History Commons^™

National Register Nomination For St. James The Greater Catholic Mission, Diana Garnett

Theses and Dissertations

St. James the Greater Catholic Mission constitutes a rare and possibly unique site on the American landscape. Comprising a church, a schoolhouse, and a cemetery, the mission parish serves the rural black community south of Walterboro, South Carolina. Black Catholics in rural America are a rarity unto themselves, but the St. James blacks are particularly extraordinary. Parishioners today trace their roots to ancestors who were slaves of Irish Catholic planters in the 1820s and 1830s. Originally biracial, the parish evolved into a predominantly black congregation by the middle of the nineteenth century. The early white heritage exists quietly on today …

The Sensory Environments Of Civil War Prisons, Evan A. Kutzler

Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation explores the experiences of four hundred thousand Union and Confederate prisoners during the American Civil War. While much has been written on the overlapping experiences of soldiers, civilians, and slaves, less attention has been paid to those behind masonry walls or wooden stockades. The premise of the dissertation, borrowed from the theory and methodology of sensory history, is that while human sensory physiology changes slowly over time, perception is fluid and varies by time, place, and culture. Drawing from nearly two hundred unpublished manuscripts as well as newspapers, government records, and postwar narratives, this dissertation explores the experiences …

Community Development And Development In Communities: Challenges To The Miami-Dade County Historic Preservation Ordinance, Max Adriel Imberman

Theses and Dissertations

In Miami-Dade County, Florida, historic preservation is most powerful at the county level. The county’s historic preservation office has the power of administration over most municipalities within its borders. In 2014, organized resistance against the county office was sparked by an attempt to declare a mid-century modern section of the town of Bay Harbor Islands as an historic district. Opposition to county management of historic preservation affairs in Bay Harbor culminated in an attempted amendment to the county historic preservation ordinance that would allow municipalities to opt out of county supervision. This thesis examines the arguments used by county preservation …

The Fancy Trade And The Commodification Of Rape In The Sexual Economy Of 19th Century U.S. Slavery, Tiye A. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine the Fancy Trade—the buying and selling of mixed-race enslaved women for the primary purpose of prostitution and concubinage—through an intersectionality lens. Therefore, I will explore a culture of rape through the lived experiences of fancy maids, the women who were sold as sex commodities in the 19th century domestic slave trade. Who was she? Using an intersectionality framework to answer the proposed questions will achieve the following. First, it will highlight the social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality within the 19th century southern context. Secondly, an intersectional methodology will explore the …

Boundary Stones: Morbid Concretions And The Chemistry Of Early Nineteenth Century Medicine, Edward Allen Driggers Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is the story of communities of physicians seeking to understand the morbid concretion of the body using the new chemistry from the late eighteenth century. Morbid concretions, or calculi, were occurred in the urinary passages, lungs, joints, pancreas, uterus, and other areas of the body. At the turn of the nineteenth century, some physicians saw analytical chemistry, emerging out of the so-called chemical revolution, as applicable in understanding and treating stone-based diseases. However, some physicians and surgeons saw the treatment of stones with chemistry as evidence of the need to return to older practices of medicine, like humoral …

Knowing In America: The Enlightenment, Science, And The Early Republic, Timothy K. Minella

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes practices of science and technology in the early United States as windows onto the American Enlightenment. Although scholars have emphasized the important impact of Enlightenment thought on the American founding, the historiography tends to argue for the decreasing influence of the Enlightenment on American culture as the nineteenth century progressed. In addition, scholars tend to see a decline in American science after Benjamin Franklin as nineteenth-century Americans began to focus primarily on the practical problems of everyday life. I question these interpretations by connecting scientific practice in the Early Republic with transatlantic Enlightenment thought and analyzing American …

Foundations Of Memory: Effects Of Organizations On The Preservation And Interpretation Of The Slave Forts And Castles Of Ghana, Britney Danielle Ghee

Theses and Dissertations

The historical understanding of a place is bent to the will of the passage of time, but is susceptible to the pressures of entities that lay claim to the space. The memory of forts and castles dispersed along the tropical shorelines of Ghana have been remembered, forgotten, and rediscovered several times over the span of five centuries. But how has their story been changed? What is privileged and created for the collective memory and what has been concealed? The buildings currently serve as memorials to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but this understanding is complicated by the previous preservation motives and …

"Building A 'Temple Of Temperance': The Repeal Of Prohibition In Virginia And The Alcoholic Beverage Control Act", Alexandra T. Silva

