Persisting lay midwifery in the twentieth century American South is generally attributed to insufficient medical alternatives or to lingering folk practices. This study examines state-sanctioned lay midwifery in the South, using Florida as a case study. The study finds that persisting "official" Southern lay midwifery is best understood as state policy and practice molded by a unique way of life and the complex relations of race and class in which it was grounded. Initial state recognition of the black "granny" owed much to a pragmatic national biopolitical project to improve the conditions of rural mothers and infants through state management of birth attendance. Between the wars the state made "official" lay practice a part of a public health program to normalize the state's agricultural working classes. Incorporation of the lay practice into public health does not, however, account for continuation of the state-sanctioned practice into the 1970s, after the association between midwife attendance and relevant economic and social variables disappeared. The study finds that "official" lay midwifery continued after the 1920s because the policy and practice "fit" into a way of life and a welfare system that dovetailed with the South's culture of paternalism. The racial state sustained lay midwifery by adopting unique licensure and supervisory techniques. Public health officials maintained the shrinking practice by relicensing some who no longer met official standards and by training a declining number of younger black women to serve in areas where lay attendance was "needed." "Official" lay midwifery in the South persisted for almost half a century because it was state policy and practice articulating with historically specific and slowly changing relations of class and race. Relations of race, class, and state policy were woven into the cultural fabric of the / region. Each was supported by the culture of paternalism; all were institutionalized within community roles and practices. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-09, Section: A, page: 3243. / Major Professor: Bruce Bellingham. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

The Goodwood Plantation located in Tallahassee, Florida is one of the state's premier sites. At the time of this study it was being restored to its 1920s splendor, the time period when it was purchased by Senator William Cabot Hodges and his young wife, Margaret. / The purpose of this research was to provide information about the historic costume collection of the Goodwood Plantation in regard to its individual parts, the people it represents, and the ways in which the data obtained can contribute to the overall interpretation of the people represented in the costume collection and the Goodwood Plantation. The data were obtained from computer sorts generated using the various catalog terms from the costume collection computer database. / The costume collection contains 797 objects and spans 150 years. It represents the objects Margaret and many of her family members accumulated over their lifetimes and was used to construct meanings about them which may have otherwise remained unknown. In order to understand the people represented by the objects in the collection it was important to understand the most personal of their possessions, their clothing. This intimate portrait of Margaret and her family members can be utilized by future researchers studying other aspects of the Goodwood Plantation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3279. / Major Professor: Carol E. Avery. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

The objective of the present study is which determinants under what conditions have important impacts on pension growth, modeling the social, economic, and political forces that explain variations in nations' development of public pension growth. / This study attempts to answer two central research questions. The first research question is why previous studies produce inconsistent results on welfare policy determinants concerning impacts of political actors. Reviewing literature on welfare policies, American state public policy, and comparative political economy, the present study shows that the inconsistent findings are due to the use of mis-specified models. The present study investigates the research question with interactive models. The second research question is whether or not industrial democracies keep a similar pattern of pension growth, regardless of different pension schemes and indexing mechanisms. / The analytic tool for the first research question is conducted within the framework of pooled cross-sectional and time series data analysis design. The pooled data set includes 24 annual time periods, 1961 to 1984, with 16 advanced industrial democracies. The sample size is 384. To examine hypotheses, multiplicative and static models are used in both nominal and real terms. The second research question is examined by crosstabulation, categorizing each nation's trend of pension growth by various pension schemes and indexing mechanisms. / The present study finds that a dominant leftist government is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for pension growth. Leftist dominant governments with medium or weak labor unions and weak oppositional parties lead to greater pension growth than do other types of governments. In addition, in contrast to previous studies on welfare policies, this study finds that the strength of labor unions and the degree of state centralization are negatively associated with pension growth. Except for the relative size of the aged population and real economic growth, results of socio-economic perspectives are not always consistent in all models. Furthermore, the present study finds that different pension schemes and indexing mechanisms result in various patterns of pension growth. / The present study shows that results of previous studies are incorrect due to the problem of model mis-specification. Although both multiplicative nominal and red growth models in this study are applied to only one specific welfare program, pension policy, these models are worthy of being applied to a wide variety of welfare policies. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-11, Section: A, page: 4551. / Major Professor: Charles J. Barrilleaux. