Thesis advisor: Marilynn Johnson / This dissertation is a study of how the pursuit, advent, and popular response to professional sports in Atlanta both shaped and reflected the region’s evolving political and consumer culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the concerted effort by municipal elites during this time period to acquire professional sports franchises for their city and its environs. Atlanta’s leadership succeeded at luring four major professional sports franchises to Atlanta in a six-year period (1966-1972) by securing significant public and private investments in two playing facilities in the Central Business District (CBD). Scholars of the economic history of professional sports describe the increasing geographic mobility of the major leagues in the post-World War II era as “franchise free agency.” Atlanta took advantage of this expanding market by making civic investments in two playing venues as a means of attracting franchises. This dissertation analyzes how the emerging metropolis’ negotiation of “franchise free agency” reshaped the culture, public policy, and urban planning of Atlanta. It shows how Atlanta provided a model employed by future Sunbelt cities as they pursued professional teams of their own, often luring clubs from Rust Belt cities with similarly lucrative offers of public support. This dissertation proceeds to analyze the response to professional sports in Metropolitan Atlanta in the decade after it achieved major league status. The city’s elites assumed that residents would embrace the teams and transform their tony playing facilities into twin focal points of leisure and communal pride. Instead, Atlantans from all of the region’s racial, socio-economic, and residential clusters responded apathetically to the teams. The collective shrug with which Atlantans reacted to their new franchises demonstrated the growing cultural divergence which characterized life in the booming Sunbelt center over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. In subsequent decades, civic elites in other rapidly growing Sunbelt centers believed, like their predecessors in Atlanta, that municipal investments in professional sports would provide their communities with a wellspring of unity and prestige. Residents of these metropolitan areas responded to their new stadiums and teams in the 1980s and 1990s with an apathy similar to that of Atlantans toward their teams during the 1960s and 1970s. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

The potential for decreasing timber transportation costs in the South by increasing truck payloads was investigated using a combination of theoretical and case-study methods. A survey of transportation regulations in the South found considerable disparities between states. Attempts to model the factors which determine payload per unit of bunk area and load center of gravity location met with only moderate success, but illustrated the difficulties loggers experience in estimating gross and axle weights in the woods. A method was developed for evaluating the impact of Federal Bridge Formula axle weight constraints on the payloads of tractor-trailers with varying dimensions and axle configurations. Analysis of scalehouse data found log truck gross weights lower on average than the legal maximum but also highly variable. Eliminating both overloading and underloading would result in an increase in average payload, reduced overweight lines, and improved public relations. Tractor-trailer tare weights were also highly variable indicating potential for increasing payload by using lightweight equipment. Recommendations focused first on taking steps to keep GVW’s within a narrow range around the legal maximum by adopting alternative loading strategies, improving GVW estimation, and using scalehouse data as a management tool. When this goal is achieved, options for decreasing tare weight should be considered. Suggestions for future research included a study of GVW estimation accuracy using a variety of estimation techniques, and field testing of the project recommendations. / Ph. D.

This dissertation traces the rise of Jim and Tammy Bakker and analyzes the birth and growth of prosperity theology in the United States of America. It highlights how Jim and Tammy created a form of Pentecostalism that grew alongside and because of the growth of the Sunbelt. It blossomed in the new suburban enclaves of this region. Jim Bakker's religious ideas had their roots in an increasingly powerful anti-New Deal coalition that was led by the conservative business community. Positive thinking and the prosperity gospel reinforced their beliefs in unfettered markets and their opposition to activist government. Bakker combined these ideas with an emphasis on the family, creating a power new kind of religion. It became a form of cultural conservatism that increasingly shaped American society in the 1970s and 1980s, helping transform political issues into moral and religious questions.

The City of Bradenton is a patchwork city, whose neighborhoods vary greatly in quality. While its neighborhoods differ in type based on consumer preference, they vary in quality because of federal, state, and local planning and urban policy. These policies have resulted in inequality of place and race, clustering racial minorities in center city neighborhoods with deteriorated infrastructure and income inequality. This impacts the ability of the City to be competitive with other cities as a metropolitan whole. The City's economically and racially segregated neighborhoods are not the inevitable outcome of market forces, but rather reflect decades of federal, state, and local policy decisions. This study will provide new scholarship in the body of knowledge about inner city decline in small Sunbelt cities.

This study investigates regional average hourly wage differences in the United States furniture industry. County level census data used to compare average wages in the South with average wages in the non-South showed a considerably lower wage structure in the South. Regression models suggest wage variation is strongly influenced by factors related to economic organization, and moderately influenced by labor market characteristics, urbanization, and product type; however, region provides the single best estimate of wages. Dividing the sample into South and non-South subsamples and constructing separate regression models increased the predictive power of the models in the non-South, but failed to predict wage rates in the South. / Master of Science