Much of the history of the civil rights era rests on the myth of nonviolence: the notion that the civil rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent direct action. This dissertation argues that, on the contrary, black violence and threat of civil disorder played an indispensable role in forcing the federal government to enforce the newly enacted civil rights laws Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, many communities in the Deep South refused to desegregate. The Klan and other segregationist groups took the lead in using terror to discourage implementation of the new law. In response to this violence and intimidation, a group of black men from Jonesboro, Louisiana founded the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black paramilitary organization formed to defend the black community and civil rights workers. Formed in 1964, the Deacons quickly grew to twenty-one chapters concentrated in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. With a total membership of several hundred--and thousands of ready supporters--the Deacons soon became a popular symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King's nonviolent strategy The organization's activities reached their apex in 1965 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, when the Deacons' threats to launch a bloody civil war with the local Klan eventually forced the federal government to destroy the Klan and restore order / acase@tulane.edu

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century French writers on Louisiana produced a wealth of propaganda on the colony known as Louisiana. This literature contained extensive descriptions of the colony's environment, peoples, and history. Stated within this literature were French plans for building a new society in Louisiana. French writers on Louisiana intended to improve upon the Ancien Regime French society which had proven unsatisfactory, violent, and inadequate in the eyes of many of its members. Despite their plans to remake their society in a better form in Louisiana, the French writers failed in their endeavors to construct a non-violent community in the territory. The reason for this failure was the fact that the Louisiana French showed definite destructive proclivities in their social construction. The Louisiana French believed that the sacrifice of the natural environment and of non-white peoples living in the colony was acceptable if made for the greater good of the civilization they tried to build. The French in Louisiana exploited the environment and destroyed Native American culture and African-American freedom in their pursuit of social-construction. The decision to exploit the landscape and the peoples of Louisiana resulted in a society that was violent, much like Ancien Regime France, as seen by the revolts and conspiracies that resulted from European policy in the region. The French writers and other philosophes revealed this violence in their records of the history of the colony and their anti-imperialist literature / acase@tulane.edu

This study utilizes American, British, and French diplomatic documents and manuscript collections in order trace the long, influential career of Henry White, one of the United States first eminent career diplomats. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, White served under five presidents, including both Democrats and Republicans. Such an accomplishment was a rare feat in a system where political spoils usually determined the course of a diplomat's service. By the time of his retirement in 1919, White had worked for 12 years as first secretary at the American ministry (and later embassy) in Britain, held ambassadorships to Italy and France, represented the United States at the 1906 Algeciras Conference, and served as an American commissioner to the Paris Peace Conference White's most outstanding achievement, and the centerpiece of this study, was his work at the 1906 Algeciras Conference. On short notice, he traveled to this international gathering in Spain and skillfully helped to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the volatile Franco-German crisis over Morocco. Though the United States ostensibly represented a neutral participant at the conference, White and President Theodore Roosevelt secretly played a major role in the negotiations. This study reveals how White more steadfastly supported the French delegation than did the British envoy, Sir Arthur Nicolson, who represented France's colonial partner Central to this study is the close, personal relationship which White shared with Roosevelt. Beginning in 1880s, their friendship spanned over 30 years. After Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1901, White became one of his most trusted diplomats. The former Rough Rider frequently called on the services of White, who he considered the most useful man in the entire diplomatic service during his presidency and for many years before. Roosevelt and White shared the conviction that the time had come for America to abandon its isolationist tradition and assume its rightful role among the great powers. Their extensive, yet secretive, involvement in the Moroccan Crisis reflected the contest between isolationism and internationalism which characterized American foreign policy during this period / acase@tulane.edu

The study of the small place can illuminate larger issues in colonial Latin American history. Studies of colonial and modern communities reveal the variety of social and economic structures found in Spanish America Atrisco was founded on a grant of land to Don Fernando Duran y Chavez. After Don Fernando's death, the grant was divided into communal and privately held lands. Water was reserved as common and the community controlled access to irrigation and pond water. Common lands were for pasturage and foraging. Privately held lands were defined by access to irrigation Residents of Atrisco participated in New Mexico's sheep trade and engaged in subsistence agriculture. Eventually, they expanded communal land holdings to the banks of the Rio Puerco. Geographic expansion represented economic expansion. Patterns of land holding, marriage, and economy indicate a society defined by economic class and caste identity. Land-owning 'Spaniards' dominated. Mixed-castes and Indians served as day laborers and artisans / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines Irish immigrants and their family members in antebellum New Orleans. Historians often depict Irish immigrant families as disintegrating in the face of abject poverty, prejudice, and rampant epidemics and as victims of a cruel fate which they seem unable to escape. However, my work demonstrates that Irish immigrant families behaved in a pro-active manner: they appropriated aspects of American society, and used them for their benefit as they established cohesive communities with their own value systems. Furthermore, they did not seek validation for this system by mainstream America. The morally binding customs of the Irish came from a variety of sources, such as the Catholic Church, the transplanted customs of the old country, and the experience of the famine immigration which gave them a common basis of understanding of shared survival strategies This dissertation is based on extensive analyses of several comprehensive databases consisting of passenger lists, census records, marriage records as well as Catholic asylum records. Altogether, these databases contain over half a million entries. This study describes the coping mechanisms and familial as well as economic strategies utilized to confront a harsh new environment. Intrinsic to this investigation is a thorough consideration of the changing functions of the Irish immigrant family in New Orleans, and how these changes affected the stability of the family unit. Indeed, the Irish displayed a remarkable degree of innovation as they settled into a new urban environment. Rather than a lack of enterprise, the data reveals repeated examples of it. The Irish appropriated space that enabled them to maintain the family, build a community, and garner some measure of control over their lives. Thus, the massive relocation of this ethnic group to avoid near certain destruction was not a haphazard event. Nor was their re-settlement in New Orleans. Both undertakings were the result of Irish initiative or, put differently, Erin's Enterprise / acase@tulane.edu

