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This dissertation challenges the dominant interpretation in women's history of the 1920s and 1930s as the "doldrums of the women's movement," and demonstrates that Philadelphia's political history is incomplete without the inclusion of African American women's voices. Given their well-developed bases of power in social reform, club, church, and interracial groups and strong tradition of political activism, these women exerted tangible pressure on Philadelphia's political leaders to reshape the reform agenda. When success was not forthcoming through traditional political means, African American women developed alternate strategies to secure their political agenda. While this dissertation is a traditional social and political history, it will also combine elements of biography in order to reconstruct the lives of Philadelphia's African American political women. This work does not describe a united sisterhood among women or portray this period as one of unparalleled success. Rather, this dissertation will bring a new balance to political history that highlights the importance of local political activism and is at the same time sensitive to issues of race, gender, and class. Central to this study will be the development of biographical sketches for the key African American women activists in Philadelphia, reconstructing the challenges they faced in the political arena, as feminists and as reformers. Enfranchisement did not immediately translate into political power, as black women's efforts to achieve their goals were often frustrated by racial tension with white women and gender divisions within the African American community. This dissertation also contributes to the historical debate regarding the shifting partisan alliance of the African American community. African Americans not intimately tied to the club movement or machine politics spearheaded the move away from the Republicans. They did so not out of economic reasons or as a result of Democratic overtures but because of the poor record of the Republicans on racial issues. Crystal Bird Fauset's rise to political power, as the first African American woman elected to a state legislature in the United States, provides important insight into Philadelphia Democratic politics, the African American community, and the extensive organizational and political networks woven by African American women. / History

By the mid-1950s leisure travel became both a new arena in the civil rights movement as well as a tactic in that struggle. Middle class African Americans felt their travel (both domestic and international) constituted both a critique of race relations at home and a realization of their rights as citizens. Alongside this development, I argue, was the proliferation of black travel columns and travel ads that simultaneously upheld the Caribbean as a model of racial progressivism while reinforcing its status as an exotic location dedicated to the pleasure of American tourists. By 1960 this ostensibly apolitical movement became politicized when ex-boxer Joe Louis met resistance from the mainstream press after promoting Fidel Castro's Cuba as a black American playground. In this second section I argue that the scandal surrounding Louis' PR campaign was revelatory of white unease regarding the transnational racial/political connections being forged between a selection of African Americans and Castro, thus constituting the story as yet another episode in the entangled development of the Cold War and the civil rights movement. / History

In 1965, Blacks were only about 4.5 percent of the total enrollment in American higher education. College programs and offices geared to Black students were rare. There were few courses on Black people, even at Black colleges. There was not a single African American Studies center, institute, program, or department on a college campus. Literature on Black people and non-racist scholarly examinations struggled to stay on the margins of the academy. Eight years later in 1973, the percentage of Blacks students stood at 7.3 percent and the absolute number of Black students approached 800,000, almost quadrupling the number in 1965. In 1973, more than 1,000 colleges had adopted more open admission policies or crafted particular adjustments to admit Blacks. Sections of the libraries on Black history and culture had dramatically grown and moved from relative obscurity. Nearly one thousand colleges had organized Black Studies courses, programs, or departments, had a tutoring program for Black students, were providing diversity training for workers, and were actively recruiting Black professors and staff. What happened? What forced the racial reformation of higher education? A social movement I call the Black Campus Movement. Despite its lasting and obvious significance, the struggle of these Black campus activists has been marginalized in the historiographies of the Student, Black Student, and Black Power Movements with White student activism, Black students' off-campus efforts, and the Black Panther Party dominating those respective sets of literature. Thus, in order to bring it to the fore, we should conceive of new historiography, which I term the Black Campus Movement. This dissertation is the first study to chronicle and analyze that nationwide, eight-year-long Black Campus Movement that diversified higher education. An Afrocentric methodology is used to frame the study, which primarily synthesized secondary sources--books, government studies, scholarly, newspaper and magazine articles--and composed this body of information into a general narrative of the movement. The narrative shows the building of the movement for relevance from 1965 to 1967 in which students organized their first Black Students Unions and made requests from the administration. By 1968, those requests had turned into demands, specifically after administrators were slow in instituting those demands and the social havoc wrought by the Orangeburg Massacre and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead of meeting with college officials over their concerns, Black students at Black and White colleges began staging dramatic protests for more Black students, faculty, administrators, coaches, staff, and trustees, as well as Black Studies courses and departments, Black dorms, and other programs and facilities geared to Black students. This protest activity climaxed in the spring of 1969, the narrative reveals. In response, higher education and the American government showered the students with both repressive measures, like laws curbing student protests, and reforms, like the introduction of hundreds of Black Studies programs, all of which slowed the movement. By 1973, the Black Campus Movement to gain diversity had been eclipsed by another movement on college campuses to maintain the diverse elements students had won the previous eight years. This struggle to keep these gains has continued into the 21st century, as diversity abounds on campuses across America in comparison to 1965. / African American Studies

