Lesbians have historically lived in obscurity and isolation because living outwardly as a lesbian carried with it the almost certain loss of social standing, family, and friends (Blando, 2001). For lesbians who grew up in the Deep South, isolation and the pressure to conform was greater than anywhere in the United States (Barton, 2010). Most Deep Southerners were homophobic, especially in rural areas where people were deeply religious and had little exposure to sexual minorities. The researcher used a qualitative phenomenological approach to explore the meaning and significance of growing up lesbian in the rural Deep South. The sample included 12 Caucasian lesbians, ages 45 to 62. Four clusters of themes emerged from the interviews. Those clusters were: (1) emerging sexuality, (2) the mark of fatal difference, (3) denial of lesbian identity, and (4) conforming to Deep Southern social mores. Themes within those clusters described how delays in both lesbian identity development (Cass, 1984) and psychosocial development (Erikson, 1975) occurred in each of the participants because of the intensely religious and homophobic environments in which they were raised. Denunciation of participants' personal identities began with the first expressions of their sexual identities in elementary school. Ridiculed at a young age because of attractions to girls, participants cycled back through developmental crises involving shame, doubt, and inferiority. They entered adolescence disturbed about their developing sexualities, to discover that parents and faith-based communities were homophobic. Therefore, at the time when participants faced the most critical developmental crises of their lives (Erikson, 1975), they feared rejection by their parents, communities, and God. Participants sought to suppress or deny their lesbianism. Suppression of lesbian identity came with emotional and developmental costs, including substance abuse, unwanted marriages, and role confusion. Unable to find needed resources and role models, participants conformed to the social mores of the rural community for periods ranging from five to twenty years. Eventually, each participant in this study left her rural origins to begin claiming her lesbian identity. Retrospectively, each woman recognized that in the era in which they grew up, communities in the rural Deep South demanded conformity and resisted allowing members to individuate. Thus, participants in this study entered adulthood, and sometimes middle age, with a number of unresolved developmental crises, particularly as those crises related to sexual orientation.

This research explores the barriers that have hindered women?s ability to acquire top administrative positions in higher education in the Deep South. Previous studies document the fact that while more women are attending college nationally, far fewer women attain upper level administrative positions at their universities than do men. Sexism and family/work conflicts are known hindrances in women?s ability to assume key leadership roles in higher education. This research examines women?s perceptions of such obstacles in achieving top administrative positions at public universities in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Women administrators and women who are full and associate professors at both traditionally white and historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) were surveyed on their attitudes and perceptions of barriers affecting the representation of women in administrative and upper administrative positions. This research indicates that women largely believe that men are the key decision makers at their universities. However, contrary to my hypotheses, for those women faculty and administrators surveyed who believe that there are no barriers for women in achieving administrative or upper administrative posts, many of them state they have no intention in seeking higher positions. My research findings also reveal that finances is the primary motivator for many women faculty and administrators in moving up the administrative ladder. Women faculty and administrators with financially dependent families and those who simply desire to make more money state that they would seek administrative and upper administrative positions. Further, those women faculty members and administrators who perceive their institution as having familyriendly policies and practices indicated that they are not inspired to achieve an administrative or upper administrative position based on that factor.

Across the Deep South: A Linked Story Collection focuses on the establishment and reestablishment of themes that reflect the mutability of characters over time, along with the equally mutable notion of identity found within the cultural context of the modern Southern United States. The stories follow the paradigm of Sherwood Anderson’s linked story collection Winesburg, Ohio in that character and geographical location combine over the course of multiple stories to recontextualize theme and character development through intertextual cohesiveness. Preceding the collection of stories is a critical introduction that considers the linked story collection as an independent form of fiction occupying a distinct space between the non-interrelated short story collection and the novel.

‘MidSouth’, a relatively low maintenance interspecific hybrid bunch grape currently grown in South Mississippi, has low sugar and high acid levels for red wine use. Two studies, conducted at the Mississippi State University McNeill Research Unit in 2020 and 2021, determined the effects of pruning timing, leaf removal, and shoot thinning on ‘MidSouth’ development and fruit and wine quality. Treatments in the first study included early versus normal pruning timing, both with and without leaf removal, and treatments in the second study included leaf removal, shoot thinning, and control vines. Cluster temperatures, leaf chlorophyll, berries per cluster, berry and cluster weights, crop yield, Ravaz index, total soluble solids, titratable acidity, juice pH, monomeric anthocyanin pigment, and total phenolic content data were collected. It was determined that ‘MidSouth’ fruit quality can be altered through canopy manipulation, but not enough of a desired effect was achieved for these practices to be recommended.

