Enlisted soldiers preferred to elect company- and regimental-level officers during the first year of the American Civil War. This thesis explores how early Confederate mobilization, class conflict between elites and non-elites, and Confederate military policies affected officer elections from spring 1861 to spring 1862 among Virginia Confederates. Chapter 1 explores how the chaotic nature of mobilization and common soldiers' initial expectations regarding their military service influenced elections from April 1861 until late July 1861. Chapter 2 details the changing nature of elections as elite officers faced challenges from non-elites and Confederate policies regarding furloughs and conscription forced officers to reconcile their men’s expectations of loose discipline with directives from senior commanders.

This dissertation explores Elizabeth Barrett's dependency on the archetypal Victorian patriarch. Chapter I focuses on the psychological effects of this father-daughter relationship on Elizabeth Barrett. Chapter II addresses Barrett's acceptance of the conventional female role, which is suggested by the nature and the situation of the women she chooses to depict. These women are placed in situations where they can reveal their devotion to family, their capacity for passive endurance, and their wish to resist. Almost always, they choose death as an alternative to life where a powerful father figure is present. Chapter III concentrates on the highly sentimental images of women and children whom Barrett places in a divine order, where they exist untouched by the concerns of the social order of which they are a part. Chapter IV shows that the conventional ideologies of the time, society's commitment to the "angel in the house," and the small number of female role models before her increase her difficulty to find herself a place within this order. Chapter V discusses Aurora Leigh's mission to find herself an identity and to maintain the connection with her father or father substitute. Despite Elizabeth Barrett's desire to break away from her paternal ties and to establish herself as an independent woman and poet, her unconditional loyalty and love towards her father and her tremendous need for his affection, and the security he provides restrain her resistance and surface the child in her.

This investigation resulted from a pilot research paper prepared in conjunction with a graduate course on the Civil War. This study suggested that the Federal blockade of the Confederacy may not have contributed significantly to its defeat. Traditionally, historians had assumed that the Union's Anaconda Plan had effectively strangled the Confederacy. Recent studies which compared the statistics of ships captured to successful infractions of the blockade had somewhat revised these views. While accepting these revisionist findings as broadly valid, this investigation strove to determine specifically the effectiveness of Admiral Farragut's West Gulf Blockading Squadron. Since the British Foreign Office maintained consulates in three blockaded southern ports and in many Caribbean ports through which blockade running was conducted, these consular records were vital for this study. Personal research in Great Britain's Public Record Office disclosed valuable consular reports pertaining to the effectiveness of the Federal blockade. American consular records, found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. provided excellent comparative reports from those same Gulf ports. Official Confederate reports, contained in the National Archives, various state archives and in the published Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies revealed valuable statistical data on foreign imports. Limited use was made of Spanish and French consular records written from ports involved in blockade running. Extensive use was made of Senate and House documents in determining Federal blockade policy during the war. The record of the Navy's enforcement of the blockade was found in The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. The contemporary reports of Union and Confederate governmental officials was found in James D. Richardson's respective works on The Messages and Papers, and in the published diaries of Gideon Welles and Gustavas Fox. Contemporary newspapers and first hand accounts by participants on both sides provided color and perspective. In evaluating the performance of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, a review of the international laws governing blockading was undertaken, emphasizing America's traditional posture regarding the blockades of other nations. Under Gideon Welles, the Federal navy became a powerful and efficient force, although the navy's enforcement of the blockade often resulted in serious diplomatic embarrassment, especially from maritime incidents occurring near the mouth of the Rio Grande River. Nearby Matamoros, Mexico virtually became an international trade mart for Confederate cotton and imports. However, much contraband trade was conducted through blockaded Gulf ports such as Galveston, Texas. It is concluded that the West Gulf Blockading Squadron performed only satisfactorily at best. This did not result so much from innate limitations as from outside factors. Among the latter were the open door at Matamoros, the Lincoln administration's diplomatic timerity and national policies that authorized a type of cotton trade with the south. Further, the better vessels were assigned land campaign priorities. The statistics of the cotton trade in this portion of the Confederacy show that cotton exports were significantly high. Most of these exports egressed via Matamoros, but a high percentage existed through blockaded Gulf ports. The fact that 10,000 bales of cotton left the heavily guarded port of Galveston in the last six months of the war indicates the inefficiency of the West Gulf Blockade. It appears that the West Gulf Blockade was effective enough to create scarcity but never effective enough to seriously interdict the flow of trade. That the Trans-Mississippi Confederacy was largely sustained by imports underscores the blockade's limited effectiveness.

