Scholars have pointed to the recurrent emergence of a "New South" as a major theme in southern history since the Civil War. In studying the 1880s and 1920s, they discovered that the convergent goals of leading politicians, businessmen, and publicists resulted in demands for governmental and economic reform. In each case, initial research focused on New South personalities and state studies followed. C. Vann Woodward (Origins of the New South) and George Brown Tindall (Emergence of the New South) then wrote regional syntheses. Research in the New South era following the Second World War is currently concerned with the period's leading political personalities. Thomas LeRoy Collins, who served as governor from 1955 to 1961, guided Florida's postwar emergence as a New South state. / LeRoy Collins's philosophical precepts derived from his legacy as a native of the American South. Born a shopkeeper's son in a small, class-conscious, southern town, Collins subscribed to the principles and goals defined by his family's status. Allegiance to the church, to public education, and to free enterprise circumscribed a lifelong philosophical creed. Politically, "business progressivism" in the 1920s impressed on Collins the potential for cooperation between government and free enterprise in promoting prosperity. Franklin D. Roosevelt's forceful response to the hard times of the 1930s reinforced Collins's faith in governmental leadership for reform. As governor, Collins sought institutional and economic changes which would allow Florida to enter the mainstream of urban, industrial America. / While championing a new Florida, Collins encountered ideologies and institutions left from the state's agrarian heritage. Despite repeated appeals, Collins failed to gain adherents for a revised view of states' rights and responsibilities. Nor could he loosen the agrarian-conservatives' tenacious hold on the malapportioned legislature. Most importantly, Collins (and other New South advocates) confronted anachronistic racial traditions. Twentieth century nationalism forged, in part, by the communications revolution made the South's legalized system of racial discrimination unacceptable. The Brown decision forced Collins to deal with the issue. / Collins responded to the crisis on the basis of his heritage. Initially, the legacy of paternalistic racial traditions prevailed. While defending the Supreme Court's authority, he instituted a program to meet the Brown decision's minimum demands. Such "moderate" guidance led Florida through a difficult period with fewer disruptions than other southern states. Yet, by 1960 he recognized tokenism's inadequacy. His perception of practical and moral necessities influenced Collins to call for fundamental change in Florida's racial customs. / As Collins's outspoken advocacy of revised racial codes moved him beyond traditional boundaries, he forfeited his political career. During the 1960s, Florida politics demanded racial conservatism and sapped the strength of the New South movement. In a race-oriented campaign, Collins lost a 1968 bid for the United States Senate. When race waned as a political issue during the 1970s, New South advocates once more concentrated the state's attention on governmental action to promote economic change. Many of the ideals and goals associated with the LeRoy Collins administration again became a part of Florida politics. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-03, Section: A, page: 1192. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.

