<p> The thesis explores the ways in which residents of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana experienced and altered race and class boundaries during the process of emancipation. Planters, laborers, and yeoman farmers all viewed emancipation as a jarring series of events and wondered how they would impact prevailing definitions of labor and property that were heavily influenced by slavery. These changes, eagerly anticipated and otherwise, shaped the experience of freedom and established its parameters, both for former slaves and their masters. Using the records of the Freedmen's Bureau and local planters, this paper focuses on three common responses to emancipation in West Feliciana: <i> flight, alliance,</i> and <i>violence,</i> suggesting ways in which those responses complicate traditional views of Reconstruction. </p>

<p> In 1947, the National Panhellenic Conference invited Jewish sororities to join its ranks, constituting the first time in the organization's history that non-Jewish sororities officially recognized their Jewish counterparts. The period of 1947-1964, I argue, became an era based on a new understanding between the Jewish and non-Jewish sororities, a "Gentlewoman's Agreement." This unspoken arrangement offered Jewish sororities unprecedented status in Greek affairs and a more visible presence within student life on college campuses across the country. However, membership came at a cost; the Jewish women had to ensure that their individual organizations' spoken beliefs conformed to those articulated by the larger, socially conservative non-Jewish groups. This significantly impacted the ways in which they responded to civil rights and the anticommunist hysteria that enveloped American society in these years. In addition to offering an appraisal of the ways in which gender shaped Jewish encounters with American higher education, the postwar Jewish sorority experience serves as a previously unexplored entry point into an examination of the limits of Jewish liberalism and provides a reevaluation of Jewish-Christian relationships during the period scholars have deemed the "Golden Age" of American Jewry </p>

<p> This dissertation considers the extensive and multifaceted efforts by civil rights activists to fight racial discrimination and promote social and economic equality in the nation's capital city. It examines the prolonged battles District of Columbia activists waged to end segregation and discrimination and encourage integration and equality in public accommodations, schools, employment, housing, and voting rights over the course of the mid-twentieth century. As the nation's capital and seat of the federal government, Washington, D.C. represented a significant symbolic and strategic location for nationally-focused institutional campaigns; however, the District of Columbia's pervasive Jim Crow policies and significant black population meant the city also served as an important site for local grassroots activism. Civil rights groups, often comprised of interracial coalitions of residents, pioneered complex strategies that employed direct action protest, espoused political rhetoric, and engaged the federal establishment to challenge discrimination and promote justice. While federal officials expressed various positions on civil rights, from supportive to antagonistic, the complex, overlapping, and often competing jurisdictions of the federal state made deep-seated and long-lasting progress difficult.</p><p> This project also explores the complicated role of the state in promoting, obstructing, and institutionalizing civil rights programs in the city. Additionally, this dissertation analyzes these civil rights campaigns within the context of shifting social and political circumstances within the city and nation. As the city underwent massive demographic shifts with rural African Americans moving into the city and white residents moving out to the suburbs, civil rights activists responded with more aggressive campaigns focused on economic and political issues. While leaders of the burgeoning Southern civil rights movement concentrated on legal freedoms and individual rights, local efforts emphasized fairness and collective equality. Civil rights activists employed more aggressive rhetoric and more assertively demanded justice. Despite the turn toward a more militant tone, the men and women in Washington remained committed to the liberal ideal of making the city truly democratic. It was not their dedication to liberal ideals and solutions that impeded progress in the city, but rather the convoluted federal power structure in the city that impeded meaningful progress and hindered the movement toward full equality. As in most places, the legacy of the civil rights movement in Washington, D.C. remains ambiguous.</p>

<p> This study defines and explores the concept of community learning as a driver of economic and social change. Community learning refers to the creation of new knowledge and skills as a result of people interacting with each other to affect change within a locality. Jointly-created knowledge and skills build the efficacy of individuals as well as the capacity of a group to further its purpose. The question that shaped this study was: How do communities educate themselves for change? A theoretical framework is developed based on social constructivist learning theory, organizational and collaborative learning, and community development. This study applies Morse's (2006a) six postulates of community learning to the creation of Chattanooga Venture, a non-profit organization in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1984. Three primary sources&mdash;personal interviews, organizational documents, and newspaper accounts&mdash;ground the study in the lived experience. By applying Morse's postulates to the origin of Chattanooga Venture, the study examines both the process and structure of community learning and has implications for both theory and practice. The significance of this study is to determine if a theoretical understanding of community learning can be applied to creating stronger and better communities, increasing the knowledge-base both individually and collectively, and generating social and economic productivity.</p>

