Digital Commons Network^™

Media Erasure: A 1904 Lynching In St. Charles, Arkansas, Mary Hennigan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As Americans grew increasingly interested in historic racial violence following the Black Lives Matter movement in 2021, select news publications chose to publish apologetic editorials and articles that addressed their failure of inclusive reporting for the last century (Lancaster, 2021; Fannin, 2020). In the theme of acknowledging past mistakes, the Printing Hate project emerged to investigate the power white-owned papers had in influencing lynching incidents in the county (Capital News Service, 2021). The present study examines one Arkansas lynching in 1904 St. Charles. The incident includes the death of 13 Black men. Findings from a content analysis of 70 original …

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 …

As Seen On Screen: American Ambivalence Shown Through Death Penalty And Vigilante Films, Lisette Donewald

Honors Scholar Theses

The United States is one of the last western nations still practicing capital punishment. A history of and commitment to vigilantism and its ideals offers an explanation of America’s retention of capital punishment. Employing scholarship on law and popular culture and vigilantism, this thesis finds that pro-death penalty frames are prevalent in vigilante films while anti-death penalty frames are prevalent in films that focus specifically upon capital punishment. Since the 1960’s however, there has been a gradual shift towards anti-death penalty frames and away from pro-death penalty frames as well as changes in the themes presented in the two genres …

The Use Of Native American Literature For Teaching Native American History, Charles Democker

Senior Honors Theses

hite historians, schools, and writers have produced works that teach inaccurate and biased subjects that surround Native American history and culture. While most of this inaccurate and racist writing comes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Indigenous authors, both past and present, have written works that have the potential to give more historically accurate and thorough representations of their people and culture. This thesis examines three novels written by Indigenous authors to argue for using Native American fiction to correct misrepresentation of Native culture by white writers. In contrast to both novels and histories written by white people, Native American …

20,000 Feet Between: The Experiential Disparities Of Precision Bombing In Austrian Bomb Victims And American Bombardiers, 1945, Emily E. Hanish

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

From November 1944 until May 1945, the 57^th Bomb Wing executed the “Battle of the Brenner” to incapacitate the German war machine. As a result of five campaign missions from March – April 1945, the USAAF not only decimated the village of Matrei am Brenner and Trautson Castle, but also killed dozens of civilians. Recent archaeological excavations at Medieval Trautson Castle prompted serious questions about the USAAF’s bombardment strategies and ethics, especially regarding precision bombing. By analyzing these bombing missions, this thesis will delineate the “Battle of the Brenner” within the evolution of the USAAF’s bombardment doctrine in order …

Exodus Arena: Cashman Field And The (Re)Development Of Sports And Recreation In Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, Ryan Browar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Cashman Field is a minor league sport stadium one-mile north of the world famous “Fremont Street Experience” in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. Minor league sports stadiums are microcosms of their communities, and Cashman Field’s history is Las Vegas’s history. Although the city’s first permanent sports venue, the stadium endured numerous cycles of colonialism, stadium building, successful operation, neglect, decay, and abandonment. Now at the end of another cycle, Cashman Field is being forgotten as Las Vegas transitions into a major league sports town. Sports stadiums reveal the social, cultural, and economic factors that define twentieth-century American history, but Cashman Field’s …

Policing Sin City: The Creation And Impact Of The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, 1973-1985, Richard Kim

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines the creation of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in 1973 and its impact on the War on Crime. The first chapter examines the significance of race and policing in Las Vegas from the early twentieth century until the consolidation of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office and Las Vegas Police Department in 1973. Chapter 2 then analyzes how the federal government’s so-called War on Crime played out at the local and state level in Nevada from 1973 to 1985. The thesis argues that this period witnessed a punitive turn in policing that had long-term consequences for Las …

International Connection, Domestic Radicalization: The Connection Between East Asia And Black Radicals, Randy O. Felder

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

Utilizing newspapers, journals and pamphlets, this thesis examines the ways that the Black Power movement, primarily in the 1960’s connected with East Asian countries.

