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H.L. Mencken coined “the Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and regional life in the American South. But the reality Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Like the label itself, the Bible Belt was something new, and everything new must be made. This dissertation is the history of its making. Over the course of several decades, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding religious authority transformed southern evangelicals’ inward-looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. Late-nineteenth-century religious leaders overcame crippling spiritual anxieties and tamed a freewheeling religious world by capturing denominations, expanding memberships, constructing hierarchies, and purging rivals. Clerics then confronted a popular anticlericalism through the politics of prohibition. To sustain their public efforts, they cultivated a broad movement organized around the assumption that religion should influence public life. Religious leaders fostered a new religious brand of history, discovered new public dimensions for their faith, and redefined religion’s proper role in the world. Clerics churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a popular political movement and, with prohibition as their weapon, defeated a powerful anticlerical tradition and injected themselves into the political life of the early-twentieth-century South. By exploring the controversies surrounding religious support for prohibition in Texas, this dissertation recasts the politicization of southern religion, reveals the limits of nineteenth-century southern religious authority, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history.

M. Com. (Economics) / The objective of the study was to examine the behaviour of American foreign direct investment in South Africa since 1985. By the mid- eighties more than 300 American companies had direct investments or employees in South Africa. During the period 1984-1991, 215 of these companies withdrew from South Africa. Most of them sold their affiliates to local investors or local companies. Some sold their affiliates to non- South African companies. A few liquidated their South African operations while others sold their assets to trusts. Most of the companies that withdrew from South Africa maintained licensing and other contractual agreements with their former affiliates. No American company established new affiliates in South African during the period 1984-1991. During the period July 1991 - February 1994, 39 American companies settled in South Africa. Some of them were companies that withdrew from South Africa during the sanctions period. The number of companies re-entering the country could, however, be misleading. Only a few of these companies established manufacturing plants locally. The new settlement was not accompanied by a significant inflow of capital or the employment of large numbers of workers...

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How to Orient Yourself in the Wilderness is an exhibition presented in the style of a survival guide. The “wilderness” is a metaphor for the unknown. Within this category of the unknown are numerous literal and figurative spaces. I use the guide as an attempt to pin down why I gravitate towards the camera and what it means to me as a form of communication. Simultaneously I explore what it means to be “southern” and the manner in which it is traditionally represented in images. Also included in the wilderness tag is the “art world” and the relationship of straight photography towards and with it. The exhibition is loosely attached to the survival guide premise in order to highlight the shortcoming of photography’s ability to explain.

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This case study assesses the elementary school choice decision-making process of black middle-class families living in the Algiers community of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The concept of community has been central to the success of blacks in America since Reconstruction. However, as the Civil Rights Movement helped eliminate some of the legal obstacles facing blacks and provided them with more access to opportunities, it also had the unfortunate consequence of redirecting the attention of blacks more inwardly to the success of their own families, thus diminishing some of the formerly needed sense of community responsibility. These families are not oblivious to the racism that still exists. Yet, they go about a process of prioritizing their options within their choice sets in order to strike the best, if not optimal, balance of school characteristics, such as Catholic tradition, racial diversity and academic rigor, to ensure the success of their children.

Increasing concern with the amount of energy required to maintain static indoor conditions in hot-humid climates is encouraging designers to again contemplate passive methods of indoor environmental control. Yet prevailing cultural perceptions of acceptable comfort levels make building occupants wary of any suggestions to reduce the mechanical control of building interiors. The rapid deployment of air-conditioning in the building sector over the past fifty years and its consequent pervasiveness nearly guarantees that most Americans have had little conscious experience with non-conditioned space. This thesis considers the potential for historic sites in Texas to interpret pre-air-conditioned indoor environmental conditions and to demonstrate historical approaches to climate mitigation. Within the context of preservation practice and theory, this study examines the historical context for these sites, particularly the professional and cultural constraints on architectural design in the nineteenth-century American South and architects’ strategies for managing environmental conditions within the limits of prevailing stylistic modes. Three case study sites are explored as potential venues for discovery and interpretation of traditional or transitional methods of cooling and ventilation: Historic Texas (Goliad and Comal county) courthouses, Galveston Historical Foundation’s Gresham House (Bishop’s Palace), and the University of Texas at Austin’s Battle Hall. Issues of historical interpretation are discussed and strategies that could be deployed in an indoor-climate interpretive program are proposed. With the rest of the world poised to follow America’s lead into a fully air-conditioned existence, it is critical to understand the modes and methods building designers used in the past in order to imagine alternate futures. Historic buildings and sites are well positioned to be the interpreters of those conditions and activities that made life in a hot-humid climate manageable. However, the ways in which preservationists value and evaluate historic buildings may have to change in order to participate meaningfully in this discussion. / text

This dissertation seeks to describe and explain the connection between The Supreme Court and politics outside of the judicial system. It is a case study of the reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education integration decision in the American South. I apply a theoretical model of “judicialization,” arguing that when courts affect politics outside of the judicial system, they reshape politics to resemble the adversarial legal system, sparking polarized conflict and causing non-judicial political actors to make arguments in the form of constitutional doctrine. Analyzing editorials and letters to the editor from Southern newspapers, I show that debate after Brown was characterized by appeals to constitutional principles, and that Brown increased the salience of segregation in schools as a subject of political debate. I also supplement my Southern newspaper data with data from African-American newspapers and analyze Southern elections in the periods immediately before and after the education integration decision to assess the impact of the Court’s education decision on both voters and candidates. / text