The overall objective of the research presented in this dissertation is to establish ways in which the Red Scare and Cold War eras impacted social studies education in Georgia from the 1930s through the 1960s. My position is that the decision by the Communist Party’s international leadership to support African Americans in the southern United States through legal defense and the organization of sharecroppers’ unions impacted white segregationists’ interpretation of subversive activity as being inclusive of racially liberal ideas. Social studies education in Georgia was affected by the policies and curriculum decisions made in the context of Red Scare and Cold War influences. An analysis of the historiography of communism in the United States reflects the changing tenor of uncertainty and fear that gripped Americans when it came to radical ideas contrary to the democratic capitalist tradition. Historians tend to agree that the Party’s efforts in the African American community had minimal impact. However, the calibration used by scholars to measure “impact” should be adjusted to look beyond changes in Communist membership numbers and whether the lives of blacks in the South improved. My focus in this study is the peripheral impact the efforts of the Communist Party had on southern white segregationists who began to equate racially liberal actions with subversive activity. Chapters in this dissertation focus on the formation of the Communist Party’s Black Belt Self-Determination Thesis and how it was carried out in the American South, national efforts to combat communist infiltration through loyalty oaths and textbook reviews, and the evolution of civic and democratic education initiatives in social studies. Georgia’s scandalous episode of the early 1940s involving Eugene Talmadge’s manipulation of the state’s educational system is presented as an example of how the concepts of subversion and racial liberalism were equated in an effort to maintain segregation in the state. These chapters provide evidence of the Red Scare and Cold War eras’ impact on social studies education in Georgia from the 1930s through the 1960s.

It was the goal of this study to examine teacher perceptions of the effectiveness of the English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Sheltered program model for 9th to 12th grade students as it relates to passing scores on the Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State (ACCESS) for English Language Learners Test. This study also measured teacher perceptions of the ESOL Sheltered Program as it relates to academic improvement. The research focused on the possible relationships that may exist between ACCESS scores and ESOL teacher demographics, ESOL teacher training, ESOL teacher attitudes, ESOL teacher challenges, ESOL teacher efficacy in the use of general strategies, and ESOL teacher efficacy in the use of specific verbal and nonverbal strategies. The research design required the use of the correlation, ANOVA, and regression statistical models to test the research questions. The Cronbach Alpha statistical model was used to test the survey for reliability while item-to-scale correlations were used to the test the survey for construct validity. The researcher found that there was a significant relationship between student performance as measured by ACCESS scores and the independent variable, School Culture for ESOL students. The dependent variable—effectiveness—revealed significant relationships with teacher attitudes, school culture for ESOL students, and teachers’ self-efficacy with the use of specific verbal strategies literacy, vocabulary, and questioning. Recommendations were suggested for policy makers, district educational leaders, school educational leaders, ESOL teachers, and future researchers.

American composer Christopher Theofanidis’s choral-orchestral work The Here and Now (2005) is a setting of Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s thirteenth-century poetry as translated by Coleman Barks. Theofanidis employs a cappella sonic contrasts, silence, rhythmic text setting, and a libretto based on fragments of Rumi’s poems to tell a story about the search for love, longing, joy, and gratitude. While rooted in traditional Western composition methods, this twenty-first-century work uses musical elements like color chords (bichords), cluster chords, changing meters, and modality, as well as imitative polyphony and unifying motifs within a new, tonal American aesthetic espoused by the Atlanta School of Composers, of which Theofanidis is a founding member. This DMA project presents warmups, rehearsal strategies, and teaching methods to guide the choir and conductor through the challenges of rhythmic text setting and dense harmonic language so that learning and performing The Here and Now is a rewarding endeavor.

