Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Belle Isle, Point Lookout, The Press And The Government: The Press And Reality Of Civil War Prison Camps, Marlea S. Donaho

Theses and Dissertations

The study of Civil War prisons is relatively new within the broader study of the Civil War. What little study there is tends to focus on bigger prison camps. It has been established in the historiography that prisoners suffered across the divided nation, but it has not been ascertained how the decisions and policies of the government, as well as the role of the press in those decisions, effected the daily lives of Civil War prisoners. Belle Isle, a Confederate Prison, and Point Lookout, a Union prison, will be analyzed for key differences to provide a fuller picture of life …

Ethics, Eugenics, And Public Education In Georgia (1910-1965), Aaron Gerald Guest Sr.

Theses and Dissertations

This study traces the eugenics movement in Georgia, focusing on the ideology behind the social policies that led to the forced sterilizations of over four thousand Georgians from 1939 to 1965. This thesis will address the following questions: 1) How were Georgia’s public policies affected by eugenics? 2) To what extent were the racial views of Georgians affected by scientific proclamations? 3) What role did the public schools play in educating the populace about eugenics? This research will focus primarily on the scientific racial dynamic of America during the twentieth century, arguing that American political thought and the idea of …

The Central Intelligence Agency And Cuba: How The Trap Of Success Led To The Bay Of Pigs, Yandy Orozco

Theses and Dissertations

This research looks at how covert operations in Iran and Guatemala shaped the decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, and why the United States government embarked on an operation that had little chance of success. Key areas of discussion are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its role in the removal of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq (Iran) and President Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala), the Dulles faction, the anti-Castro program, and President Kennedy’s relationship with the CIA. Upon examining these areas, the study shows that the covert action success in Iran and Guatemala fueled American hubris and obviated the recognition …

Rebirth Of The House Museum: Commemorating Reconstruction At The Woodrow Wilson Family Home, Jennifer Whitmer Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

Rebirth of a House Museum traces the transformation of the Woodrow Wilson Family Home (WWFH) in Columbia, South Carolina from an eighty year-old presidential shrine to the nation’s first museum of Reconstruction. A semi-guided house tour with limited objects and grounded in a specific time and place modernized an outdated historic house museum (HHM). The house became the primary artifact, supported by a panel exhibit and five original Wilson family objects. Critical to the exhibit’s success were the docents, who also steer this manuscript via their oral histories and fill a void in public history literature. Like Reconstruction, the reinterpretation …

"An Amazing Aptness For Learning Trades:" The Role Of Enslaved Craftsmen In Charleston Cabinetmaking Shops, William A. Strollo

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the role of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston cabinetmaking shops during the late-eighteenth century and how wealthy Charlestonians’ desire fashionable goods fueled the demand for this labor force. The first chapter examines the rise of the wealthy Charlestonians and the origins of their taste for fashionable goods. The second chapter explores the increased use of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston cabinetmaking shops during the last half of the eighteenth century and how they affected the production of fashionable cabinet goods.

The Japanese Experience In Virginia, 1900s-1950s: Jim Crow To Internment, Emma T. Ito

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses how Japanese and Japanese Americans may have lived and been perceived in Virginia from 1900s through the 1950s. This work focuses on their positions in society with comparisons to the nation, particularly during the “Jim Crow” era of “colored” and “white,” and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It highlights various means of understanding their positions in Virginia society, with emphasis on Japanese visitors, marriages of Japanese in Virginia, and the inclusion of Japanese in higher education at Roanoke College, Randolph-Macon College, William and Mary, University of Virginia, University of Richmond, Hampden-Sydney College, and Union …

Wake The Devil, Ricardo Ruiz

Theses and Dissertations

You could only bury a body so deep before the seasons decided you would join it . Topsoil so desperate for affection it shakes to remind me that I was once and am loved .

I linger in the southwestern sky , burgundy to violet , with Neil Young playing faintly in the distance as my father calls me home .

Funding South Carolina’S Monuments: The Growth Of The Corporate Person In Monument Financing, Justin Curry Davis

Theses and Dissertations

The post-Reconstruction monuments in South Carolina have attracted scholarly interest for their role in promoting an alternative “Lost Cause” interpretation of the Civil War and its aftermath. Once established, this monument tradition continued to flourish throughout the twentieth century. The emphasis on a grassroots monument financing campaign has existed from the beginning of the monument building movement in South Carolina, as elsewhere in the American South, since the turn of the twentieth century. What has shifted is the role of the corporation in providing private funding for monuments. As the twentieth century progressed, the state came to play a much …

Within The House Of Bondage: Constructing And Negotiating The Plantation Landscape In The British Atlantic World, 1670-1820, Erin M. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a comparative study of the plantation landscape in South Carolina, Barbados, and Virginia between 1670 and 1820 that explores how the built environment (landscape, architecture, and material culture) shaped interactions between enslaved people and free, white workers and slaveholders. Instead of simply the home of the planter class, the plantation house was more than a living space or a work space; it was a workshop for the creation of a distinctly American culture.