The story of 'Bleeding Kansas' and its aftermath, spanning the years 1854-1860, may have represented, in microcosm, the larger history of sectional conflict and reunion. My dissertation records that story through the lens of the free state constituency in the territory. The major protagonists of the study include the New England Emigrant Aid Company, incorporated after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 with the purpose of securing Kansas to freedom and earning dividends for its bondholders through the organized emigration of free labor; the New York based American Missionary Association, which sent a contingent of clergymen to advance the cause of Christian abolitionism and racial justice in the territory, and the antislavery American Home Mission Society which added a more conservative dimension to the evangelical assault upon slavery in Kansas. These organizations represented, between them, the two major strains in American antislavery thought, namely a religious-humanitarian tradition relatively free of explicit racism and a second overlapping tradition of concern for the economic welfare of white America based on the ideology of free labor. Both factions, however, shared a common tendency toward cultural imperialism which was manifested in the New Englander's desire to mold the motley crew of deviant elements whom he encountered in the West including western frontiersmen, European immigrants and all elements of southern slave society into model specimens of New England society by setting a good example. Refracted through the lens of the free state press, the conjunction of the evangelical and economic assaults on black bondage in Kansas, representing different degrees of radicalism on the antislavery spectrum but couched in the common language of the middle-class North, broadened the popular appeal of abolitionism in the free states and facilitated the emergence of antislavery politics The true significance of 'Bleeding Kansas,' however, perhaps lay in its aftermath. Ideological volte-faces among members of camps on both sides of the slavery issue suggest that northerner and southerner may not have been reverse mirror images of each other after all. Instances of interparty cooperation reveal the existence of underlying commercial interests that eventually facilitated a harmonious sectional reconciliation at the expense of the Negro, and anticipated the fate of free labor experiments below the Potomac after the Civil War. One of the concerns of this dissertation is to prepare the ground for determining the extent to which the sequel to the Kansas wars was a 'rehearsal for redemption,' as the northern planter movement was / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation explores the dynamics of racial construction and the emergence of racism in eighteenth century French Louisiana in the light of the evolution of French colonial discourses and attitudes towards Indians, Africans, and people of African descent in New France and the French Caribbean during the seventeenth century. It thus analyzes the emergence of 'race' in eighteenth century French Louisiana from an Atlantic world rather than regional perspective. My dissertation proposes to revise the current historiography of the French colonial Americas which holds that, by contrast to bipolar race relations in the English and Spanish Americas, the French colonial experiences in the Americas did not lead to the construction of exclusive racial groups until the last decades of the eighteenth century My argument is twofold. First, I maintain that the French colonial ethos of assimilation and relative tolerance that characterized seventeenth century conceptualizations of Indians and Africans in French Canada and in the French Caribbean, and which emphasized cultural rather than racial differences between French and Indians and French and Africans, underwent dramatic transformations during the last decades of the seventeenth century. I argue that the increasingly racial conceptualization of Indians and Africans inaugurated in late seventeenth century New France and French Antilles crystallized in the peculiar frontier context of eighteenth century Louisiana where French colonial officials and missionaries desperately struggled to establish an orderly slave regime in the midst of large and powerful Indian groups, and growing numbers of Africans. Secondly, I suggest that the movement from cultural to increasingly racial conceptualizations of Indians and Africans stemmed in large part from French colonial responses to French-Indian and French-African sexual encounters, and that these responses were shaped by early modern French metropolitan interrelated constructs of gender, social order and class, that emerged in association with the rise of metropolitan absolutism / acase@tulane.edu