<p> Contrary to Texas Ranger myth, Stephen F. Austin's settlers were not the first Texas Rangers to ride across Texas. As early as the 1540s, almost three hundred years before Austin arrived in Texas, mounted Spanish subjects on the frontiers of northern New Spain ranged, scouted, pursued, and waged offensive war against Chichimeca enemies. These methods were employed and accepted actions on the hostile frontier, and were also the characteristics Texans so highly revere in Ranger traditional lore. Several of these colonial military and ranching families from Nuevo Leon and Coahuila, settled Texas in the first half of the 18^th century. They intermarried and developed kinship bonds and were community leaders. In the 1820s, and 1830s Spanish surnamed descendants of early military men and ranchers became acquainted with newly arrived Anglo-European settlers. Friendships and alliances were forged based on political ideology and even kinship. As the winds of rebellion blew, several of the leading military and ranching families chose to fight for Independence in the Army of the Republic. They also joined the ranks of the Republic of Texas Rangers, and finally the Texas Rangers. Despite their loyalty, they lost political powers as more Anglo-Europeans arrived. Tejanos lost property, status and ultimately their right to be identified as Texas Rangers. The object of this work is to contribute a small piece to the literature regarding the development and evolution of ranging traditions from a southern to northern frontier perspective. The military and law enforcement traditions of colonial era New Spanish soldiers and ranchers were passed on to their Tejano descendants through continuous participation in ranging and ranching activities within their communities. Tejanos participated in the Independence of Texas, the Republic Rangers and the Texas Rangers throughout the 19^th century, and based on connections with Anglo settlers may have taught Anglos mounted ranging technique, and how to survive on the Texas frontier.</p>

This dissertation analyzes the rise of conservatism in American politics from 1948 to 1968, paying special attention to the impact of the civil rights movement and race on postwar political realignments. Unlike previous studies, which have concentrated chiefly on domestic policy issues such as court-ordered desegregation, busing programs, welfare, and taxation, this work focuses on debates over U.S. foreign policy. It considers topics such as the development of an international human rights ideology, the growing force of revolutionary nationalism, and the progress of decolonization to than the emergence of a distinctively conservative vision for American power in the world. As the dissertation argues, a natural symmetry existed between political responses to the African American freedom struggle and views on U.S. foreign relations in a rapidly decolonizing world; civil rights opponents easily projected their beliefs about racial difference into the global arena, and, although many national conservative leaders worked to distance themselves from the open defenders of racial segregation, they unreservedly asserted that the Asian, Arabic, and African residents of newly decolonized states were not entitled to the same rights as Europeans or North Americans. The dissertation thus offers a new interpretation of the role of race in modern conservatism. This study contains three parts: Part I suggests that what traditionally has been called "massive resistance"---the white South's opposition to integration after the 1954 Brown decision---might be better understood as a broader dissent from the emerging global ideology of human rights. Part II uses the Cold War's arrival in Africa to suggest how decolonization fused the politics of race and the politics of U.S. foreign policy, creating common ground for segregationists and national-security conservatives. Part III describes the evolution of a conservative philosophy on American power in the world, which rejected calls to demonstrate sympathy with anticolonial movements and instead advocated unequivocal support for Western Europe and anticommunist states like South Africa. Throughout, the dissertation contends that ostensibly color-blind positions on U.S. foreign policy in reality rested on a narrow, exclusionary interpretation of democratic freedoms and human rights.

In 1839, the year after slavery's end in the British West Indies, a group of young abolitionist graduates of Ohio's Oberlin College established a Protestant mission in Jamaica. Joining the already numerous British missionaries on the island, these mostly Congregationalist white American men and women created mission churches and schools to aid and convert black Jamaicans as well as to show skeptical whites in the United States a successful model of an emancipated society. The fledgling American Missionary Association adopted their project in 1847, and it continued until the end of the American Civil War. The mission failed to be the shining example of an interracial society its founders had intended because in spite of their devotion to their doctrine of Christian liberty, the missionary men and women positioned themselves as perpetual parents over "childlike" Jamaican converts. The dissertation focuses on the conflicts over the meaning of liberty as different factions in the mission defined it. It does this in two parts: first by showing how abolitionist men committed to liberty instituted mission churches and households based in strictly controlled hierarchies, and second, by examining the challenges brought to those hierarchies by black Jamaicans, white women, and others. The Americans went to Jamaica with an idea of Christian liberty that conflated religious conversion and emancipation. When the missionary men found that few black Jamaicans lived up this initial expectation of a "born again" society, they managed this "licentiousness" by imposing strict church discipline and by becoming increasingly attached to their power as infallible "fathers" overseeing their mission households. Over the course of the mission's almost thirty-year history, disgruntled members of the mission---both black and white---challenged this hierarchy in direct and indirect ways, and most interestingly, the ministers could, at times, be convinced that they were wrong, especially when a white man had raised the complaint. Black Jamaican men and women and the mission's white women had less success. Occurring as they did in the missionary setting, these periodic disputes over the mission's power structure reflected and distorted American discussions about gender and race, religion, and Christian reform.

