I use the military march of Union general William Sherman during the American Civil War to estimate the effects of wartime violence and destruction on post-war voting behavior and personal identity. First, I examine how the march influenced the support for the Democrats throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Second, to proxy for the strength of Southern identity, I construct several variables from both historical and contemporary sources. These variables include the share of individuals likely named after famous Confederate generals, the relative frequency of streets likely named after Confederate figures, and the presence of Confederate monuments. The results show mostly small and statistically insignificant effects of the march on Democratic vote share. For some outcomes proxying for Southern identity, I find a significant positive effect; however, these results are not robust across different model specifications. Overall, the results suggest that Sherman's march did not have a transformative impact on the politics and personal identity in the US South. vii

The intent of this thesis is to examine white, rural women of the South who were directly affected by home demonstration between 1920 - 1950 and to discuss their roles as producers and consumers in the expanding market economy. Home demonstration, a three-tiered bureaucratic agency that provided domestic education and production techniques to Southern women, played a major role in guiding women toward the expanding market economy. Agents often had to temper their programs in order to compromise with the women they served to accommodate rural restrictions on capital, capability, and confidence. By integrating rural women into a more modernized, less isolated, and more urbanized environment, home demonstration hoped to improve the lives of women through its focus on sanitation, nutrition, and efficiency within household production.

The following thesis is concerned with the ways in which perceptions of crime and disease shaped knowledge about urban decline and structured demands for urban renewal projects in Richmond, Virginia between 1953 and 1964. By looking at the city's renters, landlords, public health officials, and local politicians, this thesis contains three arguments: first, advocates diagnosed economic decline through medical and criminal categories; secondly, if urban renewal's existential purpose was to correct the environmental determinants of social pathology, then the contest between renewal advocates and opponents defined an economically-delimited solution; lastly, renewal contained the basis for a strengthened post-war, post-Jim Crow Southern state a state whose most important prerogative was not the maintenance of race relations, but the protection of property and capital. This mode, the capitalist-interventionist mode of state formation is an alternative archetype for historians of the post-war South, implicates capitalist impulses as an accomplice in structuring racial domination, and not simply an extension of Southern barbarity and Jim Crow. The first chapter interrogates the ways in which renewal supporters appropriated knowledge about crime and disease to address urban decline, both its supposed causes and possible solutions. The second chapter focuses on how renewal advocates created competing market evaluations of pathology in Richmond's Seventeenth-Street Bottom, as they cleared the supposed slum to build the new city jail. The conclusion poses suggestions for further historical research on the categories of crime and disease and the relevance of Jim Crow. / History

Following the end of the Civil War, the revisionist myth of the Lost Cause spread over the South as an apologist narrative for white hegemony and slavery, which protected the former Confederate states from the devastating effects of their loss. Pro-Confederate organizations lobbied to replace real history with this collective memory of the South through education and memorialization. This national myth then served as a legitimization of white Southern nationalism that sought to restore white hegemony of the antebellum racial order. The white nationalist organization League of the South, whose goal is the second secession of the Southern states, embraces and manifests the ideology of the Lost Cause in its textual and audiovisual discourse and use of iconography. This discourse anchors their separatist intentions in the context of postwar collective memory, and aids the organization in the legitimization of their actions on the basis of revisionist history. The League derives its identity from this collective memory as the self-established white Southern ethnicity of Anglo-Celtic origin and the descendants of Founding Fathers as well as Confederate leaders. In doing so, the League identifies itself as the organization of true heirs of America stigmatized by the external aggression of the federal...

This MA thesis provides a close analysis of William Faulkner's most famous short story, "A Rose for Emily." The focus the thesis is motivated by what I take to be the central theme of the short story: community and its functioning. Shifting the focus from the main character to the narrator, I want to "rectify" the perception of the short story which owns its renown largely to its "shocking" or "gothic" aspect. The utilized methodology is chosen with respect to the proposed interpretation. The prism through which the text is approached is narratology. To account for the peculiar narrator of "A Rose for Emily," I use the narratological framework of "collective narrative" ("we narration"). Another important theoretical framework introduced in order to interpret the short story is the interdisciplinary concept of "collective memory." Some sociological conceptions of community are discussed. In the introductory chapter, I mainly discuss the concept of person in narrative and argue against the traditional distinction between first and third person narratives. In the second chapter, I provide an introduction to the technique of collective narrative. The third chapter provides a close reading of "A Rose for Emily" in the context of collective narrative. Firstly, I identify the narrator as essentially...

