Visitors to historic plantation house museums may come for tours of grand manor houses, stories of elite white history, and expensive decorative arts, but once they step outside the main house they are confronted with numerous outbuildings which were once the work and living spaces of enslaved men and women. Perhaps the most popular outbuilding with visitors today, the detached kitchen is the focal point of my study into the interpretations of space at historic house museums. More commonly found at historic sites than smokehouses, privies, and dairies, the detached kitchen has become the primary venue for the incorporation of slavery into the master site narratives. As scholars of plantation landscapes have shown, the detachment of the kitchen was a purposeful choice made by white elites in an effort to control the access enslaved workers had to areas of the white family. This racial segregation meant a plantation household was really a series of households, and my paper argues that the architectural legacy of the kitchenâs detachment from the house complicates the very ability of a site to incorporate and interpret the social structures of the plantation into one inclusive narrative. This paper focuses on Gunston Hall Plantation in Masonâs Neck, Virginia, Tryon Palace in New Bern, NC, and Mordecai Historic Site in Raleigh, NC to highlight the ways the kitchen is interpreted through both the regular tours and special programming.

This thesis examines the interpretation at Somerset Place and Historic Stagville, two North Carolina Historic Sites. While the interpretation of slavery at plantation museums has received increased attention, much remains to be explored regarding the interpretation of women. In addition to examining the interpretation, this thesis explores the history of both Somerset Place and Stagville as active plantations and later historic sites. This thesis proposes that interpretations of race and gender are interconnected but not always concurrent at plantation museums. While the first chapter explores the history of Somerset Place, the second examines Stagville. The final chapter focuses on the current interpretation found at both sites.

The Whitney Museum of American Art founded in 1931 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offers insight into the role of women patrons in the American art world. Furthermore, the Museumâs contemporary identification with the Museum of Modern Art obscures its unique history and different founding principles. This paper explores the foundation of the Whitney Museum in roughly the first two decades of its existence from 1931 to 1953 to examine how Whitney and the Museumâs first director, Juliana Force, negotiated gender and class ideology and the Modernist discourse to found the first museum solely devoted to American art. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force operated the Whitney Museum based on three main principles: the primacy of the individual artist, the promotion of American art, and the importance of an informal museum space. The Whitney Museum of American Art, staked Whitney and Forceâs claim in a male dominated art world. The Museum was a complex space, representing a modern feminine viewpoint that embraced inclusivity and elitism, masculine and feminine, Modernism and conservatism. Whitney and Force wanted the Whitney Museum to be less formal and more inclusive, so they designed it like a middle class home with intimate galleries, furniture, carpets, and curtains. However, the decor hindered the Whitney Museumâs influence on the modern art canon because critics perceived the Museum as feminine and personal, Modernismâs rejection of the feminine and realism that ultimately led to the exclusion of the Whitney Museumâs collection of realist art from the modern art historical canon.

Most would say that the pinnacle of the Space Race was when the United States landed on the Moon. Besides the countless videos and images, what is the proof that the U.S. was there? Moon rocks are tangible evidence that the U.S. was on the Moon. Once the moon rocks came to Earth, they were studied, distributed, and displayed. The goal of this research is to examine the displays and narratives of the Apollo lunar samples. Understanding where and how the rocks ended up in their earthly homes around the country allows for analysis of the historical and cultural impacts of these rocks. It is important to understand the Moon and its history because the lunar landings were a major part of the 1960s in the United States. My research involves hunting down the lunar samples that are across the U.S. and working with several institutions to gather the stories of their lunar samples. My research shows that the lunar samples are not only rocks and pebbles, but they are objects that share different stories about the history of Apollo and, therefore, are an important part of Apollo's legacy.

This study examines the experiences of a group of Jewish German and Austrian children who were sent on the Kindertransport to France in an effort to escape Nazi persecution. Using oral history interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, written testimonies, personal papers, and archival collections from organizations such as the OEuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), this study analyzes the children's experiences at the Château de la Guette children's home in France and their subsequent time at the children's home Hôtel des Anglais in La Bourboule. This thesis examines the social and spatial dimensions of the children's journey to find home and flee Nazi persecution via France. While research has more extensively covered other children's rescue efforts such as the Kindertransport to Great Britain, this thesis demonstrates that the migrations of children fleeing the Holocaust via France were diverse and often characterized by frequent movement due to the historical context of France during World War II. In conjunction with a digital project, this thesis maps and discusses four paths taken by the La Guette children during the war: life in hiding in France, illegal flight over the border into Switzerland, deportation, and immigration to the United States. This research also examines the impact of children's homes on the pre-war, wartime, and post-war experiences of Jewish refugee children fleeing Nazism. After the La Guette group dispersed, many of the children stayed in contact with one another. Through survivor reunions and other commemorative activities years later, many survivors maintained a connection with their peers, educators, the Rothschild family, and others associated with their time in France and constructed memory of their wartime experiences. Ultimately, the La Guette case shows the long-lasting impact of children's homes on the lives of Jewish refugee children fleeing the Holocaust.

