Digital Commons Network^™

“Infantry Would Not Do:” Appalachia, The Environment, And The Evolution Of Mountain Warfare During The American Civil War, Lucas Michael Wilder

Theses and Dissertations

Union General Ambrose E. Burnside launched his invasion of East Tennessee in the summer of 1863. The corps he used consisted of half-infantry and half-mounted units to utilize their speed to overcome mountain obstacles. The successful campaign and the capture of the agriculturally rich region of East Tennessee and its vital East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad deprived the Confederacy of resources, ultimately contributing to Confederate defeat. The American Civil War saw commanders plunge into the mountains of Appalachia and encounter a terrain and a people with which many were unacquainted. This dissertation argues that their tactics and strategies for dealing …

Badger State Nationalism: World War I, The Ku Klux Klan, And The Politics Of 'Americanism' In 1915-1930 Wisconsin, William Levi

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The Ku Klux Klan is most synonymous with racism and religious bigotry, especially during the revival period of the 1920s. What is often less understood is the aggressively nationalist nature of the Klan, which in some locales proved to be its most potent symbol and recruiting tool, epitomized by the use of the American flag and the ‘100% Americanism’ slogan. In Wisconsin, where entry into World War I was least popular in 1917, the following months saw a series of ‘loyalty struggles’ develop; many Wisconsinites regretted their early lack of support and sought to prove their loyalty and patriotism to …

To Conquer The Coast: Pensacola, The Gulf Of Mexico, And The Construction Of American Imperialism, 1820-1848, Maria Angela Diaz

Florida Historical Quarterly

Americans' dreams of empire appeared to become reality when the United States gained control over Florida in 1821. Yet although the U.S. controlled a significant portion of the Gulf Coast, the nation remained one among many foreign powers vying for dominance in the region, a fact that raised concerns about future expansion in the minds of many. As of 1821 the U.S. shared the coastline with a newly independent Mexico. At the same time, France, Britain, and Spain remained active in both the Gulf and the Caribbean.1 The combination of new republics and old colonial powers shaped the nature of …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Weatherford, They Dared to Dream: Florida Women Who Shaped History. by Thomas H. Appleton Jr.; Link, Brown, Ward, and Bone, eds., Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South. by Robert Cassanello; Kvach, De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South. by Frank J. Byrne; Pickenpaugh, Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy. by David Carlson; Millner, The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet. by Katherine Marra; Bryan, Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra. by Margaret Humphreys; Abreu, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the …

"The Indians Are Scattering, I Fear": Mobility And Power In The Second Seminole War, Christine A. Rizzi

Florida Historical Quarterly

Five days after Christmas in 1837, Brigadier General Thomas Sidney Jesup wrote a letter to Colonel Zachary Taylor on the subject of cypress canoes. The latter officer was fresh off an engagement against a large band of Seminole Indians. Taylor's force of 800 regular soldiers and volunteers engaged some 400 Seminole warriors and their black allies on the north shore of Lake Okeechobee.1 The Indian group, led by fabled leaders Sam Jones, Alligator, and Wild Cat, retreated across the lake after injuring and killing a significant number of Taylor's detachment.2 With the enemy withdrawing across the large, unfamiliar lake, and …

Interpreting Florida, Its Ninetenth-Century Literary Heritage, Maurice O'Sullivan

Florida Historical Quarterly

In January 1827, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 23-year-old licensed but not yet ordained minister plagued by religious doubt and failing health, came to St. Augustine. As he wrote in a letter to his brother William, he found himself constantly bored during his two and a half months residence: "What is done here? Nothing .... I stroll on the sea-beach and drive a green orange over the sand with a stick. Sometimes I sail in a boat, sometimes I sit in a chair."1

Historiography Of Nineteenth-Century Florida, James G. Cusick

Florida Historical Quarterly

When the nineteenth century began, Florida, or the two colonial territories that became the modern state, was still under Spanish rule, its residents untouched as yet by coming rebellion and war. When the century closed, Florida was part of the American Deep South, looking to northern financiers for its Gilded Age development while creating Jim Crow laws as a buttress against calls for racial equality.

