History Commons^™

"Model And Patriarch" Of Southern Settlements : Neighborhood House In Louisville, Kentucky, 1896-1939., Kalie Ann Gipson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the workings of Neighborhood House, a social settlement in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1896 to 1939. It argues that Neighborhood House represented a typical settlement house that operated during the Progressive Era in the United States. From its beginnings under its founder, Archibald A. Hill, through the tenure of Frances Ingram, Neighborhood House served as an Americanizing institution for urban, European immigrants in Louisville by offering clubs and classes to both immigrant children and adults. Neighborhood House residents also mitigated between immigrant children and parents, pushed for child labor reform, and battled vice in the area. Furthermore, this …

Cme Church In The Memory Of The Civil Rights Movement, Brandon Nightingale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church is a historically black church rooted in the South that was established in 1870. The church had been viewed historically as an "old slavery" church, due to its close relationship to the White Methodist Episcopal Church (formerly Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS). The history of the denomination encouraged the view that CME churches and schools had not been active in the Civil Rights Movement. Closer research into the denomination's archives from 1954, when the church changed its name from "Colored" to "Christian" up to the 1970s, when the movement transitioned, challenges that interpretation. From …

Building Unity Through State Narratives: The Evolving British Media Discourse During World War Ii, 1939-1941, Colin Cook

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The British media discourse evolved during the first two years of World War II, as state narratives and censorship began taking a more prominent role. I trace this shift through an examination of newspapers from three British regions during this period, including London, the Southwest, and the North. My research demonstrates that at the start of the war, the press featured early unity in support of the British war effort, with some regional variation. As the war progressed, old political and geographical divergences came to the forefront in coverage of events such as Prime Minister Chamberlain's resignation. The government became …

The Ideal King: Brian Boru And The Medieval European Concept Of Kingship, Kody Whittington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When one thinks of great kings, and more specifically of great kings of the early medieval period, there are a few names that almost immediately come to mind. Charlemagne is perhaps the first great medieval ruler one may mention. Alfred the Great would likely not be far behind. Both these men represented, for their respective peoples, what a great king should be. The early medieval period was a time of development in thought and in practice for the office of kingship, and the writings and actions of the men of this period would have a profound influence in the following …

Central Florida School Districts' Responses To Hispanic Growth, 1980-2010, Kendra Hazen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1980s, Hispanics have been the fastest growing minority in the United States and have been moving into rural, Southern areas where there have previously not been populations of Hispanics. Studies of these demographic changes have concentrated on how communities impacted by the influx of Hispanics have created or adjusted socioeconomic and political infrastructures to accommodate the linguistic and cultural needs of the Hispanic population. The public-school system is a sociopolitical structure that has affected and has been affected by the increase in Hispanics. Whereas the modern Civil Rights movement had created legal precedence for students' language rights and …

Making Our Voices Heard: Power And Citizenship In Central Florida's Black Communities, Gramond Mcpherson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the impacts of government policies on community mobilization in Orlando's Parramore neighborhood and the all-black town of Eatonville in Central Florida. The scope of this thesis covers the history of both communities from their formation in the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century. This research reveals the relationships between the predominantly black residents of Parramore and Eatonville and the largely white government officials over the development and maintenance of each community. By understanding the social creation of both communities during the era of Jim Crow, this thesis reveals the differing levels of power each community …

The Medieval Borderland: Geophysical Analysis Of A Later Medieval Deserted Settlement And Cultural Landscape From Western Ireland, Andrew Ryan Bair

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the archaeological remnants of an early 14th century settlement at Ballintober, Roscommon County, Ireland. An innovative methodology combining ground-penetrating radar, magnetic gradiometry, and archaeological excavations is utilized to reconstruct the medieval built environment, which was comprised of a masonry castle, nucleated settlement and wider arable agricultural landscape. By integrating the archaeological and historical records, I pose hypotheses related to the differential statuses of people at the settlement, their domestic and agricultural practices, and a timeline of their occupation and abandonment of the site. The Ballintober settlement offers a unique case study to investigate the colonial dynamics of …

China's Lost Face And The Two Koreas: The Effects Of Culture And Identity On Chinese Foreign Policy, Kang Kyu Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the question of why China responded particularly harshly to pro-U.S. military actions taken by South Korea, when this nation was identified as a friend to China, while responding less harshly to similar pro-U.S. military actions taken by Japan, who was not identified as a friend. My argument is that these divergent responses were caused by China’s different expectations, according to whether different nations had a perceived identity as a friend or a rival. China’s behaviors are essentially based on its own proclaimed identity and on the perceived identities of others. China has advanced the proclaimed identity of …

