Roosevelt and Truman's rhetoric in promoting the Lend-Lease Act to Congress from 1940-1941.

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In 1550 Thomas Cranmer wrote A Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ. This theological work sparked a written debate between him and leading English traditionalist Stephen Gardiner in 1551. This dissertation outlines the differences between Cranmers newly asserted Reformed understanding of a Spiritual Presence in the Eucharist and Gardiners traditional doctrine of Real Presence, more commonly termed transubstantiation. The dissertation analyzes the three-book exchange between these bishops and explains how each uses the same Scripture, writings of the early Church Fathers, and contemporary Continental Reformers to establish their very different ideas. In addition to this theological context, the dissertation argues that both Cranmer and Gardiner are also writing with a personal, not solely spiritual, goal. As the Reformation continued throughout Edward VIs reign, religious practice and doctrine in England were still quite uncertain and unstable. Thomas Cranmer was attempting to institute more reforms, taking England further from its traditional religious roots and relying on his authority as Archbishop to legislate and enforce the religious changes. Gardiners consistent challenge to these changes presented Cranmer a potential discrediting of his authority and the Protestant cause in England. In turn, Gardiner was imprisoned during this debate and challenged Cranmer in order to demonstrate that Cranmer was, in fact, the man who was at fault and Gardiner should not be tried and held for his right religious views. Thus, both men were trying to prove he was the credible authority, not his opponent. This personal animosity, rife with insults, between the two theologians in 1551 was the culmination of over a decades worth of opposition that marked this theological debate with a complicated underlying social context. The dissertation will also show that it was because of this debate that Cranmer created a clearly defined Reformed Eucharistic position that would later be adapted in the Protestant Elizabethan settlement. Thus, this debate directly impacted the trajectory of England's Protestant Eucharistic position well beyond 1551.

This dissertation analyzes the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification battle in Louisiana and the women who helped defeat it. The study emphasizes the role of anti-ERA women in the amendments defeat, but the views of pro-ERA women are also featured. Historical evidence shows that ERA advocates underestimated anti-ERA women. They dismissed anti-ERA women as either ignorant of their oppression or as pawns of male interests. This study challenges the idea that female ERA opponents in Louisiana behaved irrationally, worked against their own interests, or acted at the behest of men. Organized women led in opposition to the ERA in Louisiana. Several factors motivated them, including their religious beliefs. Anti-ERA women had different worldviews than pro-ERA women regarding the meanings of gender and equality. Although they came from different faiths, most ERA opponents believed in a created order based on gender difference. In their view, a law that forced equality by demanding men and women be treated the same would not only fail, it would generate disastrous social consequences, including women being drafted into the military, moral decline, and family breakdown. The desire to preserve their class and social status also motivated them. Most anti-ERA women were wives who depended on their husbands financially. They received economic rewards from their marital status, but also psychological and social rewards. Anti-ERA women believed the ERA would diminish and possibly eliminate their roles as housewives. An emerging conservative movement, which began to take shape in the context of the Cold War and the 1960s social revolution, also influenced and motivated anti-ERA women in Louisiana. A significant number of Louisiana women rejected many of the tenets of this social revolution, including feminism and the ERA.

This dissertation analyzes the evolution of the Tennessee Valley Authoritys power program and its effect on residential electricity use, economic growth, and environmental change in the Tennessee Valley Region between 1939 and 1969. It argues that the ideals of the public power movement shaped both the TVAs transition from hydroelectric to coal-fired power and its relationship with the people and natural resources of its service area, forming the foundation of a technopolitical regime predicated on high use, low cost, and abundance that defined federal energy policy after World War II. The Authority was the boldest experiment in public power in United States history and became the nations biggest producer and wholesale distributor of electricity. Its leaders cultivated relationships with local elites and treated cheap electric power as a social good and a basic right of American citizenship that could raise standards of living, expand the regions economy, and promote national security. The TVA succeeded in making electricity more accessible and affordable for in-home and commercial use, and it became a bulwark of the Cold War state. However, the Authoritys energy regime reinforced a political economy of white privilege, and it concentrated the environmental consequences of coal-fired production in poor, rural communities, undermining support for the agency. In this way, the successes and failures of the TVA's regime demonstrate both the states ability to project its influence in the postwar period by promoting widespread energy use and the limitations of consumption as a tool of social, economic, and environmental policy.

