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This study re-examines the Great Red Scare that followed the First World War in an effort to more accurately determine its origins, tactics, duration, and conclusion. Specifically, it analyzes the efforts of the Lusk Committee, New York State's joint legislative committee to combat radicalism, between 1919 and 1923.;Prior studies agree that the Red Scare was intense and brief in duration. Physical raids upon Socialist Party, Communist Party, and Industrial Workers of the World offices dominated the episode, culminating with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's infamous national raids in January, 1920. His heavy-handed tactics, which failed to uncover any serious revolutionary threat, awoke many Americans to the ridiculous nature of the hysteria. Tired of years of reform, war, and government witch hunts, the public turned a deaf ear to Palmer's warnings and embarked upon the carefree Jazz Age of the 1920s.;Recent evidence suggests that the Red Scare did not truly end in January, 1920, though. The Lusk Committee in New York State continued to investigate and antagonize radicals until 1923, and in the process introduced new tactics and targets that established precedents for future waves of political repression in America. Following moderately successful raids upon the Soviet Bureau, the Rand School of Social Science, and communist and socialist meeting rooms and publishing facilities, the Lusk Committee adopted new tactics to combat the radical threat, specifically courtroom proceedings and subsequently legislation. The committee also shifted its focus entirely to education, urging and attaining the passage of laws requiring loyalty oaths from public school teachers and state licensing for private schools.;Eventually, as New Yorkers came to understand the threat that such laws posed to fundamental civil liberties such as free speech, the popularity of the Lusk Committee began to fade. When Governor Alfred Smith signed the repeal measures, the Red Scare truly came to a close. However, subsequent episodes of political repression standardized the new tactics and focus introduced by the Lusk Committee, indicating the importance of their endeavors.

This dissertation examines the people who brokered cultural exchange among the various groups in and around Georgia from 1733--1765. Populating the territory were Europeans, Indians, and Africans who interacted frequently with one another despite disparate cultural traits. Cultural brokers not only brought members of each society together but did so in a manner that allowed the groups to achieve a level of understanding that would have been otherwise impossible.;The project concentrates on four categories of cultural brokers: Indian traders, military personnel, missionaries, and the Indians themselves. Members of each of these groups played critical roles as intermediaries between the natives and the newcomers. In addition to directing the material exchange between the two groups, they conveyed ideological values and diplomatic information as well. Cultural brokers served as interpreters, escorts, and emissaries. They relayed messages, invitations, and military intelligence. They explained one side to the other, interpreting language, protocol, and meanings. They consequently had an invaluable effect on maintaining positive relations between the Indians and the colonists during Georgia's first thirty years.;All of these mediators lived and worked on the frontier, but that does not mean that they were on the fringe of society. In fact, Georgia's cultural brokers enjoyed a favored position, respected for their abilities to move between Indian and colonial worlds. They were equally comfortable in each society and were fully accepted by both.

This dissertation examines the creation and evolution of the agricultural economy and labor relations of South Texas from the late Nineteenth Century to the Nineteen Sixties. The changing demographic reality of Mexico, with massive population shifts northward during the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, caused massive emigration to the United States once the violence of the Mexican Revolution erupted after 1910. Hundreds of thousands fled north of the border, most of them traveling to South Texas. This migration wave out of Mexico met another group of migrants traveling from the Southeast and Midwest who sought to purchase farm land in South Texas as the region underwent a transition from ranching to agriculture.;A new regime of labor and racial relations emerged from these simultaneous migrations, built on a system of social and residential segregation, continued migration from Mexico, and seasonal immobilization of workers. While this system never stopped the mobility of the Mexican and Mexican American populations of South Texas, it did allow the region to continue paying the lowest wages in the nation even as production and profits soared. Agricultural interests in the rest of the country were not long in taking notice, and began recruiting workers from South Texas by the thousands during the Nineteen Twenties after immigration from Europe had slowed down following the passage of restrictive immigration legislation in 1917, 1921, and 1924.;The South Texas model of labor relations then went national during the era of the Bracero Program from 1942-1964. Originally meant to be an emergency contract labor program between the United and Mexico during World War II, it morphed into a method by which growers could replicate the labor market conditions of South Texas, with basic rights of choice, mobility, and citizenship disregarded in favor of cheap and easily exploitable foreign labor.;Throughout the Twentieth Century, in other words, South Texas has not been a peripheral, backward region with little importance for the rest of the nation. Instead, the rest of the nation has followed in the footsteps of South Texas.