This dissertation explores the ways in which Americans constructed a public understanding about gender relations in Muslim countries from the Iranian Revolution through the post-9/11 period that cast Muslims as oppressors of women. It argues that such understandings significantly influenced U.S. foreign policy in recent decades. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the degree to which women had or lacked rights became one barometer by which Americans judged Muslim societies. Journalists, scholars, women's rights activists, novelists, filmmakers, politicians, and others in the U.S. contributed to public debates since 1979 that cast Muslims as particularly oppressive of women. The pervasiveness of such views and lobbying efforts by women's rights activists pushed policymakers to situate the attainment of rights for women within the constellation of legitimate areas of policy concern regarding the Muslim world. As a consequence, by the 1990s concern for Muslim women's rights sometimes drove U.S. policy, as when President Clinton chose not to recognize the Taliban regime in 1998; at other times, rhetoric about the oppression of Muslim women became a political tool which policymakers could use to provide legitimacy and moral force for their interventions in the Islamic world. This story is both national and transnational and involves both state and non-state actors. / History

This work is intended to add to literature of American race relations, Lincoln history, Civil War history, and American history. It illustrates how most historians have processed Civil War and Lincoln history by centralizing emancipation as the primary policy by which all information of mid-nineteenth century political and cultural information is processed through. This research validates evidence that nineteenth century policy of the colonization of people of African descent can be equally qualified, compared to emancipation, as a central policy of this period during the Lincoln presidency and the Civil War. Considering this policy as a primary nuance of the political structure of the mid-nineteenth century speaks to a different historical implication when interpreting Civil War, Lincoln history, and American race relations of this period. Interpreting mid-nineteenth century American dynamics through a lens of what was called "colonization" of people of African descent more broadly leads historians from eighteenth century American structure into Black removal efforts via colonization in efforts to address issue of what groups would play a role in the participatory government. Penal slavery was America's resulting policy to address Negro belongingness and placement in the nation once it was evident the colonization of the nineteenth century Negro was not a viable option. It in fact, upon the failure of his largest and final colonization attempt, Lincoln replaced colonization with penal slavery as his recommended policy to become the Thirteenth Amendment. I submit that historians interpret this period considering colonization with the same influence of emancipation. First, centralizing colonization, with the concept of emancipation, adds a new emphasis on the United States recognition of Haiti and Liberia, displaying it a much more significant event in mid-nineteenth century America. Second, considering the influence of Negro colonization on mid-nineteenth century America, the period illustrates a dynamic rarely associated with the Civil War transference of American slaveocracy from chattel slavery to penal slavery—as articulated in the Thirteenth Amendment. It better explains how a Civil War of emancipation resulted in another one hundred years of oppressive federal and state racial legislation and imprisonment and broadens our interpretation of the sixteenth president. Adding the colonization of Blacks throughout the nineteenth century and following its path as a perceived solution to Negro belongingness, historians will be led in new ways to interpret how slavery was ultimately transformed during the Civil War, and not abolished in 1865, as prevalent in popular education and US scholarship laments. This research adds that slavery was actually transferred from the private sector to the public sector, specifically the judiciary branch of government, by way of the Thirteenth Amendment's restriction of slavery occurring on in result of legal processes. As important as anything else, the insertion of colonization's influence casts Lincoln as a president more accurately aligned with the primary sources of the mid-nineteenth century as opposed to popular Lincoln narratives. Lincoln's elevation of Negro colonization from private interests to federally induced migration creates a more accurate understanding of who Lincoln was and aligns better with who he represented himself to be—as opposed to only considering emancipation as the only influential policy of the period. Centralizing the significant policy of removing Blacks from the nation during the nineteenth century creates new understandings of notions and perspectives of freedom moving forward from early self-governance formation to modern American race relation.