Francis William Reitz served as the fifth State President of the Boer republic of the Orange Free State from January 1889 to December 1895. This study discusses both the material and nonmaterial culture of Bloemfontein and the way of life of the inhabitants, during President Reitzâs time in office. During the Reitz period the town of Bloemfontein developed rapidly and the community underwent far-reaching changes. The arrival of the first railway in Bloemfontein in 1890 was the main incentive for the townâs rapid development and created new markets, resulting in greater prosperity and an increase in population. This in turn resulted in a growth in housing, the development of infrastructure and improvements in many areas. By the end of the Reitz period the Free State capital was a prosperous town with a relatively wide range of businesses, impressive public buildings, stately houses, several good schools, a wide range of religious denominations and a model black township. The advent of the railway marked the end of the townâs previous isolation, and contact with other towns and people was expanded. The white population was of cosmopolitan origin but the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, English-speaking inhabitants, Germans and Jews, all played a leading role in the community. In general persons of different nationalities were on good terms with each other and white people of different nationalities were welcomed heartily to the Bloemfontein community of those days. The relationship between white and black inhabitants was that of master and servant and blacks were subjected to many regulations and restrictions. Therefore the social conditions of the brown and black people were inclined to be poor. Bloemfontein only had a very small Indian community, and in 1890 the Indians were prohibited from farming or conducting businesses in the Orange Free State, with the result that most of the Indian traders soon left Bloemfontein. New Indian settlement was largely discouraged. Dutch was the official language of the Boer republic, but English was so widely spoken in Bloemfontein that the Free State capital had a predominantly English character. By this time Dutch was already gradually developing into Afrikaans. In the 1890s Bloemfontein, with its dry healthy climate, was widely known as a health resort, especially for people with lung diseases and consumption. Patients from all over the world came to the Free State capital in search of better health. But despite the healthy climate, poor sanitary conditions and polluted water sometimes led to epidemics, such as diphtheria, typhoid fever and smallpox, and an increase in the death rate. Drought, locust plagues and the division of former large farms into smaller units, gave rise to an increased influx of poor-white people (especially Afrikaners) to the capital, in search of jobs. The social life of the more prosperous part of the white population was informal and lively and there was no shortage of recreation and entertainment. After the coming of the railway many overseas entertainers performed in Bloemfontein. The capital also had its own talented singers and musicians, and a variety of cultural societies and organizations enriched the lives of the inhabitants further. The strong Late Victorian influence was reflected in the clothing, interior decoration, furniture, food, garden layout and social traditions of Bloemfonteinâs inhabitants. The church and religion influenced almost every aspect of the peopleâs lives, as they regarded religion to be of prime importance. Both the government and church were involved with education and in 1895 the Orange Free State became the first South African country to implement a system of compulsory education for white children. The Anglican Church played a vital role in the education of brown and black people.

A Model for America investigates how black and white South Orange, New Jersey residents formed alliances in order to transform their community from a predominantly white community into a racially integrated community. Interviews with residents and community activists, local and national newspapers, and community organizations internal documents, reveal a history, spanning from 1963 to the late 1990s, of black and white residents using civic associations to voluntarily integrate the community in order to increase property values. This narrative is uncommon in the field of urban history, where traditional historiography emphasizes hostility and even violence against black homeowners that is rooted in white homeowners fear that the presence of African-Americans in their neighborhood would harm property values. Using sociologist Karyn Lacys assertion that shared interests among black and white suburbanites are the basis for the construction of suburban identities, to frame my research, I argue that black and white South Orange residents shared identities as suburbanites caused them to realize that integration causes property values to rise by opening the housing market to additional homeowners, and that panic selling and white flight cause property values to decline. Thus, A Model for America investigates how black and white South Orange residents shared identities as suburbanites compelled them to integrate their community.

