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Baptist minister and author of novels, plays, sermons, and essays, Thomas Dixon, Jr. today remains most known as the storyteller behind the 1915 D. W. Griffith Film The Birth of a Nation. I argue that Thomas Dixon crafted a white supremacist rhetoric and narrative of modern whiteness indebted to the structures of Fundamentalist Christianity. With varying degrees of success, later writers struggled with the legacy the Dixonian cultural narrative bequeathed them.;Fundamentalist theology offered a whole host of tropes, metaphors, and arguments to its users. In short, Fundamentalism presented a rhetorical stance that was, in the hands of an ambitious and designing opportunist like Dixon, capable of being adapted for other purposes. Dixon structured his narrative of whiteness like a religion and drew the blueprints for that architecture from the Fundamentalist theology that he and his brother A. C. Dixon promulgated. That Fundamentalist mindset included consequential interpretations of the apocalypse that divided theological positions between premillennial and postmillennial points of view. Drawing on rhetorical analysis from Kenneth Burke, I analyze the ways Thomas Dixon crafted a blueprint for a revived Klan trained for constant surveillance of eschatological signs as a way to intervene and avoid the racial apocalypse he prophesied. Fundamentalist rhetoric and imagery provided Dixon tropes, arguments, and stirring icons that he could assimilate and incorporate into his vision of whiteness. This morality play for Dixon had some form of a threatening black man who menaced a pure white woman and called forth a white paladin of vengeance to be her savior. This savior then grouped all the men in the community in a white supremacist cult that would forestall the racial apocalypse Dixon worried would arrive. This study traces Dixon's creations, strategies, and eventual failure at dressing his white supremacy in religious robes.;Far more than being a study of one author, this project ranges beyond Dixon himself to his impact on a surprisingly wide range of twentieth-century cultural texts and artifacts, including film. From the immediate response from writers like Charles Chesnutt, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and W. E. B. Du Bois to the epic engagements of William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell, Dixon's legacy has involved several writers in its wake. Ultimately the rise and fall of Thomas Dixon's version of white supremacy offers a view of America's racial and sexual obsessions and the rhetoric bestowed by white Protestantism through which to articulate and structure those obsessions into narratives and social formations designed to consolidate and preserve whiteness. Any view of the Dixonian narrative that treats it as a freakish aberration ignores the centrality and popularity that it enjoyed at its height, and such a view would risk misunderstanding the forces that shaped such a damaging vision, one that inspired the second Ku Klux Klan and codified the symbol of the burning cross. Religion and racism run throughout the cultural and literary history of the United States, but they were never so infamously mingled and menacingly deployed than in the writings of Thomas Dixon.

This study is an ethnohistorical examination of Indian religious responses to contact with Euroamericans on the Columbia Plateau, from 1600 to 1850. Plateau natives understood their encounter with European civilization primarily as a momentous spiritual event, and sought new sources of spiritual power to cope with their rapidly changing world. White people seemed to the Indians to have an abundance of spirit power, and many native religious efforts were aimed at capturing some of this power for themselves. These efforts included the protohistoric Prophet Dance, the syncretic "Columbian Religion" of the fur trade era, and the initial enthusiastic response to the first Christian missionaries on the Plateau. Each of these attempts was marked by great enthusiasm at first, and each was abandoned with bitter disappointment as the material condition of the natives worsened. By 1850, most Indians had abandoned the idea that the spirit power of the white people could ever be accessed by themselves, and new religious impulses took the form of nativist movements which sought to purge the natives of white influences.;Because both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries were active on the Plateau, I also compare the conversion efforts of the two faiths. to native eyes, the cultural flexibility, language skills, impressive ceremonies, and superior organizational structure of the Catholics compared favorably to the stem and incomprehensible doctrines of the Protestants. But in both cases most Indians accepted Christian doctrines only as a supplement, and not as a replacement of native beliefs. True converts proved rare before the reservation period.