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Theodore Marburg was an American internationalist and supporter of Social Darwinism. Born in 1862 in Baltimore, Maryland, Marburg spoke out in favor of American imperialism and of creating an Anglo-American alliance. From 1900 to 1914, Marburg applied his Social Darwinist beliefs, and joined the arbitration movement for an international court system controlled by the "superior" nations. By the First World War, however, Marburg reexamined his beliefs and realized that world peace would not be maintained through legal measures if military and economic enforcement was not also established. Through the creation of the League to Enforce Peace, an American internationalist society, Marburg and other Americans worked to guarantee the United States a leadership position through the creation of the League of Nations. When these attempts failed, Marburg continued to write about U.S. foreign policy and lived to see America survive a Second World War and become an active partner in the United Nations. / Theodore Marburg was a product of the upper-class and of the intellectual movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Marburg was a progressive and an internationalist, but as this dissertation will illustrate, Americans with similar backgrounds used these movements to advocate a foreign leadership role for the United States based more on racism than on altruism. The life of Theodore Marburg and his place in history proved that racism, especially the emphasis on Social Darwinism and Anglo-Saxon theory, was an important foundation in establishing the modern foreign policy of the United States. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-10, Section: A, page: 4115. / Major Professor: Valerie Conner. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This thesis analyzes the evolution of Abigail Adams's republican thought throughout the course of her life. The transition from a traditional wife of a local lawyer to an articulate and well-informed First Lady can be traced along with the increasing personal hardships she faced in light of the events of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. Her unique relationship to men leading the Revolution and her own intellectual curiosity led her to a sophisticated understanding of republicanism and a unique interpretation of women's important contributions to the new nation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Alan Rogers / Thesis advisor: Brendan McConville / The Massachusetts Constitution is the oldest active constitution in the world — it has been in effect for 228 years. While the state has amended the original document many times since its passage, its essential provisions, which have remained largely unaltered, are undoubtedly the work of a single man — John Adams. John Adams, routinely neglected among scholars, is essential to the development of American political thought. The purpose of this study is to put a magnifying glass on two important aspects of John Adams's life and give them the detailed study that they deserve: his legal career and its impact on the Massachusetts Constitution. The link between his legal career and his political theory is crucial to understanding that document. To write about John Adams's political thought without understanding the two-decade long legal career that drove so much of it leaves one with only a shallow understanding of how that thought developed. It was through the study of numerous legal authors along with his reflection and experiences as an attorney that Adams came to understand how vital the law was for a nation. Indeed, for Adams, law was the basis for good government itself, "to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men." / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: History Honors Program. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This study is based on the premise that navigating boundaries of the self is a historical, ideological process. Up until the turn of the century, categories of race, class, and gender were seen as fixed constructions that grounded individual selves within non-negotiable spheres. The advent of modernity, however, witnessed a number of political, economic, and social changes. Reformers in the early 1900s were thus able to renegotiate the structures of American public life, using education as their primary means. By combining accepted, unifying, pragmatic principles with more radical ideas of social revolution, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and W.E.B. Du Bois were able to rethink class, gender, and race and thereby attempt to mold anew the identity of the American public. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / The 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a dawning awareness throughout many sectors of American society that women were good for more than simply bearing children and tending house. The threat of communism, epitomized by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, created extreme anxiety in the United States, an anxiety that manifested itself in two contradictory fashions. First, American women learned that the nation's best defense against communism began in the home, which was decidedly women's domain. The second message that American women received during this time is unquestionably the lesser known. The federal government and much of American society identified women as an untapped resource in national defense, a source of innovation and advancement in science and technology, thereby implying that with the help of American women, the United States could match Soviet achievements in these fields. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / The forty year fight to reform the 1879 Comstock statute that prohibited the use of birth control in Connecticut began in 1923. When the 1879 measure was originally enacted, it was in response to the bustling market for pornography and reflected that part of the Victorian moral reform movement which classified all things that referenced sex as obscene. Throughout the lengthy struggle, several court cases were pursued and numerous bills were introduced in the state legislature to various degrees of support. Every decade had a different set of arguments for and against the legalization of birth control, spanning from economic and social to medical and moral. The law was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1965 based on the burgeoning right to privacy. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Marc Landy / The election of 2000 was the most tumultuous election of the present day - an election that involved numerous lawsuits and was ultimately decided by the votes of Supreme Court Justices. What many Americans do not know or remember is that there was another election in 1876 with largely similar circumstances - disputed electoral votes (in Florida again) and a winner (Rutherford B. Hayes) produced by a Supreme Court Justice. This essay aims to examine these two elections in detail in order to demonstrate the flaws of the U.S. Constitutional system and the different manners in which they were resolved. The second part of the essay aims to determine whether the purported illegitimacy of the two winners (Hayes and Bush) affected their respective presidencies. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science. / Discipline: College Honors Program.