Enacted in 1833, Great Britains abolition of West Indian slavery confronted the United States with the complex interrelationship between slavery and progress. Dubbed the Great Experiment, British abolition held the possibility of demonstrating free labor more profitable than slavery. Besides elating the worlds abolitionists, always hopeful of equating material with moral progress, the experiments success would benefit Britain economically. Presented evidence of the greater profits of free labor, slaveholders worldwide would find themselves with compelling reason to abandon slavery. Likewise, London policymakers would proceed with little needand no economic incentiveto promote abolition in British foreign policy. British hopes foundered on almost every count. Even in 1840, after Joseph John Gurney reported the experiment a resounding success, slaveholders in Washington remained unswayed by the prospect of greater profits. Buoyed by their republican ideals, and convinced abolition would bring racial warfare, John C. Calhoun and fellow slaveholders took comfort in the British abolitionists evidence of West Indian prosperity. As success implied Britain profited by abolition, British policies could be assumed to lack economic incentive and therefore earnestness. If London moralizers demanded a crusade against the Atlantic slave trade, as well as natural-right policies that lured fugitive slaves and harassed the South with the Underground Railroad, London realists could be expected to frustrate their larger purpose. Southerners assurance in the security of slavery diminished after 1843. Approached by the British government with an overture for an immigration agreement that would bring laborers to Britains island possessions, Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur perceived an official, if indirect, acknowledgment of the Great Experiments failure. Alarmed by the implications of the admission, Upshur ordered an inquiry into the experiments results from the American consul in Jamaica, Robert Monroe Harrison. Upon receiving the findings, Upshur expedited measures to annex Texas, catalyzing the sectional crisis that ended in eventual civil war. In part those hostilities resulted from southerners newfound understanding of the problem of slavery and progress. Ever more confident of slaverys economic viability in the modern world, southerners after 1843 looked to Britain and the American North and perceived newfound earnestness in slaverys enemies.

The Mexican War, 1846-1848, has often been overlooked in American history. Scholars have been more interested in assigning blame for the conflict, or assessing the role played by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in the coming of the Civil War. Only recently have scholars made any attempt to understand the motivations and attitudes brought to Mexico by American soldiers. This thesis focuses on how the racial and religious attitudes of American soldiers during the war were an implementation of the nationalism inherent in Manifest Destiny. Americans used their perceived racial and religious superiority to further the goals of Manifest Destiny. Mexico was a country that could be the target of American aggression precisely because it did not conform to the proper standards of civilization Americans believed they enjoyed. American soldiers believed that God assigned them the duty of showing Mexicans how to worship properly, conduct a war, and practice republican government. Americans expressed their feelings in writing and through their contact with Mexican soldiers and civilians. American racial and religious attitudes drove their attitudes about Mexican women and allowed them to see Mexico as a failed republic that could be justifiably invaded by a nation espousing republican virtue.

In Louisiana during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a unique group of people known as Creole created a culture that differed from the rest of the United States. Descendants of the first French and Spanish settlers, Creoles both black and white struggled to maintain their heritage despite an influx of Anglo-American Protestants into Louisiana; women in particular sought to preserve their culture. Although black Creole women have received significant attention, their white counterparts remain virtually absent in scholarship. This thesis focuses on the lives of white Creole women in the River Parishes and New Orleans and seeks to recreate the lives of both independent women plantation owners as well as women who served as wives and mothers. Creole women in Louisiana differed from women in the rest of the United States in their language, religion, legal system, and traditions; they also resided in a more racially fluid environment. Creole women spoke French, and most refused to allow their children to learn English. They were governed by civil rather than common law, which included a system of community property that enabled them to own property, resulting in a large number of female plantation owners. This legal system also gave them the right to draft their own wills, obtain legal separations from their husbands, and act as private business owners. Catholicism provided these women with the Blessed Virgin Mary, a powerful model of female authority and virtue absent in the Protestantism dominant in the rest of the country at the time. Creole women often had family members who were both black and white and faced complex tensions that arose from the mixing of races. Unlike many women in the rest of the South, Creole women plantation owners viewed themselves as masters capable of running a plantation and disciplining their slaves without hesitation. All these factors created distinct differences between Creole women in southeast Louisiana and the women in the rest of their state and nation.

