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This paper represents original research in the UNICEF archives and illuminates the case study of this particular intergovernmental organization (IGO) during the period of the Korean War through the Vietnam War (1948-1975). It investigates the complex issues raised by the intersection of power politics and humanitarian impartiality. It argues that historians must take intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) seriously in their attempt to accurately interpret the historical record. The story of UNICEF during the Korean War charts a familiar narrative where superpower rivalries served to derail the good intentions of this purportedly impartial intergovernmental organization. However, the case study of UNICEF in Vietnam is a surprising example of the rising influence and impact of IGOs and INGOs on the international scene. By balancing its associations across the East-West divide and riding a wave of increasingly international sentiment worldwide, UNICEF navigated a treacherous political arena and realized new heights of its goal of impartiality even before the cessation of war in Vietnam. In a dramatic show of their expanding influence, UNICEF played a pivotal role in improving relations between the United Nations and North Vietnam. / History

The following thesis is concerned with the ways in which perceptions of crime and disease shaped knowledge about urban decline and structured demands for urban renewal projects in Richmond, Virginia between 1953 and 1964. By looking at the city's renters, landlords, public health officials, and local politicians, this thesis contains three arguments: first, advocates diagnosed economic decline through medical and criminal categories; secondly, if urban renewal's existential purpose was to correct the environmental determinants of social pathology, then the contest between renewal advocates and opponents defined an economically-delimited solution; lastly, renewal contained the basis for a strengthened post-war, post-Jim Crow Southern state a state whose most important prerogative was not the maintenance of race relations, but the protection of property and capital. This mode, the capitalist-interventionist mode of state formation is an alternative archetype for historians of the post-war South, implicates capitalist impulses as an accomplice in structuring racial domination, and not simply an extension of Southern barbarity and Jim Crow. The first chapter interrogates the ways in which renewal supporters appropriated knowledge about crime and disease to address urban decline, both its supposed causes and possible solutions. The second chapter focuses on how renewal advocates created competing market evaluations of pathology in Richmond's Seventeenth-Street Bottom, as they cleared the supposed slum to build the new city jail. The conclusion poses suggestions for further historical research on the categories of crime and disease and the relevance of Jim Crow. / History

This dissertation argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, a variety of Americans, including television and film producers, journalists, rock `n' roll fans, novelists, counterculturists, presidential candidates, and George Wallace supporters, looked to an imagined rural white South as a repository of supposedly discarded values. In the shadow of the civil rights movement and the South's increasing modernization, these individuals often perceived such "southern" traits as family-centeredness, closeness to the land, common-sense thinking, manliness, pre-modernity, and authenticity as both a welcome refuge from and an antidote to concerns about "rootlessness" in U.S. society. This sense of rootlessness was grounded in the vague belief that Americans had lost touch with cultural traditionalism. It combined contemporary anxieties about social unrest and government deceit with longer standing worries about suburban blandness, the shift from producerism to consumerism, social anomie, and the increasingly technocratic nature of modern America. My work traces the allure of the rural white South by detailing the region during the 1960s civil rights movement; country-rock music and the South in the countercultural consciousness; the Masculine South(s) of George Wallace, the novel and film Deliverance (1970, 1972), and the film Walking Tall (1973); the contrasting southernness of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band; and the appeal of Jimmy Carter's "healing" southernness during the 1976 presidential campaign. This study expands the scope of historians' recent investigations into the South's burgeoning influence in national politics and culture. It directs a much-needed focus to Americans' perceptions of rural white southernness, and more specifically, to how they formed and utilized these understandings, and what this information reveals about U.S. society and culture. In addition to emphasizing the malleability of race and the southland's image in national discussions, this dissertation underscores the imagined South's role as a safe area of contemplation in which Americans could address their conflicted thinking about a variety of national trends, from changing gender roles to evolving family structures to consumer culture, without ever having to resolve any incongruities. Finally, this work employs a new angle for integrating southern history into the national narrative while paying attention to the ways in which post-World War II Americans continued to cling to the idea of southern distinctiveness. / History

Cold War era preacher Carl McIntire played a significant role in the politicization of fundamentalism during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. His libertarian political philosophy was shaped by the denominational politics in the Presbyterian Church of America during the fundamentalist - modernist controversy. / History

