<p> This dissertation examines two radically different political projects in Argentina as moments in a dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution. The short-lived, progressive Peronist government of 1973 sought to construct a more egalitarian and democratic society, addressing social inequalities while fomenting political mobilization. In response, the last and most violent military dictatorship (1976&ndash;1983) aimed at suppressing social antagonisms and the perceived excesses of mass democracy. In each case, education was a means to form citizens suitable to a specific conception of society. Therefore, each political project can be understood with special clarity through an examination of civic education and pedagogic reforms. The progressive Peronist government encouraged students to participate in exploring and addressing social inequalities to bring about social justice. The dictatorship was counterrevolutionary insofar as it put forth an ideological project without precedent in previous military regimes that aimed not simply at preserving the status quo ante but at founding a new society. In order to do so, it sought to eradicate &ldquo;subversion&rdquo; and to form spiritually minded, obedient, and individualistic citizens through a broad schooling reform. Based on both archival research and oral history, this dissertation sheds light on the political uses of education, on the Cold War dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America, and on the centrality of social antagonisms for our understanding of authoritarianism. </p>

<p> Saint Frances Orphan Asylum and Saint Elizabeth Home were institutions in post-bellum Baltimore for African American orphans. Saint Frances Orphan Asylum was founded and managed by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first community of women religious of African origin. The Franciscan Sisters, whose order originated in England, directed Saint Elizabeth&rsquo;s Home. As Catholic institutions, the orphanages received support, albeit in differing levels, from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. This study investigated the two institutions and their place in the Catholic Church. Primary source documents from the Oblate Sisters of Providence Archive and the Franciscan Sisters of Baltimore Archive form the basis for this dissertation. An analysis of those documents, and others, reveals that race and gender were critical factors in Catholic support of the two institutions. Saint Elizabeth Home, run by a white order of nuns, received a great deal more backing, both financial and political, than did Saint Frances Orphan Asylum. Support for the Oblates and their institution varied depending upon the leadership of the church at a particular time and the personal beliefs.</p>

This dissertation explores the high water mark of southern resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: the five-year abolition of public education in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Through interrogating the "culture of civility" that guided this bureaucratic, legalistic strategy of defiance, it argues that both massive resistance and the unique trajectory of events in Prince Edward County are not the anomalies in Virginia history that state boosters suggest, but rather logically consistent outgrowths of a coherent political tradition known as "the Virginia Way." When blacks chose to step outside of the traditional channels of "managed race relations," white Virginians struck back in a manner consistent with their determination to maintain white supremacy without condoning a rise in vigilantism that might have threatened elites' control over the mechanisms of political power. It highlights the important role played by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in bolstering community institutions, lobbying for federal intervention in the crisis, serving the educational and social needs of the out-of-school children, and building the capacity of local community members to take on leadership roles in the struggle. It characterizes the Friends' work as providing the institutional framework for indigenous protest. By following the trajectory of AFSC involvement in the county, it weaves together the diverse narratives of massive resistance, community organizing and school desegregation into one multi-faceted struggle to control the terms of the future. Ultimately, however, the study explores the long-range consequences of abandoning, starving, or compromising public education. In tracing the Prince Edward story up to the present, it reveals the flimsiness of the safeguards guaranteed to keep private education accessible, the difficulty of reconstructing a gutted public system, and the multi-generational psychological, social, and economic impact of educational deprivation. It demonstrates the centrality of equal educational opportunities to every phase of the local freedom struggle, challenging the assumption that the school desegregation phase of the civil rights movement passed into history after 1960 without sparking sustained community campaigns for change or significantly contributing to the development of local cultures of protest.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson was one of the most notable leaders and orators in the African American community. He was best known as the first Black president of Howard University, a post he held from 1926 to 1960. But throughout this public life, he was also a forceful defender of Black civil rights, a vocal critic of colonialism in Africa and Asia, and an opponent of American militarism during the Cold War. This dissertation examines the intersections between Johnson's roles as an educator at a federally-funded Black institution and his political stances on behalf of civil rights, economic justice, and self-determination. In particular, it seeks to determine the extent to which the competing demands from Johnson's various constituencies—White federal officials, Howard University students, faculty and alumni, the larger African American community, and other Black leaders—affected the expression of his political ideas during his tenure as Howard president. Given Johnson's long public career as a Baptist preacher, civil rights activist, orator, and educator, this dissertation will examine a number of important themes, including the role of the Black church in early civil rights movements; the effect of anti-Communism on African American protest; academic freedom in historically-Black colleges and universities; African American perspectives on United States foreign policy; and the impact of White funding on Black institutions of higher education. In this manner, the career of Mordecai Johnson is used to illustrate a number of important themes in the development of Black political movements from the 1910s through the 1960s.

This project examines the politics of education, culture and black community formation in Roxbury, MA during the postwar era. Elma Lewis was active in Boston’s black community for more than half a century and through her work as educator, cultural worker and institution builder helped shape the spatial and ideological contours of Boston’s black community throughout the postwar period. Her early commitment to institution building supported the development of cultural networks that facilitated the large-scale organization and mobilization of Boston’s black residents during the 1960s and 1970s in the struggle for educational equality. She founded a school, a national arts organization and a museum, each of which fostered the emergent sense of black community culminating in calls for community control, black power and cultural pride during the later period. She was a bridge activist who established and developed cultural institutions that helped transcend social, ideological and generational divisions within Boston’s black community.

<p> In 1954, Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) became the first undergraduate school in the Deep South to desegregate. Its acclaim as the first, however, was promoted only because it lost as a defendant in <i>Clara Dell Constantine et al. v. Southwestern Louisiana Institute et al.</i> What occurred then, and the indignities experienced by African American students during that first decade has never been fully documented. The black experience was figuratively and literally blacked out. </p><p> African American students found themselves receiving lower grades in class than their white counterparts. Social events banned them, and school services denied access. To cope with racism, they drew strength by supporting one another, developing a grapevine, establishing their own social network, and most of all, keeping focused on their education. But not everyone was against them. Some whites risked their reputation, and became their brother&rsquo;s keeper. </p><p> The four Pillars of Progress, commemorating the fiftieth anniversaries of SLI&rsquo;s desegregation and <i>Brown</i> in 2004, stand today as a campus testament to that era. But what remains at odds is whether the desegregation of SLI was &ldquo;without incident.&rdquo; That still remains a matter of interpretation and depends on whom is being asked and who answers.</p><p>

The purpose of this study…is to compare the seventh and eighth grade American history textbooks adopted for use in the Indiana public schools during the past century, more specifically, from 1854 to 1946.