Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Deserting The Broad And Easy Way”: Southern Methodist Women, The Social Gospel, And The New Deal State, 1909-1939, Chelsea Hodge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of three decades, white southern Methodist women took on issues of labor and poverty through their national women’s organization, the Woman’s Missionary Council (WMC). Between 1909 and 1939, the WMC focused their work on five groups of people they viewed as in need of their help: women, children, black southerners, immigrants, and rural people. Motivated by the Social Gospel and an intense belief that their faith led them to effect real change in the American South, the WMC intervened in people’s lives, pursuing reform that could at times be maternalistic and condescending but at other times radical …

Architectures For A Future South: Posthumanism And Ruin In The Novels Of Cormac Mccarthy, Joshua Ryan Jackson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reads the novels of Cormac McCarthy as posthuman southern literature to explain why fiction from the South after World War II could no longer convey a sense of place during postmodernity: that is, because the region's culture and economy were transitioning from predominantly humanistic thinking (i.e., believing that humans [and especially southern humans] are supreme beings) to predominantly posthumanistic thinking (i.e., believing that humans are not as supreme as they think they are). It argues that we can trace this ideological change over time via structural shifts in the South’s architectural record, which we see in the ruins …

Feet In The South, Eyes To The West: Fort Smith Enters The Sunbelt, Adam Morrison Carson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the political realignment of Fort Smith, Arkansas and argues that the standard historiographical argument about the process of realignment does not explain what occurred in this city. Much of the historiography of political realignment currently revolves around the belief in a white backlash against the federal government and the national Democratic Party for their support of African American civil rights. Though historians have moved toward a "suburban synthesis" that downplays the backlash thesis, historians still argues that many white southerners moved to the suburbs to avoid integration.

I argue that this process did not occur in the …