In the early 1900s, African Americans died at higher rates, got sick more often, and had worse health outcomes for almost all diseases when compared to whites. This disparity was due to a combination of racism, discrimination, and segregation. Most blacks could only afford to live in unhealthy conditions and had little or no access to medical professionals. Problematically, poor black health led many whites to think of blacks as being inherently diseased, promoting the segregation and discrimination that contributed to black ill health in the first place. This project examines Negro Health Week (NNHW), which became National Negro Health Week (NNHW), a public health campaign designed by African Americans as a systematic effort to improve their health that lasted between 1915 and 1950. The dissertation reveals the strategies African Americans used to empower themselves to combat ill health and the ways medical ideas became accessible to blacks. The racism of the white medical establishment limited the ability of African Americans to enter the medical profession. The small number of black doctors and nurses meant that NHW had to rely on non-medical professionals to teach health practices. Originally begun as a local campaign in Savannah, Booker T. Washington adopted Negro Health Week as a program to teach formerly enslaved blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama how to live. Working as sharecroppers and living in the small cabins they had inhabited as enslaved people, the majority of blacks lived in squalor. Margaret Murray Washington, who co-founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, laid the groundwork for NHW at Tuskegee. During her tenure as Lady Principal of Tuskegee, she created the Tuskegee Woman’s Club and brought together local organizations and women’s clubs to work with women in improving their homes by providing advice on basic hygiene and sanitation that they could implement with little cost. Booker T. Washington coopted the TWC program and brought Monroe Work from Savannah to Tuskegee to head up a more ambitious program which he envisioned expanding throughout the rural South. In 1900 Washington founded the National Negro Business League (NNBL) which included key black business men from throughout the nation, especially the South. The NNBL was instrumental in helping Washington to expand and publicize Negro Health Week. Under the leadership of Booker T. Washington and his successor, Robert Moton, NHW continued to focus on providing advice on basic hygiene and sanitation in one’s home and neighborhood. The emphasis on low-cost individual health practices, such as basic privy sanitation or proper whitewash technique, gave African Americans the ability to take ownership of their health. The Week explained how blacks could improve their health and that of the community even without medical professionals. After Booker T. Washington’s death in 1915, Moton succeeded in getting the support of the national Public Health Service (PHS) and National Negro Health Week came into existence in 1921. The Service’s vast network of health professionals and connections with state and local health departments allowed the campaign to expand out of the South. However, with the involvement of the PHS, the Week began to change. As hygiene practices became more accepted, the Service reframed NNHW to focus on vaccinations and regular physician and dentist visits. As medical professionals became NNHW leaders, the campaign’s message transformed from emphasizing how individuals could improve health on their own to describing how much people needed physicians to obtain good health. Under the PHS, lay people could do little to improve their health. Instead, they had to rely on the medical profession. The PHS used NNHW to reposition the medical establishment as the ultimate arbiter of African American health. Today, there is still a wide racial disparity in participation in, and access to, public health, and indeed in health outcomes in the United States. Understanding the Week can better position scholars and public health officials to understand how race and health intersect and the ramifications of health policies on race relations. / History

The CITY CYCLING (STADTRADELN) campaign has been running since 2008 to motivate German citizens to use the bicycle for daily mobility routines. In the course of the MOVEBIS research project, nationwide GPS data of the CITY CYCLING participants were collected in the years 2018-2020 and were processed for planning purposes. This contribution addresses the question to which extent the participants in the CITY CYCLING campaign represent cyclists in the Federal Republic of Germany and whether the motivation during the campaign leads to a significant change in mobility behaviour. For this purpose, more than 73,000 complete questionnaires of campaign participants from a survey in the year 2020 were evaluated. The age and gender distribution of app users and non-users of the campaign are corresponding to those of cyclists from representative household surveys in Germany (MiD 2017). App users and non app users differ only insignificantly from each other and are, on average, rather older than in the cycling participants of nationwide MiD survey. The results reveal that the smartphone has no significant influence on the cycling behaviour of the users. The survey participants are regular cyclists. Around 88% of the respondents use the bicycle most frequently in everyday life, followed by the private car (national average) and public transport (in large cities). The influence of the campaign on the level of utilisation or the number of kilometres travelled by bike can be described as rather low, overall. Whereas 65% of the participants stated that they cycled to work just as often as outside the campaign period, 19% of the respondents used the bicycle less often for commuting and 16% more often. The results indicate that the CITY CYCLING campaign captures and represents the everyday transport behaviour of participants. During the COVID-19 pandemic, participants used their bicycles significantly more often (73%). The perception of safety is consistently high. The campaign was rated very positively and the majority of users (91%) would participate again or rather recommend the campaign to others (78%).:1. Introduction 2. State of Research 3. Data and Methods 4. Results 5. Discussion 6. Conclusion

