The American South’s cultural distinctiveness has been a central historiographical issue debated by scholars since the first decades of the country’s inception. Implicitly or explicitly, this debate centres largely on one question – why has the South retained its distinct identity for cultural, social, political and economic exclusivity? This thesis examines southern distinctiveness with specific reference to America’s military involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, providing new insights upon an old question. Although a national effort, which encompassed the service over three million men, America’s 16 year involvement in their war against the communist-backed North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Minh/Vietcong (VC) forces was shaped by distinct southern influences attributed to the region’s history and culture. This thesis demonstrates that the southern influence over America’s political, economic and military theatres profoundly shaped the direction and administration of the Vietnam War. Southerners occupied crucial leadership roles throughout the Vietnam war era, including the presidency and Secretary of State, while both the Senate and the House of Representatives were led by men from South of the Mason-Dixon Line.

archives@tulane.edu / Pillars of elite white supremacy, wealthy southern white women, through their work on social welfare projects, transitioned from their roles as influential dependents and stakeholders within individualist economic systems to unselfconscious political citizens in the early twentieth century. This dissertation traces that transition through a single, elite women’s organization: the Junior League. The following chapters tell the stories of the oldest Leagues in the Deep South: the Junior Leagues of New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Montgomery, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Savannah, Georgia. The Association of Junior Leagues of America (AJLA) is an elite women’s voluntary association born out of the settlement movement in late 1890s New York and experienced explosive growth in the decade following suffrage. Out of regional pride and a desire for class solidification, southern debutantes formed Junior Leagues in their own cities. By tracing members’ relationship to gender, race, and class, this dissertation contributes to the larger narrative of the twentieth century women's rights movement through the addition of supposedly apolitical Junior Leaguer's unselfconscious claim to political citizenship. Their administration of health clinics in the Deep South is especially revealing because it was through this work that they performed their citizenship via community investment and collaboration with the state. Junior Leaguers built, constructed, and maintained their projects with the goal of demonstrating their usefulness to the State, which they hoped would, in turn, take the project and its work under the umbrella of state-run services. / 1 / Anna Morgan Leonards

archives@tulane.edu / Pillars of elite white supremacy, wealthy southern white women, through their work on social welfare projects, transitioned from their roles as influential dependents and stakeholders within individualist economic systems to unselfconscious political citizens in the early twentieth century. This dissertation traces that transition through a single, elite women’s organization: the Junior League. The following chapters tell the stories of the oldest Leagues in the Deep South: the Junior Leagues of New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Montgomery, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Savannah, Georgia. The Association of Junior Leagues of America (AJLA) is an elite women’s voluntary association born out of the settlement movement in late 1890s New York and experienced explosive growth in the decade following suffrage. Out of regional pride and a desire for class solidification, southern debutantes formed Junior Leagues in their own cities. By tracing members’ relationship to gender, race, and class, this dissertation contributes to the larger narrative of the twentieth century women's rights movement through the addition of supposedly apolitical Junior Leaguer's unselfconscious claim to political citizenship. Their administration of health clinics in the Deep South is especially revealing because it was through this work that they performed their citizenship via community investment and collaboration with the state. Junior Leaguers built, constructed, and maintained their projects with the goal of demonstrating their usefulness to the State, which they hoped would, in turn, take the project and its work under the umbrella of state-run services. / 1 / Anna Morgan Leonards

The growing prevalence of overweight and obesity among United States (U.S.) elderly people today is a health concern. Higher incidences of obesity and obesity-related health conditions and mortality exist in the southern area of the U.S. Understanding obesity in relation to obesity-related factors in this population is crucial. The purpose of this study was to identify regional differences and associations between obesity and obesity-related factors in Southern U.S. elderly people, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, using data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), an existing telephone health survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Through frequency tests, chi-square tests, and a multinomial logistic regression, the results revealed no regional difference in weight status among U.S. elderly people. However, multinomial logistic regression indicated some consistent associations with weight status among Southern U.S. elderly people. Males, Blacks and married elderly people, along with those diagnosed with high cholesterol, diabetes, and hypertension were associated with both overweight and obesity. Associations found between Southern U.S. elderly people who were overweight or obese and obesity-related factors support the need to continue to encourage elderly people living in the South to control their weight.

