Excerpt: Fredericksburg buzzed with excitement on 29 August 1862. The end of four months of federal occupation was imminent, and the town’s mostly pro-Confederate residents rejoiced over the rumored approach of soldiers in gray. Around 5 p.m., a panicked horseman sped through the town’s dirt roads to the home of James W. Hunnicutt, a forty-seven-year-old Baptist minister and newspaper editor whose stern features, wrinkled brow, and graying hair lent to an already strong physical resemblance to abolition zealot John Brown. Both Hunnicutt and his friend knew that the restoration of Confederate control meant trouble for the clergyman. Hastily, the editor gathered what few items he could carry and left his wife and children. Elvira Samuel Hunnicutt promised to “pray constantly” for her husband without knowing when—or if—she might see him again. Few of his white neighbors shared her concern. Men and women, even children, shouted “Traitor!”, “Abolitionist!”, “Submissionist!” as Hunnicutt and roughly fifty other residents fled across a temporary bridge with the retreating Federals [...]

Review of: Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South. By Susanna Michele Lee. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 270. Cloth, $95.00.). Excerpt: Susanna Michele Lee’s Claiming the Union sheds new light on something we thought we already knew. Lee examines the records of the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), the post–Civil War congressional commission tasked with assessing southerners’ claims for lost and damaged property, and interprets them differently from many scholars before her. The SCC records are a staple of Civil War loyalty scholarship, casting significant light on southerners marginalized or silenced by the Lost Cause’s facade of white unity. Claiming the Union is not another attempt to glean every last hint of wartime loyalty out of postwar records. Lee successfully places the wartime struggles over loyalty and citizenship in the SCC’s proper Reconstruction context. This placement of the SCC squarely within the Reconstruction era is insightful in and of itself. But Lee offers much more than that; she argues that the process embedded in the SCC’s direct engagement with southern civilians informed a “vernacular citizenship” that shaped postemancipation American citizenship (7). The overall result is a thoughtful and effective book that enriches our understanding of the complex nature of postemancipation American citizenship [...]

Review of: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. By R. Scott Huffard Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 324.) Excerpt: Generations of scholars have debated the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the South’s transition from “Old” to “New.” Railroads are a critical part of this story of industrial transformation, and they are the focus of [End Page 56] R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. Building on a current historiographical reassessment of the capitalistic nature of the pre–Civil War South, Huffard sees the railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s as an expansion of earlier practices. In the post-Reconstruction South, railroads served as tangible capitalist development that Huffard analyzes in some unique ways. Moving beyond track mileage and corporate ledger books, Huffard blends top down sources like political correspondence, company records, and newspapers with “mentalities, mores, and stories” to show how the South embraced the capitalist ethos of the railroad while utilizing the region’s deep-rooted racial hierarchies to paper over capitalism’s more destructive elements [...]

<p>Between 1964 and 1975, approximately 7,500 to 11,000 American military women served in the Vietnam War. They served in many roles – they worked as air traffic controllers, dieticians, physiotherapists, clerks, and cryptographers – but the bulk of American women who went to Vietnam served as military nurses with the Army, Navy, and Air Force Nurse Corps. This dissertation explores the wartime and homecoming experiences of female nurse veterans whose Vietnam experiences have been largely ignored or minimized by historical accounts of the war. By refashioning the narrative of the war to include women, this study challenges cultural constructions of war as an exclusively male sphere, and in doing so offers a more sophisticated understanding of both men’s and women’s Vietnam service.</p> <p>In Vietnam, American women risked their lives for their country. Motivated by a blend of patriotism, humanitarianism, professional advancement, and educational opportunity, female nurses volunteered for war at a time when many young men sought to evade military service. Yet the women who served have been consistently denied the rewards of their sacrifice. After the war, sexist attitudes about who is eligible for the privileges which accompany military service led the VA to routinely deny veterans entitlements including health care and disability pensions to female military nurses. Efforts to memorialize the war, through their focus on male veterans’ experience, relegated women’s service in Vietnam to the periphery of public memory. Based primarily on oral history interviews with 29 female military nurses who served in the war, this dissertation reveals women’s agency through an exploration of their responses to these and other gendered challenges associated with their military service, and exposes the connection between public memory and women’s access to the benefits bestowed upon martial citizens.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A history of tobacco and its use by the Indians of South, Central, and North America is discussed and its gradual spread of use to Spain, England, and the Continent is given. The formation of a monopoly by James B. Duke in establishing the American Tobacco Company, and the price policies, product differentiation, and advertising expenditures used in the development of the Trust is discussed. The Sherman and Clayton Anti-trust Acts are presented and their use in the dissolution of the trust and the establishment of an oligopoly are covered extensively. The Lexington, Kentucky Case of 1940-1946 shows the tobacco industry again prosecuted by the government for conspiracy in restraint of trade, monopoly, and attempts to monopolize resulting in a decision against the eight companies indicted and the assessment of fines totaling $255,000. The companies developed business practices after this trial that would enable them to stay within the letter of the law and have successfully avoided prosecution from 1946 to 1962. The current financial positions of the major tobacco companies is given and the long-run prospects of the tobacco industry are those of gradual growth and expansion based on an increase in population and the growth of national income as regard domestic sales and expansion of foreign trade by nearly all of the major producers. Finally, some general observations concerning monopoly and oligopoly are given and their relationship to the tobacco industry as a whole are explained. / Master of Science

