This Master’s Thesis examines the ways in which the culturally distinct groups who inhabited the pre-colonial and colonial Southeast approached cross-cultural communication. The extensive and violent entradas led by Spaniards into the Southeastern interior in the 1500s represent a watershed moment in North American history that deeply impacted the economic, social, and geopolitical landscapes of an already well-populated and politically sophisticated region. The subsequent establishment of St. Augustine in 1565 and the arrival of the British in the mid-seventeenth century are similarly seen as pivotal moments in the region’s history that forced many culturally and linguistically dissimilar groups to interact. Early accounts of cross-cultural interactions are peppered with glimpses into the importance of verbal and nonverbal communication to the successes and failures of Indian and European groups and individuals in the region. This thesis explores how different groups actually learned and utilized language and communication in pre-colonial and colonial times. It argues that Southeastern Indians remained active agents of their lives when faced with the drama and disharmony that often accompanied European settlements and the individuals who populated them. Although they sometimes borrowed communicative techniques and methods from their European counterparts when attempting to quell cross-cultural anxieties and misunderstandings, Southeastern Indians continued to rely on methods of communication predicated on maintaining balance and harmony within and between communities developed during the Mississippian period. Meaning making, performance, and communicative practice lay at the heart of this study, as do the multiple perspectives of those who contributed to these processes.

Following the Yamasee War of 1715, many of the Yamasee Indians rekindled alliances with the Spanish and returned to La Florida. San Antonio de Pocotalaca (1716 to 1752) was one of three initial Yamasee Indian towns to relocate from South Carolina and settle on the fringes of St. Augustine. In South Carolina, Pocotalaca (referred to there as Pocotaligo) served as the primary upper town of six Yamasee towns and was the political center for conferences and council meetings between Yamasees, their Indian allies, and South Carolina officials. When Pocotalaca relocated to St. Augustine after the Yamasee War, the town and its inhabitants retained their political significance. Having recognized the importance of the town’s Yamasees, their connections to Indian groups in Apalachicola, and how the alliance could be beneficial to the colony, the Spanish treated them accordingly. As a result, Pocotalaca’s Yamasees secured influence and continued to so by bolstering power through their relations with the Spanish. For these reasons, they were able to carve out their own space in St. Augustine where they retained a high level of autonomy, maintained their Yamasee identity, some traditional practices, and many aspects in their material choices.

The Florida land boom was an orgy of real estate speculation and development that swept the state during the period 1924 through 1926. The few books and articles that deal with that event rarely mention Jacksonville, although it was Florida's largest city and its chief commercial and transportation center. This could lead one to the conclusion that the North Florida city did not become caught up in the boom. Yet scattered throughout the Jacksonville area are the remains of a number of real estate projects that date from that period. Therefore, this thesis examines the effects of the boom on greater Jacksonville during the 1920s. During the years immediately following World War I, Jacksonville's leaders concentrated on expansion of industry and commerce to promote their city's growth, rather than building tourism. Jacksonville had not been a major winter resort since the building of railroads southward in the late 1800s, and this made the North Florida city different than its downstate rivals. The increasing prosperity of the 1920s brought growing numbers of tourists, new residents, and land speculators to resort centers in South and Central Florida, but few to Jacksonville. As interest in Florida grew, the expanding numbers of land buyers created a frenzy of real estate sales and development downstate. The most immediate effect of the boom for Jacksonville was tremendous expansion of the city's industries, as they provisioned the state. However, many local residents became interested in syphoning off some of the tourists and land buyers for their own community. This resulted in civic promotion of Jacksonville as a resort, and the construction of a number of new real estate projects primarily for winter residents, including San Jose, Venetia, Florida Beach, and San Marco. Local expansion of business and real estate also resulted in the construction of several major buildings in downtown Jacksonville. Early in 1926, real estate prices broke downstate and many of the speculators and other newcomers went home. This created a statewide economic decline during the late 1920s that resulted in the failure of many real estate developments throughout Florida, including some in greater Jacksonville. With its extensive commercial and transportation complex, however, the North Florida city fared better than its tourist-dependent rivals downstate. Throughout the late 1920s, percentages of economic decline for Jacksonville were much smaller than in cities such as Miami and St. Petersburg.