In the days when the United States of America was struggling to establish itself as a nation, the prevailing type of popular song was naturally patriotic. Walt Whitman in his article “Slang in America” observes that folk songs, like language, are not an abstract construction of the learned, bu something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has their bases broad and low, close to the ground; because the final decisions of folk songs, like those of language, are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea.

In the American capitalist society, the media is often an agent used to perpetuate ideals and to inform consumers of products that they can purchase by using multiple advertising techniques. In an attempt to counter the thin body ideal for women, some companies have begun advertising their products by using plus size models, such as the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The purpose of this research is to examine college women's perceptions of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, an advertising campaign whose goal is to reverse the stereotypical body ideal for women and broaden the definition of beauty. Some sociologists have criticized Dove for sending conflicting messages. This study is the first that focuses on women's perceptions about this potential conflict. Through the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, this study examined if, how, and when women changed their initial perceptions toward the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty based on two separate scenarios brought to their attention. This is important because the findings suggest how consumers can change their perceptions regarding a company, in this case one that is a part of a multi-million dollar parent company, based on how a company advertises its products.

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Disinformation campaigns are a growing threat towards democracy and a phenomenon that is important to understand in order to guard against. One part of the literature around disinformation campaigns that is as of yet not widely studied is how they can be connected to social movements. Previous research on this connection have shown that disinformation campaigns will tend to support social movements indirectly through the spread of disinformation which both amplifies the claims of the movement and attracts more mobilizers, which can lead to for example lessened trust towards institutions and thus a successful disinformation campaign. This paper analyses the case of the mobilization against the Swedish Social Services in order to see if this connection between the disinformation campaign and the social movement was present in this case as well. The findings made shows that the connection was not that of an indirect connection as have been observed in previous studies but rather one of direct cooperation. Furthermore, this paper also explores what factors allowed for both a disinformation campaign and mobilization against the Swedish Social Services to manifest.

U.S. politics, media, and citizens are highly polarized, stipulating that society is divided between Democrats and Republicans (Hameleers, 2019). The U.S. has seen an increased political polarization over the past 25 years (Heltzel & Laurin, 2020; Westfall, Van Boven, Chambers, & Judd, 2015). Technological development in the campaign environment has fueled this political polarization (Hong & Kim, 2016). In such a polarized technological society, partisan news media cover political issues and events from their ideological perspective (Arceneaux, Johnson, & Murphy, 2012), which may affect the polarized citizens.The Republican Party is conservative, while the Democratic Party is liberal (Westfall, Van Boven, Chambers, & Judd, 2015). Each party has issue agendas that they prioritize during the campaign. When political campaigns post a message on social media, they not only post just one issue but several related issues. These interlinked issues have a networked effect on the partisan news media and the polarized citizens (McCombs, Shaw, & Weaver, 2014). How political campaigns interlinked different issue agendas during campaigns in a polarized environment has not been investigated. This study intends to see the similarities and dissimilarities between the Democratic and Republican Party issue networks using a network agenda setting theory during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign and how they build and set networked issue agendas in the partisan news media and the polarized public on Facebook. The study uses a hybrid content analysis and network analysis of issue agendas presented by the Biden and Trump campaigns, partisan media (CNN and Fox News), and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party supporters on Facebook. Facebook posts are collected using Facebook’s CrowdTangle Search option from January 1, 2021, to November 3, 2020. This study uses a hybrid content analysis method which engages with both human coders and computational means to analyze big data sets (Guo et al., 2016). The data analysis involves measuring core-periphery block model, clique analysis, network visualization, and Quadratic Assignment Procedures (QAP). A social networking analysis software, UCINET, is used for measuring core-periphery block model, clique analysis, and QAP correlations(Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson, 2018). The scholarship of political campaign communication needs to reconnect to the ideological positions of political campaigns, partisan news media, and party supporters. This holistic study is significant in terms of better understanding the mechanism of networked agenda-setting activities of presidential campaigns in a polarized environment on Facebook. Methodologically, this study offers new techniques for investigating networked issue agendas of campaigns, news media, and citizens. It uses core-periphery block model and clique analysis as indicators of network agenda building and network agenda-setting influences. Social media practitioners like campaign managers can consider the political polarization, fragmented nature of social media, and polarized audience during political campaigning.