A Place in the Sunshine State, is a thesis project focused on the Parliament House Motor Inn in Orlando, Florida. This project nominated the Parliament House Motor Inn for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. This nomination was completed using both oral histories and more traditional historical source material. The Parliament House Motor Inn was evaluated using National Register Bulletins and the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Preservation. This nomination was presented to give voice to a long-underrepresented community within the national narrative of the United States, along with giving the Parliament House the recognition it deserves as an integral institution within the gay community. This nomination sheds new light onto early gay life in Orlando and concludes that Parliament House is a significant historic and cultural resource. This conclusion is vital to the preservation of LGBT history; it allows for a more complex interpretation of Orlando and central Florida history and helps to recognize LGBT history and the sites associated with them. This thesis also discusses Parliament House and its role as a site of the intersections between gay community and identity creation, place making, and the intricate history of the southern United States.

This digital thesis project examines the folk song collecting expeditions of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) in Florida between 1935 and 1942. The FWP carried out numerous folk music collecting expeditions in Florida through the Works Progress Administration. Folklorists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, and Stetson Kennedy led the expeditions and traveled throughout Florida to record blues, "jook" songs, work songs, and traditional music from African American, Cuban, Czech, Greek, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic communities. While romantic notions of nationalism in the 1930s often promoted homogenization, the FWP emphasized inclusiveness and highlighted cultural diversity. The FWP's approach challenged popular concepts concerning the homogeneousness of American culture and identity. Their recordings indicate that Florida was a patchwork of varied cultures. Yet, Florida's diversity is not adequately highlighted in popular history. Historians often see Florida history through the eyes of the mythologized "Florida Cracker", the Celtic pioneer who settled in Florida in the eighteenth century, but the Cracker perspective represents but a square in the patchwork quilt that makes up Florida's cultural history. An exploration of the FWP folk song recordings brings Florida's diversity to the forefront and increases the public's understanding of the state's cultural variety. The project includes a podcast series that features stories about the FWP expeditions, the folklorists, the performers, and the music. It also includes an interactive exhibit that is currently a work in progress. Source materials derived from open-access public archives create an immersive, interactive learning experience.

Drawing upon close observation of site practices, interviews, and visitor surveys, this project analyses the programming offered at historic sites, highlighting the aspects of history that are omitted or treated superficially. The case studies conducted at Fort Henry, Upper Canada Village, and Fort William demonstrate that women’s and gender histories continue to be minimized, stereotyped, and segregated. Each site selectively communicates information about the past. The commemoration and preservation of the past and the tourism industry have been intricately connected in Ontario throughout the twentieth century. Historic sites have been directed by the dual goals of educating the public about a national past and of attracting visitors and revenues. As Ian McKay and Robin Bates have articulated, the resulting tourism/history is a narrative less interested in verity than in saleability. Though the management of historic sites have not jettisoned the concept of accuracy, broadening the picture of the past presented to be ‘more accurate’ by addressing such issues as courtship, birth control, or marital separation is often not as high a priority as increasing visitor numbers. The costs, financial and otherwise, of making changes to the traditional fare at historic sites are considered undesirable. Sites are unprepared to invest in changes to collections or programming unless it can be shown that the investment will pay dividends. The perpetuation of traditional political and economic narratives continues also because of the perception that this appeals to and pleases visitors. Sites aim to give visitors what they want and to entertain them in order to secure repeat patronage. Women’s history and gender history are considered, somewhat contradictorily, too controversial and too mundane to garner the interest of visitors. Despite being trusted by a majority of Canadians as trustworthy sources of history, historic sites are letting down their constituents by omitting significant aspects and concerns of daily life in their narratives. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-28 20:02:08.987

In recent decades the study human geography has become an increasingly enlightening mode of analysis in the historian's repertoire. One area in which this method has proved insightful is in the exploration of the various ways that interpretations of the past in public places shape the public consciousness. Works on this topic have primarily been broad studies that look at public representations of the past regionally, nationally, or even globally. This study seeks to provide a more nuanced perspective on the complex ways in which public memory and place are created, and continually shaped, through a case study which takes an in-depth look at this process in one locale. This comparative analysis of Jacksonville, Florida's Hemming and Memorial Parks throughout the twentieth century explores how monuments, commemorative events, and historical discourses act as rhetorical devices which promote partisan ideologies within public parks, which shape the public perception of the both the past and the present. In particular, this study explores the revitalization campaigns of Hemming and Memorial Parks in the last quarter of the century to demonstrate how the rhetoric of public memory has been used strategically to recreate the public perception of each park in an effort to control access to and behavior within each park.

"From the Temple to the Synagogue" is an analysis on the influence of external cultures, predominantly the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism on the early rabbis following their failed revolt against Rome and the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century CE. How did the Jewish people react to the upheaval of their center of worship? What can we attribute to the major changes in their religious literature and centers of worship following the demise of their rebellion? Is it possible that what has traditionally been seen as an isolated and uniform group of people did in fact borrow major theological ideas from neighboring religions? This analysis demonstrates the transmission of ideas into this new center of power in the Jewish community, that of the rabbis, through their changed notions of the afterlife, the incorporation of artistic design within the synagogue, and the apocalyptic literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls community of Qumran. While the conversation has become more open in recent years to the idea that Judaism did not simply grow in a bubble, the extent to which Persian ideas made their way into Jewish theology has been largely ignored. This work seeks to demonstrate how open early rabbinic Judaism was to the exchange of ideas and how much of their ideas can be attributed to their non-Jewish neighbors.