The vastly different houses built in each colony reflect the transformation of the built environment in the New World that began during the second …

Skin Deep: African American Women And The Building Of Beauty Culture In South Carolina, Catherine Davenport

Theses and Dissertations

“Skin Deep: African American Women and the Building of Beauty Culture in South Carolina,” examines how African American women in the state adapted door-todoor beauty systems into successful businesses between 1900 and 1960. Black beauticians in South Carolina built beauty parlors that would serve as critical community meeting spaces away from the cruelties of Jim Crow segregation, and in some instances became centers of activism. Through sources including memoirs, newspapers, city directories, and the Negro Motorist Green Book, I highlight the ways black beauty culture proved black women could be financially independent, beautiful, and politically active.

The thesis consists of …

Potential Republicans: Reconstruction Printers Of Columbia, South Carolina, John Lustrea

Theses and Dissertations

If the project Reconstruction was to succeed in the South, Republicans needed a significant minority of native white Southern support. The printers of Columbia, South Carolina seemed like a promising group of potential Republicans. They were members of an urban skilled trade that had a long history of activism. There were several immigrants and native Northerners among them. Plus, the Republican presence in the South created the possibility of more jobs and patronage money for them. All the relevant data suggests that the printers of Columbia could have been scalawags, but they ultimately were not. My research shows that the …

Environmental Negotiations Cherokee Power In The Arkansas Valley, 1812-1828, Cane West

Theses and Dissertations

In the early 19th century, the Arkansas River Valley existed as a borderlands region of powerful Indian nations and immigrant Euro-American and Native American settlers. In the resulting contests over settlement, Cherokee chiefs recreated the Arkansas Cherokees' ecological identity from hunters to agrarians to differentiate themselves from their Osage and white rivals. During the 1820s, Cherokee chiefs expanded on their agrarian rhetoric by appropriating American scientific systems in order to stymie white settlement. By the end of the 1820s, Arkansas Cherokee chiefs had infused their arguments of preferred agricultural lands, appropriate survey methods, and accurate cartography into the debates over …

Lamps, Maps, Mud-Machines, And Signal Flags: Science, Technology, And Commerce In The Early United States, James Russell Risk

Theses and Dissertations

As the United States looked forward to its future as an independent nation at the end of the eighteenth century, many saw commerce as a way to secure the nation’s future. American commerce, however, was plagued by a number of commercial problems. Solving these commercial problems facilitated an interest in science and the practical arts as engineers, inventors, mechanics, public officials, and everyday tinkerers innovated new apparatuses to preserve, promote, and protect American commerce. Many of America’s commercial problems in the early nineteenth century, however, resulted from the young nation’s varied geography and environments. Combating the environment’s unrelenting forces often …

Odor And Power In The Americas: Olfactory Consciousness From Columbus To Emancipation, Andrew Kettler

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes discourses concerning odor within the Atlantic World from approximately 1492 until 1838. Numerous historians and philosophers have described how the Reformation’s emphasis on texts and an increased concentration on visual science during the Enlightenment influenced Western Europeans to heighten the importance of the eye to the detriment of the lower sense of smell. This dissertation begins by thinking about materialist contours of this olfactory decline through a linguistic analysis of sulfur within seventeenth century England. It then proceeds to examine how in the early Americas such a repudiation of the sense of smell did not occur. The …

Heritage Without History: The 1960 South Carolina Secession Reenactment And The Desertion Of Historical Authority In Confederate Commemoration, Joshua Whitfield

Theses and Dissertations

In 1960 the South Carolina Confederate War Centennial Commission sponsored a reenactment of the 1860 secession convention as the keystone event for state observances of the Civil War Centennial. Local organizations such as the Richland Country Historical Society and WIS Television produced the reenactment, which featured politicians like Strom Thurmond and George Bell Timmerman in leading roles as secession delegates. The pageant had three live showings, and a televised version of the reenactment aired on WIS-TV, which broadcast the program across the state. Following the production’s open-circuit broadcast, the SC Educational Television Center continued broadcasting it in state public schools …

Buy For The Sake Of Your Baby: Guardian Consumerism In Twentieth Century America, Mark Vandriel

Theses and Dissertations

“Buy For the Sake of Your Baby” argues that consumerism for infants in twentieth century America was an exceptional type of consumer society. Because the parents who bought the consumer goods could not effectively communicate with their children who used these products, parents frequently purchased items for their babies as acts of good parenting. These parent consumers wanted to do what was right for their children, but because they could not effectively communicate with their children, they were particularly susceptible to influence from outside groups. Businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and the federal government recognized throughout the twentieth century how to effectively …

Sex And The State: Sexual Politics In South Carolina In The 1970s, Jennifer Holman Gunter

Theses and Dissertations

Sex and the State: Sexual Politics in South Carolina is an investigation of the interactions of feminists and the state from 1966 through 1985. Nationally, women cooperated with officials of state agencies to push their agenda of self-sovereignty. Using South Carolina as a case study highlights the inherent power struggles inherent in these maneuverings. Inspired by the Second Wave of the women’s movement, activists across South Carolina, in both small towns and urban settings, worked with the state and manipulated state reactions to suit their needs. The work focuses on four key aspects of the women’s movement including: the abortion …