This thesis is a study of famous ships and how they influenced American history.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study explores the intersection of the developments in the growing advertising, railroad, and automotive sectors of the U.S. economy. It examines the latter two sectors’ advertising to the elite by focusing on how industries that targeted the luxury market used fine art to emphasize and underscore the exceptionalism of that high-end market compared with the mass market. It does so by looking at the transition from using art as a decorative component unrelated to the product to using art specifically designed to advertise a product or experience. In the literature, advertising history has been delineated rather narrowly as the history of advertising to the mass consumer or as the history of advertising a specific type of product. This work broadens the focus in advertising history to show that luxury advertisers, as a sub-category of advertisers, developed particular advertising strategies, which recognized and exploited the relationship between their respective service or product, and a consciously selected audience for their respective advertisements. It shows that high art became a differentiating characteristic of advertising strategies aimed at the social elite market. This work also proposes the need for adding a specific timeline for the development of luxury advertising to the broad, more generally known outline of advertising history.

This is a historical study of the intersection of political economy with natural resources management, as played out on the national forests between 1945-1991. Specifically, it focuses on two core national forest management policies; sustained yield and multiple use. These two policy directives represent an attempt by the public and elected officials to apply principles of sustainable development to publicly-owned forest lands, and to ensure that a wide variety of both market and nonmarket forest values are preserved for the benefit of present and future generations. Interest groups, the Forest Service, and policy makers have conceived of sustained yield and multiple use in different and evolving ways over the years. This study explores how these principles have been variously defined and either implemented or thwarted. After World War Two, with escalating demands on national forest resources, the U.S. Forest Service turned to "intensive management" as a technological method of enhancing natural forest productivity and mitigating the environmental effects of increased use. But the agency's optimistic vision of efficient, sustained production of forest commodities through technical mastery over nature has met overwhelming fiscal, environmental, technical, and political obstacles. Nevertheless, agency leaders, industry advocates, and politicians have consistently promulgated an optimistic faith that intensive applications of labor, capital, and technology can maximize and harmonize multiple uses, rehabilitate damaged resources, and sustain high levels of outputs in perpetuity--despite repeated failures to achieve balanced multiple use management and to manage grazing and timber extraction at sustainable levels. The conspiracy of optimism ideologically justifies continued unsustainably high levels of resource extraction. Changing public values since the 1960s and the popularization of ecology have initiated a growing skepticism toward the premises of intensive management. At the same time, field level forest managers have grown frustrated with top-down imposition of resource production quotas and the lack of adequate political, fiscal, and organizational support for sound forest management. As the last old growth forests fall to the chainsaw, and as the federal subsidies required to access these remote timber stands on the national forests escalate, public controversy deepens. In this decade of the national forest centennial a revolt of conscience has erupted among grassroots Forest Service personnel, and a strong challenge from the environmental community has gained momentum. Another major period of policy evaluation and revision appears to be taking place. Whether the conspiracy of optimism can continue to sustain the old status quo is questionable.

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Polarization forced massive changes in the institutions of Washington throughout the 20th century, and the Democratic Party played a key role throughout. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party formed the powerful New Deal coalition. The coalition faltered in the turbulent 1960s under the pressures of the Vietnam War and racial unrest. The chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago dealt the coalition a mortal wound. Young voters and activists gained an outsized voice in the party. Several crushing defeats in presidential elections followed as the party chose unelectable candidates who appealed to the passions of left-wing activists and interests. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the nomination and forced the party back to the center. Clinton’s success, however, drove the Republican Party further right as its efforts to destroy Clinton grew increasingly obsessive. The cumulative effect has been an increase in polarization and the weakening of institutions in Washington.

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how a well developed and validated national standard for United States history can affect public school achievement levels. Currently, there is no mandated national standard for United States history; rather it has been left to the respective states to create their own. This study focused on the state of Virginia, which has been able to meet both the nationally mandated adequate yearly progress (AYP) level, and achieve high proficiency levels in United States history achievement. This comparative case study examined two neighboring states of similar demographics: Virginia which made both the AYP and high history achievement, and a southern U.S. state which did not meet either the AYP or acceptable history scores. Archival data included achievement levels as assessed by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test scores in U.S. history for both states, and State of the State (SOS) national assessments of state history standards. It was hypothesized that there would be a correlation between well established and vetted standards and achievement levels. Sequential analyses employing Pearson correlations and Somers' D tests of association demonstrated significant correlations between SOS standards and NAEP achievement scores. These results can contribute to positive social change by informing research based decision making related to best practice standards for U.S. history curricula that will increase student achievement levels, and provide a more common curricular foundation from which supporting resources can be developed and shared to offset reductions in education budgets.

The Alternative Education movement in American public education emerged in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the social criticism and political activism of the 1960s. Alternative Schools represented the pragmatic adoption of the least objectionable proposals which were popularized by radical school reform advocates. What began as a movement of alternatives to conventional schooling became a movement of widening options within public school systems.This study is an anaylsis of the historical roots and evolution of Alternative Education. A broad perspective is structured first by a theoretical discussion of public schooling and social reform which includes a historiographical interpretation of New Left revisionism. Next a description of selected parts of the radical movement of the 1960s is related to the political and intellectual context of school reform. This part of the study focuses on the social and intellectual origins of young radicals and the structure and ideology of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) as illustrations.A discussion of the rhetoric of radical school reform is the next part of the evolutionary framework structured in this study. The central themes of selected spokesmen of the radical critique of public schooling, including Paul Goodman and John Holt, are briefly examined. Then the relationship between the rhetoric of radical school reform and the development of private free schools is described in the context of the political activism and intellectual radicalism of the 1960s. The progression is completed with a broad assessment of the Alternative Education movement which examines its origins in the 1960s, its popularization in the 1970s, and its evolution from radical reform to political pragmatism.Finally, a case study of an Alternative school-within-a-school, Learning Unlimited at North Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, illustrates the conclusions of this study and demonstrates the theoretical problems. The description of Learning Unlimited is based on observations, interviews with participants, documents, and involvement in program evaluation. The emphasis is on the role of Learning Unlimited as a model-program designed to demonstrate and encourage educational innovation.York

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