This dissertation examines the experiences of Latina immigrants in Atlanta, GA in accessing and receiving reproductive healthcare. Although Atlanta is a new destination city for immigrant labor, the state of Georgia has passed anti-immigrant legislation, including a 2011 law that allows local police to check immigrants’ documentation while investigating unrelated violations. This localization of immigration policing heightens immigrants’ risk of detention and deportability. In combination with media discourses of illegality, local immigration policing instills fear in immigrants, which deters them from going out in public in order to perform everyday tasks such as seeing a doctor. Latinas immigrants’ ascribed illegality is not only an issue when trying to access reproductive healthcare, however, but also inflects their interactions with health service providers. Moreover, legal and pragmatic barriers to reproductive healthcare are bound up with ideological notions of Latinas’ reproduction. Drawing from 68 interviews with recent Latina immigrants and immigrant advocates, I detail how experiences of receiving reproductive healthcare foster a “biological citizenship” – which can be defined as the ways in which an individual or group claims inclusion through biological means – that eases Latinas’ outsider status. By enacting biological citizenship through the care of their bodies, which are often viewed and treated as undeserving of care, I contend that undocumented immigrants act politically via one of the few avenues that is open to them, albeit one – the care of the body – that is often overlooked. Additionally, they are creating a bit of security in an overwhelming insecure environment. This research finds that Latina immigrants’ access to reproductive healthcare is impeded not only by anti-immigrant laws and inflammatory discourse, but also by pragmatic issues such as lack of health insurance and language differences. Moreover, legal and pragmatic barriers to reproductive healthcare are bound up with ideological notions of Latinas’ reproduction. For example, Latinas are frequently portrayed as “hyperfertile” in anti-immigrant discourse. Latina immigrants’ reproduction is viewed as threatening to the nation-state and is thus often blatantly or covertly treated to render Latinas as “undeserving” of citizenship and the welfare state. Interestingly, however, in the context of the aging population of the U.S., there are other discourses making their way onto the scene. These discourses reveal that Latina reproduction, though much maligned, was concomitantly viewed as the solution to revitalizing the eroding lower rungs of the U.S. population pyramid. Additionally, political pundits drew on the trope of the hyperfertile Latina immigrant to construct the hopes of an eventual permanent Democratic majority, which would be facilitated by the exponential breeding of Hispanic immigrants. However, this research corroborates 2015 statistics from the Centers of Disease Control that show that Hispanic fertility is steeply declining, thus undermining the demographic and political dreams which relied on tropes of the hyperfertile Latina. This study aims to expand conceptions of citizenship by examining reproductive healthcare as a site where risk is negotiated and borders of membership are both constructed and broken down. The lens of biological citizenship emphasizes the political nature of healthcare access and allows for analyzing Latina immigrants’ everyday experiences with reproductive health as they are shaped by state policies, anti-immigrant legislation, and gendered portrayals of illegality. In doing so, this study complicates healthcare access and draws out both the non-biological determinants and non-biological implications of this access.

Hispanic religious ministry provides a way for long established mainstreams to stay afloat in the face of the demographic realities in the U.S. today. Unfortunately, the lack of literature, particularly in geography, precludes the examination of elements of contemporary Hispanic religious outreach, including such considerations as strategies, their effectiveness, and institutional praxis among mainstream religious denominations in the U.S. Using a hybrid methodology that relies on several techniques, I examine Hispanic religious ministry in the Upper U.S. South, which geographers tell us is America’s newest Hispanic destination. I, thereby, develop and present here a case study to compare Hispanic religious ministry in Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass metropolitan region, which has recently been attracting Hispanics. I use three mainstream denominations including the Roman Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention to examine the relationships of religious polity, outreach practices, and disparate strategies among these three denominations. Strategies of Hispanic religious ministry among religious organizations associated with the Roman Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention; reflect many similarities, while simultaneously exhibiting much variation throughout the Inner Bluegrass. Similarities in outreach praxis seem to be predicated on tactics wherein agencies have come to dominate the cultures of contemporary mainstream religious denominations, while polities, historically structured to differentiate religious traditions and doctrines within a continuum of congregational versus connectional organization, seemed to account for much variation among these disparate denominations. While Hispanic outreach in the Inner Bluegrass mostly follow national-level plans or strategies, the Roman Catholic denomination seems most efficient and effective in managing new Hispanic ministries in the Inner Bluegrass today.

