The purpose of this study is to find the hidden facts of a man who has done much to illuminate Kentucky's greatness and glory. Yet little but his name is known to the youth of the land. As death has fixed the seal of glory on his life, history should assign to him his rank. Much of the data in this sketch has been gathered from source material.

The present work is intended as a survey of events and conditions in Tennessee during the decade from 1860 to 1870 when the entire nation was torn by sectional strife, racial antagonism, and economic and social disorder. The writer can make no pretension of having made a comprehensive or exhaustive study of the sources. That would involve a paper far beyond the scope of the present study. At best I have only scratched the surface; merely opened avenues for future study.

This work is an attempt to tell, and in some measure interpret, the story of the relief phase of the New Deal in Kentucky. In a work of this length, the writer encountered difficulty in giving justice to the various agencies in operation.

All over the world, Carnival is a time for a break in human activities, and inversion of the usual hierarchies. In New Orleans, Carnival is a time when the powerless take over the streets, and, for a time, invert control and ownership. One of the New Orleans carnival organizations are the Mardi Gras Indians, groups of African Americans who dress as Indians during the day and take over the streets of their neighborhoods, showing their power and beauty in a breathtaking display of costumes, music and dance. The Masking of the Mardi Gras Indian is a tradition dating back to at least the early nineteenth century. The Creole Wild West were the first named Indian tribe on record in 1884 but this does not mean they were the only or earliest tribe to mask. In the beginning some gangs would get together on Mardi Gras but did not mask under a proper name. The Mardi Gras Indian practice is a practice rooted in resistance to white oppression and African Americans’ demands for inclusion in the city’s Mardi Gras celebrations. The history of Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans is not limited to the East Bank of the Mississippi River but is also includes residents on the West Bank, specifically in the neighborhood of Algiers. Within the Algiers neighborhood there are several different sections. Probably the most well known section, Algiers Point, consisted of mostly white residents. The Oakdale area, later known as the Fischer Housing Development, and the Cut-Off, an area that borders the bayous of Plaquemines Parish consisted of mostly African Americans. Although the origins of Indians masking on both sides of the River is a point of debate among scholars, some evidence suggests that Indians from Algiers masked as early as the early twentieth century. This thesis is an examination of the longest-running tribe in Algiers, the Mohawk Hunters who started out in the Oakdale area but currently most of their members now reside in the Cut-Off area. Using archival material as well as recently conducted oral histories, it explores the relationship between the Algiers Indian tradition and the more well-known groups on the East Bank. By their deep attachment to their neighborhood, despite its separation from the rest of New Orleans by the Mississippi River, they have helped to strengthen the Mardi Gras Indians’ neighborhood-bound traditions of community service and youth education. Not many people are privy to some of the information that was passed along to me through the oral interviews conducted but my personal connection to some the Mohawk Hunters, including my cousin Charles “Cubby” Dillon, possibly allowed me to gain a deeper look into the organization. I was able to use text messages for follow-up questions and this was access most interviewers may not have had. Although few residents on the East Bank know of their existence, they are a model of the community-engaged, twenty-first century Mardi Gras Indians.

This finding aid of interviews is drawn from the Arnold R. Hirsch Collection at the Amistad Research Center. Between 1987 and 1994, historian Arnold Hirsch interviewed New Orleans’ first black mayor, Ernest Morial, and others related to that crucial era in New Orleans political history. This collection consists of 37 audiocassettes tapes that contain oral history interviews conducted by Arnold Hirsch with various New Orleanians who were active in city government and political activism. This project-based thesis covers the research and construction of the finding aid completed for this collection during an internship at the Amistad Research Center, as well as the metadata collected and created for the collection. This collection and finding aid are being housed at the Amistad Research Center.

