United States History Commons^™

Forging Community In The Ouachita Foothills Of Southwest Arkansas: Duckett Township, Homesteading, Distilling And Race, Lisa C. Childs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Community was key to successful subsistence agriculture in Arkansas, especially in the Ouachita foothills in southwest Arkansas (including Polk, Howard, Montgomery, Pike, Garland Counties) and Oklahoma (McCurtain, Pittsburgh, LeFlore Counties) until the 1940s. Nearly a quarter of Arkansas’s land remained in the federal government’s name twenty years after statehood, and even more of the land in the western Ouachita foothills. Much remains unknown about how farming communities were formed in this area from the end of the Civil War until approximately World War II. As seen in the Duckett community in northern Howard County, while family connections were important to …

Historical Underpinnings And Consequent Effects Of Labor Exploitation Of Mexican And Central Americans In The United States, Andrew Elkins

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Undergraduate Honors Theses

The experience immigrants have today working and living in the southern United States is defined by systems that have developed out of lingering racist attitudes and reactions toward these individuals. The flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border has a long history, and it is characterized by patterns that have continued from early guest worker programs to the present-day flow of migrants, both legal and undocumented. Also continually present is the racialization of these migrants, which has often forced them to work and live as marginalized members of American society. This project will explore the establishment of Mexican American citizen …

Wonders In The Deep: Faith And Religious Practice In The Shipboard Writings Of American Sailors, 1810-1859, Valerie Sallis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While stereotypes of sailors as immoral, godless ne’er-do-wells flourish in mainland historical accounts, little attention has been paid to the records left by sailors that document their own faith and religious practices. This thesis examines the logbooks, journals, and diaries written by American sailors while at sea, sounding the depth of sailors’ religious beliefs through their own words. While American seamen certainly drank, swore, and caroused, sailors also frequently captured in their writing a much more religious nature than the mainland expected of them. Sailors’ position as highly mobile laborers on the ultimate borderlands—the sea itself—impacted their religious practice and …

A Tale Of Two Libraries: A History Of The Public Library Systems Of Atlanta, Ga And Baltimore, Md And How Libraries Across America Adapt To Their Communities, Gigi Powell

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

Public libraries are a staple American institution, and one that was created to adapt and react to its surrounding communities. Public libraries are unique in their ability to anticipate and fill a community’s needs, as evidenced by their constant evolution to remain relevant and provide up- to-date services to all users. To highlight this evolution, librarians from both the Fulton County Public Library System in Atlanta, GA and the Enoch Pratt Free Library system were interviewed to gauge what the library’s role is in a modern world, in a world newly ravaged by COVID-19, and how that role has evolved …

Are Small Businesses The Framework For A Successful U.S. Economy?, Carson Clevenger

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis will investigate the impact of small businesses on the United States’ economy. I will be assessing several impact areas including gross domestic product, employment, and local economy contribution. This thesis will cover a study from the time periods of 1998-2014 of the gross domestic product and employment levels and will use numbers from the years of 2018- present for other impact areas. Furthermore, I will be analyzing certain sectors of the economy, comparing small businesses contribution to corporate contribution, in order to discuss if small businesses are necessary for our country’s successful economy.

“Deserting The Broad And Easy Way”: Southern Methodist Women, The Social Gospel, And The New Deal State, 1909-1939, Chelsea Hodge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of three decades, white southern Methodist women took on issues of labor and poverty through their national women’s organization, the Woman’s Missionary Council (WMC). Between 1909 and 1939, the WMC focused their work on five groups of people they viewed as in need of their help: women, children, black southerners, immigrants, and rural people. Motivated by the Social Gospel and an intense belief that their faith led them to effect real change in the American South, the WMC intervened in people’s lives, pursuing reform that could at times be maternalistic and condescending but at other times radical …

The Shallow End Of The Deep South: Civil Rights Activism In Arkansas, 1865-1970, Sarah Riva

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On April 7, 1968, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller claimed that “Arkansas today stands at the threshold of leading the nation...for a better America,” The Republican Arkansas Governor spoke on the steps of the state capitol at a memorial for the beloved civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. who had been assassinated three days earlier. Rockefeller’s claim that Arkansas could lead the nation came just two years after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formally ended its work in the state to improve racial equality. Their efforts had seen widespread acceptance of integrated public facilities, increased voter registration and more meaningful …

Arkansas Aprons: Food Power And Women In Arkansas, 1857 To 1891, Robyn Shahan Spears