Religion And Women's Rights In Florida: An Examination Of The Equal Rights Amendment Legislative Debates, 1972-1982, Laura E. Brock

Florida Historical Quarterly

Florida housewife Adele Kanter's letter was prototypical of religious women who were supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).3 Community activist and housewife Shirley Spellerberg's letter was representative of religious opponents of the ERA. Women were mobilized to enter the political arena, many for the first time, on both sides of the ERA conflict. Florida was the key battleground state where the ERA failed after an intense decade-long (1972-1982) political battle that was an intersection of religious, gender and social issues. Examining the history of Florida's ERA conflict is significant because religious and social themes recur in contemporary public policy …

Between Swamp And Sea: Bahamian Visitors In Southeast Florida Before Miami, Devin Leigh

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1865, George Franklin Thompson, a representative of the Freedman's Bureau, wrote that southeast Florida could become the "garden of the United States," but only if the water levels of Lake Okeechobee could be lowered by at least six feet.2 In this assessment, Thompson epitomized the nineteenth-century, triumphalist belief that settlement in the region of present-day Miami would depend upon a severe manipulation of the natural environment. According to the Miami metropolitan narrative, this manipulation came in the year 1896, when a widowed heiress and "plucky" pioneer from Cleveland named Julia Tuttle capitalized on the Great Freeze of 1894-1895, and …

500 Years Of Florida History - The Eighteenth Century, Connie L. Lester

Florida Historical Quarterly

Upheaval characterized eighteenth-century Florida. European powers continued to fight for dominance in the region and Great Britain emerged as Spain's primary competitor, obtaining control of the peninsula and its environs, at least on paper, for two decades (1763-1783) before Spain again claimed ownership. Most native groups continued to decline in population due to disease, migration, warfare and enslavement while others, specifically the Seminoles, grew in numbers and regional influence for many of the same reasons. African Americans, both enslaved and free, expanded their presence in Florida, steadily asserting their autonomy militarily, socially and culturally. St. Augustine and Pensacola remained the …

The Historiography Of Eighteenth-Century Florida, Sherry Johnson

Florida Historical Quarterly

Florida is the neglected stepchild of Spain's American empire, wrote Carl L. Swanson in his introduction to the reprint of Joyce Harman's Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 1732-1763.1 Written in 2004, Swanson's observation decrying the limited number of books that dealt with early Florida was not too far from the mark. Like Jane Landers'observation on the difficulty in placing Florida into one historical tradition or another, such statements underscore the obstacles in crafting a cohesive article that overcomes the problems not encountered in writing historiographical essays for the other centuries of La Florida.2 The challenges begin when one realizes …

Wishing That Right May Prevail: Ethan Allen Hitchcock And The Florida War, C. S. Monaco

Florida Historical Quarterly

On a spring evening in 1841, Major Ethan A. Hitchcock (1798-1870), mindful of the rare privilege of spending a night alone in a "small neat house" overlooking Tampa bay, rather than encamped in the East Florida wilderness, opened a trunk containing his flute and some sheet music and proceeded to play a few pieces. Pausing for a moment, he put his instrument down and walked over to an open window where he "sat in the light of the moon." As the air blew gently, Hitchcock was overcome by a rush of feeling. "I could haye wept," he confided to his …

New Systems, Established Traditions: Governor James Grant's Indian Diplomacy And The Evolution Of British Colonial Policy, 1760-1771, James L. Hill

Florida Historical Quarterly

Grant, the first governor of the British province of East Florida, arrived at St. Augustine in 1763 with a determination to prioritize Indian diplomacy. He desperately wanted to avoid violence between settlers and the neighboring Creek Indians, as he feared that internecine warfare on the frontier would scare potential immigrants from moving to the colony. The governor sought peaceful relations, not as a humanitarian aim, but as a means of advancing his goal of developing East Florida. To this end, Grant devised what he called a "new system" for the management of Indian affairs. This "new system," actually relied on …

Perfectly Still No More: Unionists In Confederate Northeast Florida, T. W. Upchurch