The Remembering, an original drama set in rural Georgia in 1864, is about three ex-slaves, two men and an old woman, all runaways, whose fictional encounter in a deserted church sets off a series of conflicts and, significantly, incidents of remembering past conflicts which lead them to an understanding of the war, slavery, freedom, and individual responsibility. Many of the events which the slaves, naive witnesses to a great moment in history when mobilized modern warfare was being born, and the nearby Union soldiers remember reflect upon the pervasiveness, speed, and destructiveness of the new campaign. The efforts of the characters to survive in that harsh and bitter war represent one of the primary concerns of this dramatic study.

"No adequate history of the activities of the Texas state government during the Civil War has been written. Instead this phase of state history has been treated only in a limited manner in general state and Civil War histories. A history of the state government's functions and role during this period is essential to understanding Texas' development as a state and its place in the Confederacy. This work is an attempt to provide such a history. A study of the internal political affairs of Texas during the war years, this work begins with the movement toward secession and ends with the collapse of the state government and the establishment of military rule in Texas. Emphasis has been placed on revealing how the state government attempted to cope with the numerous problems which the war engendered and the futility of these attempts." -- p.iii

This dissertation presents a Whiteheadian interpretation of the notions of mind, immanence and process as they are addressed in the Zohar. According to many scholars, this kabbalistic creation story as portrayed in the Zohar is a reaction to the earlier rabbinic concept of God qua creator, which emphasized divine transcendence over divine immanence. The medieval Jewish philosophers, particularly Maimonides influenced by Aristotle, placed particular emphasis on divine transcendence, seeing a radical separation between Creator and creation. With this in mind, these scholars claim that one of the goals of the Zohar’s creation story was to emphasize God’s immanence within creation. Similar to the Zohar, the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and his followers was reacting to the substance metaphysics that had dominated Western philosophy as far back as ancient Greek thought. Whitehead adopts a very similar narrative to that of the Zohar. First there is mind containing all the eternal objects which serve as potential for the creation (God’s primordial nature). Mind becomes immanent in all actual occasions through prehension (God’s consequent nature). Finally God becomes “the lure” (to use Whitehead’s phrase) in the ongoing process of nature (God as superject). In this narrative, God is not the static being, the unmoved mover as discussed by Aristotle, but rather, is portrayed as a dynamic becoming, a God of process. Due to these significant similarities between Whitehead’s process philosophy and the Zohar with regard to the immanence of God and the process of creation, it is worthwhile to attempt a process interpretation of the kabbalistic creation story. The first part of this dissertation is entitled Philosophical Foundations, focusing on the intellectual framework of this study of the Zohar. The second part is entitled Creating a Narrative, looking at the text of the Zohar through the lens of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Finally, the conclusion looks at the narrative and discusses whether the goals of the dissertation have been achieved. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis places the Democratic party at the centre of the Reconstruction narrative and investigates the transformation of the antebellum Democracy into its postbellum form. In doing so, it addresses the relative scarcity of scholarship on the postwar Democrats, and provides an original contribution to knowledge by (a) explaining how the party survived the Civil War and (b) providing a comprehensive analysis of an extended process of internal conflict over the Democracy's future. This research concludes that while the Civil War caused a crisis in partisanship that lasted until the mid-1870s, it was Democrats' underlying devotion to their party, and flexibility over party principle that allowed the Democracy to survive and reestablish itself as a strong national party. Rather than extensively investigating state-level or grassroots politics, this thesis focuses on the party's national leadership. It finds that public memories of the party's wartime course constituted the most significant barrier to rebuilding the Democratic national coalition. Following an overview of the fractures exposed by civil war, the extent of these splits is assessed through an investigation of sectional reconciliation during Presidential and Radical Reconstruction. The analysis then shifts to explore competing visions of the party's future during the late 1860s and early 1870s when public confidence in the Democracy hit its lowest point. While the early years of Reconstruction opened the party to the possibility of disintegration, by the mid-1870s Democrats had begun to adopt a stronger national party organisation. Through a coherent national strategy that turned national politics away from issues of race and loyalty and towards those of economic development and political reform, while simultaneously appealing to the party's history, national Democratic leaders restored public confidence in the Democracy, silenced advocates of the creation of a new national party, and propelled the party back to power in 1884.