This dissertation is a political and intellectual history of educational thought in Britain and the British empire told through the Institute of Education in London. It explores how and why children’s education became central to the late British imperial project. It argues that contemporary ideas about the social and political aims of education were deeply shaped by a growing sense of democracy’s fragility and contingency in the early twentieth century, and by reformers’ view of the British empire as democracy’s guardian on the world stage. It draws on the archives of staff, students and influential supporters of the Institute, tracing its institutional transformation from provincial Edwardian teacher-training college to an outward-looking imperial center for educational reform and research in Britain’s colonial empire and in the British Commonwealth. It argues that Britain’s leading educators tried to position themselves as experts in making citizens fit for democracy. It shows how these pedagogues pursued reforms to metropolitan and colonial education to project an outward image of the British empire as a progressive pedagogical project preparing members of political communities for self-government.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Charles W. Sanders / On September 13, 1950, in a culmination of three years of efforts by organizations and individuals inside and outside the Harry S. Truman administration, 69 captured battle flags from the Mexican-American War were formally returned to the Mexican government at a ceremony in Mexico City. The events surrounding the return of flags to Mexico occurred in two distinct phases. The first was a small, secretive, and largely symbolic return of three flags conceived and carried out by high-ranking U.S. government officials in June 1947. The second large-scale, public return of the remaining flags in the custody of the War Department was initiated by the American Legion and enacted by the United States Congress. Despite their differences, both returns were heavily influenced by contemporary events, primarily the presidential election of 1948 and the escalation of the Cold War. Also, although the second return was much more extensive than the President originally intended, it was only through his full support that either return was accomplished. In the decades since 1950, historians have either ignored the return of Mexican battle flags or focused instead on Truman’s wreath laying at the monument to the niños héroes in Mexico City in March 1947. This study, for the first time, provides an in-depth description of the efforts to return captured Mexican battle flags and explains why these war trophies were returned while others have remained in the United States. The goal of this investigation is to present the efforts of the Truman administration for what they truly were: an unprecedented act of international friendship. Although the actions of the U.S. government and private organizations were partially influenced by self-interest and Cold War fears, their primary motivation was a sincere desire to erase the painful memories surrounding the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 in an effort to improve future relations between the two countries. Many historians point to the Truman administration as the end of the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. This study, however, argues that the return of captured Mexican battle flags represents the true pinnacle of the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy toward its southern neighbor.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / Despite an impressive history of woman-friendly legislation, Kansans tend to be socially conservative. The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, was the culmination of over a century's worth of women's activism attempting to remove the strictures of coverture and to recognize women as citizens in their own right, not as wives or as mothers of male citizens. After largely ignoring the amendment for fifty years, Congress finally passed the ERA in 1972 and submitted it to the states for ratification. Almost immediately, the real and imagined consequences of the legislation provoked a passionate debate among mostly middle-class white women about the meaning of American womanhood. Liberals hoped that the ERA would remove existing barriers to women's educational and professional life; conservatives feared that the ERA would cause women to focus on selfish interests outside of their households, rotting the foundations of family life and American strength. In Kansas, women from both camps converged to discuss the future of the ERA at the feminist-organized Kansas Women's Weekend of July 15-17, 1977, resulting in Kansas sending a conservative faction to the federally funded National Women's Conference later that year. Conservatives failed to derail the convention's feminist agenda, nor were they able to enact a rescission of Kansas' ratification, but in the long run they succeeded in creating widespread uneasiness about the social consequences of the ERA. The vitriolic anti-ERA campaign demonstrated the extent to which female dependency still defined both male and female conservatives' views on the interrelatedness of family, religion, manliness, and national strength. This dissertation explores a volume of letters to Kansas legislators expressing anti-ERA sentiment. The letters provide a unique lens through which to examine the passions aroused by the ERA among grassroots conservatives. Contextualizing this issue are other conservative reactions to feminist activity from the Revolution onward that consistently demonstrate how conservatives valorize female dependency. Although the liberal position regarding women's rights has changed significantly over two hundred years, conservative reaction has invariably embraced and elevated the patriarchal family as proper and necessary to the smooth functioning of a Christian republic.