On the afternoon of March 8, 1862, the Confederate ironclad ram Virginia, built upon the burned-out hulk of the steam screw frigate Merrimack, crawled slowly into Hampton Roads to challenge the Union blockade of the Confederate coastline. Before nightfall, the Virginia had wreaked havoc upon the Union blockading fleet: the USS Cumberland lay at the bottom of the Roads, her flags still defiantly flying while the surrendered USS Congress blazed ominously in the harbor until exploding spectacularly in the early morning hours of March 9.;The USS Monitor---a vessel of a radical new design and completely untried in battle---arrived too late to make a difference on the 8th, but met the Virginia on the morning of the 9th in a contest that signaled the first time ironclad had met ironclad in combat. While their four-and-a-half-hour battle ended in a draw, it changed much of the future course of naval warfare. Within days of the engagement, navies around the world were declaring an end to wooden construction and moving forward with their own ironclad building programs--many of which predated both the Monitor and the Virginia. Furthermore, the Monitor's rotating gun turret design freed vessels from the strictures of broadside tactics by allowing the guns, rather than the entire vessel, to be turned, and ushered in a new element of battleship design.;Neither the Virginia nor the Monitor lived out that year, however. The Virginia was destroyed in May of 1862 by her own crew to keep her from enemy hands, while the Monitor succumbed to a nor'easter on New Year's Eve off the coast of Cape Hatteras.;Discovered in 1973, the Monitor was designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1975 under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since 1987, The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, VA has served as the principal repository for artifacts recovered from the wrecksite and is currently conserving over 210 tons of the Union ironclad in the Batten Conservation Complex.;This dissertation serves as the text for the catalogue of the award-winning exhibition, Ironclad Revolution, which opened at The Mariners' Museum in 2007. The author serves as curator of the USS Monitor Center. Drawing from artwork, archival material and the recovered artifacts themselves, this work seeks to tell the full story of the Monitor: her history, discovery, recovery, and conservation.

Artisans played an important role in the social and economic life of Rowan County, North Carolina beginning with its creation in 1753. Whether they came individually with their families to obtain land and establish new lives, or they were chosen by the Moravian Church to settle the 100,000 acre Wachovia Tract, all of these artisans were part of the huge wave of immigration to the backcountry of North Carolina which occurred during the third quarter of the eighteenth century.;The development of the artisan population paralleled the growth of Rowan County. In the early 1750s a handful of artisans produced objects that the small groups of settlers needed to survive and create new lives in the backcountry. Blacksmiths, weavers, tailors, tanners, and saddlers made clothes, shoes, saddles, and ironware for backcountry inhabitants; and millwrights and carpenters built structures which helped Rowan County develop.;As more people poured into the county (which consisted of the northwest quadrant of the colony) so did more artisans. Hatters, joiners, masons, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, wagonmakers, potters and gunsmiths joined the expanding community of craftspeople. Simultaneously, improvements and growth in the road and ferry system increased the range of local trade networks all the way to the coast, and across the Atlantic Ocean. While backcountry residents once looked to Cross Creek, Charles Town, or London, to fill their desire for conspicuous consumption, local silversmiths, cabinetmakers, gunstockers, and watchmakers came to fill their needs. Public and private accounts record artisans making raised paneled room interiors, silver shoe buckles, fancy beaver hats, walnut tables and chests of drawers, and fancy riding chairs for a demanding clientele.;No other studies of Rowan County or the North Carolina backcountry have focused on the artisans of that region. Research in the county's court records, apprentice bonds, deeds, and wills, as well as extant invoices and account books, indicates that artisans played a significant role in increasing the quality of life in backcountry North Carolina. The presence of artisans and the availability of their products in Rowan County shows that inhabitants of the backcountry did not always live "in the most slovenly manner" described by many historians.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the lives, accomplishments, and struggles of the black community in Norfolk, Virginia, between the years of 1861 and 1884, from the black perspective.;The integration of documents with statistics to uncover the mentalite of blacks is the focus of this study's research. The black community of this period was not always reactive, but active in determining its own fate. Even during slavery, Norfolk's blacks took an active role in their destiny through participation in the Underground Railroad.;This study suggests that blacks strove diligently to work with, and in some cases, conciliate, the white oligarchy. Unfortunately, their efforts met with resistance and defeat. Despite these difficulties, the black community pulled together to assist its members as the whites unified to subjugate them.;The results of the investigation suggest that had blacks continued to be politically active, Norfolk would have had an economically prosperous black community. Instead, the introduction of Jim Crow laws served to oppress blacks economically and produce a sense of hopelessness, socially and politically.