The first part of Still Separate and Still Unequal examines how the agenda pursued by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), George Romney, was the closest that America would come to achieving racial residential integration. In accordance with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Romney linked municipalities urban renewal funding with their willingness to racially integrate. Most notably, President Nixon reversed his apparent written support for HUDs policies to promote racial resident integration due to his fear of alienating white working-class voters, who greatly influenced his election in the Presidential Election of 1968. With his attention focused on the then upcoming Presidential Election of 1972, Nixon made it increasingly difficult and uncomfortable for Romney to pursue his agenda and placed an eighteen-month moratorium on HUDs funding. Romney resigned as Secretary of HUD in January 1973. The second part of Still Separate and Still Unequal examines how successive HUD Secretaries including Henry Cisneros, Andrew Cuomo, Alphonso Jackson, have pursued moderate policies that havent addressed racial residential integration. The last portion investigates how small, integrated communities like South Orange, New Jersey and Oak Park, Illinois can serve as potential models for HUD to apply their strategies at the federal level. Overall, Still Separate and Still Unequal examines how HUD could achieve racial residential integration in the years since Romneys resignation despite its missed opportunity.

This dissertation explores the roles Gold Coast Africans played in the various challenges to Dutch and English monopoly in the Atlantic slave trade from 1621 to 1720. Using a close reading and corroboration of archaic English, Dutch, Prussian, and Swedish documents of the trade, as well as interdisciplinary inclusion of archaeological evidence, I contextualize how West African peoples such as the Ahanta, Eguafu, and Fetu, pitted various European slave traders against one another in order to weaken the growing power of the English and Dutch in Africa. This made the area attractive to smaller trading partners, such as the Swedish and Prussian slave trading companies, as well as various European and American interlopers onto the trade. This African-initiated fragmentation of the trade created a new mercantile culture on the Gold Coast dependent upon personal relationships which contributed to the destruction of the mercantilist system and the rise of free trade capitalism in the early modern world.

From the 1870s to the 1930s, the lumber industry in the United States behaved as a “great nomad,” in former Forester William B. Greeley’s words, with the center of production moving from the Great Lakes region during the 1880s and 1890s, to the South after 1900. Despite its mobility at regional and local levels, the industry simultaneously structured and controlled these production spaces both long before and long after workers removed and processed the valuable portions of the forest environment. In valuing the forest, establishing logging camps and sawmill towns, and selling cutover farms, firms created sets of working and living environments and regional landscapes that shaped northern Minnesota and Louisiana from the 1870s through the 1930s, and beyond. Historians who have only followed the “frontier” of lumber production have missed the tension between the industry’s mobility and its long-term influence over the spaces of production. By stretching the spatial and temporal frame I show how the lumber industry sought to control workers and nature (not without difficulty) in several phases of its development and in different ways and at different scales in Minnesota and Louisiana. Timber cruising represented the initial structuring of the forest spaces by lumber firms, as they sought to ascertain the number of board feet of timber on their land. The “radical simplification” of forests inherent in timber estimating proved challenging for firms, and the professionalization of this task by forestry school trained foresters offered a way toward more authoritative valuations of the forest. Next, loggers and millworkers faced the forest not as figures of board feet and prices per acre, but through workplaces and homes defined by the needs of lumber firms. These spaces were also defined by Jim Crow (in Louisiana) and challenged by workers’ brief union movements. Finally, the post lumber regime owed its landscape to the lumber industry but the social purpose to which this deindustrialized space was put – smallholder agriculture – was also outlined by the industry through its extensive landownership and by its agricultural boosterism. Their vision of the cutover foundered on its assumptions about nature and society.