For many years newspapers were locally owned by editors and publishers. However, today many are run by corporations from out of state. As a result, many communities have lost the personal relationship between the family owned publication and the community. Gene Howe, who served as editor, publisher and columnist of the Amarillo Globe-News from 1926 until his death in 1952, believed the community was where the focus should be and the newspaper should do all that it can to help their readers. Despite the fact that Howe was not born in Amarillo, Texas, his passion and love for the city and its inhabitants compensated for it. During the Dust Bowl and Great Depression Howe and the Globe-News helped Amarillo survive the dust and economic storms that blew through the Texas Panhandle, an area that has not been written as much as other parts of Texas. Through his “Tactless Texan” column, which served as a pulpit to the community, to the various contests and promotions the newspaper sprang up, including the creation of Mother in Law Day, Gene Howe gave the newspaper another dimension little has been studied about, the role of the editor and publisher in guiding a community through a dramatic era. Understanding Howe’s ethos can allow others to examine the roles editors and newspapers play in communities throughout the country.

Silenced for almost half a century, testimonies of those who lost the Spanish Civil War are now surfacing and being published. The origin of this dissertation was the chance discovery that Martín Herrera de Mendoza, a Spanish Civil War exile living in the United States, was truly a Catalonian anarchist named Antonio Vidal Arabí. This double identity was a cover for the political activist dedicated to the fight for change in the anarchist workers’ union CNT (National Confederation of Workers) and the FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists). He founded the FAI chapter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and planned a failed assassination attempt on General Franco’s life in an effort to avoid the military takeover in 1936. This dissertation is the reconstruction of Antonio Vidal Arabí’s life narrative. It is based on the texts written during his seventeen-month stay as a refugee in Great Britain. Copies of his writings were left in a suitcase with a fellow anarchist who he instructed to have sent to his family upon his death. In 1989, “The English Suitcase” was delivered to his children in Barcelona. Based on his own account, this study follows his service as an intelligence agent for the Spanish Republic during the War. When it was over, he attempted to evacuate his family from France, to save them from the threat of the Nazi invasion and reunite with them in England or America. The analysis of the letters he wrote to his wife and children in France documents how he hid from Franco’s spies using his dual identity. In his letters, always signed as Martín Herrera de Mendoza, he invents a persona in order to help his family. The present study narrates his transformation into the persona he created and the events that brought about his translation into his “other.” Antonio Vidal Arabí’s bilinguism and biculturality is underlined as the main factors in his change into Martín Herrera de Mendoza. His was a voyage into exile documented by his own words; a story of survival and reinvention. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital. I also examine a variety of mechanisms by which the Dust Bowl influenced later-life wellbeing, and investigate the scope for recovery from this early-life shock. I find that exposure to the Dust Bowl in childhood has statistically significant and economically meaningful adverse impacts on later-life outcomes, for instance, increasing disability and reducing fertility and college completion. These results hold even after accounting for the possibly confounding effects of the Great Depression, migration, and selective fertility or mortality. The effects I find are more severe for those born in agricultural states, suggesting that the Dust Bowl was most damaging via the destruction of agricultural livelihoods. This collapse of farm incomes, however, had the positive effect of increasing high school completion amongst the exposed, likely by reducing the demand for child farm labor where such labor was not essential to production, and thus decreasing the opportunity costs of secondary schooling; in this outcome, unlike in college completion, family income and student ability were irrelevant. Many of the worst adverse effects are found amongst those exposed prenatally and in early childhood, suggesting that congenital complications in capability development, together with low parental incomes in utero and thereafter, may be to blame for such later-life disadvantage. Together, these findings imply that the Dust Bowl acted largely "indirectly," as an economic shock that in turn affected in utero and early-life conditions, rather than "directly," through personal exposure (e.g. dust inhalation) in childhood. Lastly, results - particularly those on New Deal expenditure - imply both that remediation from early-life disaster is possible under the right circumstances, and that post-shock investment may have compensated for rather than reinforced damage to child endowments. The findings in this study are consistent with a multi-stage model of human capability formation, in which investments in one period respond to endowments in a previous one, and may either reinforce or compensate for these endowments.