In this thesis I describe a period in the Hubble Space Telescope's history during which a relatively small number of astronomers worked to encourage their colleagues to support the telescope project. I analyze astronomers' behavior in terms of the various problems which they faced. I argue that astronomical community came to support the project in part because the telescope's advocates succeeded in separating technological issues from economic ones. I also suggest that separating these two kinds of issues may have contributed to the circumstances which led to the telescope's well-publicized defects. / Master of Science

The behavior of the term structure of interest rates in government bonds parallels that of the behavior in high-grade corporate bonds. Previous studies have demonstrated that there are synchronous changes in different maturities in high-grade corporate bonds. Results of statistical tests and measurements of the term structure in U.S. Treasury obligations are compared with previous studies to confirm that the behavior of the yield curve, from the mid-1950's until the 1970's, is consistent with previous norms that there are synchronous changes in all maturities but that there has been an increase in the relative sensitivity of changes in longer term rates since the 1970's per unit change in the short term rates. Generally, all maturities move in the same direction with intermediate and long term rates more synchronous than shorter term rates. Changes in rates are highly correlated across all maturities, but intermediate and short term rates are somewhat more highly correlated with each other than with long term rates. Also, there is a general tendency for relative volatility to vary inversely with maturity. However, there was an increase in the relative volatility of longer term rates in the 1970's and 1980's. The results are generally consistent with Meiselman's earlier findings for high grade corporate bonds between 1900 and 1954, except for the more recent increase in the volatility of long term U.S. Treasury bonds. / Master of Arts

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2001. / "February 2001." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-248). / Combining aesthetic theory with theories of the public sphere, this dissertation examines the brief appearance of a publicly empathetic civic realm in the United States during the 1940s. The argument begins with a reevaluation of the debate over monumentality initiated in modernist architectural circles, which included such figures as Sigfried Giedion, Lewis Mumford, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Philip Johnson. Centering on the city, this debate recast monumentality in terms more progressive than commemorative; it posited open-ended architectural and urban strategies that offered a non-restrictive yet sympathetic public resonance. If empathy is understood as the viewer's physical and psychological engagement with an object, then the 'publicly empathetic' collects and communicates the public 's individualized engagements. The term 'publicly empathetic' underscores the distinction between totalitarian consensus, exemplified by the modernism of Mussolini's fascist Italy, and what Alexis de Tocqueville identified in 1835 as America's collective individualism, which persisted in the 1940s under the umbrella of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Springboarding from Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer's philosophies of symbolic form as unconsummated symbol, I argue that the modernism of this period did not define the public but rather expressed architecture's publicness through the recasting of form, programming, and modernism's public mandate. The chapters of this dissertation examine in turn the texts, projects and urbanism of this empathetic modernism. The projects constituting this realm are both public and private in nature; they include Charles Franklin and ... / by Sarah Whiting. / Ph.D.

The purpose of this research was to describe the relationship and to compare the programming of major Christian ministries during the first decade of Christian television. A historical perspective was the method used in identifying and explaining the events and activities that constituted Christian television from 1949 to 1959. The results of the research concluded that Christian television began at a time of social trauma, unrest, and confusion in America. Competition for a viewing audience was not a factor. Leading personalities presented themselves as independent thinkers who also saw themselves as "preachers" with a strong desire to succeed. Motivation was provided by a sense of "dominion" that emerged from the Great Awakenings within the churches of America that became a driving force in the first three decades of this century.