History Commons^™

Free People Of Color In West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, Evelyn Lenora Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Free People of Color in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana” documents the presence, land ownership, business development, and personal relationships of free people of color in a rural Louisiana parish. Beginning with how free people of color came to be in the parish, it shows an absence of segregation by skin color in home ownership, business relationships, and friendships. Free people of color found themselves accepted in a community that valued their talents and skills and disregarded the color of their skin.

Free people of color bought and sold homes in whatever part of the parish suited them. Most lived surrounded …

Hyear Come De Parade: The History Of The Black Mardi Gras Tradition In Baton Rouge, Kirsten L. Campbell

LSU Master's Theses

The aim of this thesis to emphasize the importance the role of photography in preserving and archiving cultural memories and histories as well as demonstrate the impact of digital archives. Using archival materials such as local newspapers and press photographs, this thesis offers, for the first time, the history of the African American Mardi Gras parading tradition in Baton Rouge between the years 1910 through 1941. This thesis, too, provides an art historical analysis of the visual material that exists of these early African American parades in Baton Rouge, and contextualizes the histories that shaped, influenced, and made these parades …

Women Of The Edward J. Gay Family As Textile And Dress Consumers In Louisiana, 1849-1899, Lindsay Danielle Reaves

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Economic, social, and cultural historians have studied and analyzed consumption behaviors throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st century. Decorative household textiles and dress items are two product categories that follow the consumption process. American consumption behaviors during the introduction of mass-produced textiles and dress items throughout the 19^th century have not been well documented.

The purpose of this research is to expand the knowledge of Southern planter-class women’s consumer behavior in relation to decorative household textiles and dress items. Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) Consumer Culture Theory and Belk’s (1988) research into possessions and the extended …

An Impossible Direction: Newspapers, Race, And Politics In Reconstruction New Orleans, Nicholas F. Chrastil

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the racial ideologies of four newspapers in New Orleans at the beginning and end of Radical Reconstruction: the Daily Picayune, the New Orleans Republican, the New Orleans Tribune, and the Weekly Louisianian. It explores how each paper understood the issues of racial equality, integration, suffrage, and black humanity; it examines the specific language and rhetoric each paper used to advocate for their positions; and it asks how those positions changed from the beginning to the end of Reconstruction. The study finds that the two white-owned papers, the Picayune and the Republican, while political opponents, both viewed …

A Vast Injustice: The Public Debate And Legislative Battle Over Compulsory Eugenic Sterilization In Louisiana, 1924 -- 1932, Adelaide Hair Barr

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

From 1924 to 1932, Louisiana lawmakers considered five bills that would have granted superintendents of state institutions and some private hospitals the authority to forcibly sterilize their patients. Based on similar legislation passed in thirty-six other states, the bills cited eugenics as evidence that stripping these patients of their ability to reproduce would prevent the conditions such as feeblemindedness from passing on to the next generation. Although none of the bills passed both houses of the Louisiana legislature, a couple of them came dangerously close to becoming law. The debate among legislators, professionals, and social reformers provides a greater understanding …

Policies Of Loss: Coastal Erosion And The Struggle To Save Louisiana's Wetlands, Rebecca B. Costa

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost approximately 1,800 square miles of land due to the subsidence of the state’s coastal wetlands. By the early 1970s, public officials and private citizens were starting to become aware of the crisis on the coast, and a broad agreement developed among state and federal representatives that action was needed to address the problem. Over the course of nearly forty years, policymakers in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., implemented a series of laws and regulations meant to protect vulnerable ecosystems like the state’s wetlands. In the 1980s, officials also started crafting policies to help restore Louisiana’s …

White Manhood In Louisiana During Reconstruction, 1865-1877, Arthur Wendel Stout

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Economic, political, and social landscapes changed for white men in Louisiana after the Civil War. Suffering displacement, business interruption, property confiscation, and lower social and political standing vis-à-vis the former slaves, white men’s standing in every realm seemed diminished, including their core identity as men. It was important to them and to their families for white men to regain a sense of competence as men. Using letters, diaries, and court cases involving white people with strong connections to Louisiana during the Reconstruction era, this dissertation analyzes the gendered problems that white men and their families sought to resolve. Newspaper articles, …

Two Histories, One Future : Louisiana Sugar Planters, Their Slaves, And The Anglo-Creole Schism, 1815-1865, Nathan Buman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

