History Commons^™

Determining Jury Impartiality In The Malice Green Murder Cases, Marco Cardamone

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

Detroit Police Department officers Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers beat Black resident Malice Green to death in November 1992 and were convicted of second-degree murder, however, their convictions were overturned by appellate courts on the basis that the jury was influenced by outside sources. Race played a critical factor in the trials and public opinion as both officers were White and the judge, juries, and prosecutors were Black. While the evidence of the case suggests a wrongful death, public opinion in Detroit and exposure to media compromised the juries’ impartiality.

Materials For Embezzlement: How Municipal Corruption Exploited Social And Economic Conditions In Detroit, Mi, Jimmy Showers

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

This paper examines how social and economic conditions in Detroit, MI, during the second half of the twentieth century were exploited in a specific instance of municipal corruption involving the city’s Chief of Police, William L. Hart. Drawing on primary source documents, this paper argues that Chief Hart corruptly exploited the city’s social and economic conditions and evaded legal intervention over a prolonged period thereby increasing the magnitude of the corruption and exacerbating negative effects on the city’s most vulnerable residents. Media coverage surrounding Hart’s conviction depicts ramifications difficult to measure highlighting a critical need for research into municipal corruption.

Citing Seeds, Citing People: Bibliography And Indigenous Memory, Relations, And Living Knowledge-Keepers, Megan Peiser Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma

Criticism

By turning the page or reading further, you are accepting a responsibility to this story, its storyteller, its ancestors, and its future ancestors. You are accepting a relationship of reciprocity where you treat this knowledge as sacred for how it nourished you, share it only as it has been instructed to share, and to ensure it remains unviolated for future generations.

This story is told by myself, Megan Peiser, Chahta Ohoyo. I share knowledge entrusted to me by Anishinaabe women I call friends and sisters, by seed-keepers of many peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, and knowledge come to me from …

Critique! Critique! Critique! Black Labor In The Early American Book Trade, John J. Garcia

Criticism

This article pursues two lines of inquiry: first, recovering the presence of Black labor in the history of the book in colonial North America, the British Caribbean, and the early United States, with a second and complementary discussion of why critique must be foregrounded in the field formation of critical bibliography. Free and enslaved Black men and women helped make early American books possible. Their presences are to be found at the edges and vicinities of print cultural production, in roles such as papermaking, wagon driving, and forms of domestic labor that extended to the libraries and reading practices of …

Mammy And Aunt Jemima: Keeping The Old South Alive In Popular Visual Culture, Angela G. Athnasios

Honors College Theses

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, American popular visual culture produced racist portrayals of Black Americans. Literature, illustrations, minstrelsy, film, and television are notorious for promoting such unflattering images. Each of these media typified African Americans as exaggerated caricatures with dark skin, bulging eyes, bright-red lips, and goofy smiles. The creators of these stereotypes project their racist beliefs into popular culture. This in turn heavily influences the way other races view people of African descent, as well as how Black people view themselves. From mammies, to Jezebels, to pickaninnies, and everything in between, the message ultimately conveyed in these …

Escrime Americana: The History Of Discrimination In American Fencing From The 1700s-1950, Alyssa J. Hirsch

Honors College Theses

This research paper will focus on the history of discrimination in American fencing from 1700-1950. The time frame covers the colonial origins of the sport in America, through segregation practices up to 1950. This project will analyze the origins of classism, sexism, and racism in American fencing, and how it connects to how racism, sexism, and classism have operated in the United States. There has been no previous research conducted into the history of discrimination in fencing exclusively, so this is new territory.

The research for this paper includes primary sources provided by the head historian of U.S. fencing, Andy …

A Comparison Of The Development Of The Salt Industries In Michigan And Ontario, Hannah Margarethe Kieta

Honors College Theses

“A Comparison of the Development of the Salt Industries in Michigan and Ontario” examines the development of the salt production industry in these two sub-national regions. They derive salt from the same deposit and historically have used very similar methods of mineral extraction, but due to the political differences between the United States and Canada, the trajectories of their growth have been different. The salt industry, which coalesced in the middle of the 19^th century, was heavily impacted by the growing forces of capitalism and protectionism (particularly directed by the American interests toward the Canadian manufacturers), and by the …

Economic Revolution From Within: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt And The Emergence Of The National Industrial Recovery Act Of 1933, Angella Lanette Smith

Wayne State University Dissertations

ECONOMIC REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN: HERBERT HOOVER, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL RECOVERY ACT OF 1933

By

Angella LaNette Smith

August of 2015

Advisor: Dr. Elizabeth Faue

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation seeks to place the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a central agency of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, in historical context. It explores the NRA’s origins in the political agendas and ideological arguments of presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as they reshaped the federal government’s role in bringing about an end to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The dissertation …

“A Lonely Wandering Refugee”: Displaced Whites In The Trans-Mississippi West During The American Civil War, 1861-1868, David Paul Hopkins, Jr.

