This thesis explores the absence of a Union monument at the Olustee Battlefield one hundred and fifty-five years after the battle concluded though this field has a number of Confederate monuments. Moreover, after the Battle of Olustee in February 1864, the largest battle of the Civil War fought on Florida soil, the victorious Confederates killed wounded African American soldiers left behind after the Union retreat. This thesis examines why Olustee battlefield became a place of Confederate memory, enshrining the Lost Cause within its monuments for well over a half of a century that consciously excluded any commemoration of the Union dead. The lack of proper commemoration to the costly Union sacrifices at Olustee comes as a surprise, since some of the Union dead still rest in a mass grave on the battlefield. They remain on this field because after the war, federal soldiers reburied the Olustee dead in a mass grave and erected a temporary memorial that marked their final resting place. This neglect contradicted War department policy that mandated that the reinterred Union dead be in separate graves and marked by individual permanent headstones. When the temporary monument marking their presence disappeared, this also erased the memory of their presence and their sacrifice from the Olustee landscape. This left room for champions of the Confederate Lost Cause - Southern, Confederate Civil War memory - like the United Daughters of Confederacy (UDC) to build monuments to the Confederate cause. In fact, these women worked actively to ensure that the Union dead were not memorialized, particularly the African American casualties. The UDC managed the site until 1949, when the State of Florida assumed control of those grounds. Seventy years of direct control by the state of Florida failed to make a difference in the landscape of memory at Olustee: the Union dead have no monument to commemorate their sacrifice. This thesis explores why the markers, monuments, and policies still honor the Lost Cause memory of the battle, even as the park services in charge of the site promote a reconciliationist narrative and the resurgence of Union memory, including the sacrifice of black US soldiers. Sources used include Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, meeting minutes of the UDC, newspaper articles, official documents from the Florida Division of Parks and Recreation, documents from the National Park Service, private correspondences, and state legislature bills.

This thesis traces the history of the abalone fisheries on the California Coast and how those fisheries have been understood and shaped by humans over time. An overarching interest that guides this effort is how indigenous populations used abalone and otters (as well as other marine resources) purposefully for millennia prior to European arrival. However, this work is not entirely focused on prehistory. Instead, it shows how a lack of understanding of this prehistory shaped the conservation efforts of the California Department of Fish and Game and its ultimate decision to close the commercial fishery in 1997. In this sense, there is a layer of this thesis that takes on the form of an institutional history of the California Department of Fish and Game, but it does so as a model of how management practices were developed and implemented during the twentieth century. In this frame, this thesis in also a history of twentieth century ecological and scientific practices that historicizes the closure of the commercial abalone fishery in 1997.

Dr. Steve Nash, Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State University, talks about many of the dynamics that emerged in Western North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era, with newly freed people gaining the right to vote, and emergence of tobacco as a cash crop to bolster local economies.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the quality of classroom instruction when a single criterion, the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) United States history assessment scores, was used to assess academic outcomes for students. Policy implementation research frequently fails to include an analysis of teaching practice. The goal of this study, then, was to explore current instructional practices among a selected group of four United States History teachers and search for patterns of practice as these teachers enacted the SOLs within the United States history curriculum. A participant evaluation research approach was used for data collection in this study. This study compared and contrasted the instructional improvement and accountability literatures and situated the implementation of the SOLs within the context of the accountability movement. It described controversies and concerns surrounding the United States History SOL Assessment. Using Duke's (1987) vision of teaching excellence as a theoretical frame for exploring instructional practice, the study portrayed how these four United States history teachers enacted the SOLs within their classrooms. Virginia's SOLs share common characteristics with other accountability efforts to influence public school curriculum and instructional practice. This study extended the literature on teachers' classroom instruction in the context of state policy reforms. Individual portraits organized by Duke's (1987) vision of teaching excellence present the instructional practices of these four teachers. Using these portraits the study establishes three patterns of response by the participants in their curricular practice: (a) failure to ensure curriculum alignment; (b) teacher-centered and lecture-based instruction; and (c) a focus on content to the exclusion of skills. Based upon these instructional practices and curricular patterns nine implications for teaching practice related to Duke's (1987) teaching categories are identified. / Ph. D.

Since its founding in the Progressive Era, public administration has focused most of its energy on the problem of executive agency administration. The study of the administration of the legislature as a distinct category of administration organization is a long-overdue step. Public administration has had “blinders” concerning the legislature. Thus even while it invokes “politics in bureaucracy,” it fails to give full breadth to the concept it has created. The task set forth for this study is to examine the distinctive administrative and management character of the legislature as a first step toward integrating its activities into a broader understanding of the inter-relationships among government institutions. Part I of this study provides a historical perspective by which to understand the legislative institution. Part I is divided into three chapters. The first analyzes the theoretical and political concepts which underlie the American legislature at the time of the founding of the nation. The second chapter examines the decline from prominence of the American legislature during the nineteenth century with particular attention given to the changing orientation that emerged during the Progressive Era. The final chapter of Part I explores the consequences of the decline of the legislature and the anti-politics and anti-legislative bias of public administration. Part II (Chapters Four through Seven) re-examines the organizational and political roles of the legislature. The first step is to create a confederated model of organization within which to study legislatures. The focus of Chapter Four is the presentation of the confederated model. Chapter Five examines the administrative and management consequences of such an organization. Chapter Six examines the political functions of the legislature with emphasis on how the model explicates those political functions. Chapter Seven examines the legislative function in the administrative processes of executive agencies. Part III represents a series of suggestions for future study that encompass four areas: theories of organization, theories of representation, legislative practice, and legislative-executive inter-relationships. / Ph. D.