History Commons^™

Slipping Backwards: The Supreme Court, Segregation Legislation, And The African American Press, 1877-1920, Kathryn St.Clair Ellis

Doctoral Dissertations

This study discusses the role of Supreme Court decisions in shaping the evolution of Jim Crow and African American newspapers’ reactions to these decisions. The study focuses on the period between the end of Reconstruction and the United States’ entrance into World War I. It looks at several Supreme Court decisions to demonstrate how the Court failed to act as a check on state legislatures’ reactionary undertakings and how these legislatures interpreted the Court’s judgments. Several of the Supreme Court’s decisions served to alert white legislators to the federal government’s limited actions to protect the rights of African American citizens. …

Freedom To Work, Nothing More Nor Less: The Freedmen’S Bureau, White Planters, And Black Contract Laborers In Postwar Tennessee, 1865-1868, David Stanley Leventhal

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the black labor situation in postwar Tennessee from 1865 to 1868. Using a wide array of primary sources from Tennessee, the research unveils an inherent bias in the Freedmen’s Bureau’s forced contract system of labor. My conclusions highlight the collusion and complacency of bureau officials and planters who confined freedpeople to agricultural labor during the initial years of African-American freedom. Whites—Northern and Southern—worked cohesively toward common goals of agricultural prosperity, law and order, and white supremacy.

The bureau’s contract system was devised as an emergency measure to put idle blacks back in their “appropriate” positions as agricultural …

Rivers, Roads, And Rails: The Influence Of Transportation Needs And Internal Improvements On Cherokee Treaties And Removal From 1779 To 1838, Vicki Bell Rozema

Masters Theses

This study examines the importance of transportation routes and internal improvements as factors in treaty negotiations and the removal of the Cherokees. Covering a period from approximately 1779 to 1838, the date of forced Cherokee removal from east of the Mississippi, it argues that the Cherokees opposed the construction of military roads and turnpikes and interfered with travel through Cherokee country. Safe passage clauses in Cherokee treaties, issues dealing with passports through Cherokee country, and disputes over ferries and taverns on transportation routes are reviewed. The plans of Southern leaders such as John C. Calhoun and Wilson Lumpkin to build …

Henry Morgenthau: The Evolution Of An American Activist, Maggie Laurel Yancey

Masters Theses

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was a central figure in the FDR administration in more than just fiscal matters. Morgenthau also worked from the 1930’s onward in several arenas to aid the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. My research updates and revises the existing historiography by revealing this activism was the logical culmination of years of interest in the fates of Jewish refugees. Furthermore, this activism was affected by several factors beyond Morgenthau’s own control. The administrative style of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, relationships between Morgenthau and other members of the cabinet, and influential undercurrents within the cabinet all …

God’S Deaf And Dumb Instruments: Albert The Great’S Speculum Astronomiae And Four Centuries Of Readers, Scott Edward Hendrix

Doctoral Dissertations

“God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum Astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers” is a study of the reception and influence of what is perhaps the most important work dealing with astrology to be produced in the Latin West during the middle ages. In order to determine the impact and importance of the Speculum I have dealt with questions relating to its authorship and dating, while studying its contents in the context of Albert’s larger body of work as well as the readers who found it useful and how they approached the Speculum. I have studied these …

Republican, First, Last, And Always: A Biography Of B. Carroll Reece, Fashion Suzanne Bowers

Doctoral Dissertations

From 1920 to 1961, B. Carroll Reece served a then unprecedented thirty-five years in the United States House of Representatives. Reece grew up in the povertystricken area of eastern Tennessee, one of thirteen children. He attended college at Carson-Newman College and New York University but felt called to enlist in the army during World War I. He earned numerous commendations for his service and returned to the United States with an increased animosity towards communism. He returned to education, but an opportunity presented itself for Reece to fulfill his dream of entering politics. He ran for and won the First …

From Hyperspace To Mental Hygiene: A. T. Schofield’S Conception Of Mind And Spirit, Kara L. Fromke

Masters Theses

This paper explores the intersection of psychology and religion in late-Victorian Britain through the life of medical psychologist and lay religious author, Dr. Alfred Taylor Schofield. Extending the work of recent scholarship on the contested nature of nineteenth-century sciences of mind, this study focuses on the interplay between popular and professional communities engaged in discourse over mind/body issues and the unconscious mind, and the relevance of these contemporary topics to debates over the certainty of natural versus supernatural knowledge.