Wayne State University Dissertations

Historians have written a great deal about the American Civil War and, until recently, much of that scholarly activity has focused on military battles and the effectiveness of the Union and Confederate armies on the war’s outcome. During the past few decades, social historians have tried to dig beneath that narrative to situate the war in the eyes of American citizens and how that war affected their lives. With this, there has been a focus on the Northern and Southern homefronts, African Americans, and soldiers’ motivations to fight – all rooted in the wartime experience. In this discussion, however, there …

Pedigree Structure And Kinship Measurements Of A Mid-Michigan Community: A New North American Population Isolate Identified, Joseph D. Bonner, Rachel Fisher, James Klein, Qing Lu, Ellen Wilch, Karen H. Friderici, Jill L. Elfenbein, Debra L. Schutte, Brian C. Schutte

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Previous studies identified a cluster of individuals with an autosomal recessive form of deafness that resides in a small region of mid-Michigan. We hypothesized that affected members from this community descend from a defined founder population. Using public records and personal interviews, we constructed a genealogical database that includes the affected individuals and their extended families as descendants of 461 settlers who emigrated from the Eifel region of Germany between 1836 and 1875. The genealogical database represents a 13-generation pedigree that includes 27,747 descendants of these settlers. Among these descendants, 13,784 are presumed living. Many of the extant descendants reside …

Assumptions Of Authority: Social Washington's Evolution From Republican Court To Self-Rule, 1801-1831, Merry Ellen Scofield

Wayne State University Dissertations

Washington City's political society was born in late November 1800, when the early republic moved its seat of government from Philadelphia to the banks of the Potomac. Washington's political elite, many of them accustomed to the urban pleasures of the nation's largest city, found themselves forming a proper society among boardinghouses, muddy roads, and half-built public buildings. A simple social hierarchy developed based on political position. Despite Jefferson's protests that the Court of the United States had died with the Federalist era, a republican court formed around him. His issuance of a set of social tenets, written after the Merry …

Deliver Me From The Days Of Old: Rock And Roll, Youth Culture, And The Civil Rights Movement, Beth Nicole Fowler

Wayne State University Dissertations

The U.S. civil rights movement is almost always presented as an undisputed success in mainstream culture and educational curricula, but scholars continue to question whether the widespread protests against racial segregation and inequality that swept the nation in the 1950s and 1960s led to meaningful economic, or social change. These criticisms extend to shifts in popular culture and the emergence of rock and roll music, which, as many contemporary critics noted, were areas where racial integration had already occurred. Since rock and roll emerged from both African-American and European-American cultural traditions, it introduced both black

and white listeners to sounds …

Interests And Ideas: Industrialization And The Making Of Early American Trade Policy, 1789 - 1860, John Austin Moore

Wayne State University Dissertations

Trade policy was a prominent economic and political issue in the United States between 1789 and 1860, culminating in the Civil War. Many historians have characterized this period as pitting mutually exclusive economic systems, an industrializing, free-labor North and a slave-based agricultural South, against one another. The traditional interpretation is that the North eagerly supported tariffs and economic protection that they provided, while the South stood in opposition. The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 is frequently cited as evidence that the tariff was a sectional issue and some historians go so far as to describe the tariff as a significant cause …

The Power To Protect Themselves: Gender, Protective Labor Legislation, And Public Policy In Michigan, 1883-1913, Amy Marie-Holtman French

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study provides a narrative of laborers' fight for legal protection through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Since American law was one of the most important forces in shaping and limiting workplace reform, both labor unionists and reformers used the law to try to solve labor problems. Reformers employed the law to force state control over women and children, while labor unionists attempted to craft legislation to allow working men control over industrial relations.