Differentiating between the Black Power and the Civil Rights groups, this thesis will show why and how the Black Power movement needed international allies such as China and Vietnam.

Showing that the connection between the East Asia and Black Power groups was due to racism, imperialism, and Maoism, I argue that Black Power individuals/groups were influenced by East Asia and saw these countries as a blueprint for revolution in America. This thesis also analyzes the significance …

Memorial Craze: How War Memorials Have Been Changed By War, Jillian Bass

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that memorials constructed after 9/11 were designed specifically in a way that privileged and focused on the dead individually. By taking a look at memorials throughout American history, the study of memorialization sets up the stage for the way the lives of ordinary people have been memorialized throughout history. 9/11 is one of the most memorable days in the history of the world in the 21st century. However, the academic world has generally ignored the study of war memorials throughout American history as a subset of memorials. Chronicling memorials from the Civil War period to present …

Coal, Land, And Ideology: Inventions Of Appalachia In The Mind Of The American Ruling Class, Zachary Harris

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Appalachia, itself a difficult to resolutely define region, has undergone the economic forces of colonialism and industrializing capitalism which allow for an excellent case study to apply Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. No American region’s national conception is likely to have been as varied and often misrepresented as that of Appalachia. From the Revolutionary American State’s invention of early white settlers as the virtuous yeoman of the Republic to the modern perception of Appalachia as backwards, conservative, and drug-addled, shifting national economic conditions resulted in a constant invention of Appalachia in congruence. Whenever the people residing in Appalachia, whether Black, …

Rabble-Rousers: A Brief Treatise On Populism And Its Ascent In The West, Andrew Baechtel

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project aims to examine the causes for the recent ascent of populism in the West during the last dozen or so years with a lens focused on the United States and France. The primary area under observation is both the historical and contemporary role that populism and its adherents have played within our cultures. I aim to address the following: What is populism, how has it been broadly understood and how do its adherents regard it and what causes populist movements to develop. Academics in the field have produced a rich historiography that reveals a divided discourse. Previously analysts …

Southerners On New Ground: The Battle For Civil War Memory Since 1993, Andrew William Hoffman

History Theses & Dissertations

Between the years 2015 and 2020, over 300 Confederate symbols, including over 140 monuments, were removed from public land across the United States. This unprecedented movement to discard Confederate symbols reflected a shift in how Americans chose to remember the Civil War. By 2015, the wide-spread attack on the legacy of the Confederacy was much-anticipated. In fact, its foundation was laid during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This thesis fills a gap within the historiography of Civil War memory by exploring controversial events that reflect Americans’ contrasting interpretation of the American Civil War from the years 1993 to …

Florida History In Publications, 2011, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

For This Is An Enchanted Land Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings And The Florida Environment, Florence M. Turcotte

Florida Historical Quarterly

American author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings described her adopted home in north-central Florida as "an enchanted land." Her love for her surroundings was evident in rich descriptions of the seasons, the forces of nature, and the lives of the people around her. Immediately upon arrival in 1928 at Cross Creek, a tiny hamlet about twenty miles southeast of Gainesville, Rawlings immersed herself in the local hunting and fishing culture. She came to understand and appreciate the lifestyle of the people of the nearby "Big Scrub" country, who depended on the land for their survival. Along with this understanding, Rawlings came to …

Pragmatism, Seminoles, And Science: Opposition To Progressive Everglades Drainage, Chris Wilhelm

Florida Historical Quarterly

Floridians have always had complex, contentious, and dynamic relationships with the Everglades. Most Floridians in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the Everglades as a wasteland and supported draining useless swamp in order to facilitate economic progress. The publication of Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) and the advent of modern environmentalism encouraged Floridians to reconsider the identity and value of the Everglades, seeing it as a 'river of grass' that needed protection and restoration. These two views, however, only scratch the surface of the multiplicity of ways Floridians have perceived and interacted with …

