On June 1 and 2, 1966, the White House sponsored the âTo Fulfill These Rights Conferenceâ in Washington, D.C. Following a year of planning by a council of civil rights activists, government officials, and big business and labor leaders, roughly 2500 people from diverse backgrounds and civil rights experiences attended the conference. Previously neglected by other historians, the conference and its planning reveal two important and related dynamics of the movement: the shifting alliances among civil rights leaders and the re-examination of civil rights goals and strategies. In particular, debates over the conferenceâs list of invitees, format, and procedures capture disagreements between established civil rights leaders, the White House, and labor and business leaders over who would, or could, direct the next phase of the civil rights movement. Secondly, conference debates on the reach of federal power, affirmative action, Vietnam, the expansion of the movement, fears of imminent violence, and the emergence of Black Power reveal the conflicting ideas that would create deep divisions between activists, liberals, and the federal government in the late 1960s and years to come.

The purpose of this research is to provide an alternative lens to use in the study of Montanism than is offered by the dominant paradigm developed during the last two centuries. Most scholars assume or assert that the earliest Montanists in Phrygia, in ancient Turkey, sprung from within the local, rural Christian community of Pepouza. As such, most modern research has omitted considerations of anything beyond incidental contact with so called âpaganâ cults in the surrounding area. I will argue that Phrygian Montanism can be viewed from its inception as a religion with several parental contributors, embodied as an eclectic amalgam of multiple forms of Christianity, the cult of Cybele and Attis, the cult of Dionysius, the oracle cult of Apollo, and other sources including Judaism. In this sense, it rather resembled not merely a Christian âheresyâ as several Ante and Post Nicene fathers asserted in their polemical tracts, nor an offshoot of a polytheistic cult, but instead a unique mystery religion, neither wholly âpaganâ nor Christian in composition. In other words, Montanism might be viewed alternately, regardless of what its founder(s) believed this âNew Prophecyâ represented, as an independent mystery religion, separately practiced while simultaneously overlapping the various Anatolian Christianities, âpaganâ cults, and state sponsored religions of the eastern Roman Empire. Within this context, arguments about its source, placement, acceptance and religious validity within the âpaganâ or Christian historical worlds become tangential. Seen as an island, a new vision of Montanism arises, one defined more comprehensively by the social, cultural and religious traditions of Anatolia and a Christianity that began with Pauline missionary activity 100 years prior to Montanismâs rise in Phrygia. I intend to argue this thesis by presenting an outline of Anatolian culture and religion as it relates to the emergence of Montanism in rural Phrygia before showing how it represents a uniquely structured hybrid mystery religion with both Christian and âpaganâ elements.

<p>WILLIAMS, SUNDEE KATHERINE. Jack Johnson: Victim or Villain. (Under the direction of Dr. Linda McMurry, Dr. Pamela Tyler, and Dr. Walter Jackson.)Jack Johnson reigned as the first African-American heavyweight champion of the world from 1908 until 1915. Unfortunately, unlike future African-American athletes such as Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, Jack Johnson infuriated Americans of all ages, classes, races, and sexes with his arrogant attitude; his expensive and usually imported automobiles, champagne, and cigars; his designer clothes and jewelry; his frequent trips to Europe, usually in the company of at least one beautiful white woman; his inclination to gamble and race sports cars; and his many well-publicized nights of dancing and playing jazz on his prized seven foot bass fiddle. However, his worst offenses, during his reign as heavyweight champion, were his two marriages to and numerous affairs with white women. The purpose of the research has been to place Jack Johnson within the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century culture, economics, law, politics, race, and sex. The influences of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American commercialization, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization on perceptions of femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and violence are investigated; and the implications of Jack Johnson?s defiance of racial and sexual constraints on the African-American community are interpreted.<P>

On April 30, 1803, the Jefferson administration purchased French Louisiana. Initially American lawmakers rejoiced at the prospect of American domination of the Mississippi River. Yet within a few short months this optimism was replaced with uncertainty and alarm as lawmakers faced the task of incorporating Lower Louisiana into the Union. As Americans tackled the many unintended consequences of the Louisiana Purchase, Louisianans also had to confront the ramifications of the landmark acquisition and the encroachment of a new American government in their lives. From 1803 to 1815, American lawmakers and Louisianans embarked on a parallel journey to incorporate Lower Louisiana into the political, social, and cultural infrastructure of the young republic. The American part of this historic journey has been well documented as many historians explore how American lawmakers passed key legislation and implemented programs of Americanization to bring Lower Louisiana into the Union. Louisianans’ perspective, however, has remained quite secondary. By exploring the lives of individual Louisianans, this project examines how they too shaped the incorporation of Lower Louisiana and how their class, race, and ethnicity influenced their participation in that process. In highlighting the experiences of Creole elite families, prominent political figures, and Lower Louisiana’s free people of color, it becomes clear that Louisianans employed vital strategies of negotiation to sufficiently assimilate to gain American citizenship and acceptance, while also preserving vital aspects of their French identity. By utilizing tools such as political activism, military service, and the conversation of attachment, Louisianans came into the Union on their own terms and ultimately created a Franco-American culture that still pervades Louisiana today.