Although society and the law treated men as independent agents, working men were not truly free. Common law designated workers as servants. Employers denied laboring …

The Road To Gaining Acceptance And Status For Women In American Medicine, Terrie S. Ahn

Honors College Theses

For my honors thesis, I discuss the history of women in American medicine during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I focus on how the social and cultural time periods affected women’s efforts in pursuing further medical education, how these women were perceived and treated by not only their male colleagues, but also the outside world, how it affected their future career choices in medicine, and finally, how their efforts ended up changing the medical career path for future female generations.

It begins with a discussion of the variety of obstacles, both private and public, that hindered …

Detroit Blues Women, Michael Duggan Murphy

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

DETROIT BLUES WOMEN

by

Michael Duggan Murphy

August 2011

Advisor: Dr. John J. Bukowczyk

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

"Detroit Blues Women" explores how African American "women's blues" survived the twentieth century relatively unscripted by the image-makers of the male-dominated music industry. In the 1920s, African American blues queens laid out a foundation for assertive and rebellious women's blues that the many musical heirs who succeeded them in the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty first century sustained, preserved and built upon. The dissertation argues that women's blues, which encouraged women to liberate themselves …

Minor Courts And Communities At The Frontier: The Justice Of The Peace In Early Missouri, Bonnie Aileen Speck

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

MINOR COURTS AND COMMUNITIES AT THE FRONTIER JUSTICES OF THE PEACE IN EARLY MISSOURI

by

BONNIE A. SPECK

May 2011

Advisor: Sandra VanBurkleo

Major: American Legal and Constitutional History

Degree: History

This study focused on local and county courts operated by Missouri's justices of the peace between the Louisiana Purchase and roughly 1875. Its purpose was to investigate the role of township justices’ courts and county courts of commissioners in terms of interactions with local residents; effects of rulings and other court actions on everyday affairs; and wider impacts on Missouri society. Sources included territorial and …

The Rise Of Public Sector Unionism In Detroit, 1947-1967, Louis Eugene Jones

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 1947, the Michigan Legislature passed into law the Hutchinson Act banning strikes of state and local workers. The law provided for the termination of striking public sector workers but did not require state and local agencies to bargain with public employees or their representatives. It even allowed for fines and prison sentences for non public sector workers who influenced public sector workers to strike. The law forced public sector unions into an untenable state of "collective begging." Indeed, it was often referred to as punitive and draconian. 18 years later, the Michigan Legislature passed and the governor signed into …

Fighting For Survival: Coal Miners And The Struggle Over Health And Safety In The United States, 1968-1988, Richard Fry

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on coal mining and occupational health and safety in the United States from 1968 to 1985. In the late 1960s, coal miners faced the constant risk of injury, occupational disease, and death. The dangerous conditions in the coal industry resulted in a massive explosion at the Farmington mine in West Virginia in 1968, which killed 78 miners. The Farmington disaster spurred miners to campaign for the reform of state and federal coal mine health and safety laws in the United States. They rejected the national leadership of their union, the United Mine Workers (UMW), which they perceived …

Down On Hastings Street: A Study Of Social And Cultural Changes In A Detroit Community 1941-1955, John Fredrick Cohassey

Wayne State University Theses

The study of the Hastings Street jazz and blues scene affords a look into Detroit's African-American community when it faced the burden of segregation, and also shared in the city's economic prosperity. The study of the street contributes to the understanding of racial relations in Detroit, concentrating primarily on the years 1941 to 1955. The delineation of the distinct features separating the migrant Southern folk blues culture and the older established jazz community reveals the diverse social and cultural elements of Detroit's African-American population.

Negroes In Michigan History, John Green

Detroit Area Peace and Justice Groups

No abstract provided.

Public School Desegregation In Virginia From 1954 To The Present, Adolph H. Grundman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an examination of the struggle to desegregate the public schools of Virginia from 1954 to 1972. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education attacked the social foundation of eleven southern states when it declared that racially segregated schools were "inherently unequal." Brown I,, in fact, was one of many controversial decisions made by the Supreme Court as it reflected the egalitarian spirit of the 1950's and 1960's. By 1970, however, a growing list of legal scholars questioned the wisdom and effectivemess of the Warren Court's judicial activism. My major objective was to trace the tortuous …

The Formation Of The Washington Intellectual Community, 1870-1898, James Kirkpatrick Flack Jr