This dissertation considers the significance of the relationship between the federal government and U.S. higher education during World War II and the immediate postwar years, using four Texas universities (the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor University, and the Rice Institute) as case studies. World War II and Cold War contexts of emergency and moral purpose were manifest in America's institutions of higher learning, which channeled their resources to assist a national agenda. Reciprocally, the federal government provided support to universities on unprecedented scales. This partnership was especially relevant to universities in the South, which had historically lagged behind their non-southern peers in research capability, had been more wary of outside influence, and had tended to stress regionalism over---if not at the expense of---nationalism. Yet despite the changes depicted in this study, a preexisting role of the southern university as serving one or more constituencies made the cooperation with the federal government less of a shift in the uses of the university than might otherwise be apparent. Among the topics that this study looks at in some depth are wartime financing of university research, curricular change, campus trainee programs, postwar veteran enrollments, the southern university as a trainer in so-called American values, and the impetus to assert these values. Of special note is the rise of defense-oriented research agendas and securing the revenues to sustain them. The partnership between the university and the federal government institutionalized a new a way of conducting university business that became so normative in just a few years after World War II as to seem irreversible. This dissertation shows the importance of this partnership at a group of universities outside the few high-profile institutions typically invoked as iconic or indicative of war-era federal cooperation. With its regional perspective that considers the southern university's role in advancing defense research, commerce, and technology, such investigation also highlights another basis on which to recognize World War II and the immediate postwar era as transformative in the history of the U.S. South.

Between 1945 and 1961, U.S. clubwomen launched a series of civic campaigns to educate Americans about the United Nations. Drawing on their older traditions of domesticating politics, conservative and liberal clubwomen from around the nation became community-level foreign affairs interpreters. This project explores the ways the foreign affairs activism of four organizations---the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Women United for the United Nations, and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.---contributed to the popular resonance of foreign affairs in the postwar period and nurtured a growing political divide among American clubwomen. Postwar clubwomen across the political spectrum promoted the idea that women could shape their nation's foreign policy by learning about international affairs. In the process, these women developed competing visions for America's relationship to the world, which they advocated in their community education campaigns. These rival campaigns injected the UN into the everyday lives of American citizens and pitted clubwomen against one another, training a generation of club activists. Beginning with clubwomen's initial support for the United Nations, this project traces the changes in their foreign affairs perspectives and programs over the postwar period. Confronted with the Cold War and the anticolonial movement, conservative clubwomen increasingly billed the UN as a threat to America and sought to police the boundary between the domestic and the foreign, while liberal clubwomen embraced the connection between the two and labeled the UN an agent of both American foreign policy and global peace. Changes in American society, especially the civil rights movement, bled into discussions of foreign affairs, encouraging conservative women to blame internationalism for what they viewed as unwelcome shifts in the status quo and liberal clubs to segregate their foreign affairs work increasingly from controversial domestic reform campaigns. Ultimately, some clubwomen adopted a centrist liberal perspective and some joined a conservative political counterculture. In both cases, foreign affairs work served as postwar clubwomen's political training ground. By positing international awareness as a viable civic project, American women's clubs made the United Nations central to postwar political culture and to their own political identities.

This dissertation explores connections between occupation, class, and state formation, employing comparative and sociological perspectives previously neglected by historians of this topic in order to locate the officer corps more firmly in its social and cultural context. Officers were socialized in responsibility, gentility, and nationalism, closely connected attitudes which encouraged subordination to civilian political control. The ultimate source of this accountability was employment by the nation-state, which provided security in an increasingly unstable society. Officers responded by stressing order and national sovereignty in their peacekeeping duties in the nation's borderlands. Socialization and self-interest also made Jacksonian-era officers much less bellicose than they had been before 1820, which helped to keep the nation out of war with Britain during crises along the Canadian border, while the officer corps dutifully executed policies many of its members disagreed with or found distasteful, like Indian removal or the occupation of Texas. In the process, conflicts with local settlers and authorities reinforced officers' allegiance to the federal government. Army organization and caste structure were ultimately shaped more by subjective social influences like ideals of gentility and organizational phenomena like bureaucracy and careerism than by the needs of military function per se. This thesis provides a study of officers' mentalite, worldview, and motivation, particularly the nuances and paradoxes of individualism and gentility manifested in their balancing of ambition and security through organizational careers and conflict. These behaviours can help historians understand the changing occupational and cultural construction of elite status and the reconstitution of personal ambition and community obligation in nineteenth-century America. The army officer corps was the first national managerial class in the United States, and its experiences anticipated the broader trends toward translocal functional organization and specialization in transferal functional organization and specialization in American society and culture after mid-century. This thesis also examines the construction of military expertise in social, cultural, and institutional context, questioning its content and objectives in new ways, and suggests that American military expertise was primarily administrative and logistical rather than tactical or strategic. This bureaucratic expertise reflected a successful adjustment to the problems of scale, scope, and complexity encountered by the nation's largest organization, reinforcing the army's sense of political accountability and preparing it to effectively manage the mass armies of the Civil War. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrates the social construction of military professionalism and the decisive role of the state therein, providing a paradigm of bureaucratization, social and institutional consolidation, and class and state formation in nineteenth-century America.