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind achieved massive literary success before being adapted into a motion picture of the same name in 1939. The novel and film have amassed numerous accolades, inspired frequent reissues, and sustained mass popularity. This dissertation analyzes evidence of audience reception in order to assess the effects of Gone with the Wind's version of Lost Cause collective memory on the construction of the Old South, Civil War, and Lost Cause in the American imagination from 1936 to 2016. By utilizing the concept of prosthetic memory in conjunction with older, still-existing forms of collective cultural memory, Gone with the Wind is framed as a newly theorized mass cultural phenomenon that perpetuates Lost Cause historical narratives by reaching those who not only identify closely with it, but also by informing what nonidentifying consumers seeking historical authenticity think about the Old South and Civil War. In so doing, this dissertation argues that Gone with the Wind is both an artifact of the Lost Cause collective memory that it, more than anything else, legitimized in the twentieth century and a multi-faceted site where memory of the South and Civil War is still created. My research is grounded in the field of memory studies, in particular the work of Pierre Nora, Eric Hobsbawn, Andreas Huyssen, Michael Kammen, and Alison Landsberg. In chapter one, I track the reception of Gone with the Wind among white American audiences and define the phenomenon as rooted in Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation. I further argue that Gone with the Wind's Lost Causism provided white national subjects with a collective memory of slavery and the Civil War that made sense of continuing racial tensions during Jim Crow and justified white resistance to African American equality. Gone with the Wind, in other words, reconciled the lingering ideological divisions between white northerners and southerners who then were more concerned with protecting white supremacy. In chapter two and three, I analyze Gone with the Wind's continuing popularity throughout the twentieth century and its significant influence on other sites of national memory. Chapter four uses contemporary user reviews of Gone with the Wind DVD and Blu-ray collector's editions to reveal that the phenomenon remains popular. Throughout this study I analyze the history of black resistance to the Gone with the Wind phenomenon. For African Americans, Gone with the Wind's Lost Causism has always been understood as justification for racism, imbuing the white national conscious with a mythological history of slavery and black inferiority. As I argue, black protestors to Gone with the Wind were correct, as the phenomenon has always resonated most during moments of increased racial tension such as during the civil rights era and following the Charleston Church Massacre in 2015. / Ph. D.

<p dir="ltr"><i>Conjure, Care, Calls, and Cauls</i> centers the histories of Black and southern conjuring midwives in life, lore, and literature. I argue that these conjuring midwives are practitioners of wholistic care who employ conjure work as a method to access wholeness. This avenue to access Black wholeness was intentionally disrupted by 20^th century physicians across the United States and the South. These physicians espoused <i>disabling racist rhetoric</i> to attack Black midwives’ bodies and beliefs as dangerous, casting them as unreliable and unsafe caregivers. Widely circulated in US medical journals, physicians articulated a national and regional “midwife problem” that led to the overwhelming removal of Black midwives from US medical care. This successful displacement of Black midwives by Western medicine and its physicians created and perpetuated what I name the <i>crazy conjure lady trope</i>, the disabling stereotype that considers the Black folk health practitioner or believer as crazy, insane, or otherwise unwell in Black women’s literature and lives. Using Black feminist literary criticism and a Black feminist disability framework, I consider Toni Cade Bambara’s <i>The Salt Eaters </i>(1981), Gloria Naylor’s <i>Mama Day </i>(1988), and Jesmyn Ward’s <i>Sing, Unburied, Sing </i>(2017) alongside Black midwives’ ethnographies and autobiographies to center and consider the Black southern conjuring midwife in Black women’s literature and US history.</p>

<p>This work looks at the intersections of nature, race, and spirituality in Black communities primarily situated in the United States from the early 20th century to the present day. These communties stories are interpreted through the Black women that lived in them, and their stories denote that Black folks' relationship with and amongst nature could not be had without spiritual praxes in their day-to-day lives. </p>