The Bryn Mawr School (BMS) is an exceptional college-preparatory school for girls founded in 1885 in Baltimore and still thriving today. This dissertation outlines the history of BMS from its founding to the present, using the school as a lens for exploring the evolution of girls' education with focus on changing understandings of the purpose of single-sex schools and their relationship to ideas about women and their place in society BMS's founders (among them noted educator M. Carey Thomas) planned an education for girls which would equal that offered in the best boys' schools of the day, and, indeed, BMS would be the first exclusively college-preparatory school for girls in the United States. BMS maintained unprecedented standards for academic achievement and improvement of physical health and was intended to serve as a model for women elsewhere to emulate But envisioning an exceptional education and translating those ideals into a working school institution were two different things. Long-time Headmistress Edith Hamilton was particularly instrumental in adapting BMS to the expectations of families in Baltimore in the 1890s and early 1900s. With the increasing popularity of higher education for women and the growth of city suburbs, BMS would further evolve in the 1920s and 1930s, essentially remaking itself in the image of fashionable country-day academies. By the mid-century, BMS was gradually becoming a school that mirrored, more than challenged, social expectations for girls By the 1960s, however, the relevancy of single-sex schools was in question as rarely before. Indeed, the modern preference for coeducation would force schools like BMS to reexamine their single-sex identities. By the 1980s, BMS was embracing a dialogue that offered promising new reasons why girls' schools should continue to exist, even thrive. Along with other single-sex institutions and a host of researchers and popular commentators, BMS would particularly explore issues of female difference which, notably, had been adamantly rejected by its founders in favor of emphasis on the similarities between the sexes. This dissertation thus concludes by exploring the nuances and implications of the modern dialogue about female difference and single-sex education / acase@tulane.edu

Post-World War II New Orleans was home to several famous and successful venues for female impersonators. In the white club My-O-My, situated in a lightly policed border-space on the fringe of New Orleans, men performed women to a largely heterosexual audience of locals and tourists in a fast-paced nightclub review. Black clubs included the Dew Drop Inn and the Caledonia. On all stages, the female impersonators, utilizing sex, humor, talent and falsies, acted to undermine the basis of patriarchy During this Cold War period, patriarchy was the law of the land. Women, confined to the home and relieved of any economic or personal agency, were encouraged to find fulfillment in passive femininity. Black Americans were offered only second-class citizenship, with no voice in their own governance, and little or no economic opportunity. Homosexuals were despised and persecuted, particularly under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the attacks of Senator Joseph McCarthy In this political climate, the success and popularity of entertainment clubs featuring female impersonators might seem an anomaly. However, the phenomenal appeal of the female impersonators was directly attributable to the transgressive nature of their performance. The performance of women by men challenged the assumption of essential gender; the appeal of the free wheeling sexuality of the impersonators in their guise as women offered actual women an alternative to passive dependence, while undermining the basic idea of patriarchy: men are masculine and women are feminine The performers skewed ideas of essential gender; without active and passive natures irrevocably assigned according to biological sex, there is neither a basis nor a justification for patriarchy. By establishing the social construction of gender, it was possible also to suggest a social construction of race. As 'Other' to patriarchy, and therefore dominated by patriarchy, women, blacks and homosexuals all had an interest in finding a new social order. Performance provided freedom to transgress the restrictive prohibitions of the Cold War era, and disprove the tenets of the established system of hierarchy. The performance became a dress rehearsal for a less restrictive social order / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines the literary writings of Andrew Lytle, one of the original twelve Nashville Agrarians. During the time period from the 1920's through the 1950's the South transformed from a predominantly agricultural to an industrial region. In the process, the myths of the plantation and yeoman farmer were undermined. A savage Modernist Objectivism replaced the formalistic stability of the Victorian frame of mind. Over the course of thirty years Andrew Lytle's novels, short stories and essays reveal a progression from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism. His literary creations act as a kind of looking glass into the political, economic and social changes that confronted the South But Lytle's real importance as a thinker was his ability to establish the authenticity of his social constituency, the Celtic yeoman farmers of the Southwest. The Great Depression and the Second World War destroyed the sharecropping system. The yeoman farmers were finally liberated from peonage and the mystique of the planters. Through Jung's depth psychology Lytle revealed the identity of the yeoman farmers that was always there but held at bay by superior forces. In the process, he unmasked the true character of the South. Rather than being a hierarchical 'medieval' society as the myth would have it, the South was defined by social-bond individualism, otherwise referred to as Southern libertarianism. Andrew Lytle buttressed yeoman identity and in the process, participated in the multicultural revolution that took place after the Second World War / acase@tulane.edu