Nominally, Thailand has never been colonized by western imperial states. However, just as Benedict Anderson stated that ¡§it¡¦s borders were colonially determined, therefore, one can see unusually clearly the emergence of a new state-mind within a ¡¥traditional¡¦ structure of political power¡¨. In order to resist the invasion of imperialism, Siam¡¦s rulers bent their attention to build a polity corresponded with the game rule of the Sovereign State System. It required that Siam¡¦s political and cultural boundaries must be overlapping. Then Thainess which was based on the trinitarian mystery of ¡§Nation, Religion, and King¡¨ was created, and became the central value of Thailand¡¦s national identity. During the last one hundred years, Thai rulers impose the Thai nationalism on their people within border. Consequently, there are so many conflicts between the dominant ethnic group and the ethnic minorities while the policy of national assimilation is put into practice by way of national education system, religion, and the mass media. Recently, with the tides of de-territorialization, and de-nationalization, the capability of nation-state as a basic unit of international system is questionable. It¡¦s the best time to rethink the constituents of nation-sate, especially the role of boundary and identity. Undoubtedly, Thailand is the best object of study because of it¡¦s distinctive historical legacy.

For years Arkansas voted for Republicans in blue. From post-Reconstruction to industrialization and civil rights, Arkansas maintained a conservative ideology while aligning itself with the Democratic Party. In the late 20th century, the South shifted to the right, but the Natural State stayed loyal to the left and its traditional voting tactics. It would not be until the 21st century that Arkansans would recognize that the national Democratic Party did not represent their views. By the 2014 midterm elections, Arkansas’s long time conservatism, newly developed industry and demographic changes coalesced into a partisan change. Arkansas embraced red.

This thesis is a social history of disease and mortality in the American Deep South before the Civil War. Yellow fever attacked the region at epidemic levels every two or three years between 1800 and 1860, killing about eight percent of the urban population, and as many as 20 or 30 percent of recent migrants from Europe. With little epidemiological understanding of mosquito-borne viruses-and almost no public health infrastructure to ameliorate disease-the only real protection from this scourge was to "get acclimated": fall sick with, and survive, yellow fever. About half of all people would die in the acclimating process. By placing the Deep South within an Atlantic disease diaspora uncontained by continental boundaries, the project shifts the fault-lines of the Southern past from North-South political conflicts onto similarly formative but overlooked ecological processes in the Greater Caribbean. Yellow fever and mass mortality are largely absent from the recent historiography on the cotton kingdom and "slave racial capitalism." But as well as being a “slave society,” this thesis suggests the Deep South was also a "disease society": Deep Southerners discussed yellow fever obsessively, worked according to its seasonal schedule, and judged others based on their perceived vulnerability to the disease. Yellow fever, and immunity to it, profoundly shaped the asymmetrical hierarchies of Deep Southern society, with acclimated "immunocapitalist" creoles on top, and unacclimated "foreigners" below. Slavers and their allies argued only intellectually-inferior but naturally-resistant black people could perform the arduous labour of sugar and cotton cultivation in the Deep South, as whites too frequently died. This became the region's chief argument for permanent racial slavery. However, almost every slave revolt in Louisiana coincided with a particularly bad epidemic, suggesting slaves found disease politically intriguing and understood that yellow fever left white society chaotic and vulnerable to attack.

Experiences of stigma, including stigma in religious settings, among individuals who are HIV positive have been widely documented. However, research related to stigma has predominantly focussed on urban locations. As a result, stigma incurred via religious settings in non-urban areas has been underexplored. The aim of this study is to uncover the experiences of individuals who are HIV positive with religious institutions, leaders and congregants in the non-urban American South. A total of 22 participants were interviewed. Experiences with stigma were pervasive with participants often describing anticipation of future stigma (often based on past negative experiences), the experience of stigma, and, for some participants, intersectional or layered stigma related to being both gay, or being perceived as gay, and HIV positive. Our findings suggest that the conditions of the non-urban setting in which this research took place made specific contributions to participants’ experiences of stigma.