In 1979, the West Virginia Supreme Court remanded to the trial court the highly controversial <i>Pauley v. Bailey</u> decision. Subsequently, the trial court judge, Arthur Recht, following the specific instructions of the Supreme Court, ruled the public school finance system unconstitutional. Justice Recht ordered the West Virginia Legislature to develop a state system for funding the public schools that would comply with the constitutional mandate to provide a system of public schools that was "thorough and efficient" (West Virginia Constitution Art. 13 Section 1). Thus, West Virginia joined six other states that have ruled their state systems for financing public schools violative of their respective state constitutions. The purpose of this study was to identify the historical circumstances affecting the public school finance system which ultimately led to the <u>Pauley</u> decision. In addition, the study traced and chronicled the legislative and judicial attempts to implement <u>Pauley</u> through the end of the West Virginia Legislature in 1984. / Ph. D. / incomplete_metadata

The United States Army of the Second World War faced a shortage of manpower after two decades of budgetary and organizational neglect following the post-First World. According to the Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, this period of mobilization, between 1939 and 1941, was the most crucial of the entire war. In this period, the United States Army pursued large-scale peacetime mobilization, breaking from eighty years of traditional policy. As such, the effort to increase allocations for armaments, industrial expansion, tactical reorganization of the ground forces, mobilizing the National Guard, and the implementation of a peacetime draft all faced an uphill political battle to accomplish, reflecting the complicated political factionalism of the late New-Deal United States. Between the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1939 and December 1941, the United States Army grew from less than 150,000 men to more than 1 million personnel, incorporating the National Guard and inductees while also adopting many of the weapon systems it would use throughout the conflict. By mobilizing a usable core for a wartime army and vetting its general tactics and doctrine in peacetime, the Army leadership provided a cadre capable of responding to some of the Allied powers' strategic requirements during the critical year of 1942.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Mark P. Parillo / ABSTRACT Historians of the integration of the American military and African American military participation have argued that the post-World War II period was the critical period for the integration of the U.S. Navy. This dissertation argues that World War II was “the” critical period for the integration of the Navy because, in addition to forcing the Navy to change its racial policy, the war altered the Navy’s attitudes towards its African American personnel. African Americans have a long history in the U.S. Navy. In the period between the French and Indian War and the Civil War, African Americans served in the Navy because whites would not. This is especially true of the peacetime service, where conditions, pay, and discipline dissuaded most whites from enlisting. During the Civil War, a substantial number of escaped slaves and other African Americans served. Reliance on racially integrated crews survived beyond the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, only to succumb to the principle of “separate but equal,” validated by the Supreme Court in the Plessy case (1896). As racial segregation took hold and the era of “Jim Crow” began, the Navy separated the races, a task completed by the time America entered World War I. The Navy paid the price in lost efficiency to maintain the policy. After the war, the Navy chose to accept African Americans solely for duty as messmen and stewards. Matters changed in World War II. The Navy eventually lifted its restrictions on African American enlistment and promotions, commissioned its first African American officers, and finally committed itself to a program of integration. The increased interaction between whites and African Americans had also led to white officers and policymakers re-assessing the value of African American sailors, a crucial sine qua non for the actualization of integration in the postwar years.