Abstract This thesis analyzes lynching and segregation in the American South between the years 1877 and 1951. It argues that these crimes of physical and social violence constitute genocide against black Americans, according to the definitions of genocide proposed by Raphael Lemkin and then the later legal definition adopted by the United Nations. American law and prevailing white American social beliefs sanctioned these crimes. Lynching and segregation were used as tools of persecution intended to keep black people in their designated places in a racial hierarchy in the United States at this time period. These crimes were two of many coordinated actions designed to physically and mentally harm a group of people defined and targeted on grounds of race. These actions of mentally and physically harming members of the group do constitute genocide under both Lemkin's original concept of genocide and the United Nations' legal genocide definition. Studies of the black experience, although starting to gain some research popularity, are virtually absent from genocide historiography. This thesis aims to fill part of that void and contribute to the emerging studies of one of America's "hidden genocides."* * "Hidden genocides" is a term that Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson have used to describe intentional destruction of groups in human history (genocide) that are often denied, dismissed or neglected in popular and scholarly discussions about genocide. [Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson. Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2014).

Organizational leaders are unaware of the gender-specific leadership skillsets women possess to increase organizational effectiveness and how to address potential barriers for assuring these skillsets are recognized as effective. Of the estimated 69,000 police officers serving in Canada, approximately 14,000 are women. Of those 14,000, only 10% hold a senior rank, and less than 3% hold the position of Chief of Police. Technology speed, globalized crime, and shrinking budgets have created a need for a new style of leader in policing, and increasing the representation of women may address this need. This multiple case study used the concept of doing gender and transformational leadership for its conceptual framework, and was designed to identify the skillsets that women bring to the chief of police position to increase the effectiveness of recruiting and promotional boards' decision process. Data were gathered from government resources, newspaper articles, and information provided by 13 female participants who had held the position of Chief of Police in Canada. Coding and analyzing the responses showed 3 underlying themes that the participants considered mandatory for the position of chief of police: higher education, political and business acumen, and effective interpersonal skills. Higher education improves critical and creative thinking, while enhancing analytical skills and improved understanding of self. Political and business acumen is important for women, as their voices are often marginalized in community dialogue, and effective interpersonal skills. The implications for positive social change include promoting awareness of the skillsets women can develop while maximizing existing resource talent.

This is a film about my father, who died in 2017. It deals with his ancestry, rooted in South African history, as well as the events before and after his family’s immigration to America in 1965. The purpose of the project was to investigate the past, as I have been disconnected from my family history due to exile, assimilation, tragedy and trauma. This lead to the discovery of undeniable patterns of love and loss, which I present in this film, yet do not completely understand. Content warning: discussion of suicide and car accidents.

One of the problems which has intrigued English historians for over a hundred years is that of the position of the common man in early England. Was he a freeman working land held communally by the village, or was he a serf laboring upon the land of an overlord? Since this question of freedom is inextricably interwoven with landholding concepts the problem may also be stated another way: Did private property in land exist from the earliest times, or is that institution the result of centuries of appropriation by individuals of land originally belonging to the commmunity as a whole? In the late 19th century a group of English historians devoted themselves to the study of this problem. The conclusions they reached varied considerably. The purpose of this essay is to examine some of those conclusions and the suppositions upon which they rest and to attempt to find methodological and ideological differences which may account for the varied results. The study will focus upon Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925), legal historian and jurisprudential scholar, whose best known works are concerned with this subject. Toward the end of the 18th century there developed in Germany a theory of the beginnings of society, known as the Mark theory, which described those beginnings as an idyllic period when mankind lived together in free communities. English historians found this thesis much to their liking: it fitted well with English ideals of freedom and democracy, and it supported popular belief in a strong Germanic, rather than Roman, influence in the development of English institutions. Beginning with John M. Kemble' s Saxons in England in 1849, English historians almost to a man accepted the theory without critical examination of the authorities upon which it rested. In 1883 however, an amateur historian, Frederic Seebohm, in The English Villa Community challenged the Mark theory and asserted that the English common man was originally a serf laboring on an estate which strongly resembled the Roman villa. Paul Vinogradoff, a talented Russian working in England on early agrarian history, sought new proof to sustain the cause of the common free man. In Villainage in England (1892) he attempted to prove that the early villein was free both legally and economically. He was supported by Frederic Maitland in Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), who found in the Domesday survey proof of vestigial freedom, which he held could only mean that the once free villein had lost much of his liberty during the late Anglo-Saxon period, and that his subjection was completed by the Norman conquerors. William Ashley, in several works, supported Seebohm' s position, but did not always agree with him. All four historians were products of conservative background. There were, however, differences in the more intimate details of their social surroundings, differences of family, education, religion, and in the case of Vinogradoff, of national origin. Vinogradoff and Maitland came from economically secure families, who provided for them the best education available; they were religious agnostics; both were legal historians. Seebohm’s and Ashleys families were not affluent, and the education they obtained came primarily from their own efforts; both were devout members of evangelical faiths; Ashley was an economic historian and Seebohm's best works were in the field of early agrarian history. Each of these men read the sparse evidence available on the subject from a particular point of view. Vinogradoff and Maitland concluded that the early English peasant was free and that his fall from freedom to serfdom during the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods was due to a large extent to a misinterpretation of his legal status. Seebohm and Ashley held he had been a serf from the time of the Teutonic settlements, and that his legal rights were never as important as his economic position.

