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Using archival records preserved by Iowa’s community colleges, private four-year colleges, and public universities, this dissertation examines how Iowa’s established higher education institutions responded to and adjusted to the presence of new two-year colleges from 1965 to 1975. This decade was a critical period of development for Iowa two-year colleges as they were most vulnerable to and influenced by other education institutions during an economic downturn. This study also explores how the curricular tension between vocational education and liberal arts education shaped early relationships between Iowa’s new two-year colleges and other higher education institutions. Specifically, this dissertation examines six two-year colleges, seventeen private four-year colleges, and three public universities to understand how the curricular purpose, mission and identity, position in the higher education hierarchy, and reputation of each type of institution played a role in early relationship-building. Ultimately, this study sought to answer the question whether the state’s new two-year colleges developed relationships with other higher education institutions that increased educational opportunities for Iowa students. Chapter 2 explains how officials from Merged Area I and Western Iowa Tech, two of Iowa’s two-year colleges founded as vocational-only institutions, persisted in their efforts to offer liberal arts education. Officials from neighboring private colleges resisted their efforts because they believed two-year colleges that offered liberal arts education posed a competitive threat. Chapter 3 explores how Iowa’s two-year colleges posed a financial threat, as well as a curricular threat. Part I highlights how Iowa private college officials confronted the financial threat by collaborating with the Iowa Association of Private Colleges and Universities to advocate for the Iowa Tuition Grant. Part II shows how eight private colleges responded to the curricular threat in three distinct ways: strengthening their role as a liberal arts college, making significant institutional changes for long-term survival, and changing or creating new curricular programs. This dissertation also considers the contributions of Iowa’s three public universities, Northern Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Iowa. Chapter 4 explains how each university responded in a distinct way to the presence of two-year colleges. This dissertation concludes by explaining how this study contributes to the debate between scholars about whether two-year colleges were egalitarian institutions or diversion institutions, specifically, whether two-year colleges and their relationships with other higher education institutions provided Iowa students with more educational opportunities and the path to a baccalaureate degree. I concluded that the presence of Iowa’s two-year colleges pressured private college officials to respond in ways that increased educational opportunity, and officials from Iowa’s three public universities to respond in ways that helped two-year colleges secure a stronger position in the higher education system hierarchy, which strengthened the ability of two-year colleges to provide a path to a baccalaureate degree.

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), 64% of primate species are declining in the wild and 49% face a significant risk of extinction. This crisis is largely the result of human activity, including logging, ranching, and hunting. In this study I examine the impacts of the anthropogenic habitat disturbances associated with cattle ranching on a primate community. Research was conducted at the preeminent site for the study of rain forest fragmentation, the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, Manaus, Brazil. I surveyed 8 line transects totaling 13 km that sampled: 1) secondary forest on abandoned cattle pasture,2) selectively logged primary forest, and 3) undisturbed primary forest. Specifically, I tested for edge effects, niche partitioning, and interhabitat differences in population density. Primate presence in edge habitats was negatively related to the amount of fruit consumed, a relationship that was also apparent in the densities of individual species. Four species were more abundant in edge habitats: Alouatta macconnelli (folivore-frugivore), Chiropotes chiropotes (seed predator), Saguinus midas (generalist), and Sapajus apella (generalist); one was less abundant: Ateles paniscus (frugivore); and the last showed no edge-related pattern: Pithecia chrysocephala (seed predator). Niche partitioning was evident in diet and macrohabitat use. In addition, in primary forest there was partitioning along several microhabitat variables. In secondary forest, however, microhabitat partitioning was absent, possibly due to habitat constraints or low encounter rates. Body size was positively related to use of vertical strata in both habitats, hence a combination of body size and competition may drive vertical niche partitioning. Primate characteristics were not related to their presence in selectively logged or undisturbed primary forest, though body size was inversely related to presence in secondary forest. Only the two generalists (Saguinus and Sapajus) heavily utilized secondary forest. The two largest species, Ateles (frugivore) and Alouatta (folivore-frugivore), showed an equal preference for all primary forest (logged and undisturbed) over secondary forest. Chiropotes (seed predator) also preferred undisturbed primary forest while Pithecia (seed predator) was relatively uniformly distributed. / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

For two hundred years the history of the Battle of New Orleans has suffered from the neglected state of the historiography on the War of 1812 and the static state of the Battle's orthodox narrative. This dissertation identifies and deconstructs the central themes of the Battle's orthodox narrative. It reveals how these long standing presumptions surfaced through the Battle's public commemoration in the nineteenth century and have fostered misleading perceptions about Louisiana’s involvement in the war, the defense preparations undertaken in New Orleans prior to Andrew Jackson's arrival, and the so-called unity that was achieved through the victory. By incorporating the actions and experiences of women and the enslaved into the Battle's history, this dissertation exposes the traditional marginalization of these groups in accounts of the Battle and its subsequent memorialization. It shows that the absence of women and the enslaved in the cultivation of the Battle's public memory was a deliberate measure taken by white slaveholding elites to preserve racial and social divisions that were blurred by the Battle's symbolic message of the power of unity. The actions of a third group, free men of color, are examined to illustrate how critical they were to the victory and how dangerous the memory of their service was to white slaveholding elites, especially in the 1850s. These new perspectives on the Battle and its public commemoration challenge the unchanging nature of the Battle's history and indicate that there is far more to the Battle's story than has ever been told. / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation analyzes the wills left behind by African-born ex-slaves in nineteenth-century Salvador in order to shed light on the lives that they led in the Bahian capital upon their arrival as slaves from Africa, and upon the re-acquisition of their freedom through the alforria system. The material assets and the slave ownership of libertos are studied in depth, as well as their religiosity, and the larger world and networks within which they operated in their Brazilian lives, with a specific eye towards African agency and processes of community formation. The qualitative and in-depth study of post-mortem testaments and inventories as meaningful texts in their own right provides the opportunity to decipher the individual voices of freed Africans, as well as to acquire insight into their Bahian worlds. The relationships, affective ties, and kinship networks of libertos, as well as their efforts to exercise agency and deliberation over their own lives, and the lives of others to whom they were connected, also become evident in the process. The testaments also make it possible to acquire a deeper understanding of African cosmologies in Brazil, through the ways in which libertos understood the passage from the worldly life to the afterlife, the meanings they gave to death, to funerals and other last rites. Understandings of justice, legality, and honor also come to the forefront, while the complex context of nineteenth century Bahia (and Brazil in general) constitutes the constant backdrop against which all these discussions acquire meaning. Understanding the lives, belief systems, and connections of African libertos also has important repercussions for understanding the experiences of Africans and their descendants in slave societies all over the Atlantic World. Insights deriving from the in-depth analysis of libertos’ wills have important implications for furthering our knowledge with regards to the Atlantic slave trade, slave ownership, and enslavement, as well as processes of identity and community formation, retention, adaptation, and resistance in the African Diaspora as a whole. / acase@tulane.edu