Theses and Dissertations

"BUILDING A ‘TEMPLE OF TEMPERANCE’: THE REPEAL OF PROHIBITION IN VIRGINIA AND THE ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE CONTROL ACT”

By Alexandra T. Silva, Bachelor of Arts, 2011

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015

Major Director: Dr. John T. Kneebone, Chair, Virginia Commonwealth University Department of History

This project examines the process by which the Commonwealth of Virginia repealed its statewide prohibition laws and the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 and created a public monopoly system of alcohol control in 1934. It provides an overview of …

Building Sanity: The Rise And Fall Of Architectural Treatment At The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, Kimberly Jean Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

Although many historians have acknowledged the importance of architecture in the treatment of the mentally ill during the nineteenth century, no historian has ever examined the rise and fall of the importance of architecture to the treatment of patients at the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum. By the late eighteenth century, physicians and laymen alike accepted the ideology of environmental determinism – that one’s environment exercised a direct influence over his or her behavior. In other words, mental illness was both caused and cured by the environment; thus, architecture played a key role in the treatment of mental illness. The South …

Science Fairs Before Sputnik: Adolescent Scientific Culture In Contemporary America, Sarah Michel Scripps

Theses and Dissertations

"Science Fairs before Sputnik: Adolescent Scientific Culture in Contemporary America" traces the formation and evolution of science fairs in America, focusing on the ways in which adolescents established communities of practice by engaging in these competitions. Over the course of the twentieth century, generations of American children conducted their first experiments by crafting science fair projects. The dissertation evaluates this understudied phenomenon against the backdrop of American fascinations and fears of science and evolving notions of adolescence. It argues that science fairs were central to shaping an adolescent scientific culture in the United States during the early to mid twentieth …

Gender Influenced Social Welfare Reforms At The South Carolina Confederate Soldiers’ Home And Infirmary: An Institutional History (1908 - 1957), Brian Dolphin

Theses and Dissertations

The South Carolina Confederate Soldiers’ Home and Infirmary in Columbia opened in 1909, serving two aged and infirm veterans per county. The last former Confederate state to establish a residential facility for veterans, South Carolina became the first state to reserve positions for women on the managing board. Women on the Board exercised more power there than at any comparable institution in the South, with policy implications that featured an increasingly inclusive policy for accommodation of women as both Confederate Soldiers’ Home and Infirmary administrators and occupants. When the institution closed in 1957, it had cared for women for a …

Saint Dominguan Refugees In Charleston, South Carolina, 1791-1822: Assimilation And Accommodation In A Slave Society, Margaret Wilson Gillikin

Theses and Dissertations

During the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century, nearly 20,000 refugees fled the French colony of Saint Domingue for asylum in the United States. They found new homes in such American port cities as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. This dissertation explores the experiences of the white planters, gens de couleur, and slaves who sought asylum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the effect their presence had on the city’s long time residents. It might seem from first glance that finding acceptance in Charleston would be easy for them, but this was not the case. …

Dove V. Parham: Desegregation In The Dollarway School District, Kevin Sinclair

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the Dove v. Parham school desegregation case that was heard on December 16, 1959, in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division with Judge J. Smith Henley presiding. Attorney George Howard Jr. had brought forth the lawsuit on behalf of three African American students who were denied transfer to the all-white Dollarway School District. The tactic of massive resistance had failed to stop any integration attempts in the state and was replaced by minimal compliance. The Dollarway School District chose to use pupil placement laws to avoid integration. By using transcripts from the …

A Digital History Of North Little Rock Mayor Ross Lawhon, Kimberly Anne Pipkin

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis topic is Mayor Ross Luther Lawhon and his time in the office of mayor of North Little Rock, Arkansas. Mr. Lawhon was a major player in getting the city to where it is today. Ross Luther Lawhon was born in Floresvlle, Texas on June 28, 1894. He was the son of Luther Allen and Virginia Worsham Lawhon. He served in World War I as a corporal. Mr. Lawhon came to North Little Rock, Arkansas in 1923 where he stepped into the political atmosphere of the town. He was instrumental in getting the post office of North Little Rock …