The memory of the battle of Okinawa was shaped by politics. The memory of the battle for Okinawans emphasizes war crimes committed against them and the devastating impact that was inflicted upon their peaceful island. Their emphasis on sole victimization led to other Okinawan narratives being either downplayed or outright denied. To remove American bases off their island, gain recognition for Japanese atrocities plus reparations, the Okinawans portrayed themselves as a peaceful people that were the sole victims of the battle of Okinawa. The United States glossed over the crimes committed by the Japanese on Okinawa and Asia to use Japan as a bulwark against what they perceived as communist aggression in Asia. To solidify this new alliance, the United States promoted reconciliation instead of punishment. In doing so, they willingly forget atrocities committed by the Japanese against Asian nationals. Americans also remember the battle in conjunction with the dropping of two atomic bombs and to justify their morally superior position to the Soviet Union, promote a more complex picture of the decision to use the bombs. This included discussing how Okinawa changed the American leader’s perspectives on a mainland Japan invasion. As a result, has become increasingly difficult to separate Okinawa and the bombs because of their temporal closeness. The Japanese tend to remember the battle as a heroic last stand and emphasize sacrifice to inspire future generations partly out of fear that Japanese youth have gone soft, ultimately demonstrating that Japan has not fully come to terms with her memory of the Second World War.

Currently, Title II of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT Act) Act of 2001 appears to be stalled as a result of controversy over the intent and meaning of the law. Proponents of the title advocate the necessity of the act to combat modern terrorism, whereas opponents warn of circumventions of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Using punctuated equilibrium as the theoretical foundation, the purpose of this case study was to explore the dialogue and legal exchanges between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Department of Justice related to the National Security Agency's metadata collection program. In specific, the study sought to explore the nature of resistance to changes needed to mollify the controversies associated with Title II. Data for this study were acquired through publicly available documents and artifacts including transcripts of Congressional hearings, legal documents, and briefing statements from the US Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union. These data were deductively coded according to the elements of PET and then subjected to thematic analysis. Findings indicate that supporters and opponents of the law are locked in a consistent ideological polarization, with supporters of the law touting the necessity of the authorizations in combatting terrorism and opponents arguing the law violates civil liberties. Neither side of the debate displayed a willingness to compromise or acknowledge the legitimacy of the other viewpoint. Legislators who accept the legitimacy of both researched viewpoints could create positive social change by refining the law to meet national security needs while preserving constitutional protections.

This thesis discusses how certain societies (Germany, Israel, and Argentina) that have been involved in two documented cases of genocide in the 20th Century -- one that was the source for and falls within the United Nations Treaty definition of genocide (the Holocaust), and one that does not (the Dirty War in Argentina) --have dealt with these events in their recent past. In dealing with these issues, the thesis employs the analysis of genocide developed by the Argentine scholar, Daniel Feierstein, who has proposed that all genocides progress through a series of steps that first create what he calls a "negative otherness" to the victims of the genocide, that then isolates and debilitates the victim group, and that ultimately leads, as a penultimate (not final) step, to the physical annihilation of the victims of the genocide. Feierstein's most novel and provocative contribution to the study of genocide, however, is his concept that there is an additional and final step -- which he calls the threat of “symbolic realization” -- that will actually take place in society after the killing or physical annihilation has been completed and the historical order of things has been restored. In Feierstein’s view, the purpose of genocide is to use the technologies of power of the state against the victim group in order to permanently change social relations within the state by excluding and then annihilating the victims of the genocide. For this reason, Feierstein argues that, unless the post-genocide society continues to confront the causes and reality of the genocide as a present and ongoing political and social dynamic in the society, so that the memory and cultural and social presence of the victim group is preserved in an immediate way, the genocide will be realized on a symbolic level in the sense that the change of social relations that the perpetrators of the genocide intended will in fact occur. In the analysis that follows of the issues of assigning culpability, providing reparations, and constructing memorials in post-genocide societies, the thesis argues that, whether consciously articulated or not, what drives the bitter controversy and debates over these matters in post-genocide societies is an underlying fear on the part of victims and victim groups that the significance of what they have suffered and why they have suffered will be lost and forgotten (symbolically realized, in Feierstein’s terminology) in the state's efforts at reconciliation precisely through the process of assigning guilt, awarding reparations, and constructing memorials. Going a step beyond where Feierstein leaves off, the thesis suggests, however, that this sort of symbolic realization is, in fact, an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the process of writing the history of the genocide (or any event) and the detachment, analysis, contextualization, reductiveness, and simplification that history requires.

