This narrative chronicles the dissemination of sacred music from the eastern seaboard to the West and South spanning a time frame from the colonial era to the latter part of the Early Nationalist Period (1700-1820). Musical culture in its migration away from the eastern seaboard also parallels the greater western and southern expansion of the United States from its initial configuration of localized regional subgroups to the beginnings of a larger national identity. From this conceptual base, sacred music becomes a vehicle for understanding not only religious and musical changes over time, but also the broader maturity of a nation. Focusing on this period allows for inquiries both into the development of hymnody in the Middle Atlantic, and the subsequent developments of the West and South. These chronological delimitations allow for a discussion of musical practice beginning with formative sacred music developments and continuing to the incorporation of techniques shaped by reform-minded musicians from the eastern seaboard. The following topics guided the construction of this thesis: explicating how the Middle Atlantic region shaped compositional trends, aesthetic, and performance practice of the American West and South; identifying the various southern cultures as understood by eighteenth and nineteenth-century southerners and their application to sacred music practice; understanding how nineteenth-century Americans distinguished between the West and the South; understanding how southern and western music relates to individual denominations and cultures within these areas; and understanding performance practice common to the evangelical and non-evangelical branches of individual sects. Identifying patterns of development in American sacred music of the South and West involves documentation of performance practice, denominational aesthetics, and tunebook bibliography. The study of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century material by twentieth-and-twenty-first-century writers has falsely defined cultural borders of this region according to a post-bellum conceptualization of the boundaries of the North and South. Prior to 1850, writers defined their borders according to a different set of geographic boundaries than today. Consequently, this thesis differs in terms of geographic and cultural definitions of the North and South from current scholarship because of this writer’s application of colonial and Early Nationalist understandings of American culture.

This creative thesis is comprised of five original short stories and a critical preface. The preface discusses the changing cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic landscape of the modern American South and the effects-positive, negative, and neutral-these changes have had on the region's contemporary literature, including the short stories contained within.

Greek immigration to the United States occurred in two distinctive waves: the first wave from the 1890s-1920s and the second wave from the 1960s-1980s. This thesis explores the regional diversity of the Greek immigrant experience in the Southern United States through the case study of the Greek community in Richmond, Virginia. The first chapter introduces the history of Greek immigration to the United States, discusses major scholars of Greek American studies, and explains the Southern Variant theory. Chapter two examines the experiences of the first wave of Greek immigrants in Richmond. The third chapter incorporates oral history to explain the experiences of second wave Greek immigrants in Richmond. Chapters two and three examine factors including language, church activity, intermarriage, and community involvement, in order to demonstrate a Southern Variation in the experiences of Greek immigrants in Richmond in comparison to their counterparts elsewhere in the United States.

Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Wilson / For more than a century, the chain gang has been glamorized, criticized, abhorred, and often explained away as an economic necessity or natural byproduct of historical circumstances. After Emancipation, this centuries-old approach to punishing criminals offered an immediate palliative for southern plantation owners in need of field hands, northern coal and steel interests and railroad tycoons in search of blasters and miners, and eventually government officials who identified the South's antiquated infrastructure as its greatest barrier to integration into a regional and national economy. Heavily influenced by Hollywood, the blues, oral histories and folkways, archived photographs, and literary representations, many people now view the chain gang as a relic of a bygone era of southern prejudice and brutality. After all, history does not cast the men and women who served on chain gangs as heroic workers and, if they are acknowledged at all, they are only occasionally figured as victims of the political, social, and economic forces that led to their convictions and servitude. And yet, paradoxically, labor historians and others have argued convincingly that the chain gang, even with all its warts and abuses, actually made southern economic progress possible. Entering this still-vibrant, contested territory, "Restricted Movement" and Coordinates of Freedom focuses on depictions of chain gangs in selected literary works and films from 1901 to 2000, including Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren and the films I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Defiant Ones (1958), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). This dissertation attempts to make sense of a multitude of historical and social conditions that bear specifically on chain gangs and convict labor, including black criminality, white supremacy, the Good Roads Movement, race-based electoral politics, and industrialization. In addition to exploring these vexed arguments about servitude and progress, this dissertation also explores how the chain gang, real and imagined, serves as its own special form of segregation. Beginning with the work of Edward L. Ayers, Alex Lichtenstein, Matthew Mancini, and others in the 1980s and 1990s, a handful of southern and labor historians broadened the study of postbellum race, crime, and punishment to consider whether convict-leasing programs and chain gangs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really did result in a form of "neo-slavery." In other words, these historians asked, did these practices actually "re-enslave" African Americans in the American South between 1865 and 1940? And if so, what were the social, political and cultural implications of this re-enslavement? How did these practices shape the experience and consciousness of both blacks and southern whites? Moreover, in a culture that speaks so often of slavery's terrible legacies, how might a deeper understanding of convict leasing and chain gangs offer its own particular lessons about race, history, and justice in the United States since the Civil War? My hope is that the methods and approaches laid out in this dissertation will invite other scholars to grapple with the ways in which chain gang history and cultural history inform one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Excerpt from Introduction" Social class is one of the fundamental analytical categories for studying southern cultures. Exploring southern society as the context for cultural life is an enduring concern of scholars from such disciplines as sociology, social history, anthropology, social psychology, and political science, among others, and this volume shows the vital public policy connections to scholarly issues of social class.