Florida Historical Quarterly

James William Allen's career as a Confederate soldier lasted only six months; he doubled over with a hernia and was discharged on the last day of 1861.2 His reaction to this medical condition is unknown since Allen left no letters,journal, or public pronouncement. Did he have dreams of military glory that were squashed by his rather inglorious medical condition? After all, Allen's unit, the St. Augustine Blues, had moved only 60 miles up the road to Fernandina.3 He had not left his home state nor, we assume, had he fired a weapon except to practice his marksmanship. However, judging by …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Foster, Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900-1600. by David McCally; Din, War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles. by Kristofer Ray; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. by Jeffrey L. Fortney; Lawson, Jim Crow's Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945. by Court Carney; Reid and Bennett, eds., Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction. by Dolita D. Cathcart; Boyd, Georgia Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Shaping of the New South. by Sarah H. Brown; De …

The Role Of Cattle Ranching In The 1656 Timucuan Rebellion: A Struggle For Land, Labor, And Chiefly Power, Justin B. Blanton

Florida Historical Quarterly

Late in the spring of 1656, the principle cacique of Timucua, Lucas Menendez, led a group of twenty Indians on an attack of the La Chua cattle ranch of north Florida.1 The raiding Indians murdered a Spanish soldier and two African slaves in addition to slaughtering all the cattle. Lucas Menendez spared the surprised ranch owner, Juan Menendez Marquez, but ordered him to abandon the ranch and leave Florida for Spain.2 These events, together with four other murders in the Western Timucua mission province, are known as the Timucuan rebellion.

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Jennings, New Worlds of Violence: Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast. by David A. Nichols; Frank and Kilbride, eds, Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Broum. by Adam Tate; Carey, Sold Down the River: Slavery in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia. by Lauren K. Thompson; Bush, I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island: Life in a Civil War Prison. by Steven J. Ramold; Barnes, ed., The Materiality of Freedom: Archaeologies of Postemanicipation Life. by Stacy Pratt McDermott; Way, Conerving Southern Longleaf: Herbert Stoddard and the Rise of Ecological Land Management. by Tom Okie; …

Colonialism On The Spanish Florida Frontier: Mission San Luis, 1656-1704, Bonnie G. Mcewan

Florida Historical Quarterly

The status of indigenous chiefs in the Americas was acknowledged by Spaniards in 1492.1 This resulted in a hierarchical social order of republics, including "a Republic of Spaniards, a Republic of Indians, and a "third order" of free blacks and mixed bloods ... presumed to have an African taint."2 During the seventeenth century, this framework became an important element in structuring the Indies and other colonies such as La Florida.3 In exchange for allegiance and tribute obligations, chiefs received special privileges, immunities, honorific titles, and material gifts that reinforced their status. However, the recognition of native nobility and indigenous political …

The Historical Archaeology Of Seventeeth-Century La Florida, Bonnie G. Mcewan

Florida Historical Quarterly

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, St. Augustine was still recovering from Francis Drake's 1586 raid during which the town and fields were ravaged.1 Officials were also evaluating the fallout from the 1597 Guale Rebellion during which four of the five friars working among the native peoples were killed, and rebuilding the town following a devastating fire in 1599. If not for St. Augustine's strategic location and perceived progress in the religious conversion of natives, Florida might well have been abandoned at the turn of the century. As it turned out, the next century would be the period of …

"These People Are Not Conquered Like Those Of New Spain": Florida's Reciprocal Colonial Compact, Amy Turner Bushnell

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1605, Pedro de Ybarra, Governor of Florida, sent a terse note to Fray Benito de Blasco, a missionary who had gone behind his back to send his own envoy to the wild coast south of St. Augustine. "These people are not conquered like those of New Spain," he warned him. "This is a new land."1 As the Spanish extended their influence over the New World, they encountered a broad range of environments and peoples, and how they related to them differed from place to place. The maritime periphery of Florida, which included parts of present-day South Carolina, Georgia, and …

500 Years Of Florida History--The Seventeenth Century, Connie L. Lester

Florida Historical Quarterly

Seventeenth-century Florida little resembled the region Ponce de Leon first visited in 1513. Various indigenous peoples still dominated the peninsula but their numbers had dramatically declined over the years due to disease, warfare, and migration. Thousands of Europeans visited the locale during the 1600s, many of them planning to stay permanently, few of them actually doing so, and most failing to realize their economic, religious or imperial goals there. Africans and African Americans also lived in the region and its hinterlands, though the majority did so under circumstances they would not have chosen. Partially as a result, by 1700 Florida …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Davis, The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History. by Miles Smith; Hatch, Osceola and the Great Seminole War: A Struggle for Justice and Freedom. by Patricia Riles Wickman; Marotti, The Cana Sanctuary: History, Diplomacy, and Black Catholic Marriage in Antebellum St. Augustine, Florida. by Larry Eugene Rivers; Gallagher, The Union War. by Brian Craig Miller; Weinfeld, The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post-Civil War Florida. by Will Guzman; Frantz, The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877-1933. by R. Matthew Poteat; Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, …