Environmental aspect of pavement, unlike its economic counterpart, is seldom considered in the theoretical study and field practices. As a highly energy and material intensive infrastructure, pavement has great potential to contribute to the environment protection, which, in root, depends on the in-depth understanding of the environmental impacts, holistically and specifically. A life cycle assessment (LCA) model is used to fulfill the goal. This research firstly carried out extensive literature review of LCA studies on pavement to identify the major research gaps, including: incompleteness of the methodology, controversy of the functional unit, and unawareness of feedstock energy of asphalt, etc. Based on that, a comprehensive methodology to apply the LCA model in the context of pavement engineering was developed. The five-module methodology, including material module, maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) module, construction module, congestion module, and end of life module, covers almost every stage of pavement for a life time. The unique contribution of the proposed methodology lies in the deep-going modeling of the congestion module due to construction and M&R activities and the great efforts on the usage module. Moreover, the proposed methodology is a complex structure, demanding many sub-models to enrich the model bank and therefore another three contributions are made accordingly. Specifically, the environmental damage costs (EDCs) were calculated based on the estimates of the marginal damage cost of involved air pollutants; a function describing the relationship of pavement roughness and average vehicle speed was established; and an improved pavement M&R optimization algorithm was developed with the incorporation of EDCs. To demonstrate how the proposed methodology can be implemented, a case study of three overlay systems, including hot mixture asphalt (HMA), Portland cement concrete (PCC), and crack, seat and overlay (CSOL), was performed. Through the case study, the PCC option and CSOL options are found to have less environmental burdens as opposed to the HMA option while the comparison between the former two is indeterminate due to the great uncertainties associated with usage module, especially pavement structure effect; and the material, congestion, and usage modules are the three major sources of energy consumptions and air pollutant emissions. Traditionally, cost evaluation of pavement does not refer to EDC while the developed M&R optimization algorithm suggests that EDC occupies a significant fraction of the total cost constitution. And the M&R algorithm leads to a reduction from 8.2 to 12.3 percent and from 5.9 to 10.2 percent in terms of total energy consumptions and costs compared to the before optimization results. On the other aspect, pavement communities seem to prefer long life pavement because they believe small increase of pavement thickness prolongs the service life and thus leads to a smaller marginal cost while the study in Chapter 5 suggests that it may not be always true, at least in terms environmental impacts. Specially, frequently used pavement designs in the U.S. of two design lives, 20 years and 40 years, at three levels of traffic, are evaluated for their environmental impacts using the proposed methodology. It is found that only at high traffic volumes, the 40-year designs carry environmental advantages over their 20-year counterparts while the opposite is true at the low or medium traffic volumes. Unfortunately, it is not possible to determine the watershed traffic volumes due to the disturbance of many external factors.

We live in a frantic, fractured, ever-quickening, and violent world that is at the end of the era in which we will be able to talk with survivors of the Shoah. To date, there have been approximately 100,000 recorded interviews of Holocaust survivors. The vast majority of these interviews--such as the 52,000 done for Steven Spielberg's and USC Shoah Foundation Archive--have used traditional, single-session, and "neutral" methods of oral history interviewing to "capture" and "preserve" the legalistic, historical "testimonies" of survivors. The present study responds to this situation and unique moment in time by slowing down, listening, speaking repeatedly and intimately, forming interpersonal relationships, and storytelling with three Holocaust survivors in the Tampa Bay area: Salomon Wainberg, Manuel Goldberg, and Sonia Wasserberger. I do this in order to see those I work with as experiential authorities able to help me address the classic and post-modern issues of human meaning, connection, and value in the post-Holocaust world. I first contextualize this work within extant and related research in the field of communication. Then I situate this project in the broader intersections of work on the history of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. This is followed by an outline of the particular collaborative oral history and ethnographic theories and methods that influence this work. These contexts lead to three chapters, the ethnographic stories of each survivor I have worked with for the past three years. Each story focuses on: a) the oral history and ethnographic significance of sharing particularities of each survivor's experience through our dialogues together; b) broader insights and explorations of the central themes (compassion, identification, and affinity) that emerged from our interviews and relationships. The final chapter concludes by reflecting on and synthesizing the values and limitations of this project. As a whole, this dissertation cultivates and exemplifies: a) a unique understanding of humane and humanistic approaches to ethnographic methods in the fields of communication and oral history; b) compassion, identification, and affinity as important lenses and motives to consider in research with individuals (in particular individual survivors of mass atrocities); c) the historical value and need to continue developing diverse approaches to scholarship that centralize personal stories, dialogue, peace, wisdom, and work that represents marginalized experiences and experiences of marginalization in a violent, oppressive world. This dissertation is offered as a token of remembrance of the Holocaust and to those who shared their stories with me.

This thesis examines labor organizing in the U.S. South, specifically the Piedmont and eastern regions of North Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. It aims to uncover an often overlooked local history of civil rights labor organizing which challenged the southern status quo before America's 'mainstream' civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. This study argues that through labor organizing, African American tobacco workers challenged the class, gender, and race hierarchy of North Carolina's very profitable tobacco industry during the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, the thesis contributes to the historiography of black working class protest, and the ever-expanding field of local civil rights histories and the long civil rights movement.