has been written on the overlapping experiences of soldiers, civilians, and slaves, less attention has been paid to those behind masonry walls or wooden stockades. The premise of the dissertation, borrowed from the theory and methodology of sensory history, is that while human sensory physiology changes slowly over time, perception is fluid and varies by time, place, and culture. Drawing from nearly two hundred unpublished manuscripts as well as newspapers, government records, and postwar narratives, this dissertation explores the experiences …