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Educational Reform And The Social Democratic Party In Weimar Prussia, 1918-1932., Patricia Gebhart Mcfarland

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Education in Germany has historically been a matter for the individual states rather than the central government. In Prussia in the 1920s, elementary education was segregated by religious denomination, while the upper grades were divided according to occupational specialty. The Social Democratic Party was the only party which proposed to change the system, calling for the secularization and integration of the schools. When it unexpectedly found itself in power in November 1918, the party's commitment to its program was tested. While the leadership continued to affirm its support for educational reform throughout the 1920s, it did little to introduce any …

Religion In Seventeenth-Century Anglican Virginia: Myth, Persuasion, And The Creation Of An American Identity., Edward Lawrence Bond

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This work examines the religious thought and the function of religion in colonial Virginia from first settlement to approximately 1725 by looking at the religious aspects of England's missions to the New World, the neglect and subsequent collapse of these missions, and the creation by Virginians of an Anglican religious establishment possessed of a self-identity different from that of the Church of England in the mother country. Virginia began as an extension of England into the world, a part of the English nation which, in its religious aspects, was shaped by the mythic idea that true Englishmen were Protestants. Virginia, …

Bodies Of Life: Shaker Literacies And Literature, Etta Maureen Madden

Doctoral Dissertations

I examine the roles of literacy and literature among the Shakers from the opening of "Mother" Ann Lee's testimony in 1780 through the early twentieth century to propose that the sect persistently resisted and revised "the world's" literacies. I assert that multiple kinds of reading and writing acts reinforce the beliefs of individuals and the church as a whole, and I argue that the increase in literary acts which appear to contribute to individualism and fragmentation of the institution actually allows Believers to revise their theology so that they see their sect as continuing to grow rather than declining.

In …

Emerging From The Chrysalis: Isolation And Publication In Nineteenth-Century Literacy Narratives, Lisa Ann Sisco

Doctoral Dissertations

"Emerging From the Chrysalis" begins with the words of Frederick Douglass, who explains in his 1845 slave narrative that learning to read was a conflicted experience, simultaneously enabling and painful. Douglass writes, "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing." These powerful words reveal a paradoxical "double-consciousness" inherent in nineteenth-century narratives about literacy: literacy's capacity to simultaneously imprison and empower. Douglass's relationship to literacy, both as a character within his narrative and as an author in a historical context, exemplifies the focus of this dissertation.

I borrow my central metaphor from …

Education, Class And Gender In George Eliot And Thomas Hardy, Keith Ronald Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between education, class and gender in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) by George Eliot; and in The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1896) by Thomas Hardy. The Introduction discusses how, in nineteenth-century Britain, education was intended to "improve" individuals and society. The Introduction establishes the Marxist and feminist critical background of the study, and briefly surveys the nineteenth-century debates on "The Education Question," and on education for women.

The novels examined show education failing to 'improve.' Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, and Jude Fawley in Jude …

School And Society In London, Canada, 1826-1871: The Evolution Of A System Of Public Education, Michael F. Murphy

Digitized Theses

The principal question investigated in the thesis is: were changes in school attendance behaviour primarily the result of socially differentiated family strategies. The behaviour analyzed is the decision of London parents to send or not to send their children to school between 1826 and l871.;Parents in this study were divided into three cultural groups: Protestants, Roman Catholics and Blacks. They were also classified into occupational groups which were employed as surrogate measures for social class: upper, middle, and lower. Enrollments and attendance rates provided the proxy measure of the behavioural decision. The time frame was differentiated into four periods of …