The shift from the use of French faience and continental European coarse earthenwares to the use of Anglo-American (primarily British manufactured) ceramic types in Spanish colonial southeastern Louisiana is examined. Ceramic collections from seven sites and site groups were analyzed using a paradigmatic classification. Frequency seriation and mean ceramic dating were utilized to determine when British ceramics came into widespread use. Comparative archaeological data and probate records were used to further refine the chronology. The results were then synthesized with the historic record to establish the context in which the change occurred The archaeological, comparative, and documentary source data demonstrate that Anglo-American ceramics became widely available in southeastern Louisiana ca. 1780. The historical record indicates that while they may have begun to arrive during the American Revolution, use expanded immediately following the war. French and American trade through the West Indies and direct trade between the French and the British provided sources of supply. Following the introduction of British wares, ceramic assemblages rapidly became Anglo-American in character. By 1800 there was little use of French ceramics / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines same-sex desire through the course of the twentieth century in the city of New Orleans. In some ways the history of same-sex desire and homosexuality in New Orleans is unique and in other ways it is demonstrative of the rest of the country. Chapter one introduces the city itself as a character in this history so that the unique and the ubiquitous can be more easily discerned. Chapter two examines same-sex desire in the 1920s and suggests that same-sex desire existed in many forms and places without an overarching culture of homosexuality. Chapter three discusses cross-dressing at carnival and the implications for the history of same-sex desire in New Orleans. Chapter four and five examine the regulation of homosexuality through formal and informal methods and suggests that 1958 was a pivotal year in the history of homosexuality in New Orleans. Finally, chapter six qualifies the dominant narrative of political activism in the historiography of homosexuality and describes New Orleans's unique contribution to the history of same-sex desire in the United States. The appendix is a discussion of the regulation of same-sex desire and physical acts of sexuality through legislation in Louisiana / acase@tulane.edu

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 34-04, Section: A, page: 1904. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1973.

Maryland in the mid-nineteenth century was a state trying to balance its regional ties to both an agrarian culture based on the institution of slavery and an industrializing, urban culture. Caught in between two warring societies, Marylanders themselves were unsure of their identity given the rapid changes of the late antebellum decades. This study argues Maryland's cultural identity shifted from being a "southern" state in 1861 to being a "northern" state by 1865 in the minds of its own citizens as well as in the minds of politicians, soldiers, and civilians from other parts of the nation. This transition was the result of economic, political, and social changes that took place in the state during the late antebellum period, although cultural and ideological recognition of this shift did not occur until the war brought Maryland's dual identities into focus and compelled state citizens to choose a side in the conflict. A minority of citizens contested the state's "northern" identity both during and after the war, but the new cultural identity remained dominant largely because northern industrial, urban, and demographic patterns were already well-established and Union military policies directed most Marylanders' political and economic behavior towards a loyal and northern-looking orientation by the end of the war. Understanding these cultural dynamics in a border state like Maryland helps to clarify our vision of complicated and competing ideologies in mid-nineteenth century America.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Advisers: Roger D. Simon; John Pettegrew.

This study describes how some members of the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama, a state recognized community, reacts to the ways in which Native peoples are represented in the social studies curriculum of DeKalb County, Alabama. Tribal members, ages 30--80 were interviewed about their educational experiences, as well as about their perspectives on the current curriculum. Social studies curricula of this school district, as well as elsewhere in the Alabama public school system, portrays Native peoples in a negative manner, and through the interviews and an extensive analysis of the curriculum, specific examples of these negative portrayals are pinpointed. This study specifically looks at the content, language and illustrations of seven state adopted textbooks, resulting in some specific recommendations on how teachers, as well as administrators, could improve the curriculum.

This study examines Mexican American popular culture, including seasonal festivals, professional stage plays, journal essays, and ritual narratives in early Arizona. Through these various cultural forms, Mexican American residents negotiated and countered prevalent notions of U.S. national identity aligned with nineteenth-century ideas about Western modernity and Mexican antiquity articulated at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, that presented Mexican America as an 'Orient,' an internal Orient named Aztlan. Civic rhetoric in the early twentieth-century Spanish-language press created an intimate cultural landscape that casts light and shadow upon prior histories of Mexican America in Arizona. In addition to social criticism in local journals, scripted plays in print and on stage extending beyond Iberia and Mexico into the Southwest affirmed local forms of Mexican American popular culture. Staged narratives of class relations within border space defined by international economic and labor interests are also noteworthy registers of allegorical formulations of cultural identity. In addition to frontier drama and border journals, personal correspondence and candid images of rural and urban parishes also demonstrate processes by which religious farms became unfolding and inclusive demonstrations of public devotion and civic rhetoric. Popular Catholicism nurtured by an early generation of Spanish Discalced Carmelite priests in Arizona created devotional societies, public processions in religious precincts, Spanish plays in parish halls, and festival parades in commercial districts that embodied local demonstrations of Mexican American culture of Aztlan in Arizona.