Wayne State University Dissertations

These pages deal with the post-Civil War emergence in Washington of a self-conscious body of government-scientists and local intellectuals, men whose group identity was established by the network of clubs and societies which they founded and whose self-image was derived from an awareness of shared purposes. This community saw itself as fulfilling two inseparable functions: improving the quality of life at the seat of government by encouraging intellectual pursuits, and using its collective influence to promote national culture, particularly through public science. The interrelationship of these goals rested on the conviction that Washington was destined to become the cultural capitol …

A Study Of Political And Sectional Voting Alignments In The United States Senate, 1921-1929, Patrick Gene O'Brien

Wayne State University Dissertations

Several common and casual assertions about "twenties" politics should come under critical reanalysis, including traditional descriptions of the extent and character of party division. The usual historical generalization is that, although conservativism was the predominant political attitude, both parties were fragmented by sectional and ideological struggles. As a con­ sequence there was a breakdown in the party system. This dissertation tests this conclusion through an examination of voting patterns in the United States Senate from the 67th through the 70th Congress (1921-29), Virtually every politi­cal history of the era touches upon Senate voting align­ments, but there is no extant study …

George Iii In The Pennsylvania Press: A Study In Changing Opinions, 1760-1776, Robert D. Fiala

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study is an attempt to utilize the popular newspaper and pamphlet press to trace the growing estrangement between the monarch and his subjects before July, 1776. At what point did Americans abandon their hope in George III? What factors contributed to their final conclusion that the responsibility for the estrangement of the colonies from the mother country wets the king’s? Because of the vast amount of available material and also because of the widespread reprinting of newspaper articles and pamphlets, the writer has limited his study to the press of one colony, Pennsylvania. He has examined most of the …

The Politics Of Free Banking In The Old Northwest, 1837-1863, William G. Shade

Wayne State University Dissertations

There is a great gap in the history of American monetary politics between the years of Jackson’s “Bank War” and the lengthy debate over bonds, Greenbacks, and silver that occupied the energies of the nation after the Civil War. While these years w ere chaotic and produced little constructive monetary legislation, the money issue played an important role. This study is designed to help clarify the nature of the issues during this period and the ways in which the parties reacted. The study of these issues has usually been confused by assumptions derived from a projection of the post-war issues …

Jonathan Boucher: Moderate Loyalist And Public Man, Anne Young Zimmer

Wayne State University Dissertations

This inquiry began then, with an attempt to understand Jonathan Boucher, the Tory of Tories, the adversary of Locke and egalitarian principles, the spokesman for Filmer in America, and the divine rights advocate. The whole complex of Boucher's life has been examined, with particular emphasis on the pre-Revolutionary years of crisis in Virginia and Maryland between 1765 and 1775, together with the milieu of the two colonies, in order to discover what factors may have contributed to Boucher's High Tory role, if, indeed, he was a High Tory. And it has been an effort to understand all of the circumstances …

The Social Bases Of American Voting Behavior; Wayne County, Michigan, 1837-1852, As A Test Case, Ronald P. Formisano

Wayne State University Dissertations

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Political Affiliations Of American Economic Elites: Wayne County, Michigan, 1844, 1860, As A Test Case, Alexandra Mccoy

Wayne State University Dissertations

The scope of this study has been dictated by its methodology, which, in turn, has been determined by its aim. In order to formulate with precision a theory of political behavior for economic leaders of the mid-nineteenth century it is necessary to document the economic careers, ethnic origins, religious affiliations and family backgrounds of a carefully selected economic elite. What is obtained by the extensive documentation of over one-hundred and seventy-five individuals is the opportunity to study the relationship of these attributes to political affiliation. By tabulating these attributes against party affiliation, relationships were discovered which indicate that religious and …

The Mormon Colonies Of Northern Mexico: A History, 1885-1912, B Carmon Hardy

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study, based almost entirely on Mormon diaries and other primary documents, suggests in the first place, that Mormonism while displaying a kind of cultural separatism on one level, was, at another level, in close harmony with American notions of economic and political expansionism. The study of the character of the colonists' thought and culture, provides explanation for the difficulties imposed on Mexico Mormons during and after the 1910 Revolution. Finally, this dissertation seeks to chronicle a frontier venture. For the Mormon undertaking in northern Mexico constitutes one of the last chapters in the story of America's nineteenth century pioneers.