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:31:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CD 1 - HIS - Elizabete M Espindola.pdf: 661211 bytes, checksum: 7851f6236ee1dd5421f26c18d76dc850 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-01-01 / This History Master s Dissertation tried to make a re-reading of Cruz e Souza s life experience. The current paper has as its main purpose to understand his way of life, his limits and his attempts of social mobility. Cruz e Souza lived in a period of time were there were deep changes both in the political and social contexts. His disappointment with the society of that period has become into poetry. His poetry has earned important space in the research field and a decadentist symbolist aesthetic was the way he founded to better express this disappointment. The letters he wrote to his friends and relatives were also used in the research, since they enabled us to perceive his dreams, desires, expectations and frustrations. The course of his life worked as a guide that led us to understand the contradictions, the ambiguities, the possibilities and the limitations concerning to the attempts of social mobility of a free black man living in a period of time marked by discussions about the end of the slavery and the establishment of the Republic . In the first chapter, we tried to make a brief introduction about Cruz e Souza and his family, his first years as a poet in Desterro / Florianopolis, his relationship with the city as well as its organization and urban modernization process. In the second chapter, we emphasize the poet s networking in the society during his youth, where theater and sessions with readings and discussions of philosophy and literary news as well as the literary soirees were responsible for gathering this little group of young people. In the third and last chapter, we analyze Cruz e Souza in Rio de Janeiro, his new social circle, the publication of his main works, his search for a room in the world of poetry and the beginning of a group of symbolist poets identified by their decadentist aesthetic / O tema desta dissertação de mestrado em História procurou fazer uma re-leitura da experiência de vida de Cruz e Sousa. O presente trabalho tem como idéia central, compreender sua trajetória de vida e os limites da Modernidade. Cruz e Sousa viveu em um período marcado por profundas mudanças no contexto político e social. Sua poesia ocupou lugar importante na pesquisa, bem como, suas cartas a amigos e familiares, pois através delas nos foi possível perceber seus sonhos, desejos, expectativas e desencantos. Sua trajetória de vida foi adotada como fio condutor, que nos permitiu compreender as contradições, as ambigüidades, as possibilidades e as limitações às tentativas de mobilidade social de um homem livre de cor vivendo em um período marcado pelas discussões em torno do fim do trabalho escravo e da instauração da República. No capítulo inicial, procuramos fazer uma rápida apresentação de Cruz e Sousa e sua família, os primeiros anos do poeta em Desterro/Florianópolis, sua relação com a cidade, como esta cidade estava organizada e os processos de remodelamento de seu espaço urbano. No segundo capítulo, procuramos destacar o círculo de sociabilidade do poeta durante sua juventude, onde a atividade teatral, os encontros para leitura e discussão das novidades filosóficas e literárias, bem como os sarais literários foram os principais aglutinadores desse pequeno grupo de jovens. No terceiro e último capítulo procuramos analisar Cruz e Sousa na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, o circulo de sociabilidade construído na Capital Federal, a publicação de suas principais obras, sua busca por uma colocação e a formação de um grupo de poetas simbolistas identificados com uma estética decadentista

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T14:16:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Quatro Temperamentos_Antroposofia_Steiner.pdf: 886113 bytes, checksum: 7de78798c24d5783bdf1cbb4f783724c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-06-21 / Estudo das idéias de Rudolf Steiner acerca dos quatro temperamentos, dentro de seu contexto histórico, procurando verificar até que ponto existem semelhanças e diferenças entre as concepções de Steiner e o conceito dos quatro temperamentos que faz parte da antiga tradição hipocrático-galênica

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