In the period between 1890 and 1910, when psychology (‘the new psycho-physiology,’ in Britain) emerged as an autonomous scientific discipline separate …

Alfonso X: A Medieval, Castilian Emperor?, Joseph Henry Carignan

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X of Castile in the context of two historiographical assertions: that Alfonso was a revolutionary monarch who consciously anticipated the developments surrounding the rise of the nation-state, and that the Siete Partidas represent a mere compilation of older legal traditions with little creative manipulation by Alfonso. To test these assertions, I selected three samples of the legal code and analyzed the extent to which they conformed to these historiographical claims.

My analysis concluded that these sections of the Siete Partidas do not support the prevailing historiographical assertions …

Public Women In Public Spaces: Prostitution And Union Military Experience, 1861-1865, Danielle Jeannine Cole

Masters Theses

This study examines prostitution in Union-occupied cities during the American Civil War. During the war, the visibility of urban prostitution triggered contentious public debates over appropriate forms of sexuality and over the position of sexualized women in public areas. Union commanders posted in occupied cities had an especially difficult time dealing with prostitution since their garrison troops had money, were not preoccupied by marching and fighting, and expected urban pleasures in an urban environment. For example, military authorities in Washington, D. C., Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana, unsuccessfully struggled to control or eliminate public prostitution using traditional legal systems. …

From Despised Enemy To Wronged American: Images Of The Japanese American Internment, 1942-1992, Kenichiro Tsuchihashi

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to elucidate the popular image of the World War II Japanese American internment in postwar America. It examines how the internment was described in the print press, high school history textbooks, and motion pictures between the early 1940s and the early 1990s, and explains when, why, and how the description changed.

The popular image of the internment was transformed from “justifiable relocation of despised enemies” to “unjustifiable incarceration of wronged American citizens.” Despite earlier studies on the internment, which often suggest this dramatic shift occurred in the late 1980s, this thesis demonstrates that the shift actually took …

Educating Boys, Graduating Men: Student Masculinity At Centre College, 1865-1885, Amanda Renee Ledford

Masters Theses

During the nineteenth century higher education was an important part of the development of upper- and middle-class young men. College did not train young men for a career; rather it educated them in classical subjects and religion. Knowledge of Greek and Latin was considered a distinction of class, while religious training prepared young men for their anticipated role as the spiritual leader of their family. I focused my study of higher education and masculinity on Centre College, founded 1819. Using both school documents and personal papers of Centre students, I have developed a composite of Centre students, their parents, the …

Beer, Barbarism, And The Church From Late Antiquity To The Early Middle Ages, Joseph Wayne Strickland

Masters Theses

At the height of the Roman Empire, Roman citizens undoubtedly favored wine. As the Empire expanded into surrounding areas, increased exposure to beer even further solidified Romans’ preference for wine, not just as a drink, but as a symbol of Romanitas. Beer, brewed mostly in the provincial regions not climatically suited for grapes and wine, quickly became associated with barbarians and therefore stood in opposition to Roman values. As Roman authority waned in the West through the fifth and sixth centuries, Christianity remained powerful, and Christian sources betray an acceptance of beer, tacitly and later more explicitly. This ecclesiastical …

The Papers Of Andrew Jackson, Volume Vii, 1829, Andrew Jackson

The Papers of Andrew Jackson

With this seventh volume, The Papers of Andrew Jackson enters the heart of Jackson’s career: his tumultuous two terms as President of the United States. The year 1829 began with Jackson fresh from a triumphant victory over incumbent John Quincy Adams in the 1828 campaign, yet mourning the sudden death of his beloved wife, Rachel. In January, having hired an overseer for his Hermitage plantation and arranged for Rachel’s tomb, he left Tennessee for Washington.

Jackson assumed the presidency with two objectives already fixed in mind: purging the federal bureaucracy of recreant officeholders and removing the southern Indian tribes westward …