Bound together across lines of color and lass, Nantucket and New Bedford residents pursued the unique economic opportunities presented by whaling during the nineteenth century. Whaling was becoming a major industrial enterprise with few available options to fulfill the labor needs required for the whaling crews, ropewalks, blacksmith shops, and sail lofts that made it possible for Nantucket and New Bedford whaleships to transit the globe. Whaling thus generated the jobs that made it possible for free black communities to thrive. People of color consequently turned the need for labor to their advantage. Drawn by the financial opportunities that the whaling industry offered, people of color were able to do much more than break the bonds of impoverishment. Side by side with white activists, many people of color channeled their energy toward advancing the cause of freedom and equality.;Black abolitionism included much more of the community than the few black leaders who have long received credit as the driving forces of abolitionism in antebellum America. Free people of color in Nantucket and New Bedford lived out on a daily basis the truth that freedom did not necessarily imply equality in nineteenth-century America. Living in separate worlds carved out of shared communities, people of color in Nantucket and New Bedford joined with white activists during the 1800s to seek a new birth of freedom. How race relations, class divisions, religion, and economic conditions unique to the maritime economy of Nantucket and New Bedford drove the struggle for change lies at the center of this story.

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In recent years, the field of comparative history has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as scholars attempt to understand the past in a global context. This study examines the early period of English exploration of the Atlantic world and the confrontation of English men and women with natives of geographically distinct regions. By comparing English interactions with Russians, West Africans, and North and South Americans during the contact period, this dissertation argues that the mutually constructed dialogue between the visiting English and the natives of each region was a struggle for power and control. In their efforts to construct the natives as being both recognizable and inferior, the English utilized contemporary notions of class and gender not only to understand the people they encountered, but as a strategy to make the natives submissive.;While the English noted that the natives of each region had different skin color, notions of racial hierarchy were not fixed in the sixteenth century. In fact, the English were more threatened by similarity than by difference during their early encounters. Convinced that they were a unique and superior people, the discovery of Russia as a distorted image of English society was cause for great consternation among the English visitors. In an effort to distance themselves from the apparently barbarous Russians, the English suggested that despite their outward signs of "civility," the Russian people had a fundamental flaw that allowed them to accept tyranny and oppression.;Despite their belief in the superiority of their society, the English focus on economic matters above all else during the first-contact period forced them to act within the parameters of native cultures. Not only did the English have to come to terms with the demands of unfamiliar environments, but they often had to meet the demands of native peoples. Natives in each region held considerable power based on their military prowess and their monopoly on local trade and information about the area. as vital allies, trading partners, and informants, the natives recognized their power and manipulated the English visitors at every opportunity.

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In 1922, Virginia's General Assembly created a Motion Picture Censorship Board, which viewed every movie seeking legal exhibition in Virginia until 1965. This cultural regulation of popular culture complemented other economic and political policies of the state designed to buttress the power of white, middle-to-upper class elites within the state. to this end, the censors, empowered by the authority of the state, were particularly concerned with regulating certain images of African Americans and female sexuality on-screen.;Yet the process of censorship was a contested, fluid practice, and individuals and community groups protested formal censorship decisions. Furthermore, filmmakers whose films were not allowed to play in the state often took more covert methods to get their films show. African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux continually worked with theater owners to get his officially censored fare shown to Black communities despite a state ban against them. While censorship decisions, despite contestation, stood unimpeded in the 1920s and 1930s, by the end of the World War II, many Virginians no longer accepted the cultural authority afforded the censorship board. A wide variety of groups protested the board's censorship of the anti-Klan film The Burning Cross in 1947.;With rising civil rights protests, waning movie profits, and federal court decisions which continually expanded First Amendment protections to the movies, the work of the censorship board was continually constricted until, by the early 1960s, the censors only had the legal authority to censor ambiguously-labeled "obscenity" from the screen. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "a priori" censorship which determines whether a movie is or is not suitable prior to its exhibition, was unconstitutional. as a result, Virginia's censorship board disbanded, and the General Assembly officially dissolved it in early 1966. Virginia's moviegoers enjoyed a brief interlude in which most any material could be found on some theater screens, including the hardcore pornographic film Deep Throat (1972). In 1973, however, the U.S. Supreme Court returned jurisdiction over such material to local authorities in the Miller v. California ruling. Thus film and other cultural offerings could be deemed acceptable in some locales yet forbidden in others.

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The purpose of my thesis research was to transcribe a collection of letters to John H. Crawford about the formation and actions of the Sixtieth Tennessee Infantry (Confederate) in Jonesboro during the Civil War, annotate them, and provide an introduction that details the events and people described in the letters. These letters are important because they describe first-hand the process of formation of this Confederate infantry unit in an area of East Tennessee that predominately supported the Union. The letters themselves can be found in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University’s Charles C. Sherrod Library.