This study assesses the intersection of crusading and heresy repression in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The event that encapsulates this intersection was the Albigensian Crusade, a two-decades long conflict that befell the south of France, or Occitania. The papacy, aligned with northern lords and other willing Christians, took up arms to defend the Church from the Cathar heresy’s corrupting influence. This conflict marked a new development in Christian acts of violence. While the Church had crusaded against many different enemies—even branding some as heretics—before 1209, the Church had never called a crusade for the explicit purpose of stamping out a heretical group. This study aims to answer two questions: how did the scope of crusade broaden to incorporate heretical groups and how did methods for countering heresy shift to include crusading? To answer these questions, this study analyzes two strands of ecclesiastical propaganda. Propaganda consisted of written works that functioned as tools to educate, inform, persuade, and inspire in others certain beliefs and actions. These were texts that defined, promoted, and celebrated the practice of crusading; and texts that defined, maligned, and condemned heresies and those adhering to them. These two strands of propaganda began to intertwine in the late twelfth century, resulting in a modified anti-heresy discourse in which crusading against heretics became a theologically justifiable idea. This study argues that the call for crusade against the Occitan heretics was the end result of theological developments that began in the 1170s. What’s more, the institutionalization and codification of these strands of propaganda created the theological precedent for framing the Albigensian Crusade as a holy war, allowing the idea of crusading against heretics to take root in anti-heresy discourse in the years preceding Innocent III’s papacy and his call for crusade in southern France.

This study explores the relationship between fascism, fascist ideas, and environmental consciousness in Britain during the pre- and post-World War II decades. In examining this topic, two main questions arise. First, why did fascist intellectuals support environmentally conscious ideas, and how did they relate these positions to their political ideologies? Second, why were many environmentally conscious thinkers during this period attracted to fascism? This thesis will also address several related issues regarding fascism and environmental consciousness. These issues include what role environmental concerns played in the British Union of Fascist’s platforms and in fascism’s public appeal, and how that role changed as the party’s needs and goals changed. This project also addresses how former members of the BUF drew attention to environmental issues after World War II, and how such ideas related to broader environmental discussions taking place in Britain at the time.

Several factors which influenced the formation of an urban black community following the Civil War are examined in this study. Prior to the war, LaVilla, a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, was sparsely populated by wealthy white families. At war's end, freedmen seeking shelter and work took advantage of the inexpensive housing and proximity to employment LaVilla offered and, by 1870, became the majority population. The years 1866 through 1887 have been chosen for this study because they demarcate LaVilla's inception on the one hand and, on the other, its disappearance as an independent entity. Local, state, and federal records have been utilized to better understand the freedmen's decision on where to settle, finding work, securing a home, and political participation. Although an integrated community, the focus of this study is on the role of blacks in community formation. During the first twenty years of freedom, the blacks who lived in LaVilla came to organize their community along two separate and distinct paths: the social and the political. The social dimension was segregated and articulated through social networks created by family, kinship, and friendship anchored in and strengthened by the church, school, and voluntary associations. In the context of urban growth and development, these social networks would mitigate the harsh realities of poverty, unemployment, and inadequate housing. The political dimension was integrated and afforded black males power and influence concerning the civic decisions of their community. Following annexation to Jacksonville in 1887, LaVilla's blacks were removed from the political arena and disjoined from the decision-making process. As a result, the freedmen came to rely solely on the social dimension of their community.

In 1967 Sallye Brooks Mathis and Mary Littlejohn Singleton were elected the first blacks in sixty years, and the first women ever, to the city council of Jacksonville, Florida. These two women had been raised in Jacksonville in a black community which, in spite of racial discrimination and segregation since the Civil War, had demonstrated positive leadership and cooperative action as it developed its own organizations and maintained a thriving civic life. Jacksonville blacks participated in politics when allowed to do so and initiated several economic boycotts and court suits to resist racial segregation. Black women played an important part in these activities--occasionally in visible leadership roles. As adults, Sallye Mathis and Mary Singleton· participated as educators, family members and leaders in various community efforts. Both had developed wide contacts and were respected among many blacks and whites. Mary Singleton had learned about politics as the wife of a respected black politician, and Sallye Mathis became a leader in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in Jacksonville. In 1967, a governmental reform movement in Duval County, a softening of negative racial attitudes, and perhaps their being female aided their victories. While Sallye Mathis remained on the Jacksonville City Council for fifteen years until her death in 1982, Mary Singleton served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1972 to 1976--the third black in the twentieth century and the first woman from Northeast Florida. From 1976 to 1978 she was appointed director of the Florida Division of Elections and in 1978 she campaigned unsuccessfully for Lt. Governor of Florida. As government officials, Sallye Mathis and Mary Singleton emphasized the needs of low-income people and were advocates for black interests when they felt it was necessary. They were active as volunteers in numerous other community organizations and projects to further their goals. PALMM

