History Commons^™

Generations Later: Has Once-Remote Promise Of Freedom Been Fulfilled?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Emancipation began with a flickering promise, burned intensely for a few years during Reconstruction, and then smoldered for a century. Equality and justice have come into view for most African-Americans only in the past two generations. For many descendants of slavery, those essential rights of a free people are still hard to see.

Havel, Vaclav, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Czech playwright, dissident writer and human rights philosopher, statesman, president of Czechoslovakia, and first president of the Czech Republic. Havel was born into a prominent business family in Prague during the interwar period of Czech independence.

The Battle Of The Crater, William Mahone, And Civil War Memory, 1864-1937, Kevin Michael Levin

Master's Theses

The battle of the Crater, which took place outside Petersburg, Virginia on July 30, 1864, proved to be one of the bloodiest engagements in the final year of the Civil War. The attempt on the part of Union commanders to break the growing siege between the two armies by tunneling under a Confederate position and exploding 8,000 pounds of explosives created a battle environment unseen elsewhere. The novelty of the mine explosion, the close hand-to-hand fighting, extensive casualties, the decision to include United State Colored Troops in the attacking columns, and a decisive Confederate victory guaranteed that the battle would …

Blindsided By Catholicism : R. W. Seton-Watson And The Surprising Strength Behind Interwar Slovak Nationalism, Marty Elizabeth Manor

Master's Theses

Although many historians have studied the topic of nationalism--even interwar Czechoslovak nationalism--none has analyzed it as seen through the eyes of R. W. Seton-Watson, the foremost scholar on Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after World War I. He possessed a unique relationship with the Slovak people, yet he underestimated the influence religiously-inspired nationalism had on the Slovak masses. This study proposes that it was diverging religious institutions, namely Protestantism and Catholicism, which determined the convictions of the Czech and Slovak intelligentsia and thus the direction of Slovak nationalism in interwar Czechoslovakia. Protestantism's Czechoslovakist national theory gave way to …

From Opposing Sides : The Duality Of Citizens' And Their Government's Views On Town Squares, Zachary Powell

Honors Theses

The purpose of my paper is to explore how the State's and the people's views concerning town squares come together. I will focus mainly on the duality between these two views: one the one hand, the State uses these spaces to display its power and for physical security. On the other side, the populace sees these spaces as theirs, as central to their community as citizens. Furthermore, they see it as a place to confront their government. Where else would be better than the place where the government seems to take on physical form?

I will explore this duality in …

Kieft's War And Tributary Politics In Eastern Woodland Colonial Society, Nicholas Klaiber

Honors Theses

From the earliest interactions between the Dutch and native groups in the New World, cultural differences regarding the ideas of property and governmental jurisdiction created societal conflict. When native tribes in the vicinity of New Netherland began to consolidate into traditional political alliances based on tribute and protection during the mid-1630s, thereby undercutting theoretical European dominance in New Netherland and New England, the English and Dutch both aggressively used the native system by forcing tributary status on local tribes through armed conflict, ritualized violence, and the use of tribal extermination as symbols of power. For the Dutch, this movement was …

American Prisoners Of War In Vietnam Tell Their Stories, Ryan Frost

Honors Theses

This paper seeks to examine the experiences of Vietnam POWs, both those held in thejungles of South Vietnam and those in the Hanoi prison camps of North Vietnam based on POW narratives consisting of memoirs, autobiographies, and interviews. Early POW history depicts great differences between the two groups of POWs, giving the impression that Pilot POWS, who comprised the majority of prisoners in Hanoi camps, acted more honorably while interned in comparison to enlisted army POWS, who spent the majority of their captivity in the jungles of South Vietnam. This paper demonstrates the similarities in their experiences through these narrative …

[Introduction To] What Caused The Civil War? Reflections On The South And Southern History, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians.

Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, …

Richmond, Virginia's Every Monday Club, 1889-1919, Maureen Elizabeth Salmon

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the formation and growth of the Every Monday Club, a woman's literary club in Richmond, Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Since the group has never been researched before, most of the study concentrates on untouched archives. The study uses the extensive Every Monday Club papers which include club meeting minutes, letters, papers, pictures, yearbooks, and newspaper clippings. This information is also supplemented with obituaries, census, and other primary data. The records disclose issues of class, race and education.

The Troubled Intersection Of The Interests Of Christ And Commerce : Appellate-Court Review Of Virginia Sunday Closing Laws In Historical Overview Through 1942, William Robert Vanderkloot

Master's Theses

Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals, between 1900 and the conclusion of this thesis in 1942, consistently narrowed Virginia's Sunday closing law, enacted in 1786 to prevent Sunday labor. While paying lip service to the statute's purpose, the court almost unhesitatingly chose statutory interpretations encouraging more Sunday labor, particularly by expanding its ''necessity" and "charity" exceptions. The legislature also granted additional statutory closing law exceptions. This reflected the preferences of the public as well, which increasingly depended on the services of others laboring on Sunday. These results were also due, in part, to inherent confusions and contradictions in the law itself, …

Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, And Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Book Review), David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

The Kremlin tête-à-tête and the iconoclastic revival of the Russian Orthodox Church that followed have long intrigued those writing about ideological change in the USSR under Stalin. Many believe that the concessions to the church were an exigency of war designed to increase the party’s ability to rally support from among even the most reluctant members of Soviet society. Others consider the revival of the church to have been part of a more thoroughgoing Russiªcation of the USSR in the mid- to late 1930s that rehabilitated aspects of the Russian national past for mobilizational purposes well before 1941. In Stalin’s …

Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, And Radical Politics In Late Colonial Buganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Late in 1948, one of the radical Luganda newspapers in Buganda printed Dionizio Sifirwakange's rhetorical and distinctly aggrieved questions: "Has it become a crime for schoolchildren to evince patriotic sentiments? Why does the Government prohibit the assembly of the Bataka at the houses of their 'grandfathers'?"¹

Sifirwakange was complaining about the repressive response of the Kingdom of Buganda and its ally, the Protectorate of Uganda, to a political and social movement whose most visible adherents were the patriotic schoolchildren, along with other youth and men of all ages, who assembled by the thousands at the homes of their grandfathers …

Stalin As Symbol: A Case Study Of The Cult Of Personality And Its Construction, David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

Although the cult of personality certainly owed something to Stalin’s affinity for self-aggrandisement, modern social science literature suggests that it was designed to perform an entirely different ideological function. Personality cults promoting charismatic leadership are typically found in developing societies where ruling cliques aspire to cultivate a sense of popular legitimacy.² Scholars since Max Weber have observed that charismatic leadership plays a particularly crucial role in societies that are either poorly integrated or lack regularised administrative institutions. In such situations, loyalty to an inspiring leader can induce even the most fragmented polities to acknowledge the authority of the central …

What Caused The Civil War?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The challenge of explaining the Civil War has led historians to seek clarity in two ways of thought. One school, the fundamentalists, emphasizes the intrinsic, inevitable conflict between slavery and free labor. The other, the revisionists, emphasizes discrete events and political structures rather than slavery itself. Both sides see crucial parts of the problem, but it has proved difficult to reconcile the perspectives because they approach the Civil War with different assumptions about what drives history.