This study utilizes William Benoit’s Image Repair Theory to frame the dominant crisis communication strategies that fast food chain Chick-fil-A (CFA) employed before, during and after their CEO mixed his personal opinion on social issues with corporate policy in June 2012. The thematic analysis draws from three distinct data sets that include 3,900 Facebook comments posted by the general public on CFA’s social media page, 32 individual Atlanta Journal-Constitution news articles that address the debate and CFA’s public response to the crisis titled “Who We Are.” This thesis aims to identify both the dominant themes in Facebook posts and the news articles, as well as how these themes are situated within Benoit’s Image Repair Theory. Research shows that CFA representatives utilized eight of Benoit’s 14 strategies to address their CEO’s comments on gay marriage in an attempt to salvage their reputation. The transcendence strategy was used more than any other throughout the crisis. The thematic analysis of Facebook comments showed that religion and loyalty were the most addressed theme within social media users’ posts on the company’s page. Research also shows that a national boycott initiated against CFA by the LGBTQ community did not hurt the company, but may have helped to spur brand recognition and overall sales. Another pertinent question arose during this research; did company representatives purposely forgo sharing their 2011 and 2012 tax documents that prove they had already stopped contributing to supposed anti-gay organizations more than a year before the controversy arose? Was CFA benefiting from the crisis to such an extent that they strategically remained silent and allowed the misconception to take place when they could have ended the crisis and shown proof?

Thesis (D.Min.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC, 2005. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-323).

ABSTRACT This work answers the question “Who was Frances Virginia?” by recovering the story of an Atlanta entrepreneur, Frances Virginia Wikle Whitaker, and her tea room foodservice business. It acknowledges “Frances Virginia,” as the public knew her; and focuses on her career as demonstrative of an under‐theorized form of women’s activism. Her education and proclivity in the once all‐female domain of home economics have important characteristics that are under‐ represented, and often misinterpreted, in today’s discourse. I use a womanist theoretical lens within a historical frame to examine her story as a home economist during the tea room movement of the U. S. feminist movement’s Transition Era, 1920s‐1960s. Together, these elements illuminate the significance of Frances Virginia and her particular form of activism.

The seven-and-a-half-hour series of funeral rites that occurred in Atlanta on April 9, 1968 in honor of assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were broadcast live to 120 million U.S. television viewers and reported extensively in local and national newspapers and magazines. While King's April 4 assassination triggered deadly riots in more than 100 cities, Atlanta remained peaceful before and during the funeral. In this research thesis I explore how the funeral was leveraged by three disparate stakeholder group's King's family, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Atlanta's liberal white leadership- to stage image events. I create a historiography for each group that draws on primary sources and original interviews. Using an intertextual approach I conduct qualitative content analysis of the media coverage generated by each group's actions, identifying seven major messages that emerged.

This dissertation will examine the formation of the myth that William T. Sherman laid waste to the state of Georgia in 1864, and almost single-handedly invented the concept of “total war.” It will also examine how Sherman’s reputation has evolved over the years from accusations of being a Southern sympathizer and traitor at the end of the Civil War to the modern image of Sherman as the destroyer of the old South. William Tecumseh Sherman was the most controversial general of the American Civil War. The modern image of Sherman is either a destructive monster who violated the laws of civilized warfare or a strategic genius who invented modern warfare. Both of these images have evolved over the years. In large part, they have been the product of Lost Cause writers trying to reinterpret the history of the war, but also the product of Union generals and politicians attempting to glorify their own place in the history of the war, men with personal grudges against the general and modern historians using Sherman to make their own arguments about contemporary society. The sources used for this dissertation were the journals, letters and memoirs of the participants. The Official Records of both the Union and Confederacy were examined as well as nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers and magazines. This dissertation will show that the modern conception of General Sherman is not the same as the historical fact, but rather a post-war creation. Individuals’ agendas have created and sustained the myth of Sherman to explain defeat in the Civil War, justify later military strategy, condemn later conflicts and for personal gain. It is not enough to know that historical events as commonly understood are inaccurate; it is important to understand how and why these inaccuracies came about.

Designers of information communication technologies (ICTs) in public space often fall into the trap of designing only for the "flaneur," an unembedded mobile subject in the generic global city. They deracinate the experience of space and support the global flâneur as the paradigmatic deracinated subject. In this thesis I propose a specific vision of "en-racinating" media, that is media that takes the specificity of place seriously. A careful consideration of public art can help us in this endeavor by leveraging the artistic notion of "site specificity" in the most culturally grounded meaning of the term. I examining three public digital media/information-based public art works through the lens of urban informatics in order to see how the works do or do not en-racinate experience in a specific city: Atlanta

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-204). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.