Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Laurence J. Parker. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-328) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Christopher M. Span. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-247) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This dissertation explores the activities of middle- and working-class African American women during and immediately after World War II in Detroit and Richmond, Virginia, in order to examine how World War II enabled African American women to negotiate new state structures in order to articulate citizenship in a way that located them within the state as contributors to the war effort and legitimated their calls for equality. This study provides a new understanding of the groundwork that lay behind the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at African American women's wartime protest and exploring how those women created templates for activism and networks for the dissemination of new discourses about citizenship, it reveals the gendered roots of the civil rights movement. This study uses a cross-class analysis within a cross-regional analysis in order to understand how African American women of different socioeconomic levels transformed their relationship with the state in order to use state structures to gain equality in diverse regions of the country. Class and region framed African American women's possibilities for activism. In both Detroit and Richmond, women's class positions and local government structures affected how African American women constructed claims to citizenship and maintained activist strategies to promote equality. This study finds that the new discourse and programs of middle-class African American women, linked with the attempts of working-class women to gain and retain jobs and better living conditions, contributed to a new sense of militancy and urgency within the civil rights movement of the 1940s and 1950s. By attempting to claim their rights based solely on their status as citizens within the state, African American women greatly contributed to the groundwork and the ideology of the more aggressive civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. African American women's initial forays into desegregating restaurants, jobs, transportation, and housing created the momentum for the entire African American community's struggle for equality.

Divorce in nineteenth-century Texas was rooted in social customs as much as law, with class, gender, and race serving as strong influences on marital experiences and decisions to divorce. Legal divorce took place primarily at the local level, with the option of appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. Under Mexican rule, Anglo settlers had no option for divorce, and marital status was itself often uncertain, resulting in the practice of bond marriage (marriage by contract). For a short time under the Republic of Texas, a few Texans sought legislative divorce. However, judicial divorce soon became the standard practice and remained so throughout the century. This study is based on a reading of 1,578 local divorce cases from Harrison and Washington Counties. An extensive database including all available information on the litigants of each case provides insight into the influences of class, race, gender, kinship, and community on divorce. Although culturally very southern, Texas was also a western frontier and a community-property state. A combination of property protections based on Spanish law, frontier attitudes, and southern paternalism assured Texas women of a relatively high legal status. The Texas divorce law of 1841 remained intact throughout the nineteenth century with only minor changes. With remarkable legal persistence, social factors were the most evident influences on marital expectations and divorce. Chapters are laid out chronologically. Chapter One examines the statutory context of Texas divorce. Chapter Two addresses marital dissolution in the earliest phase of Anglo settlement and under the Republic of Texas, with an emphasis on frontier circumstances and changing political identities. Chapter Three examines divorce under antebellum statehood with an eye toward social hierarchy. Chapter Four discusses the impact of the Civil War and the actions of divorce seekers in postwar Texas, with emphasis on kinship and community influences as well as changing expectations for marriage. Chapter Five deals with the unique experiences of African American divorce seekers in Texas after 1865.

This dissertation is a cultural and intellectual history of black education, nationalism, and empire. I argue that educational philanthropy played an indispensable role in the construction of Anglo-Christian nationalism in the nineteenth century, and Anglo-American empire in the twentieth. The Tuskegee idea, as embodied in the educational philosophy of Booker T. Washington and underwritten by corporate philanthropy, enabled advances in African American literacy, economic development, and land ownership. However, it packaged these advances in such a way that they accommodated disfranchisement and segregation as the dominant organizing principles of the southern and the national political order. Moreover, the principles of the Tuskegee idea proved adaptable to educating colonial subjects in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other imperial settings across the globe. Tuskegee Institute became a laboratory for the working out of race relations in the South. The Tuskegee idea---a complex of theories regarding racial differentialization, progress, and the gradual accrual of citizenship rights for African Americans---played a prominent role in the regional unification of the North and South into a modern nation-state, the exclusion of African Americans from the national family, and an entry point for the U.S. into the family of nations. As such, it played a key role in Gilded-Age contests over the meaning of citizenship for African Americans, for women, and for poor whites. Those who participated in these contests helped define the meaning of American nationalism in the modern era.

This thesis is a study of Rice University's struggle to integrate and charge tuition to its students. In 1891 William Marsh Rice established the charter that founded Rice University. As the school developed, however, the Board of Trustees found it difficult to follow the charter's restrictions against admitting non-white students or charging tuition. The board was struggling to uphold the wishes of the founder while also adapting Rice to changing social and economic conditions. In 1962 Rice began legal action to reinterpret the charter. The board believed that permission to integrate and charge tuition was vital in Rice's efforts to remain a leading educational institution. As a result, the trustees argued that these restrictions prevented realization of the founder's main intention of creating and maintaining a first class university. This action was successful, and with the court's permission, Rice began to integrate and charge tuition in 1965.

In July 1835, a northern anti-slavery society sent bundles of abolitionist literature through the United States postal service to the South. Arriving at South Carolina's port city, the mailing became the focus of white Charlestonians' fears of slave uprisings and those Who might assist a servile insurrection. During an attack on the post office to destroy the papers, someone in the crowd shouted for a lynching of Charleston's Catholic bishop and the destruction of the Catholic cathedral and surrounding buildings, including a parochial school for free black children. Using the Charleston Post Office Raid as a backdrop, this study explores both the connections between anti-abolitionism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism in the antebellum South and the reaction to these pressures from southern Catholics, mostly recent immigrants, as they made a place for themselves in their new homeland. At the heart of the work is a consideration of the effects of the ethnic and racial stereotypes and cultural assumptions at play in the antebellum South.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 4025. Adviser: Claude Clegg. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 7, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 11, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 3288. Advisers: Claude A. Clegg; Steven M. Stowe.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2008. / Title from home page (viewed on Jul 28, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-12, Section: A, page: 4834. Adviser: Claude A. Clegg.