This dissertation examines the origins and impact of student activism on southern college campuses during the 1960s. Southern students of the sixties joined their colleagues in other parts of the nation in addressing the major social and political questions of the day, but the political mobilization of these students has received scant attention from historians. When a student-led sit-in movement against segregated public establishments swept the South in 1960 and 1961, it initiated a new era in the region's political history and in the history of southern higher education. The sit-ins provided new precedents for southern students as political actors while they simultaneously exposed limitations on academic freedom. On this foundation, southern students built a student movement that challenged not only the racial discrimination in the region but also inadequacies in the region's higher-education system. The escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam intensified this movement in the late 1960s. At the same time, the emergence of black-power rhetoric signaled a rise in militance among the region's black students and raised questions about the meaning of integration in formerly segregated colleges and universities. In 1969 and 1970, campuses throughout the region experienced unprecedented demonstrations. Nevertheless, faced with strong resistance and beset by internal weaknesses, the southern student movement soon lost momentum Based on research conducted at a variety of institutions throughout the region, this dissertation differs from most previous studies of the student movement of the sixties by adopting a biracial focus. Historically black institutions and predominantly white campuses provided different contexts for the emergence of a student movement. But despite the differences, the clashes on black and white campuses were part of one movement---a movement that sought to remake southern higher education and, in the process, southern society / acase@tulane.edu

This is an ethnohistorical and literary biography of Olivia Ward Bush (Banks), 1869-1944, an Afro-American/Native American poet, playwright, teacher, and journalist. From her birth in Sag Harbor, New York to her residence in Providence, Boston, Chicago, and New York, the work explores Bush's aesthetic response to events such as the accommodationist-integrationist controversy, the Great Migrations, provitivism, Negritude, and the Great Depression. The sources consulted include Bush's published and unpublished works and memorabilia, studies in linguistics, anthropology, literature, and interviews with Bush's family and with Native Americans. One concludes Bush concurrently adhered to a Montauk and Afro-American identity and contributed to the Negro Renaissance movement of the 1920's-1930's. Her life was a microcosm of America's change from a rural to urban industrial society at the turn of the century / acase@tulane.edu

This study examines the mobilizing of southern workers for the Second World War, and how the mobilization process exposed regional anxieties over race and labor relations. With the expanded federal presence in the South during the war, the process of state-building and economic development remained fraught with tension. As the experiences of the War Manpower Commission (WMC), the U.S. Employment Service (USES) and the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) illustrate, southern economic boosters hoped to achieve the economic benefits of industrial modernization, while co-opting federal agencies to serve their conservative interests Within this context of state-building and economic development during the war, historians have failed to acknowledge adequately the key role that federal manpower agencies played in transforming southern and national labor markets. Paradoxically, the War Manpower Commission often hindered the utilization of black industrial labor on the southern home-front, while exporting southern black workers to defense industries in other regions. This manpower policy reinforced migration trails out of the South, and hence, left a permanent imprint on national race relations. For southern employers, this policy illustrated the limits of their power to control local labor markets. For all southern workers, and especially African-Americans, these WMC inter-regional recruitment networks to the West and the North provided new opportunities for economic and geographic mobility / acase@tulane.edu

A great majority of the intellectuals in the post-independence period in Latin America tend to be preoccupied with distancing themselves from European culture by attempting to answer the question: ques Quienes somos? (Who are we?) and ques Como somos? (How are we?) This was a vital step in the process of decolonization. While national intellectuals attempted to define who they were, they invariably extended their particular reality to mean 'national reality.' This dissertation will investigate the process by which national writers attempted to define their national identity, by looking closely at the case of the Brazilian and Cuban intellectuals from 1930-1964 In forging a national consciousness, dominant intellectuals exploited salient national symbols, which emerged out of the context of the 1930s. Under different historical circumstances, however, challenges to the dominant myths began to emerge in both countries. Black intellectuals and nationalists, in particular, had their own views about their national image In the cases of both Cuba and Brazil, black intellectuals were no less patriotic or nationalistic than their white counterparts. In any case, the national myths were so forceful that they became almost impossible to discredit. The transition to the new political generation in the 1960s and the continued use of the dominant national myths underscored this truth Both Cuba and Brazil, experienced revolutions in the 1960s that were more conservative, from an intellectual perspective, than the revolutions of the 1930s. The effect on the intellectual community was remarkably similar in regards to the issue of national culture This study is interested in the mechanism by which the national state and nationalist intellectuals forged a national cultural identity. With access to the major means of communication, the dominant intellectuals, from the right or the left, succeeded in propagating their idea of culture, which was remarkably similar, through the major mediums of communication. The purpose of this dissertation is to present in a succinct fashion the process by which national inculcation occurs and to point out in a broader context how economic and ethnic minorities are co-opted by patriotism / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation analyzes the African presence in chronicles and documents of the early Spanish American colonial period, critically examining such textual presence as both European construct and African discursive resistance to colonialism. In order to access an African voice in the colonial period, traditional notions of 'text,' and 'writing' are theoretically expanded to explain the multidiscursivity that exists both on the African body and the pages of the texts considered. The African voice and articulation of difference are revealed as part of a process of reinscription of body and territory that simultaneously translates as a claim to textual- and historical-space The first chapter treats European contact with Africans before and after the encounter with the New World and explores the construction of the African Other within Renaissance texts such as Cervantes' Don Quijote, and Novelas ejemplares; Lazarillo de Tormes, dramas by Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega, El Abencerraje and writings by Juan Latino. Chapter two is devoted to the analysis of the texts of rebellion and escape by African slaves within various chronicles of the 16th century. Included herein are Bartolome de las Casas (Historia de las Indias) and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (Historia general y natural de las Indias), and from the region of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, Lucas Fernandez de Piedrahita (Noticia historial de las conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada); Fray Pedro Simon (Noticias Historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme in las Indias Occidentales). Chapter three is an analysis of constructions of blackness and Africanness in the only known chronicle devoted exclusively to Africans in the early colonial period, that of the Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval: De instauranda Aethiopum salute (1627, 1647). Finally, chapter four treats documents from the 16th century in which Africans negotiate for freedom and rights by gaining access to writing as a source of power This dissertation intends to serve as a contribution to the neglected theme of African discursive and textual presence in the Spanish American colonial period and to also define directions for further research, specifically with document sources / acase@tulane.edu