An Hgis Approach To Land-Use/Land-Cover Change In The Blanice Watershed, Czech Republic, Kelly J. Measom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, the landscape is distinguished by a network of long narrow fields bordered by hedgerows clustered in small groups. These unique clusters of hedgerows have been interacting with their environment, effectively mitigating erosion, since they were first established in the High Middle Ages. In this research project I used historical maps to characterize land-use and land-cover (LULC) change relating to hedgerow features in one cadastral territory in the Blanice Watershed. Using georeferenced historical maps from 1837 and 1952, and unreferenced historical maps from 1837 to 1953, I compared the historical LULC to …

Gramscian Perspectives On Populism, Luke William Mooberry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly liberal states are facing challenges from populist movements. This paper argues that the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci can provide important insights into the phenomenon and how to counteract it. The first two sections outline a set of Gramscian analytical tools: hegemony, non-hegemony, passive revolution, and Caesarism. These theoretical tools are then applied to different periods of the Third Republic of France, 1870-1940. This paper looks at this French example because it features unique relationships between populism, ideology, and the experience of liberalism prior to World War II. The third section demonstrates the implications of non-hegemony within international society, …

Exercising Obedience: John Cassian And The Creation Of Early Monastic Subjectivity, Joshua Daniel Schachterle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

John Cassian (360-435 CE) started his monastic career in Bethlehem. He later traveled to the Egyptian desert, living there as a monk, meeting the venerated Desert Fathers, and learning from them for about fifteen years. Much later, he would go to the region of Gaul to help establish a monastery there by writing monastic manuals, the Institutes and the Conferences. These seminal writings represent the first known attempt to bring the idealized monastic traditions from Egypt, long understood to be the cradle of monasticism, to the West.

In his Institutes, Cassian comments that "a monk ought by all …

To Sink Our National Character: Slavery And National Character In The U.S. House Of Representatives, 1789-1820, Jessica Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1790 1804 and 1819 the U.S. House of Representatives debated measures intended to restrict slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. During these three debates slaveholding representatives primarily from the Lower South attempted to call into question the general government’s right to discuss and legislate on slavery contending that except for in a few specific instances outlined in the Constitution slavery was purely a state matter not a national one. Their opponents employed a variety of tactics to counter this idea. One particularly effective approach was an expression of concern for the impact of slavery and the slave trade on …

Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My documentary project focuses on the group of students who planned this event and why they invited Kennedy. The thesis project consists of two parts: a film and a paper. This paper accompanies the documentary thesis film Truth Marching On: Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Mississippi. In this paper, I attempt to do the following: 1) summarize the necessary backstory of Kennedy’s 1966 visit to the university that is central to my film and paper; 2) provide information and analysis of the components that make up the short film, which include interviews, archival materials, and additional film …

How Change Started To Come: Examining Rhythm And Blues And Southern Identity, Jennifer Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks a better understanding on how blackness has been peripheral to our understanding of the term Southerner. The purpose of this work is to examine an area where the intersection of race and region exists to more fully understand how blacks in the South have presented their sense of Southern identity. The chosen area of examination is the music of rhythm and blues. Rhythm and blues as a genre rose to prominence in the years following World War II. The main reason for analyzing rhythm and blues as an intersecting point of race and region is that the …

Civil War Memory And The Preservation Of The Olustee Battlefield, Steven Trelstad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the absence of a Union monument at the Olustee Battlefield one hundred and fifty-five years after the battle concluded though this field has a number of Confederate monuments. Moreover, after the Battle of Olustee in February 1864, the largest battle of the Civil War fought on Florida soil, the victorious Confederates killed wounded African American soldiers left behind after the Union retreat. This thesis examines why Olustee battlefield became a place of Confederate memory, enshrining the Lost Cause within its monuments for well over a half of a century that consciously excluded any commemoration of the Union …

The Redeemed, The Condemned, And The Forgotten: Narratives Of Dissenting Aristocratic Identity In Medieval Bavaria, Luke Bohmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identity in the Middle Ages encompassed numerous methods of transmission. Those of which that survive today include artwork, architecture, and written sources. In the case of written sources, the nobility and the clergy dominated the narrative to a substantial degree. Chroniclers of the Holy Roman Empire in specific saw both regional and pan-imperial narratives influence this identity through the exploration of historical figures. The medieval duchy of Bavaria fell into this milieu but experienced a substantially different relationship with its nobility from the twelfth century onward. The more condensed and consolidated format of medieval Bavaria under the Wittelsbach dynasty – …

'A Room Of Their Own': Heritage Tourism And The Challenging Of Heteropatriarchal Masculinity In Scottish National Narratives, Carys O'Neill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the visibility of women in traditionally masculine Scottish national narratives as evidenced by their physical representation, or lack thereof, in the cultural heritage landscape. Beginning with the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England, a moment cemented in history, literature, and popular memory as the beginning of a Scottish rebirth, this thesis traces the evolution of Scottish national identity and the tropes employed for its assertion to paint a clearer picture of the power of strategic selectivity and the effects of sacrifice in the process of community definition. Following the transformation of the rugged Celtic Highlander …