This Master’s Thesis establishes what motivates a group of Mississippi farmers to participate in sustainable agriculture instead of industrial agriculture. A database of sustainable farmers was constructed in collaboration with the Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of Mississippi. This research project used social network analysis with 28 farmers and participant observation and semi-structured interviewing with a purposively selected sample of 14 farmers. This project also explores the sustainable agricultural practices of participants. A map of the social network of sustainable agriculturalists in Mississippi is presented and shows that some farmers are well connected, some moderately connected, and others are isolated. As well, grounded qualitative analysis of interviews identified 4 primary motivations among participants: economic, health, self-sufficiency and anti-government. Overall this project found that motivations are numerous, social networks are weak but growing, and diverse demographics are turning to a sustainable model for agriculture in Mississippi.

By using three lenses of analysis not often used together, theology, space and gender, this dissertation explores the decisions, practices, and gender dynamics of one group of Protestant religious imperialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Southern Presbyterian missionaries to Korea. The Southern Presbyterian's missionary theology drew not only from Presbyterian beliefs and doctrine, but also from more radical ideas outside the church. This more radical theology emphasized the importance of and expedient nature in achieving world evangelism. To advance world evangelism as quickly as possible, the missionaries' primary focus became converting Koreans to Christianity. Therefore, to convert Koreans, both Korean women and men, the Southern Presbyterians made two more changes, they created sex-segregated spaces to conform with Korean cultural expectations for spatial use and, secondly, used them for intimate, one-on-one evangelism, similar to the "inquiry room" styled evangelism of Dwight Moody. These decisions put American women to work in gender roles that mimicked those of men as primary evangelists, teachers, and tacit pastors to Korean women. These changes in theology, changes in spatial arrangements, and changes in gender roles characterized the Southern Presbyterian mission to Korea. Importantly, all three of these transformations, when implemented on the ground in Korea, did not contradict with one another, however, instead contributed to the success of the mission with each change supporting the others. While the Southern Presbyterians espoused a conservative evangelical theology, that included conservative social values, their mission theology, based in their belief that they could help usher in the second coming of Jesus, superseded the upholding of Southern gender norms for women. Further, missionaries' intimate evangelism in sex-segregated spaces allowed for evangelism of both Korean men and women in spaces and existing religious styles Koreans already considered as appropriate for religious or quasi-religious activities. By using three fields of analysis, connections between the rise of Christianity in Korea and missionary inner social dynamics can be seen. Specifically, the analysis sheds light on the significant role a group of evangelizers dedicated to certain theological beliefs not only shape a mission's endeavors but also the lives of the missionaries themselves. Theses lenses of analysis also show that much similarity existed between existing Korean spatial religious practices and the spatial evangelistic methods used by the missionaries. Also, changes within missionary gender roles can be explained which exposes the central work of evangelism done by not only single female missionaries, but married ones as well. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation explores the work of one group of Protestant religious imperialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Southern Presbyterian missionaries to Korea, by looking at the missionaries' Christian beliefs, the ways in which the missionaries built their homes and buildings and used them for evangelism, and the jobs they performed on the mission field. The Southern Presbyterian missionaries' Christian beliefs drew not only from the Southern Presbyterian denomination's beliefs and doctrine, but also from more radically evangelical ideas outside the church. This more radical theology emphasized the importance of evangelizing every area of the world to bring the second coming of Jesus. Therefore, the missionaries prime and most important focus was on converting Koreans to Christianity. To accomplish their goal of converting both Korean women and men, the Southern Presbyterians made two more changes, they created spaces where men missionaries would met only with Korean men, and women missionaries would only meet with Korean women. Secondly, they used their created spaces for intimate, one-on-one evangelism. This put American women to work in jobs that mimicked those of men as primary evangelists, teachers, and tacit pastors to Korean women. These changes in beliefs, changes in spatial arrangements, and changes in the jobs men and women did characterized the Southern Presbyterian mission to Korea. By looking at the beliefs, the ways which they organized and used space, and the jobs they did on the mission field, connections between the rise of Christianity in Korea and missionary everyday decisions, life, and jobs can be seen. Specifically, the dissertation sheds light on the significant role a group of evangelizers dedicated to certain theological beliefs not only shape a mission's endeavors but also change the lives of the missionaries themselves. By looking at these factors, this dissertation also shows that much similarity existed between existing Korean spatial religious practices and the spatial evangelistic methods used by the missionaries. Also, changes within missionary gender roles can be explained which exposes the central work of evangelism done by not only single female missionaries, but married ones as well.