'A Social, Economic, and Political Study of Blacks in the Louisiana Delta, 1865-1880,' is an investigation of the post-emancipation experiences of former slaves in four parishes in the Louisiana Delta. Carroll, Madison, Tensas, and Concordia are the four parishes studied. The author analyzes the struggle of the ex-slaves to acquire land, carve out niches for themselves and their families in the free market economy of a plantation district, build social, cultural, and political institutions, educate their children, and cope with the negative impact of the counter-revolution in post-Reconstruction Louisiana / acase@tulane.edu

Storytelling is a practice that is used to pass down important information about culture, environment, and history. From a behavior analytic perspective, the process of storytelling involves contingencies and can be viewed within the framework of the Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. For each listener, based on their history of learning and experiences, stories enable a unique type of learning about reinforcers, punishers and cultural context. In African American oral tradition, storytelling was and still is important in preserving the identity, safety, and wellbeing of African Americans. The purpose of this project was to inductively explore story telling between youth and elders in an African American community. A training workshop was developed that included an overview of the importance and role of storytelling in the black community and ways for youth to respectfully listen and learn from elders. The participants included two children and one elder. The independent variable was the training package, the dependent measures included the levels of synchronous engagement, the listener behaviors of the youth and the participant voices, that is, the descriptions and reflections of children and elders about the process and outcomes of this project. A multiple probes design across skills with in-vivo generalization check was used to observe the effects of a storytelling interview package to engage children with an elder in the community. The results of the project indicated that the project was beneficial and enjoyable for the participants. The extent to which this was a result of the workshop was not clear and suggestions are made for future directions. The findings are discussed in the context of measurement, meaning, and positionality.

<p>In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique. </p><p>This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.</p> / Dissertation

Traversing geographical borders frequently allows people the illusion of crossing social, political, and economic boundaries. For African-Americans of the early twentieth century, crossing physical borders offered the promise of freedom from racial segregation and discrimination in all aspects of social, political, and cultural life. Haiti became a site for African-American imaginings of a free and just society beyond the problem of the color line. From the 1920's through the 1980's, African-American travel writing was strategically deployed in efforts to transform a U.S. society characterized by Jim Crow segregation. In the process, Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean were romanticized as spaces of racial equality and political freedom. This project examines the ways in which the Caribbean has been packaged by and for African-Americans, of both U.S. and Caribbean ancestry, as a place to re-engage with romanticized African origins. In the selling of the Caribbean, cultural/heritage tourism, romance/sex tourism and ecotourism all trade on the same metaphors of loss and redemption of the innocence, equality, and purity found in a state of nature. Through analyses of standard commercial tourism advertising alongside of travel writing, I argue that with the growth of the black middle-class in the late 1980's crossings to the Caribbean have become romantic engagements with an idealized pastoral past believed lost in the transition to middle-class prosperity in the United States. African-American travel writers, writing about the Caribbean, tend to create a monolithic community of cultural belonging despite differences of geography and class, and gender hierarchies. Thus, African-American travelers' tales constitute narratives at the crossroads of celebrations of their economic progress in the United States and nostalgia for a racial community believed lost on the road to suburban prosperity. For them, the Caribbean stands in as the geographical metaphor for that idealized lost community.

This is an analysis of the task system, the primary form of labor organization used by South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry rice planters. It examines the labor process of rice field hands, analyzes the extent to which gender shaped enslaved men and women's experiences of tasking, and explores some of the ramifications of task work on field women's lives. Conventional interpretations of the task system claim that it provided slaves with more autonomy, control, and opportunities for individual initiative than gang labor did. In contrast, this study finds that tasking was a multifaceted labor regime whose differences from gang labor were less pronounced than previous scholarship suggests. Specifically, structural, seasonal, and managerial constraints profoundly limited slaves' ability to control their work pace and to independently manage their work routines. As a result, slaves' access to own time and autonomy could be quite limited. Significantly, field hands did not experience these limits equally. Since planters did not adhere to one uniform model of rice cultivation, task assignments and labor routines varied across plantations. This heterogenous organization of task labor meant that slaves' ability to realize tasking's potential for greater slave autonomy was disproportionate across plantation boundaries. Gender also affected slaves' access to own time. Field women's control over the length of their work day and hence over access to own time was particularly circumscribed. The origins of these limits can be found in how planters organized their labor force and allocated field work. Given these constraints, slaves clearly did not gain own time easily. Nevertheless, slaves persevered in their quest for any or more own time by trying to circumvent prescribed work routines. Historians have touted slave family assistance as one of the most important of their strategies. While true, such aid was complex, circumscribed, and sometimes gendered. Finally, I link these labor and aid patterns to field women's reproductive histories and find that they help explain the region's high rate of slave neonatal mortality. These findings provide compelling evidence that we need to lower our assessment of the relative benefits putatively enjoyed by slaves who worked in a task regime.