<p>It has been over a century since African people were forcibly removed by official decree in 1901, from the Cape Town dockland barracks and District Six, to Uitvlugt, a farm where a location of corrugated iron &lsquo / huts&rsquo / had just been constructed. This occurrence followed an outbreak of a bubonic plague in Cape Town in 1901, which became predominant among the Africans who worked at the docks, and who were in direct and constant contact with the main carriers of the disease, i.e., the rats coming out of ships from Europe. The outbreak resulted in African being stigmatised as diseased, and being banished to the outskirts of the city. Since then, knowledge about this historical occurrence has been continuously produced, presented and communicated in many ways. It has featured in many representations through memory, heritage and history.In 1902, the new residents of Uitvlugt gave the location the name kwa-Ndabeni. Ndabeni was a nickname that the residents had given to Walter Stanford who had chaired the commission that recommended for the establishment of the location in 1901. The prefix kwa- was added to the name so that it meant in Xhosa language, the place of Ndabeni. In that way, the residents, who at that time did not consider the location as a potential place of their permanent abode, named it in a way that disassociated them from the place.</p>

<p>In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique. </p><p>This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.</p> / Dissertation

The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 resulted in the deaths of more than 500 Minnesota settlers, the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homeland, and the largest mass execution in U.S. history. For more than a century, white Minnesotans declared themselves innocent victims of Indian brutality and actively remembered this war by erecting monuments, preserving historic landscapes, publishing first-person narratives, and hosting anniversary celebrations. However, as the centennial anniversary approached, new awareness for the sufferings of the Dakota both before and after the war prompted retellings of the traditional story that gave the status of victimhood to the Dakota as well as the white settlers. Despite these changes, the descendents of white settlers persisted in their version of events and resented the implication that the Dakota were justified in starting the war. In 1987, the governor of Minnesota declared “A Year of Reconciliation” to bring cultural awareness of the Dakota, acknowledge their sufferings, and reconcile the continued tense relationship between the state and the Dakota people. These efforts, while successful in now telling the Dakota side of the war at official historic institutions, did not achieve a reconciliation between native and non-native residents of the state. This study of the commemorative history of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 illustrates the impact this single event exhibited for the state of Minnesota and examines the continued tense relations between its native and non-native inhabitants.

This thesis is an analysis of the rural ideal as it resonates through exhibition at local county museums in southern Ontario. This study brings attention to the potential for museums to perpetuate the rural ideal through the manner in which they frame artifacts and create historical displays. Through a combination of a through historiography which features public history, museums, and rural history, this thesis argues that museums work in a similar manner as text or images to identify with an ideology. Utilizing the Wellington County Museum and Archives as a case study, exhibits of the institution are deconstructed to demonstrate their association with the ideal and the potential influence this may possess on audiences.

This thesis examines the intersections of visual culture with processes of folklorization in Maritime Canada between 1964 and 2007. Throughout this thesis, I explore how visual culture helps make history public in the Maritimes for local and tourist audiences alike. Ultimately, I question which visions succeed when it comes to looking at this “region’s” past in order to visualize its future. I outline chapters that consider how Nova Scotia’s first provincial gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), labelled the cultural production of local self-taught artists “folk” art and, by collecting these objects, became the foremost expert in a category of artistic expression it had itself created; how the provincial state ideologically and economically invested in a certain “folk” aesthetic by gathering objects under the authority of a few prominent collectors; how those institutions and collectors who sought to develop contemporary folk art for the art market also became concerned with the new confrontation of a global mass culture by the last few decades of the twentieth century; how the AGNS transformed self-taught artist Maud Lewis from a local tourist attraction in the 1960s into an internationally recognized cultural icon by the 1990s through the institutionalization of her life story’s public history; and how those with state and corporate authority came to brand the Maritimes for global tourism at the turn of the twenty-first century, by employing what they understood to be the region’s strongest cultural resources. Part of my rationale here is to explore what it means to label the cultural production of self-taught artists “folk” art and the implications of state and corporate investment in this cultural form for the public narrative associated with the experience of culture in Maritime Canada. I posit a complex hegemonic relationship here between relatively powerful artworld professionals and relatively powerless self-taught artists that speaks both to the inequities and contradictions of a capitalist liberal order. In doing so, I also tackle the broader implications of writing “the history of region” in an age of “global” analyses. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-25 13:45:16.05