Florida: The Mediated State, Julian C. Chambliss

Florida Historical Quarterly

In a March 2007 National Geographic article titled, "Beyond Disney," writer T.D. Allman wrote, "Everything happening to America today is happening here ... "1 The article went on to suggest that Orlando had become a prime example of the "ascendant power of cities' exurbs... " While this assessment was focused on the iconic Central Florida community, the implication that Florida's experience foreshadows the country's future highlights a crucial role the state plays in the broader U.S. experience, a role that this special issue of the Florida Historical Quarterly aims to render. Indeed, as Anne Rowe writes in The Ideal of …

The Rise And Fall Of The Original Lone Star State: Infant American Imperialism Ascendant In West Florida, Cody Scallions

Florida Historical Quarterly

To many scholars, the West Florida Revolt of 1810 served merely as a transitional period in American history. Referenced as a time when a few social elites rose to challenge Spanish colonial authority in southeastern Louisiana, the West Florida Revolt has been viewed as a necessary step in the annexation of the territory by the United States. Recent research suggests this perspective should be qualified. Much like the Republic of Texas, the Republic of West Florida exhibited characteristics common to more successful independent states, including a functioning written constitution, a judicial system, a treasury, an army, and important elements of …

The Origins Of The Monroe Doctrine Revisited: The Madison Administration, The West Florida Revolt, And The No Transfer Policy, William S. Belko

Florida Historical Quarterly

Late in October of 1810, as citizens and statesmen throughout the United States focused almost entirely on an imminent conflict with Great Britain and apprehensively monitored Napoleon's armies in Europe, the president of the United States, James Madison, quickly convened an emergency session of his cabinet members. Great Britain and Napoleon were not, however, the reason for calling the secret cabinet meeting. What occupied the attention of the executive branch was a little recognized rebellion in a sparsely populated region south of the Mississippi Territory. Two days after secretly conferring with his cabinet, on October 27, Madison issued a pivotal …

Blue Water, Brown Water, And Confederate Disloyalty: The Peculiar And Personal Naval Conflict In South Florida During The Civil War, Irvin D. S. Winsboro

Florida Historical Quarterly

As Florida's political leaders voted on January 10, 1861, to follow the secessionist lead of South Carolina and Mississippi, former Florida Territorial Governor Richard Keith Call observed the multiple and shifting solidarities of the state and warned the winning faction that "you have opened the gates of Hell." Call's premonition swayed few power-brokers in Tallahassee, yet his words proved prophetic. Only in recent decades have historians of Florida's Civil War probed past the traditional interpretations of the state's experience as a "trifling affair" to establish how disruptive and hellish the conflict was on and to the home front. Indeed, scholars …

2010 Friends Of The Florida Historical Society Keynote Lecture: The First Coming Of Judeo-Christian Religion To Florida, Michael Gannon

Florida Historical Quarterly

We are foregathered this evening in what I like to call the United States' City of Centuries- four and a half to be exact come 2015. Among this city's many claims is that it served as the American nation's cradle of Western religion. Here in 1565 was founded the first Christian parish, named after the fifth century North African bishop and theologian Augustine of Hippo. Here, too, in 1587, was established the first Christian mission, named Nombre de Dios, to the native peoples of North America north of Mexico. In turn, those religious institutions gave rise to our state's and …

Florida History In Publications, 2010, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

The Servants And Mrs. Rawlings: Martha Mickens And African American Life At Cross Creek, Rebecca Sharpless

Florida Historical Quarterly

The year is about 1940. It is evening at Cross Creek, the home of author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a simple wood-frame house set among working orange groves near Hawthorne in North Central Florida. An unknown photographer is documenting an evening of dining and entertainment for Rawlings and a group of her friends, who like the author are white people of means and accomplishment. One photograph focuses on three African American women who are standing in a row and singing, their eyes cast upward, accompanied by a man on the harmonica. A second man leans on the head of a guitar, …

From Adventure Travel To Leisure Tourism: The Florida Letters Of William Drysdale In The New York Times, 1884-1893, Jesus Mendez