Leo P. Mclaughlin: Undisputed Boss Of Hot Springs, John H. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This project involves exploring the life of Leo Patrick McLaughlin, especially his time as mayor of Hot Springs, by web exhibit, http://leopmclaughlin.omeka.net/exhibits/show/leo-patrick-mclaughlin--the-un. The goal is to inform readers of this colorful character in Arkansas history. This has been achieved by examining the gambling syndicate and political machine that McLaughlin created, as well as his connections with underworld figures such as Al Capone, Bugs Moran, and other criminals on the Most Wanted list. Upon examination of these connections, it will become clear to readers that Mayor McLaughlin began to think himself untouchable, demonstrated by his attempts to take on Governor Carl …

Acting Up And Courting Controversy: The Arkansas General Assembly Legislative Sessions Of 1957, 1958, And 1959, Sarah Riva

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1957 and 1959, under the backdrop of the Central High School Crisis, the Arkansas General Assembly worked to evade compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed segregation in public schools. The three legislative sessions passed laws that mostly sought to maintain segregated schools and limit the NAACP's ability to function in the state. However, religious leaders, parents, and the NAACP sough to have many of these laws overturned and tested their legality in court. The lawsuits were successful and by 1963, all the laws related to school desegregation and the NAAP …

The Gathings Committee: Censorship, Society, And Paperback Literature In The 1950s, Jim Stallings

Theses and Dissertations

In 1952, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn appointed Arkansas Democrat Representative Ezekiel Candler "Took" Gathings to lead a select committee and investigate the potential effect of allegedly obscene literature on the morals of American society. The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, informally known as the Gathings Committee, issued a majority report in 1953. It claimed the distribution of obscene literature was a pervasive problem, and recommended the federal government censor the distribution of material deemed inappropriate. Ultimately, the House of Representatives discarded the committee's recommendations. However, questions of whether or not literature could affect social morals, or …

Bolshevik Voices: Radio Broadcasting In The Soviet Union, 1917 - 1991, Bradley Trinkner

Theses and Dissertations

Radio broadcasting has a long and varied history in many industrialized nations yet research into radio in the Soviet Union has been given little attention from scholars. Radio offers the power to unite distant people and reinforce the party agenda yet also leaves the door open to unauthorized transmissions. The story of radio must be understood as two sides of the same coin, namely the motivation and purpose of broadcasting by the regime as well as the effects on those who listened. The dual purpose of broadcasting was represented both by the potential it offered party authorities as well as …

Troubled Waters: Security, Economic Development, And The Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands., Kevin Mckenzie

Theses and Dissertations

This project uses a case-study approach to determine the causes of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Island dispute between Japan and the People's Republic of China.

Saleswomen And The Middle-Class: Gender And Class Conflict Within The Chicago Department Store, 1880-1930, Laura Wiggers

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1880 and 1930, the emergence of a consumer culture and the increase in wage-earning women challenged traditional values. Anxiety over these changes was perhaps strongest within the middle-class who developed a reform culture to respond to a society that they felt was in chaos. As monuments of consumption, department stores sat at the nexus of the working-class culture of saleswomen and the middle-class culture of customers and management. A national leader in both the creation of the modern department store and the Progressive reform movement, Chicago provides a unique location to study this intersection. Middle-class reformers and female clerks …

Hard Rows To Hoe: Free Black Farmers In Antebellum South Carolina, David W. Dangerfield

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines free people of color and the economic and social conditions they shared with neighboring common-class whites from 1790 to 1860 in rural portions of South Carolina. Though Ira Berlin’s Slaves Without Masters has accurately described free blacks’ liminal legal, social and economic statuses, self-sufficient free black farmers signaled that their actual positions in the countryside were sometimes more complicated. Based on a careful study of free black farm production in three rural Charleston parishes as well as Abbeville, Newberry, and Sumter Counties, this dissertation examines free black farm production, their economic status, and the ways that economic …

Before They Were Red Shirts: The Rifle Clubs Of Columbia, South Carolina, Andrew Abeyounis

Theses and Dissertations

This paper argues that historians should reexamine the motivations of rifle clubs during Reconstruction by looking closely at what events the clubs held and the actual men who made up the organizations. The clubs from Columbia, South Carolina were more social and political organizations than otherwise given credit. Most of the men who joined the rifle clubs tended to be men who were too young to have fought in the Civil War and not bitter veterans trying to "redeem" the state. The clubs began years before the violent "Red Shirt" campaign of 1876-77, and were more focused on organizing balls …

Charleston’S Magnolia Umbra Cemetery District: A Necrogeographic History, Timothy John Hyder