This study chronicles the change in the foreign policy views of the National Farmers Union brought about by U.S. involvement in the Korean War. Abandoning its poignant criticisms of President Truman's earlier Cold War initiatives, the nation's foremost liberal agrarian organization embraced not only American actions in Korea but on a larger scale administration attempts to further what Henry Luce termed the "American Century." This policy reversal created a rift between the national organization and various state and regional branches. The Iowa and Northeastern divisions in particular objected to the shift as a surrender of principle and as a capitulation to the corporate-military domination of American society that threatened the already declining status of the family farmer. These wayward affiliates became Cold War casualties when the Farmers Union revoked their charters for their failure to endorse American activities in Korea. Yet, the national organization's complete about-face on American foreign policy made it, too, a casualty of the Cold War.;This study is based on a wide variety of governmental and private sources, including the newly deposited papers of Iowa Farmers Union president Fred W. Stover. It argues that America's "preponderance of power" following the Second World War led not only to a spreading of the American dream abroad but also to a remolding of political and economic relations on the homefront. The early post-war period became, in the words of President Truman, "the years when the cold war began to overshadow our lives." American priorities gave precedence to increased military budgets, which consumed non-defense related spending and strengthened ties between the military and corporations eager to play a role in shaping the world in the American Image. Organizations such as the Farmers Union initially rejected these goals as antithetical to American tradition and as damaging to their own desires for equity within American society. Political and social pressures, however, brought about an eventual acquiescence in the new American priorities and repudiation for groups and individuals unwilling to accept the Cold War as a way of life.

Anticatholicism in the early modern, English-speaking world was far more than a crude prejudice. Instead, anticatholic ideas and rhetoric provided an important stimulus for public discussion of a wide range of theological, political, economic, and social issues. Hatred of the Catholic Church was a vital factor in the early development of the public sphere in the English Empire.;The question of English, Protestant identity was central to much of the discourse that took place in the public sphere. Although all participants in this discourse agreed about certain elements of what constituted "popery" and English Protestantism, there was wide disagreement about other aspects of both ideal, English, Protestant identity, and of the Catholic "Other" against which that identity was measured. From the sixteenth century on, competing groups in the English-speaking world manipulated the attack on "popery" in order to promote their own ideal vision of English Protestantism.;This dissertation explores the anticatholic rhetoric of certain individuals and sets of individuals in England and the English colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to discover how these men used anticatholic rhetoric to promote their own agendas. This study is not an exhaustive survey of all variants of Anglo-American antipopery between the Reformation and the American Revolution. Rather, the intention here is to develop a new approach to the study of anticatholicism: anticatholic rhetoric can be analyzed to reveal the existence of competing discourses about Anglo-American identity.;The particular discourses analyzed in this dissertation reveal anxieties about the development of modern political and economic institutions in the English-speaking world. John Foxe represented the Catholic Church as an overpowerful, secular bureaucracy, intruding into the lives of private individuals. Many eighteenth-century authors portrayed Catholicism as a faith that fostered ruthless competition for material gain. These attacks on the Catholic Church as an institution that fostered modernization suggest that many English and colonial Protestants identified themselves with a society of autonomous, local communities, that social scientists label "traditional".