The design of this dissertation was to place a biographical sketch of some of my 19th Century ancestors into the context of the general history of their time. The two people selected were my paternal grandmother, Katherine Beckham Conner (Katy in the text), born September 3, 1820; died sometime near, but before, 1880, in Toledo, Arkansas. The other was Katy's middle son, William Lewis Conner (Lewis in the text), born in Mississippi, August 28, 1843; died in Fordyce, Arkansas, June 30, 1901. Lewis was my father. / Tradition has it that Katy migrated from Mississippi (Webster County) to Arkansas in 1848; that she drove and looked after her own covered wagon, traveling as a unit in a train that left Webster County leaving for the then newly discovered gold mines of California. / Katy probably had no intention of going all the way. She was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with three little boys. It was never explained why she left in Mississippi a husband, William Moore Connor, my grandfather. / Tradition also indicated that the place were she dropped out of the train was in Arkansas, at Toledo. The settlement was a rudimentary trading center in a pioneer farming community, sixteen miles South of Pine Bluff and located on the Old Military Road. / In this region, opened to white settlement in the 1820's, this old road seems to antedate acquisitions from the Indians and all other recorded events. It figures predominantly in the following story. / Katy remained in the vicinity of Toledo for the balance of her life, she became a successful farmer--possibly a prosperous one--all on her own. She brought her three boys to maturing--the oldest was Orlando Philemon (Lanny in the text), the youngest James Henry (Jim in the text). She died leaving all of them comfortably established in the community. / All their lives were rudely interrupted by the Civil War. Considerable space in the text is devoted to the experiences of Lewis and Lanny in the Confederate Armed Services. In the course of the service Lewis lost his left leg at the hip. / After Katy died the railroad came into this virgin territory. From Pine Bluff on the Arkansas River it followed generally the route of the Old Military Road, especially for the approximately seventy miles to Camden, another river town on the Ouachita River. The railroad's coming had the effect of revolutionizing the work and life styles of practically every inhabitant of this primitive wilderness. When the actual route of the road missed a town, as it did Toledo, which had become a county seat by that time, the population of the old established community would move to one of the towns newly created along the railroad. Today, just one hundred years later, Toledo, first a primitive village, then a bustling farming trading center, and finally county seat, has reverted to rural terrain. Its site is indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape. / The dissertation necessarily includes some discussion of land policy, farming and social, political and economic history that affected the family history. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-11, Section: A, page: 4810. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," Frederick Douglass wrote in 1857. "It never did, and it never will." Blacks in Tallahassee discovered the truth of Douglass' words as they struggled against an entrenched system of racism to achieve access to political, social, and economic power. Blacks fought against discrimination in every way they could, often as individuals, but most effectively through organizations, alliances, and coalitions. / After a successful bus boycott in the spring of 1956, the black community launched an attack on Jim Crow laws that left most Tallahassee whites dumbfounded and converted a few to their cause. Using the church as their meeting ground and Christian ethics as their armor, blacks struggled to teach whites that segregation was inconsistent with their shared religious values. Blacks in Tallahassee clung to the hope that this ethically-based moral suasion would disarm segregation proponents, even after it became clear that whites would use every legal and extralegal tactic to preserve segregation. / By 1963, blacks turned to a more militant phase of protest, but until the civil rights bill was passed in the summer of 1964, the strength of white resistance--buttressed by the force of the legal and political community--was able to force blacks to accept token concessions and pledges of improvement. But the passage of the civil rights bill was no panacea for black grievances. Tallahassee dragged its feet to avoid compliance with the law. Yet clearly and inexorably, change did occur. The civil rights bill had ended forever any real question over the legality of integrated public facilities and conveyances and set a tone of inevitability in the long and bitter struggle for equal rights. / But the civil rights movement was more than just a legal revolution; it transformed relations between blacks and whites on every level of human activity. In Tallahassee, the actions of individuals in the large and small contexts of life determined how and at what level the city adjusted to an integrated society. How Tallahassee finally emerged from a rigidly closed society to a more open one is the story of how one Deep South community dealt with the burden of history and embraced the challenge of the future. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-03, Section: A, page: 0778. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

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This study is a description of the popular theatre as it operated in North Carolina between the end of Reconstruction and the early 1920s. The emphasis of the study is on identifying towns which had a theatre (usually called an "opera house"), the number of theatres in each town, specifications for the theatre spaces, biographical information on managers, and types of attractions that played the theatres. One hundred and fifty-nine halls have been identified in eighty-two towns, and several thousand attractions have been accounted for. / The bulk of the work is a catalog of halls that can be inventoried from available sources, arranged alphabetically by town. Following the catalog, a chapter describes in detail the nature of the attractions presented during a sample season, 1904-05. A summary and evaluation of the characteristics of North Carolina theatre during the period completes the text. Appendices supply (A) information on plays presented by repertoire companies during the 1904-1905 season; (B) significant citations for North Carolina entries in the "Correspondence" column of the New York Dramatic Mirror, the leading theatrical newspaper of the period; (C) itineraries for selected companies for the 1904- 1905 season; (D) a preface from one of the theatrical directories of the period; and (E) illustrations, including photographs of several of the opera houses described in the catalog. An extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources is included. / The primary conclusion drawn from the data is that the primary medium of popular culture during the period was theatre. The types of attractions that played opera houses reinforced the values, attitudes and beliefs of the audience, an essential function of popular culture. North Carolina theatres were typical stops on "The Road" during the Era of the Opera House, not attracting the top stars and highest-quality attractions, but providing a substantial quantity of popular entertainment to their audiences. As such, they were the primary loci for the dissemination of popular culture in their communities. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-12, Section: A, page: 4613. / Major Professor: John A. Degen. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