The practice of Catholicism extended across racial boundaries in colonial Louisiana, and interracial worship continued to characterize the religious experience of Catholics throughout the antebellum period. French and Spanish missionaries baptized natives, settlers, and slaves, and the Catholic Church required Catholic planters to baptize and catechize their slaves. Most slaveholders outside New Orleans, however, were lax in the religious education of slaves. Work holidays did not always correspond to religious holy days, and the number of slave baptisms and confirmations on Catholic plantations often depended on the willingness of the local priest, or the slaves themselves, to attend the parish church. Despite these limitations, enslaved persons in the river parishes of Louisiana integrated Catholic rituals into their expressions of spirituality. Slaves uses of herbs, medicinal practices, Voodoo, ghostlore, and folk stories combined their experiences as enslaved persons and their contact with Catholic teachings to inform their worldviews and the Catholic-Christianity of all parishioners in southeast Louisiana. For free women of color, the Catholic Church offered particular opportunities to extend their religious, social, and economic standings. In the river parishes outside New Orleans, free women of color demonstrated their piety and their financial resources by engaging in economic exchanges with local churches. In New Orleans proper, a group of free women of color formed the Sisters of the Holy Family, the first order solely for women of African-American descent in the city, in order to aid ill and needy blacks. Although the Catholic Church had neither unqualified success nor absolute failure among African-American parishioners during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the experiences of free women of color in Louisiana proved that some blacks found religious as well as social and economic identity in the Catholic Church. Ultimately, the Catholic Church provided some degree of spiritual agency for those who incorporatedand changedCatholic practices to fit into their lives.

Three popular and critically acclaimed films of the post-Watergate era illustrated and criticized the periods disillusionment. Likewise, a series of political and economic crises spawned a shift in American culture. The Sixties mass social movements dissolved into the Seventies and launched a trend in which Americans became preoccupied with themselves more than the state of the nation. Controlling ones own destiny became a collective obsession when confronted with the periods various political and economic ailments. The Me decade turned inward rather than concern itself with public issues. Therefore, American culture earned dubious labels such as narcissistic and decadent from critics and scholars. The Culture of Narcissism (1979), written by Christopher Lasch, became one famous cultural attack of the 1970s. Laschs commentary serves as an instrumental source to place the eras films in their historical context. Several other notable sources described ways that searching for self-fulfillment saturated American society. Popular cultures contributions in the cinema mirrored the periods social trends. Taxi Driver (1976) and Annie Hall (1977) represented the peak to one of two major waves of a Seventies film Renaissance, in which personal narratives appealed to a maturing audience of baby boomers. Films with anti-establishment themes, more intellectual in nature, and cost-effective budgets helped to revive the financial burden of major studios. Ironically, the success of such films spawned the second wave of cinema, in which blockbusters ultimately proved a more attractive formula for producers by the end of the decade. Saturday Night Fever (1977), a hybrid of both waves of cinema, presents an interesting case study. The films commercial impact influenced the future direction of the industry. Although produced on a restrictive budget and containing cultural criticisms similar to the other two films, its emphasis on commercial considerations to the youth market paved the way for other blockbusters similar to it and a resurgence of optimistic narratives by the beginning of the 1980s. Nevertheless, each analysis describes the periods disillusionment and search for self-fulfillment projected to audiences in the 1970s.

This thesis is concerned with French politics in the thirteen years after 1968. After the wave of street demonstrations, seizure of schools, and worker sit-ins that beset the country in May of that year, many people in France became convinced of the need to alter the political status quo. In the years that followed, the countrys largest and most dominant political grouping, the Gaullist party, experienced a dramatic loss of electoral support. Between 1968 and 1981, the Gaullists lost control of the National Assembly, the premiership, and the presidency. By May 1981, Frances Fifth Republic was governed by a leftist president for the first time since its founding by Charles de Gaulle twenty-three years earlier. The purpose of this thesis is to find the reasons for the dramatic decline experienced by the Gaullist party during the 1970s. Scholars have usually argued that the turmoil of 1968, the resignation of de Gaulle one year later, and the economic downturn of the early- to mid-1970s hastened the collapse of the party. These viewpoints are inadequate. The second and third chapters of this work reveal that the failure of Gaullists to support far-reaching political, economic, and social reform alienated an important portion of their electorate and thus led to the weakening of the party as a whole. As the third chapter shows, this argument also helps to explain the victory of François Mitterrand over Valéry Giscard dEstaing in the May 1981 presidential election. To prove this point, this thesis examines polling data, party programs, and presidential and legislative elections held between 1968 and 1981. This work also explores the events of May 1968, Gaullist political ideology, and the realities de Gaulles successors faced after his resignation in order to demonstrate how the refusal of the Gaullist party to rollback the state compromised their ability to dominate French politics.

Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire and sought to create a unique realm, where all people Greek and non-Greek would be able to live in relative autonomy under the monarch. Scholars have debated Alexander's intent for the last century and still cannot find consensus. This thesis will approach the intent by focusing on the question of how Alexander governed the empire he conquered. Specifically, did he intend for the people of the conquered landmass to become a new type of integrated culture led by him and his progeny? If it is possible to answer this question, it may give some indication of whether or not Alexander was anything more than a "mere" conqueror. Refusing to be bound by xenophobic tradition, Alexander ruled with the assistance of foreign nobles serving as administrators. He took on a more recognizable and palatable appearance for the newly conquered and then finally acted to unify the top tier of the Persians with his friends and commanders. This study concludes that pragmatism and foresight allowed Alexander to accept all of Persia's inhabitants as subjects, regardless of ethnicity, and meld them in a way that would ultimately contribute to a more stable empire.

The relationship of the papacy to the Jews in the Middle Ages, which had developed under the influences of Patristic writers, Roman law, and papal precedent, was marked in the twelfth century by toleration and increasing restriction, but also by papal protection. Between the First Crusade massacres of Jews and the restrictions and persecutions of the thirteenth century, the twelfth century is set apart as a unique era in the lives of European Jews. As Eugenius III (1145-1153) and Alexander III (1159-1181) extended their protection to the Jews of Rome and perhaps all of Christendom through the papal document Sicut Judaeis, and simultaneously proclaimed Christianity's doctrinal superiority over Judaism, the Roman Jews also acknowledged the pope as their temporal lord and ruler in Rome through their presentation of the Torah. Other motivations for that contractual relationship perhaps existed, including the popes' need for financial backing. Eugenius III and Alexander III lived in exile through much of their reigns and struggled to maintain control of the Patrimony, a major source of papal revenues. During the same era, Eugenius III and Alexander III publicly promoted the Church's inheritance of biblical Judaism in the claim that the Treasures of the Temple of Herod existed in the Lateran basilica. Lateran texts, special liturgical rituals, and papal processions through Rome reinforced that claim. At the same time, the attitudinal influences of the Cistercians Nicolaus Maniacutius and Bernard of Clairvaux on Eugenius, and the Jewish steward Jechiel in the papal household on Alexander, cannot be measured definitively but suggest a paradoxical relationship with the Jews. The history of continuing papal conflicts with the Roman Commune and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa confirms that Eugenius and Alexander unceasingly sought to establish their authority and power over Rome, the Patrimony, and Christendom throughout their papacies, and used popular perceptions that the Church possessed the Temple Treasures to buttress that authority. The popes' emphasis on biblical Judaism and actions toward the Roman and European Jews reflects a multi-faceted mosaic of papal attitudes toward the Jews and biblical Judaism between 1145 and 1181.

Many historians have examined the Civil War soldier, but few scholars have explored the racial attitudes and policies of the Confederate army. Although Southern men did not fight for slavery alone, the defense of the peculiar institution, and the racial control they believed it assured, united rebels in their support of the Confederacy and the war effort. Amid the destruction of the Civil War, slavery became more important than ever for men battling Yankee armies. The war, nevertheless, tested Confederate soldiers idealized view of human bondage. Federal armies wrecked havoc on masters farms and plantations, seized hundreds of thousands of slaves, and eventually armed African Americans. Rebel troops were not blind to the wars negative effects on the peculiar institution. They noted black peoples many disloyal actions, and some came to believe that slavery was not worth holding onto if it would undermine the Southern war effort. But despite occasional worries about rebellious black people, Southern troops understood that slavery was vital to their cause. The Confederate military became the greatest of mastersan institution that rebels believed would assure the survival of human bondage and white supremacy. The army granted exemptions to slaveholders and overseers, invaded the Border States in order to acquire more slave territory, and impressed black workers to build fortifications and perform menial tasks. When rebels confronted black Federal troopsas at Fort Pillow and the Craterthey showed no quarter to men they believed were slaves in rebellion against their white masters. Only with the Federal governments triumph did Southerners accept the end of slavery. After Lees surrender at Appomattox, former Confederate soldiers lived in a new world. They could not reinstate slavery, but they were still committed to white supremacy and looked with fondness on the Old South.

The purpose of this study is to explore the development of public education in antebellum Louisiana. Using primarily public records, I found that despite the successful system instituted in New Orleans in the early 1840s, the rest of Louisiana faltered in its attempts to establish free public schools. Notwithstanding the requirement contained in the 1845 Constitution that each parish must organize public schools, the lack of guidance, supervision, and funding from the state legislature all coalesced to condemn public education in most of the rest of the state. As public schools in New Orleans thrived throughout the decades leading up to the Civil War, the citys school system would stand in stark contrast to public schools in the rest of the state that proved unable to overcome the obstacles encountered.