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Arkansas foodways in the late nineteenth century were defined by times of plenty and scarcity, need and connection, traditions and innovations. These components created a unique culture in which women through food exchange, were able to improve their standard of living. The years of plenty established in the antebellum era lay in stark contrast to the scarcity during the Civil War. What followed during the Progressive Era are fascinating histories of women employing their agency to empower and improve not only their lives but also future generations. I argue that these women utilized their agency to engage in “food power,” …

'The Once Peaceful Little Town:' Edmondson, Arkansas, And The Decline Of African American Landownership, Samuel Morris Ownbey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the systematic dispossession of African American property by white planters in the Arkansas Delta. It argues white planters, backed by a legal system favorable to their interests, expropriated the black land in the once flourishing community of Edmondson, Arkansas. Founded in 1902 by African American business and political leaders, the Edmondson Home and Improvement Company purchased farmland and town lots and began to sell or rent the land to African Americans coming to the area. Located in Crittenden County, Edmondson represented black defiance in the face of Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. The town consisted of …

The Farmers’ Federation: Regional Racial Mythologies As Agricultural Capital, Jama Mcmurtery Grove

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1927, the Farmers’ Federation agricultural cooperative in Western North Carolina launched an organization to solicit funds from wealthy donors. The money raised through philanthropic campaigns enabled the cooperative to fund large-scale agricultural projects, which helped members navigate the dramatic agricultural transformations of the early twentieth century. Although the cooperative advocated a progressive program of business-minded, scientific farming, its leadership modified programs to reflect farmer members’ limited resources and the realities of mountain production. As a result, the co-op provided a crucial bridge between white farmers and new methods of agricultural production that reached deep into peoples’ familial and productive …

And They Entered As Ladies: When Race, Class And Black Femininity Clashed At Central High School, Misti Nicole Harper

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“And They Entered as Ladies: When Race, Class and Black Femininity Clashed at Central High School,” explores the intersectionality of race, gender and class status as middle-class black women led the integration movement and were the focal point of white backlash during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School crisis. Six of the nine black students chosen to integrate Central High School were carefully selected girls from middle-class homes, whose mothers and female family members played active parts in keeping their daughters enrolled at Central, while Daisy Gatson Bates orchestrated the integration of the capital’s school system. Nevertheless, these women …

A Portrait Of Chinese Americans: From The Perspective Of Assimilation, Wei Bai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With more than 40 million immigrants, the United States is the major destination for most international migrants. It has always been so because America is a nation of immigrants. The United States has been shaped by four waves of immigration, and unlike previous waves, in the past 50 years immigrants have come from Latin America and Asia more than other regions of the world. Chinese immigration is the focus of this thesis. Chinese people have been present in this society from before the Revolutionary War, and their story is a complex one--one marked by rapid growth, discrimination, exclusion, acceptance, more …

Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers' Movements In North Dakota And Saskatchewan, 1905-1950, Jason Mccollom

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research uses as a case study farmers' movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, two identical locales in terms of wheat monoculture, demographics, and agrarian ideology, and traces the differing Social, economic, and political outcomes between 1905 and 1950. The research, however, moves beyond this and also investigates the transnational integration, connections, and engagements among agrarian groups across the broader North American northern plains and across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Australia. Methodologically, this study applies Social movement theory, pioneered by sociologists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilley, which seeks to replace a …

"A Song Workers Everywhere Sing:" Zilphia Horton And The Creation Of Labor's Musical Canon, Chelsea Hodge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Zilphia Horton, a college educated, middle class white woman from the rural American south, created the canon of music that would become central to the black freedom struggle in postwar America. Horton's work in the post-New Deal labor movement established the methods of incorporating protest music in movements of social justice that prevailed for the rest of the century. The work songs and hymns that she collected, arranged, notated, and published while music director at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN--including "We Shall Overcome," "This Little Light of Mine," "We Shall Not Be Moved"--motivated generations of activists as they transformed …

Feet In The South, Eyes To The West: Fort Smith Enters The Sunbelt, Adam Morrison Carson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the political realignment of Fort Smith, Arkansas and argues that the standard historiographical argument about the process of realignment does not explain what occurred in this city. Much of the historiography of political realignment currently revolves around the belief in a white backlash against the federal government and the national Democratic Party for their support of African American civil rights. Though historians have moved toward a "suburban synthesis" that downplays the backlash thesis, historians still argues that many white southerners moved to the suburbs to avoid integration.

I argue that this process did not occur in the …

Nature Of Southern Regionalism, O. Orland Maxfield

Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Mississippi Politics During The Progressive Period, Charles Granville Hamilton

Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science

No abstract provided.