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to parse the deeper historical meanings of the establishment and expansions within the Magnolia Umbra Cemetery District (MUCD), a collection of 26 different, yet contiguous, cemeteries in Charleston, South Carolina founded by a diverse cross-section of the city's nineteenth century population, by utilizing the framework of necrogeography. This methodology hinges on the notion that one can derive useful analysis of the living by analyzing the landscapes of the dead. Cemeteries, in this lens, are not constructions of the dead but of the living, and therefore the choices of cemetery location, style, and monumentation are …

We Are Aquin: The Creation Of Community And Personal Identity In The Freeport Catholic Schools, Sherry Ann Cluver

Theses and Dissertations

Aquin Central Catholic High School, a tiny institution in the rural, Midwestern town of Freeport, Illinois, is a case study unlike the schools from Chicago, Boston, and other large cities highlighted in previous scholarship. Freeport's patterns of schooling in the 1970s and 1980s were largely unaffected by race or "white flight," and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockford afforded to its schools a greater than usual degree of local control. Yet, Aquin (founded in 1923) followed the trends of Catholic schools with regard to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), assimilation of previously immigrant Catholic families into middle class American social …

Claiming The Mad, Samar Nour

Theses and Dissertations

Mental asylums in Egypt during the colonial period.

"It's Always Been Home To Me": Obligation And Sacrifice On The World War Home Front In Arkansas, Eric Robert Mills

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ideology of obligation on the American home front in Central Arkansas during World War I and the World War II national defense period from November 1940--February 1941. Fundamental to the research is historian Robert Westbrook's contention that America, as a liberal democracy, relied on alternate means to encourage the discharge of obligations and commitments during the Second World War. The state appealed to private responsibilities, such as the family, in order to promote service when unable to rely upon the thicker sense of citizenship emblematic of republican ideology. In order to test Westbrook's theories of obligation, …

Love And Marriage: Domestic Relations And Matrimonial Strategies Among The Enslaved In The Atlantic World, Tyler Dunsdon Parry

Theses and Dissertations

"Love and Marriage: Domestic Relations and Matrimonial Strategies Among the Enslaved in the Atlantic World" argues that the cultural and sociopolitical dimensions of slave marriage were primary issues for diasporic Africans, abolitionists, and proslavery apologists whose lives were intertwined by the cultural and economic connections that framed the Atlantic World throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Through analyzing the interplay between legislation, cultural practice, and political discourse in the early periods of colonial slavery, I first show how matrimonial patterns from Atlantic Africa and Britain were re-imagined by diasporic Africans enslaved in Bermuda, the British West Indies, and colonial …

The Spiritual Is Political: The Modern Women's Movement And The Transformation Of The Southern Baptist Convention, Laura Joy Foxworth

Theses and Dissertations

"The Spiritual is Political" argues that feminist politics were central to Southern Baptist Convention's notorious schism, which began in 1979, and posits that its new conservative leaders launched the nearly fourteen million member denomination into partisan politics in the 1980s in reaction to their perception that the women's movement was dangerous to the nation's moral and spiritual character. By evaluating both religious and political primary sources from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, I trace grassroots mobilization and denominational reactions to contentious issues like women's ordination, abortion, homosexuality, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Though the Southern Baptist Convention favored moderate …

Reality Vs. Perceptions: The Treatment Of Early Modern French Jews In Politics And Literary Culture, Michael Woods

Theses and Dissertations

Although historians have written extensively on both the early modern era and the development of an absolute monarchy, the history of Jewish communities in France and the role they played has been largely ignored. Beginning with the French Wars of Religion, this study analyzes to what extent France’s religious situation affected the growth of absolutism and how this in turn affected the Jews. Taking advantage of the fractured nature of the early French monarchy, Jews began settling in provinces along the border of both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Affected by economic jealousies and cultural perceptions of Jews, the …

A Study Of The Journal Of Elisha P. Hurlbut, American Social Reformer, 1858-1887, Jeffrey Dunnington

Theses and Dissertations

The life of Elisha P. Hurlbut (1807-1889) has been mostly forgotten since his death. This examination of his personal journal, which he wrote from 1858 to 1887, brings back to the forefront an influential figure that lived most of his life in and around Albany, New York. Prior to beginning the journal, Hurlbut was a lawyer and then a Supreme Court justice in New York. Seven years after retiring from public life in 1851, he commenced work on the journal that provided a detailed social and political commentary on New York, the United States, and the world as a whole. …