As dissatisfaction with the single member district has grown in recent years, new electoral systems have gained popularity. In particular, the Top Four Primary plus Ranked Choice Voting system, enacted in 2020 and used in Alaska for the first time in 2022, has received considerable attention. Besides reducing partisanship, the system claims to increase voter turnout and encourage third-party candidates and candidates of color to run on election day. Given its novelty, however, a comprehensive overview of the system and the implementation process is currently lacking. As a result, the purpose of this study is to assess the history, passage, challenges, and current debate around the Top Four Primary plus Ranked Choice Voting system. Using popular opinion data, candidate campaign techniques, archives, and ballot data, I find that voter and candidate reactions to the system varied, that incumbent advantage was not evident in the 2022 election cycle, and that voting patterns were associated with campaign strategies. States considering the Top Four Primary plus Ranked Choice Voting system can use this thesis as a guide to understanding the system's successes and drawbacks better. The study could also serve as a starting point for researchers looking into how the Top Four Primary plus Ranked Choice Voting system can enhance democracy.

"Children of the Silent Majority: Nixon, New Politics, and the Youth Vote, 1968-1972" investigates the emergence of young Americans as a major force in national politics, arguing that the 1968 generation constrained the conservative realignment that Richard Nixon envisioned but also revitalized the Republican Party after the voting age fell to eighteen. Despite the widespread assumption that the vast cadre of young voters casting ballots for the first time in 1972 would tilt the electorate to the Democratic Party, this dissertation reveals that the Nixon administration targeted and mobilized young Americans not aligned with the left--people Nixon's staff called the "sons and daughters of the silent majority." Nixon cultivated his own youth cadre, Young Voters for the President (YVP). Carefully targeting non-students and campus conservatives to join this 400,000 member organization, YVP leaders employed both grassroots organization and modern Madison Avenue advertising techniques to pry increasingly independent young voters from previous Democratic strongholds such as urban, ethnic enclaves and the Sunbelt. In addition, when the politics of youth--the ways Americans, young and old, thought about young people and youth issues--presented a barrier to Nixon's law-and-order conservative policies on problems such as marijuana and campus disorders, Nixon acquiesced on issues such as the draft and environmental protection. This youth-friendly approach allowed his administration to attract and recruit young voters. This study also explores how youth politics fueled the development of image politics during the1970s, compelling campaigns to embrace new techniques that emphasized targeted polling, television and candidates' personal characteristics over party loyalty. Attracting young voters necessitated a more image savvy campaign, giving Nixon's in-house advertising agency of high-powered executives, the November Group, a central role in campaign strategy. Young voters also supplied the campaign with public relations opportunities to counter Nixon's detractors in the media who relished his "youth problem." This study contributes to the scholarship on the Nixon presidency and the political history of the Republican "New Majority" in the 1960s and 1970s by uncovering the decisive role of young voters and youth issues in those pivotal years.

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