Looking For Angola: An Archaeological And Ethnohistorical Search For A Nineteenth Century Florida Maroon Community And Its Caribbean Connections, Rosalyn Howard

Florida Historical Quarterly

The "Looking for Angola" project (LFA) commenced on December 12, 2004 when shovels broke ground on the south side of the Manatee River at the point where it meets the Braden River. Based upon historical research, this area is believed to be the former location of Angola. Historian John Lee Williams referred to it as "Negro Point,"1 but in a land claim document filed by two Cuban fishermen it was labeled "Angola."2 The groundbreaking marked the realization of Project Director Vickie Oldham's wish to relate the story of early African American settlers in the Tampa Bay-Sarasota area of Florida. While …

Shipwrecked In The Atlantic World: Reevaluating Jonathan Dickinson's Interactions With Native Peoples Along Florida's Southeastern Coast, Jason Daniels

Florida Historical Quarterly

As the sun rose upon the mangled and beleaguered Reformation on October 23, 1696, Jonathan Dickinson, an Anglo-Jamaican planter in the process of relocating his mercantile affairs to Philadelphia, found himself shipwrecked hundreds of miles from the nearest European colony and stranded amongst Native Americans.2 For modern scholars, Dickinson's account of his two-month odyssey from present-day Jupiter Island to Spanish St. Augustine has proved to be an indispensable ethnographical tract for examining Native Americans living south of the Spanish mission provinces during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, this complicated and inscrutable text, like much of the Florida peninsula, remains …

Entangled Borderlands: Europeans And Timucuans In Sixteenth-Century Florida, Jonathan Decoster

Florida Historical Quarterly

In February 1566, grisly news reached the Norman port cities of Dieppe and Le Havre. The French Huguenot colonists, who had left those ports for Florida less than two years previously, had been cruelly slaughtered by Spaniards. An open letter to France's king, purportedly written by the widows and orphans of the victims, was quickly published in an attempt to prod the crown into action. "The blood of your poor subjects, thus treacherously spilt, cries out before God for vengeance," it exclaimed.1 When the crown seemed deaf to the public outcry, a private citizen, Dominique de Gourgues, felt driven to …

Alachua Settlers And The Second Seminole War, C. S. Monaco

Florida Historical Quarterly

The role of Florida's interior settlements and relatively modest settler population has never been assigned much historical significance vis-a-vis the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). With few exceptions, the historiography has focused on the military aspects of this protracted conflict, with certain key battles, military commanders, Native American leaders, and the destruction of the east coast sugar plantations garnering the most interest.2 The ramifications of President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act (1830) which celebrated the prospect of placing "a civilized population on large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters"3 are well-known, along with the treaties of Moultrie …

“A Nation Of Orders”: Authoritarian Rhetoric And The Missouri Council Of Defense In World War I, Zane Bell

Student Scholarship

In wartime, demographic groups with a greater resemblance or relation to the populations of adversarial powers often bear the brunt of social pressure on the homefront. To a degree, even the oft-hated proponents of peace -- who sometimes do coincide and overlap with the aforementioned sort of demographics -- seem to receive comparably less vitriol from the rest of the public. Indeed, wartime powers frequently persecute portions of their population for the sake of uncovering a “fifth column” -- an idea made popular by a fascist general in the Spanish Civil War who claimed that the march of his four …

War And Reconstruction From An East Texas Perspective: Nacogdoches County From 1861-1876, William Wade Carter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Initially founded in 1826 as a municipality of Mexico and organized as a county in 1837—and sharing its name with the oldest town in Texas—Nacogdoches County flourishes with a rich history and has been a factor in nearly every major event in early Texas history. The Civil War is no exception. Men from the county contributed to the war effort but also felt the war’s sting at home. Citizens did what they could to survive. The county continued under the yoke of Reconstruction after the war before booming again in the 1880s thanks largely to the town the county shares …

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 …

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 …