"Sisson's Kingdom" uses a community study paradigm to offer an interpretation of the Confederate homefront collapse of Floyd County, Virginia. The study focuses primarily on residents' conflicting loyalty choices during the war, and attempts to explain the myriad of ways that their discord operated to remove Floyd County as a positive portion of the Confederate homefront. The study separates the "active Confederate disloyalty" of Floyd County's Unionist inhabitants from the "passive Confederate disloyalty" of relatives or friends of local Confederate deserters. It then explores the conflicting loyalties of the county's pro-Confederates, Unionists, and passive disloyalists, seeking to understand better the wide variety of loyalty choices available to residents as well as the consequences of their choices. To determine some of the significant factors contributing to the Floyd County community's response to the Confederacy and Civil War, this thesis documents the various ways residents' reactions took shape. Chapter One examines the roots of these decisions, exploring briefly Floyd County's entrance into Virginia's market economy during the 1850s and its residents' conflicting choices during Virginia's secession crisis. In the aftermath of secession, many Floyd residents embraced their new Confederate government and enlisted by the hundreds in its military units. The decision by some county soldiers to desert their units and return to Floyd caused loyalty conflicts between their supporters and the county's pro-Confederates. This conflict, and the effects of deserters living in the Floyd community, are both explored in Chapter Two. Floyd's Unionist population and its loyal Confederate residents clashed violently throughout much of the war, hastening the disintegration of the Floyd homefront. Their discord is examined in Chapter Three. / Master of Arts

The purpose of the research was to study the evolution of quilts in Floyd County, Virginia, as a means of documenting the life and culture of the county natives. Both documents and relics were examined and methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis were utilized. The relics were any existing quilts made in Floyd County, while the documents included not only those in traditionally written form, but those in the unwritten form--in this case, twenty-two oral interviews. A visual instrument was developed to substantiate subject responses to interview questions. Geographic, economic and cultural factors were shown to have played an important part in determining the characteristics of Floyd County quilts. County aesthetic values were determined to be closely related to nature. Design lines were moderately complex and color preferences fell in the primary and secondary color range. Due to the historic functional use of quilts, no relation was found between the women's craftsmanship and design ability. / Master of Science

M.S.

Architecture can facilitate the learning process. This book outlines a design exploration of this fundamental premise. The architectural platform for this exploration is a music conservatory dedicated to teaching the traditional mountain music of Appalachia. The rich history of mountain music and its centuries-old conversational method of conveyance remain the underlying premise of this thesis. A successful bluegrass conservatory must provide places for its students to engage in three occasions: Discovery, Revelation, and Education. Architectural form is significant to these occasions in that it not only allows, but promotes their occurrence. The discovery of inspirational material can occur in a formal stage-and-seat configuration as in the auditorium, or in an informal environment such as the street. The moment in which a musician reveals or explores this inspirational material can be a private one, most likely to take place in the individual rooms of the residential buildings. The most important occasion, education, takes place as it has for centuries - within conversation. Learning the language of bluegrass music is most likely when two or more students sit together to play, share their knowledge, and build on it. These conversations are key to the learning process and can take place on the benches lining the streets, in the indoor gathering rooms, on balconies and porches overlooking the streets, etc. The discovery, revelational, and educational processes are not chronological and must all happen coincidentally within the school grounds. I have set out to build an architectural language whose meaning is derived by conventional pragmatic parameters. This system of rules or notions governs all aspects of this school's design from stair to stage. The parameters are set according to the intrinsic requirements of placing a building on the land that must promote the occurrence of discovery, revelation, and education. / Master of Architecture

This dissertation addresses the cultural, economic, and geographic factors that politically affected the development of schooling in Floyd County, located in southwest Virginia, from its formation in 1831 to the beginning of the twentieth century. Floyd County was formed in 1831 during Virginia's quasi-system of education. This quasi-system was created due to the "peopling" of early Virginia. Colonial Virginia provided educational opportunities for the rich and poor. The General Assembly, which was dominated by the planter-aristocrats, opposed state education. These aristocrats saw no reason to tax themselves for educational opportunities they would not patronize. As settlers of Swiss, German, and Scotch-Irish descent migrated into the backcountry of Virginia, they brought with them a desire for universal education. The conflicts between the eastern and western portion of the state resulted in the Literary Fund Act of 1818 which provided funds to educate Virginia's poor. The wealthy continued to educate their own with the middle class left to their own devices. This quasi-system of education lasted until the Civil War. At the end of the war, conservatives, still in control of the General Assembly, were forced to accept state supported education due to the Underwood Constitutional mandate. Separate schools for blacks and whites were begun under the state plan in 1870. By July 1876, Floyd County had 52 schools in operation; but this expansion faced ruin when the General Assembly used funds to pay off the state's debt. The debt issue split Virginians into two political camps, Funders and Readjusters. It was not until the Readjuster victory in the early 1880's that Virginia's state system began to stabilize. Political decisions continued to affect education in the late nineteenth century. District boards hired teachers and located schools for political and social reasons which were often tied to community loyalties. Superintendents licensed and examined teachers based on their own standards. The General Assembly denied teachers the right to meet during school terms. No public money could be used to finance their meetings. What education teachers did receive was financed by local efforts and Peabody funds. By the 1890's, over 4000 teachers in Virginia had not attended State Summer Normals. Floyd County had a higher percentage of teachers attending Normals due to its third superintendent bringing a Normal to Jacksonville in 1889. By 1900, schooling in Floyd County had survived its first 30 years, but with only partial success. Political entanglements, dating back over two centuries, had affected public education at the state and local level with the results that by the beginning of the twentieth century, half of the school age population in Virginia had never attended school. / Ed. D.