On September 16, 1928, the fifth most intense hurricane known to have struck the United States made landfall at West Palm Beach, Florida. Proceeding inland over Lake Okeechobee, the cyclone generated an extreme storm surge there which overwhelmed portions of the lake's inadequate levee system. At least 1,836 people died in the hurricane, making it Florida's deadliest natural disaster and the third costliest confirmed calamity (in terms of lives lost) in the nation's history. / The work begins with an introduction to Palm Beach County in 1928, the primary location of the disaster. After this the history of Florida's troubled reclamation and flood control program as relevant to the region and the evolution of the catastrophe is presented. The 1928 hurricane is then followed from its formation to the point of landfall in Florida, with particular attention given to the difficulties of forecasting its track and the various communications and warning problems which contributed to the tragedy's toll. An account of the storm and its effects along the coast is then rendered, followed by an explanation of the disaster at Lake Okeechobee and narratives of individual hurricane experiences along the lake shore. Relief, recovery and reconstruction efforts are considered, along with a brief analysis of casualties and economic impact. The work then discusses how the hurricane of 1928 led to an ongoing federal involvement in Florida's flood control and drainage programs, and how for the first time in its history Florida implemented a coordinated warning and evacuation procedure to protect a portion of the state from hurricanes. The dissertation concludes with the construction of the Hoover Dike and its testing under subsequent storms. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-12, Section: A, page: 4914. / Major Professor: Edward F. Keuchel. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 15-04, page: 0223. / Thesis (M.A.)--The Florida State University, 1976.

As Americans entered the post-World War II era, their mental world included two overlapping, but markedly different layers: one relativistic, another absolutist. / The relativistic layer had begun to emerge late in the nineteenth century as scholars developed open, dynamic, and evolutionary patterns of thought while rejecting closed and static systems. As a result, by mid-twentieth century there prevailed among most educated Americans an acceptance of the ideas of relativity and uncertainty concerning everything from subatomic physics to social ethics and religion. / The absolutist layer, expressing the grass-roots mind, stretched back virtually unchanged through the nineteenth century into the eighteenth. Characterized chiefly by belief in the free individual, traditional social values, and moral law, this layer has persisted among those whose education did not extend beyond high school, as well as among some who had attended college. / When confronted by urgent postwar crises, tens of millions of Americans sought final solutions for them. Even those of relativistic orientation succumbed to "yearning for absolutes"; they had had certainty, lost it, and then tried to regain it. / This study describes both mental layers and explores Americans' postwar quests for certainty. The most dramatic instance surfaced during the Civil Rights Movement, concerning equality. Going beyond legal equality and equality of opportunity for individuals, revolutionary measures sought equality of results for minorities (and later women) in employment, advancement, compensation, and preparation for living and working. These efforts, in turn, evoked a conservative reaction which became another quest for certainty, restating, reaffirming, and reasserting the traditional emphasis upon equality of opportunity with reward for the meritorious individual. Other quests for certainty which are explored here unfolded in (1) religion, particularly the vigorous new evangelicalism, and (2) education, whose goals became dual, involving delivery of education of excellent quality while assuring equality of educational opportunity. / Emanating from different mental layers, these quests were alternately creative and preservative, counterbalancing each other. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-10, Section: A, page: 3340. / Major Professor: Maurice Milton Vance. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

Prohibition sprang forth from the Progressive Era--the widespread reform movement that swept across the United States at the turn of the century. Responding to the dramatic changes in American society since the end of the Civil War, the Progressive movement encompassed a wide array of individuals and groups advocating a far-reaching program of economic, political, and social reform. For over forty years temperance zealots strived to impose their values on the whole of American society, particularly on the rapidly expanding immigrant population. These alien newcomers epitomized the transformation of the country from rural to urban, from agricultural to industrial. / Rapidly-expanding urban centers were often the battleground between prohibitionists and supporters of the whiskey traffic. European immigrants, retaining their traditional values, gravitated to metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York, and Chicago. With the opening of the cigar industry in the mid-1880s, Tampa, Florida also began attracting large numbers of immigrants. Because of its pluralistic composition, the city might serve as a microcosm of the national struggle between the "wet" and "dry" forces. / Using newspapers, oral interviews, and other primary materials, this study traces the various aspects of the prohibition movement in the city of Tampa. In addition, it details other peripheral areas associated with the advent of the Eighteenth Amendment including the drug and alien trades. Finally, this study examines the lengthy efforts to repeal the "Noble Experiment" and return legalized drinking back to Tampa. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-03, Section: A, page: 0778. / Major Professor: Edward Keuchel. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.