At the end of World War II, the federal government bestowed one of the richest rewards ever given a mass mobilized army in the form of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the OJ. Bill of Rights. The OJ. Bill offered veterans generous loans, education benefits, and unemployment insurance to help them readjust to civilian life. The bill is widely lauded as one of the most important federal acts of the twentieth century. Further 0.1. Bills followed for veterans of the Cold War including those who served in Korea and Vietnam. Despite their continued impact on the lives of veterans and on society, the later bills have received very little public or academic attention. No major study examines the later OJ. Bills beyond the World War II generation. This dissertation helps fill that void by examining the political origins of the Vietnam era OJ. Bills of 1966, 1972, and 1974. Specifically, this dissertation explores the debates over veterans' education benefits at the federal level during the Vietnam era. After the passage of the 1966 OJ. bill, many Vietnam era veterans complained that their benefits fell short of those offered the World War II generation. As a result, the Vietnam era 0.1. Bills often get dismissed as a part of a wider pattern of government neglect of the Vietnam veteran. This study provides a context for understanding why the benefits did not, at first, reach the same generous heights as the previous OJ. Bills and challenges the standard narrative that the government abandoned the Vietnam veteran. The government, particularly the Senate, did make considerable efforts to improve the Vietnam veteran's benefits. Although a succession of presidents and congressmen limited the government's generosity because of their ideological or economic convictions, numerous increases in the level of funding followed the 1966 bill, making veterans' benefits far more comparable to those offered World War II veterans. Following the increases, Vietnam era veterans claimed their education benefits in far greater numbers than their World War II predecessors. Because so many Vietnam veterans decided to return to school, this study shows that the G.I. Bill needs to be a central part of their homecoming story.

From 1920 to 1961, B. Carroll Reece served a then unprecedented thirty-five years in the United States House of Representatives. Reece grew up in the povertystricken area of eastern Tennessee, one of thirteen children. He attended college at Carson-Newman College and New York University but felt called to enlist in the army during World War I. He earned numerous commendations for his service and returned to the United States with an increased animosity towards communism. He returned to education, but an opportunity presented itself for Reece to fulfill his dream of entering politics. He ran for and won the First District seat in the House of Representatives in 1920. During his tenure, his hatred of communism and devotion to the Republican Party led him to become a central figure in the debates over the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, nitrate plants, the 1946 congressional elections, and the 1954 Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. Reece’s loyalty to Robert Taft and his conservative stance on international involvement, communism, and economics influenced the decision of the Republican Party to name him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1946. He resigned this position after he was unable to use his influence to secure the presidential nomination for Taft, but he remained devoted to Taft and Taft’s desire to become president. After Taft’s death, Reece turned his attention more fully on the crusade to eradicate communism within the United States and its government. He led an investigation into large foundations for fostering subversion through their grants to leftist organizations and universities. Although this did coincide with his conservative ideology, Reece had begun to see the decline in power of the “Old Guard” faction of the Republican Party and strove desperately to prevent liberals from taking over the party. The investigation garnered much condemnation, and its report became widely criticized within Congress. His investigation contributed to the increasing animosity towards foundations and large concentrations of wealth that continues today. Reece maintained his position that communism posed a threat to the security of the nation and the Republican Party until his death in 1961.

“God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum Astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers” is a study of the reception and influence of what is perhaps the most important work dealing with astrology to be produced in the Latin West during the middle ages. In order to determine the impact and importance of the Speculum I have dealt with questions relating to its authorship and dating, while studying its contents in the context of Albert’s larger body of work as well as the readers who found it useful and how they approached the Speculum. I have studied these readers both directly, through a study of thirty-five of the fifty-nine surviving manuscripts, as well as indirectly through a consideration of the way that other writers used the Speculum through the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of my research I travelled to archives in England, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States to study codices containing the Speculum, as well as examining microfilm copies of volumes housed in the Ambrosiana collection of Notre Dame University and in the Pope Pius XII Vatican Film Library at St. Louis University. My focus was upon the works that came to be bound with the Speculum and the marginalia readers left behind, as well as the accuracy of individual copies of the text. Furthermore, I have studied the writings of an array of authors, from the thirteenthcentury physician Peter d’Abano, to the fifteenth-century humanist Pico della Mirandola, to determine how these scholars viewed astrology and the place of the Speculum in their writings. In this way I have been able to demonstrate that astrology was central to the medieval worldview of intellectual elites. The Speculum astronomiae, which I demonstrate was indeed written by Albert the Great around the year 1260, served as an important component of the preservation of the study and practice of astrology as a discipline permissible to Christians. Standing as a semi-canonical defense of the science, physicians, astrologers, natural philosophers, and those interested in doctrinal purity read it with profit, while both defenders and detractors of astrology found it important to address the Speculum in their own work.