During the five decades between the War of 1812 and the end of the Civil War, southern Louisianans developed a society unlike any other region. The vibrant traditional image of moonlight and magnolias, the notion that King Cotton dominated the South’s economy as Anglo-Saxon masters lorded over their enslaves African-American workers still dominates the image of the American South. This image of a monolithic South, however, does not give a clear indication of the many sub-regional distinctions that both challenged and rewarded the inhabitants of those areas and provides exciting ways to understand slaveholding society culturally. Louisiana’s slaveholding class consisted …

Shades Of Grey: Slaveholding Free Women Of Color In Antebellum New Orleans, 1800-1840, Anne Ulentin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the economic opportunities that free women of color could derive from slaveholding, their motivations, and their impact on New Orleans’ antebellum society and economy. Another aim is to find out the role and impact of free women of color from Saint Domingue (later Haiti), whose arrival in New Orleans doubled the number of free women of color in the city. Finally, the analysis of relationships between free women of color and their slaves and with the diverse population of New Orleans plays an important part in this study. Notarial deeds (sales and purchases of slaves, mortgages of …

"Teach Us Incessantly": Lessons And Learning In The Antebellum Gulf South, Sarah L. Hyde

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Before 1860 people in the Gulf South valued education and sought to extend schooling to residents across the region. Southerners learned in a variety of different settings – within their own homes taught by a family member or hired tutor, at private or parochial schools as well as in public free schools. Regardless of the venue, the ubiquity of learning in the region reveals the importance of education in Southern culture. In the 1820s and 1830s, legislators in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama sought to increase access to education by offering financial assistance to private schools in order to offset tuition …

To Kill Whites: The 1811 Louisiana Slave Insurrection, Nathan A. Buman

LSU Master's Theses

Before January 1811, slave rebellion weighed heavily on the minds of white Louisianans. The colonial and territorial history of Louisiana challenged leaders with a diverse and complex social environment that required calculated decision-making and a fair hand to navigate. Racial and ethnic divisions forced officials to tread carefully in order to build a prosperous territory while maintaining control over the slave population. Many Louisianans used slave labor to produce indigo, cotton, and sugarcane along the rivers of south Louisiana, primarily between Baton Rouge and the mouth of the Mississippi River. For nearly a century, Louisianans avoided slave upheaval but after …

Black Catholicism: Religion And Slavery In Antebellum Louisiana, Lori Renee Pastor

LSU Master's Theses

The practice of Catholicism extended across racial boundaries in colonial Louisiana, and interracial worship continued to characterize the religious experience of Catholics throughout the antebellum period. French and Spanish missionaries baptized natives, settlers, and slaves, and the Catholic Church required Catholic planters to baptize and catechize their slaves. Most slaveholders outside New Orleans, however, were lax in the religious education of slaves. Work holidays did not always correspond to religious holy days, and the number of slave baptisms and confirmations on Catholic plantations often depended on the willingness of the local priest, or the slaves themselves, to attend the parish …

Insiders: Louisiana Journalists Sallie Rhett Roman, Helen Grey Gilkison, Iris Turner Kelso, Angie Pitts Juban

LSU Master's Theses

Sallie Rhett Roman, Helen Grey Gilkison and Iris Turner Kelso were three women journalists in Louisiana, active in consecutive time periods from 1891 to 1996. Their work brings up five particular questions. First, Why did these women start working and how did they negotiate public employment? Second, how did they balance the relationship between work and home since they did find employment outside of the home? Third, how did they fit into their contemporary image of women and journalists? Fourth, how did they use written language to portray a particular voice to the reader for a particular purpose? Fifth, did …

The New Orleans Press-Radio War And Huey P. Long, 1922-1936, Brian David Collins

LSU Master's Theses

The introduction of radio in America in the 1920s was greeted with much fanfare by the general public and by newspapers and politicians as well. Its popularity soared as radio sets became cheaper and more accessible. Newspapers were eager to boost their circulations by featuring the latest craze; many newspapers even started their own stations as a means of publicity. As the country sank deeper into the Great Depression in the 1930s, the relationship between the country's press and radio worsened. The newspapers felt threatened that radio would take away their advertising revenue in addition to stealing their news dissemination …

Trans-Mississippi Southerners In The Union Army, 1862-1865, Christopher Rein

LSU Master's Theses

Men from throughout the Trans-Mississippi South enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War both in existing northern regiments and in units raised specifically for the purpose of enlisting southerners. The men who joined and fought represented almost every social and ethnic division within the region and contributed substantially to the success of Union arms during the war. Examining a single regiment from each state or territory in the region (except Louisiana, where one white and one black unit were chosen due to segregation) reveals similarities of background, experience and purpose. Louisiana's contributions to the Union army were primarily …