This research examines the career of Robert Searle, an English privateer, that conducted state-sponsored attacks against the Spanish and Dutch in the Caribbean from 1655 to 1671. Set within the Buccaneering Period of the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1680), Robert Searle’s personal actions contributed to the rise of the English in the Caribbean to a position of dominance over Spain, which dominated the region from 1492 until the 1670s. Searle serves as a window into the contributions of thousands of nameless men who journeyed to the Caribbean as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design Fleet. These men failed in their endeavor to take Hispaniola from the Spanish, successfully invaded Jamaica, and spent the next fifteen years securing England’s largest possession in the region, transitioning Jamaica from a military outpost to a successful plantation colony. These men, including Searle himself, have been overshadowed in the history of English Jamaica by more well-known figures such as Sir Henry Morgan, the famed “Admiral of the Buccaneers.” Searle and his compatriots pursued the objectives of the core in London throughout the contested periphery of the Caribbean region. These goals were first framed as the complete destruction of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and later as achieving trade between Jamaica and Spain’s American colonies. The examination of Robert Searle through the core-periphery relationship between the metropole and the Caribbean illustrates how the totality of his actions contributed to the rising English position in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Searle and his fellow privateers proved vital to Spain conceding to England the rights of trade and formal recognition of their colonies in the region with a series of succeeding Treaties of Madrid.

This research examines a sample of North Carolina Confederates as they transitioned from citizen to soldier between 1861 and 1863 during the American Civil War, and it questions how levels of commitment and devotion emerged during this transformation. North Carolina Confederates not only faced physical and emotional challenges as they transitioned from citizen to soldier, but also encountered social obstacles due to the strict social order of the Old South. Orthodoxy maintains this social dissent hindered any form of solidarity among North Carolina Confederates. The question remains, though, why did so many North Carolinians remain committed to the Confederacy until death or surrender? This thesis addresses that question. It acknowledges traditional works on North Carolina’s Civil War experience, however it focuses on the war front more closely. By examining soldiers’ personal reflections to experiences encountered during their transition more understanding concerning soldiers’ shifting perceptions emerge. This thesis encapsulates a soldier’s transition through three stages: camp, combat, and campaign. Each stage offers insight into how perceptions toward fellow men, the home front, combat, and camp-life changed over time. Soldiers were exposed to unprecedented levels of fear, sickness, death, and nostalgia that shook their foundations. Levels of commitment were questioned as men encountered each obstacle. The reflections herein indicate men’s devotion actually increased by 1863 by engaging the basic duties of soldiering and learning to function together in the midst of combat. Self-awareness for health and survival, hard work, and camp life activities took on new meanings by 1863. Furthermore, this sample offers an example of how the constant interactions of men whether in camp or on the battlefield ultimately strengthened solidarity among troops. This thesis pays particular attention to soldiers’ attachments to natural landscapes, and their abilities to materially alter landscapes for the purposes of survival and respite. These North Carolinians reveal how experiences during their transition from citizen to soldier ultimately laid a foundation to remain committed to the war.

Following the 1959 victory of the Cuban revolution, the United States government along with the CIA and their Cuban émigré allies immediately undertook a campaign of subversion and terrorism against the Cuban revolution. From 1959 until 1963 a clandestine war was waged between supporters of the revolution and the counter-revolutionary organizations backed by Washington. This project is a new synthesis of this little-known story. It is an attempt to shed light on a little known aspect of the conflict between the United States government and the Cuban revolution by bringing together never-before seen primary sources, and utilizing the two distinct and separate historiographies from the U.S. and Cuba, concerning the clandestine struggle. This is the story of Cuba’s resistance to intervention, the organization of the counter- revolution, and finally how the constant defeat of CIA plots by the Cubans forced changes in U.S. strategy concerning intervention in Cuba and in other parts of the developing world that would have far-reaching and long-last effects.