The major problem of this study is to identify through the use of the Critical Incident Technique the main requirements for successful ministerial service in the South Carolina Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, insofar as these requirements can be determined through lay observations and judgments. The following sub-problems are closely related to the major problem: 1. What special demands are made upon the minister by special subgroups within the church--e.g., youth, women's groups--in regard to pastoral behavior? 2. How important are the roles assigned to the minister by the church itself--e.g., preacher, teacher, counselor, visitor, administrator, priest? 3. Do churches of varying sizes differ in their expectations of the Ministerial office--e.g., do large churches place greater emphasis upon preaching? 4. Does educational training and/or the salary of the minister correlate with the number of successful incidents reported by respondents?

Rather than taking a broad genre-based approach to analyzing reality television as digital media, this disserations understands the field of reality programming as operating within a new media model and as composed of micro-genres. My project specifically explores the "intimate" micro-genre, considering the politics of respectability and gendered labor as foundational elements in what is a particularly fertile and volatile site of meaning-making. Grounding my analysis in a comprehensive map of reality programming allows me to explore a pattern of politically rich programs set in the South. Shows such as Duck Dynasty, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and Real Housewives of Atlanta offer insight into the circulation and currency of race, class, and gender with significant theoretical implications for an economically and politically unstable national moment. Using an intersectional lens to investigate reality television, my project seeks to better understand the gears driving our cultural anxieties and media trends through an analysis of digital paratexts, branding, labor, and affect.

Why do some allies restructure their existing alliance relationships which they once favored, but some do not? In what ways do allies restructure their alliances? Historically interstate military alliances change their original agreements more than they remain the same, and the average duration of bilateral alliances is less than a decade. Theoretically, previous works have paid great attention mostly to the formation and duration of alliances. Answers to the above basic questions have been largely indeterminate, despite the fact that when allies change their original agreements, it reshapes the behaviors of both allies and non-allies. This study argues that when a state grows more powerful relative to its neighbors and external powers; and experiences a domestic regime change, the state is likely to restructure its exiting alliance relationship. These external and internal changes since the alliance formation cause the state’s original preference on the arms-and-allies balance to shift, and the state has greater incentive to restructure the existing alliance by way of dealignment, expiration, or renewal. In order to test the argument, this study first provides the quantitative results by testing 142 post-WWII alliances formed from 1946 to 2000, and identifies the statistically significant and substantial effects of three factors, capabilities increase, regime change (democratization and authoritarianization), and government change (both leadership and supporting coalition change), on the state’s alliance restructuring. Then this study qualitatively tests the quantitative findings and traces the causal process through case studies for three U.S. alliances in East Asia (the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan). The Philippine alliance restructuring in 1992 is examined as a typical case demonstrating that the argument empirically works. Then this study investigates why South Korea did not restructure the alliance with the U.S. in the 1990s even though the external and internal factors suggest that it would restructure. Lastly, the U.S.-Japan alliance case in 2009-2010 is examined to assess the explanatory power of the argument beyond the data population. An alliance restructuring can significantly affect an individual state’s security positively or negatively, therefore state leaders must continue to pay a close attention to the management of alliances.

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to preserve that institution. Yet, not all of Beall’s white neighbors decided that secession was an appropriate idea worth pursuing. Typical of other areas in the Upper South, these unionists existed in large numbers due to the survival of a strong, two-party political system built from an increasingly diversifying local economy. These white unionists shared a complicated relationship with local blacks, who also sought to defeat the Confederacy in order to claim freedom and citizenship rights in the United States. This paper, hence, traces the path to disunion in Jefferson County and the troubled attempts to reunify during the immediate aftermath of the war from the perspective of the largest population demographic in the county—albeit smaller than elsewhere in the South—the cultural conservatives like Beall. Beall’s words serve as some of the best surviving evidence of how most local whites felt toward the attempts to shatter slavery and how difficult it was for those whites to prevent its destruction.