While the intersection of sport and the Civil Rights era has been well documented from a number of angles and approaches, perhaps no athlete has been so thoroughly connected to this period in history as Muhammad Ali. His stances on Vietnam, race relations and religion during this period have provided a fountain of historical research and narratives on this very turbulent period. However, what about the political and social activities of Ali’s contemporaries? Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman were not just heavyweight champions, but also individuals who were profoundly affected by the mass exodus of Blacks out of the South and into the cities of the North and West. Known to history as the Great Migration, this movement not only affected these men physically, but also helped to shape their ideas and understandings about racial identity, civil rights and race relations in their adult lives. The purpose of this research is to examine the political and social activities and experiences throughout the lives of Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. In addition to exploring the narratives surrounding their migration experiences, it will display the differences in opinion each man had regarding issues such as segregation and how they defined themselves against Ali’s largely ignored, hardline segregationist stance. Finally, it will explore the possibilities for reexamining not just the popularly accepted narratives of these four men, but also of Ali himself.

La musique psychédélique britannique est née grâce à la conjonction de quatre facteurs : 1. Un contexte socio-économique et culturel extrêmement favorable. 2. La présence simultanée d'un nombre significatif de musiciens de grand talent 3. La disponibilité de drogues psychédéliques sur le territoire britannique. 4. Une série d'innovations technologiques qui ont modifié les perspectives de création sonore. Cette thèse analyse l'interaction entre ces quatre éléments et en détermine l'importance respective pour la genèse du style musical

A depositional framework for the Mississippian (Chesterian) Pride Mountain Formation/Hartselle Sandstone clastic tongue and the lower Bangor Limestone carbonate ramp in the Black Warrior basin, Mississippi and Alabama, is constructed from approximately 250 geophysical well logs, 15 well cuttings descriptions, and outcrop data. The framework is based upon cross sections, isopach maps, and transgressive-regressive sequence stratigraphy. The Lowndes-Pickens synsedimentary fault block controlled sediment dispersal in during Pride Mountain/Hartselle deposition. The basin filled from the southwest, which pushed the depocenter northeastward during Hartselle deposition. The Hartselle sub-basin is composed of the Hartselle barrier-island and back-barrier deposits to the southwest, including the Pearce siltstone. The Pearce siltstone, a previously unidentified subsurface unit, was deposited in a restricted environment controlled by the Lowndes-Pickens block. The Pride Mountain, Hartselle, and lower Bangor succession contains one complete and one partial transgressive-regressive stratigraphic sequence. An exposure surface at the top of the Hartselle Sandstone and Monteagle Limestone is a maximum regressive surface. The upper part of the Bangor ramp is highly cyclic and grades from oolitic shoal deposits southwestward into a condensed section, the Neal black shale, at the toe of the ramp. The entire thickness of the lower Bangor is equivalent to the Neal shale.

Through an examination of the album The Wall by the group Pink Floyd, the intention of this study was to answer questions such as tale following in hopes that a clearer understanding of The Walls popularity might be obtained. What are the major and minor events in this musical narrative? Who are the main characters in -111ne narrative? What cause-and-effect relationships are established in the narrative? now did The Wall function rhetorically in achieving a sense of identification with contemporary listeners?The study found that The Wall achieved identification through the use of its themes which centered around war, derisive school systems, parental overprotection. collapse, and extreme alienation.The study notes that The Wall contained substantial social commentary, and states that the rock music form, often belittled as nothing more than hedonistic escapism, is capable of producing work worthy of scholarly examination. / Department of Speech Communication

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Paul Ruscher, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Meteorology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan 18, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.