This study concerns a network of progressive dissidents among Southern Baptists in the twentieth century. It explores their activities, understandings, and methods of relating to one another and to the broader southern and Baptist cultures of which they were a part 'A Genealogy of Dissent' developed along several pathways of influence, unfolding along the lines of a family tree, beginning with a remarkable, and today virtually unknown, figure named Walter Nathan Johnson. A pioneer racial integrationist who also challenged the corporate 'captivity' of Christianity in the United States, Johnson created a network of supporters and sympathizers from the 1920s through the '40s out of which came civil rights workers, labor organizers, advocates of women's rights--including ordination to the ministry--and proponents of disarmament and abolition of capital punishment, all within the ordinarily conservative group of Christian believers known as Southern Baptists Within this network arose a culture of protest against the usual southern and Baptist ways of behavior, and to a certain extent ways of belief, especially having to do with questions regarding the nature of a just society. While in many ways the people in this family of dissidents believed themselves to have been alienated from their traditions as southerners and as Baptists, for the most part they believed their protests to be a fulfillment, not a rejection, of the basic tenets of their beliefs as Southern Baptists For the most part, these dissidents avoided the usual pathways of institutional advancement in denominational life in the United States, preferring to place their efforts to influence life in the South on the individual and congregational level and in issue-oriented coalitions within and outside the ranks of Southern Baptists. Their most dramatic effects on the Southern Baptist denomination at large were inadvertent, serving to validate the cries of outrage over supposed liberalism in the Southern Baptist Convention raised by a resurgent fundamentalist party that mounted a successful takeover effort of the convention in the late 1970s and '80s / acase@tulane.edu

This study focuses on St. Mark's Community Center and St. Mark's United Methodist Church, which share a building in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1895, Methodist women, motivated by Social Gospel studies, adopted a struggling mission, and in 1909, expanded the work to the French Quarter, where Methodist deaconesses established a settlement serving white immigrants Women's work at Methodist settlement houses has been undervalued, discounted by the church as too secular, and by non-sectarian settlement workers and historians as too religiously motivated. I argue that examining the work of southern Methodist women who embodied the Social Gospel reveals gender differentiation in the movement's praxis, alters understandings of its duration, and demonstrates the unproductiveness of characterizing female reformers as social and theological conservatives. Far more nuanced understandings of their motives and experiences are required Despite attempts in the early 1990s by Ralph Luker and Ronald White to combat assertions that the Social Gospel was racist, in 2001, scholar Darryl Trimiew still insisted it was by definition a racist movement. The perception is common that female Social Gospel/Progressive reformers pursued conservative, if not racist and classist, agendas. However, several white deaconesses who served St. Mark's joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1930s, held radical views about social and economic equality, and operated as racially open a facility as possible within Deep South mainline Protestantism Denied ordination because of their sex, deaconesses nevertheless exerted profound theological influence on two young New Orleans clergymen (including a deaconess's son) who agitated prophetically for school desegregation in the mid-1950s. In 1960, the pastor of the St. Mark's congregation broke the white boycott of William Frantz Elementary School by keeping his daughter in school with the first black student. Deaconesses were leaders in the congregation, and many members had joined because of their relationships with the women of the Community Center; thus, deaconesses played decisive roles in determining the congregation's response during the school desegregation crisis. Studying six decades of deaconess work at St. Mark's reveals strong links between female Social Gospel practitioners and the Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans / acase@tulane.edu

An extensive interaction, on a much broader scale than is generally recognized or acknowledged, took place between the British and American woman suffrage movements between 1900 and 1914. During these years, suffragists in the two movements engaged in correspondence, visits, and speaking tours. Personal relationships developed which affected the course of both suffrage campaigns. Tactics and strategies were borrowed from the other country, though most of this interchange tended to be from Britain to the United States. Ongoing and lengthy coverage in the suffrage newspapers in both countries reported the interaction and kept participants aware of the common goals of the two movements. An international suffrage organization, in which suffragists of both countries participated, further connected the two movements. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 brought the period of extensive interaction between the two movements to an end This study isolates and analyzes the interaction and connecting links between the British and American suffrage movements from 1900 to 1914. Seven particular areas are emphasized and evaluated: (1) the personal relationships, some of which resulted in friendships; (2) the bonds of 'sisterhood' and common cause generated by the two movements as each worked toward the common goal of female suffrage; (3) the participation in each other's organizations, meetings, conventions, demonstrations, and parades; (4) the speaking tours and visits, including hospitality arrangements, itineraries, and target audiences and groups; (5) the utilization of each other's situation as a stimulus to the movement in the other country; (6) the 'copying' and use of each other's tactics and methods; and (7) the influence of the international suffrage movement on the interaction. These areas are evaluated through an examination of the correspondence between the suffragists and suffrage organizations; the diaries and journals of the suffragists; the memoirs of the women involved in the two movements; the pamphlets and articles written by the participants at the time; and the coverage in the suffrage newspapers, as well as other newspapers, in Great Britain and the United States. A comparison of the British and American woman suffrage movements, as well as the impact of militancy upon the two movements, is an integral part of this study / acase@tulane.edu