Florida Historical Quarterly

William Drysdale was a fixture in newspaper circles of New York City in the late nineteenth century, a reporter and writer whose powers of observation and social commentary made him equally at home covering famous legal battles of the time or describing his travels over many years in the United States, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe. Fortunately for Florida, some of Drysdale's best literary pages chronicled important decades for the young state that would eventually build its fortune and its future on tourism. For 24 years, he wrote, often under the thinly disguised pseudonym of "W.D.", more …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South. by F. Evan Nooe; Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. by Barbara Krauthamer; Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army. and Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. by John David Smith; Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South. by Pamela C. Edwards; Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. by Lauren B. Acker; Vickers, The Life of Ruth Bryan Owen: Florida's First …

Administrative Recalcitrance And Government Intervention: Desegregation At The University Of Florida, 1962-1972, Jessica Clawson

Florida Historical Quarterly

The desegregation of American schools in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education was often long, slow, violent, and varied considerably based on location, leadership, and community attitudes.1 The national political climate also influenced local responses to desegregation, as grassroots conservatism took hold in the post-war era.2 Although white segregationists made pledges never to submit to racial integration, many southern white leaders subtly and strategically accommodated civil rights activists and the federal government. Their compromises helped preserve white elite priorities while casting the struggle against civil rights activists as part of a national battle to …

Uninvited Guests: A Night At Cedar Point Plantation, Patrick W. Doyle

Florida Historical Quarterly

In October 1817 a mariner's mistake at the entrance of the St. Johns River and a subsequent mishap proved fortuitous in preserving a rare glimpse of plantation life in Spanish East Florida in a time of turmoil. Documents describing these events reveal details regarding the humiliating dispossession of Spanish authority on Amelia Island and its town of Fernandina, first by filibusters led by Gregor McGregor and later by rogues headed by the pirate Luis Aury.

"Secrecy Has No Excuse": The Florida Land Boom, Tourism, And The 1926 Smallpox Epidemic In Tampa And Miami, Eric Jarvis

Florida Historical Quarterly

Historians frequently have identified the period from roughly 1921 to 1926 in Florida as the Land Boom, or simply, the Boom. It is usually analyzed through the prism of the Roaring Twenties in the United States, a time best symbolized in the state by a frenzied real estate market, overinflated land prices, and massive speculation. Miami and south Florida received much of the attention, but there were important aspects of boomtime mania in many parts of the state, including the Tampa area. A booster-driven public relations blitz made up of promotional advertising, business propaganda, and glowing press releases fuelled the …

Cuban Exiles In Key West During The Ten Years' War, 1868-1878, Antonio Rafael De La Cova

Florida Historical Quarterly

The upheaval of the Cuban Ten Years' War (10 October 1868-10 February 1878) prompted the largest number of refugees fleeing the island to settle ninety miles away in Key West, Florida, the southernmost point of the United States. Although the expatriates transformed the physical landscape of the coral and limestone reef and modified its social, economic, and political order, there has been no demographic study or precise statistics on the Cubans in Key West during that decade. Likewise, accurate statistical data is lacking for Cubans in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. In 1870, Key West had the second …

End Notes, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society; Florida Historical Quarterly Podcasts; Florida Historical Quarterly Joins JSTOR; Florida Historical Quarterly now on Facebook; Call for Papers 2011 Annual Meeting of the Florida Historical Society; Florida Lecture Series 2010-2011; 51st Annual Meeting Florida Conference of Historians Call for Papers and Participation; Guidelines for Submissions to the Florida HIstorical Quarterly

Selling Seduction: Women And Feminine Nature In 1920s Florida Advertising, Nicole C. Cox

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1925, Tampa's Booster Record and Publishing Company debuted its latest jingle, "Tampa Steps Out," with words and music by Frank W. Salley. The song, and many others like it, promoted the state and the city of Tampa during the 1920s real estate frenzy known as the Florida land boom. Following the United States' long booster musical tradition, Florida songbooks featured colorful pictorial covers designed to function as a sort of billboard depicting the region's charms and progress. City and state developers, hotel proprietors, real-estate salesmen, and other boosters engaged professional songwriters, including the renowned Irving Berlin, to develop original …