This dissertation investigates the place-making practices of African American lesbians in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 2010. For this project, I ask how African American lesbians claim space to examine how race, sexuality, and class shape their place-making practices. The study is situated in the city before and following the 1996 Olympic Games, which was a period of rapid social, economic, and political growth. The primary question posed in this study is as follows: How do African American lesbians claim space in Atlanta? This dissertation posits three arguments. First, African American queer spaces are transitory, reflecting the shrinking boundaries of black neighborhoods within the contemporary city. Second, these spaces are informed and forged by the sexual, racial, and classed identities of participants. Third, through their place-making practices, struggles, and contestations over public space, African Americans have transformed sites in the city into black queer cartographies. In this empirically informed study, I employ ethnographic research methods, participant observation, archival research, oral histories, and in-depth interviews. By positioning black queer cartographies within the larger schematic of African American life, this work extends current understandings of queer space and builds on the growing subarea of black queer geographies (McBride 2007; Bailey 2011; Eaves 2017). Multiple sites that reflect the transitory and clandestine nature of locating queer space are mentioned in the work. Within Atlanta’s neighborhoods of Midtown, Southwest Atlanta, and Westside, African American lesbians curated spaces that validated their identities and provided a sense of belonging during the period studied.

In this paper, I will examine works of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers, three Southern women writers who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. While these authors differ in a number of ways, each of them produced work that deals, often explicitly, with ideal Southern womanhood and the expectations this ideal places upon women. Additionally, each of these three authors uses the grotesque as a tool for examining ideal womanhood, most often represented through the ideal of the Southern Lady. This paper is concerned with analyzing the link between the grotesque and the ideal of the Southern Lady, specifically the ways in which O’Connor, Welty, and McCullers employ the grotesque as a tool for exposing the limiting and destructive nature of this ideal.

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1971.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the theme of alienation in selected fiction by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, taking into consideration the geographic as well as ideological positions from which the two authors write, contextualizing their work in its portrayal as well as critique of the South. Firstly, the insular nature of the South is examined vis-à-vis ethnic and racial othering. The exclusionary social politics of Southern communities are satirized and subverted, as the two authors pit the xenophobic and racist tendencies of their provincial characters against a cultural landscape that fails to accommodate their narrow- minded world view. The gap between the Southern ideology and its contemporaneous reality can be partially accounted for due to the rise of consumer culture, which is discussed in its impact on race relations and social mobility as well as religion. The following chapter, entitled "Commodity Culture and the Americanization of the South," explores the conflation of religious and consumerist ideologies, negotiating the proclaimed adherence to Protestantism in the South with the rise of consumer behaviour as supplanting spirituality. The impact of a ritualistic adherence to capitalist structures is analyzed as promoting a culture of hyper-individualism, narcissism and alienation,...

The Southern Metal scene depends heavily on the performance of a Southern Identity. While considerable research has been done on other musical genres and scenes from the American South (country music, blues, gospel music), less attention has been given to the extreme metal scene of Southern Metal. Using scholarship of Nadine Hubbs, Philip Auslander, Jefferey C. Alexander, and Keith Kahn Harris, among others, I analyze two films, Slow Southern Steel (2010) and NOLA: Life, Death, and Heavy Blues from the Bayou (2014), and one song, Down’s “Eyes of the South” as cultural productions of this Southern Metal scene. In this project, I define the musical elements and scene ethos of Southern Metal as they relate to a wider, more mainstream American audience and describe how these identities and cultural forms are produced, negotiated, and embodied.