Between 1846 and 1867, J. D. B. De Bow, the editor of De Bow’s Review, promoted agricultural reform, urbanization, industrialization, and commercial development in the nineteenth-century South. His monthly journal appealed to thousands of antebellum southerners with similar interests in a modern market economy. De Bow’s vision and his readers’ support of economic diversification predated the rhetoric of postbellum boosters who promised a New South after the Civil War. He created an economic plan that resonated among urban, middle-class merchants and professionals; wealthy planters; and prominent industrialists. They supported De Bow because he understood the necessity of economic diversification. Yet, despite these modern capitalistic leanings, a majority of Review subscribers were unapologetic slaveholders and ardent supporters of the social and economic trappings provided by slavery and cotton. These Old South innovators, like their New South counterparts, shared a similar message of hope for the future. De Bow created a similar sense of forward economic momentum that appealed to profit-minded readers with capitalistic and entrepreneurial tendencies. For the first time in southern history, he successfully consolidated modern economic goals into a cohesive plan. His reverence for past traditions helped legitimize his feelings about the future transformation of the South. Progress and modernity were to be embraced, and De Bow campaigned for regional support for his plan. He had anticipated the future, and by 1860 the economic transformation of the South had begun. Although slavery and sectionalism overwhelmed the original intent of the Review, De Bow recovered his editorial balance after the Civil War and rededicated himself to regional economic improvement. He asked readers to forget about past mistakes and help reintegrate the South back into the national economy. His comprehensive postwar plan for recovery came from years of prewar experimentation. Although De Bow died before the next generation of boosters began their public campaign for a New South, he had made the first and most significant contribution to their vision. He foresaw the need for a well-rounded, diversified economy. De Bow’s anticipation of a modern economy helped create hope for a New South long before the demise of the Old South.

This dissertation takes a fresh look at the forgotten generation of servicemen and women who served in theater during the Korean War. Beginning with their shared childhood, growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, this narrative account follows the story of American men and women as they enlisted in or were drafted into the Armed Forces, took basic training, shipped out to the Korean Peninsula or Japan, lived in the war zone, and returned home to a country that seemed not to have noticed their absence. Special attention is paid throughout to the complex interplay between service members and the home front and to the changes which occurred in both the lives of individual Americans and in American life as a result of wartime experiences. Though not a treatise on civil rights, the dissertation examines how integration in training and in foxholes helped break down racial barriers. Research for this project comes from the Library of Congress’s Robert A. Taft Papers and Veterans History Project Collection, the Eisenhower Papers, various collections at the National Archives and the Center for the Study of the Korean War, veteran surveys at Carlisle Barracks, oral history collections, published and unpublished memoirs, collections of veteran poetry, and contemporary newspaper and magazine stories. This work adds greatly to the historiography of the American soldier, connecting military and social history and examining both the personal and collective consequences of waging war the American way.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reformers, intellectuals and travel writers drew the attention of the American public to Southern Appalachia. Although the region had previously not been viewed as distinct from other parts of the rural South, a mythology about mountain deviance emerged after the Civil War. Commentators identified mountaineers as aberrant based on exaggerated accounts of violence, poverty and ignorance. As the urban middle class became identified as the core of American society, efforts to “Americanize” other groups brought organizations such as the Pi Beta Phi into the Mountain South. Founded in 1867 at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois, Pi Beta Phi Women's Fraternity decided to embark upon its first national philanthropy in 1910. The growing national focus on Appalachia led them to plan a settlement school in the region. An investigation of the most educationally needy areas of the Mountain South brought them to the village of Gatlinburg, Tennessee where the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School would become the center of a partnership whose legacy lives on in the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. An examination of the school's history requires an attendant investigation of the interactions between Appalachian people and those who perceived themselves as the main stream of American society. This analysis brings Appalachia from the periphery to the center of discussions about American identity building. Another goal of this thesis is to provide mountaineers with agency beyond the usual stock characterizations that many histories of the region have assigned them. Rather than passive recipients of philanthropy, Gatlinburg's residents displayed their desire for a school from the outset and assisted the Pi Phis whenever possible. The primary purpose of this thesis is to interpret the bilateral relationship between the fraternity women and the subjects of their reform by giving a voice to the local people.