Identity, Dissent, And The Roots Of Georgia’S Middle Class, 1848-1865, Thomas Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, which focuses on Georgia from 1848 until 1865, argues that a middle class formed in the state during the antebellum period. By the time secession occurred, the class coalesced around an ideology based upon modernization, industrialization, reform, occupation, politics, and northern influence. These factors led the doctors, lawyers, merchants, ministers, shopkeepers, and artisans who made up Georgia’s middle class to view themselves as different than Georgians above or below them on the economic scale. The feeling was often mutual, as the rich viethe middle class as a threat due to their income and education level while the poor …

Courtroom Wars: Constitutional Battles Over Conscription In The Civil War North, Nicholas Matthew Mosvick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In February 1863, Congress considered a bill to create for the first-time conscription at the national level. Democratic politicians vigorously protested that the proposed act was unconstitutional and destroyed the state militias. When Congress passed the Enrollment Act, commonly known as the “Conscription Act,” on March 3, 1863, outcry from Democrats about the unconstitutionality of national conscription immediately followed. In New York and Pennsylvania, Democratic newspaper editors and politicians decreed the act the worst among the Lincoln war measures in threatening to subvert the constitutional republic and to transform the United States into a despotism under the control of an …

Whistle Before You Work: Defining Paid Labor In The New Deal State, 1938-1947, Thomas Porter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the conceptualization of work from the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) through the Portal-To-Portal Pay Act of 1947. I argue that the FLSA created a new framework for industrial laborers to define what constituted work. This enables an understanding of work as defined by those in mines and on the industrial plants floor, allowing those who were closest to toil and exertion to create their own definitions. By 1946, Congress heeded to the complaints of the military and capitalists and codified their definition of work and the work week. This restricted the broadly …

Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …

My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism And Mobility In The Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, Christine Antoinette Rizzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and …

A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dollar General Corporation has grown into a retail titan with more than 15 000 stores across the continental United States. The first chapter of this thesis traces the history of this multibillion-dollar firm since its founding as a family-run business in Scottsville Kentucky in the late 1930s. Situating Dollar General’s history within the evolving contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries illustrates that Dollar General Stores succeed when the economy staggers. Neoliberalism and global finance capitalism have only exacerbated the geographic expansion and profitability of the company as the second chapter begins to explore. Although Dollar General Stores open at …

A Balm For The Times: The Origins And Evolution Of The Lost Cause In The South Carolina Low Country, 1830-1876, Andrew Patrick Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study uses the concept of civil religion as a framework through which to examine the origins and early development of the Lost Cause in the South Carolina Low country. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as American colonists severed their ties with Great Britain and established an independent republic they likewise began forming a civil religion or a set of beliefs regarding the relationship between God and their incipient polity. Prophetic in nature the central tenets of this civil religion held that the Almighty proved actively involved in human history and that Americans represented an especially chosen …

Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …

Laughing Out Loud: American Indian Comedy As A Force For Social Change, Jacob M. Ward

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Activism entails not only individuals overtly campaigning for changes in public spheres, but in other ways and strategies as well. One of these other avenues is the use of political satire and humor. Comedy publicizes frustrations of American issues, just as sit-ins, walk-outs, or marches do. For the most part, scholars fail to address the importance of humor. This work researches not only the comedic works of Charlie Hill, the 1491s, and other American Indian comedians, but also how their craft possibly alters stances and opinions. These comedians have a voice, and, therefore, deserve examination. This work shows the influence …

Preserving The Memory Of Those Perilous Times: Archaeology Of A Civil War Prison In Blackshear, Georgia, Colin H. Partridge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the closing months of 1864 Confederate prison authorities were forced to evacuate the large stockade prisoner of war (POW) camps at Millen and Andersonville, Georgia in the face of General Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’. While attempting to evade Union forces, approximately 5,000 POWs were sent along the Atlantic and Gulf railroad in south east Georgia, stopping just outside of the town of Blackshear. For three weeks prisoners and guards camped along a small tributary of the Alabaha River with only a few steaks to mark a deadline between them. No formal prison enclosure or fortifications were constructed and …

The Bioarchaeology Of The Tugalo Site (9st1): Diet, Disease, And Health Of The Past, Nompumelelo Beryl Hlophe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Tugalo site is a prehistoric and early historic Native American site located in northeast Georgia along the upper Savannah River basin, near the junction of Toccoa Creek and the Tugalo River. According to archaeological materials analyzed from the site it was occupied from ca. A.D. 1100 to 1600 (Anderson et al. 1995). Although archaeological investigations of the site revealed basic characteristics of its chronology and architecture, very little analysis and reporting of the skeletal remains from Tugalo has been completed. By analyzing data collected by Williamson (1998) concerning the age and sex of the burials, the presence or absence …