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The period of 1936-1964 in the Democratic Party was one of intense factional conflict between the rising Northern liberals, buoyed by FDR’s presidency, and the Southern conservatives who had dominated the party for a half-century. Intertwined prominently with the struggle for civil rights, this period illustrates the complex battles that held the fate of other issues such as labor, foreign policy, and economic ideology in the balance. This thesis aims to explain how and why the Northern liberal faction came to defeat the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party through a multi-faceted approach examining organizations, strategy, arenas of competition, and political opportunities of each faction. I conclude that an alliance between the labor movement and African-Americans formed the basis on which the liberal faction was able to organize and build its strength, eventually surpassing the Southern Democratic faction by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This passage forced the realignment of Southern states as Southern Democrats sided with Republicans at the national level. However, the party position changes that precipitated liberal Democratic support for the bill began much earlier, starting in the 1930s, another key conclusion of this thesis.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation explores how Black and white, men and women in ex-Confederate states physically recreated or created their environment after four long years of war. Through rebuilding and building homes, businesses, churches, jails, and infrastructure, southerners remade their landscape in a way that reflected their aspirations and fears for life in the postwar South, and in ways that reflected expectations about new alliances and relationships. For instance, white southerners used their kinship networks as well as state governments to rebuild jails, courthouses, and grand churches to reconsolidate their elite, Old South status. This process of rebuilding has received little attention from historians, and the existing literature has instead emphasized the social, political, and economic narratives of the Reconstruction Era. While that scholarship is essential to understand the contentious and fraught nature of the period, the unexplored story of rebuilding adds to these histories by recovering the motivations of the laborers and financiers who rebuilt the South after the Civil War. In addition, this project illuminates how Black and white southerners tried to exert control and influence over their space and place in the postwar world, and in doing so, reveals that the work of rebuilding mattered just as much to southerners as did the political reunification and Reconstruction of the Union. More broadly, it posits the process of rebuilding as a moment of transition for both the South and the nation, as it bridged the gap between the Old and New South, wartime and peacetime, and the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras.  </p>

Appalachia, itself a difficult to resolutely define region, has undergone the economic forces of colonialism and industrializing capitalism which allow for an excellent case study to apply Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. No American region’s national conception is likely to have been as varied and often misrepresented as that of Appalachia. From the Revolutionary American State’s invention of early white settlers as the virtuous yeoman of the Republic to the modern perception of Appalachia as backwards, conservative, and drug-addled, shifting national economic conditions resulted in a constant invention of Appalachia in congruence. Whenever the people residing in Appalachia, whether Black, white, or indigenous, either failed to represent or directly challenged the interests of empire or profit, ideas and perceptions of the region subsequently shifted accordingly. Utilizing secondary sources which have attempted to paint an overarching narrative of the region and primary sources recounting contemporary individuals’ views on said region’s people, the broad arc of cultural hegemony’s construction in Appalachia is traced in this thesis. From Thomas Jefferson’s invention of the virtuous and integral small land holding settlers in the region to Theodore Roosevelt’s shifting of national consciousness away from Appalachian settlers and into the proverbial international settler frontier, tracing the ideas of state leaders within the American Republic and profit-focused interests allows for a general timeline of social invention to be traced. The constructed timeline insinuates that one thing remained certain throughout Appalachian history: constantly changing perceptions of the region almost directly followed changing economic and political agendas. Further, after an exploration of how Black and white Appalachians indeed presented a counter-hegemonic movement necessarily connected with the rest of the nation in the form of the Mine Wars, Appalachia as a proverbial helpless region apart is argued to be ultimately a false conception. In response to this conclusion, a responsibility arises for those with the power of narrative and cultural production. Meaning, as academics or scholars, those Antonio Gramsci deemed the intellectual base of any given economic class, conscious counter-narrative production steeped in consciousness of exploitation and class antagonisms becomes objectively necessary. In fact, this work concludes, without an intellectual counter to dominant minority economic interests, social invention of often exploited regions will and do continue unabashed and unopposed.

This Master’s thesis uses the Indochinese Refugee Foundation of Lowell, Massachusetts, a federally funded social service provider, as a case study in the local politics of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement. I argue that the Foundation’s archives offered an opportunity to study the local implementation of the “economic self-sufficiency” mandate of the 1980 Refugee Act, which led the Foundation to increasingly scramble to get refugees off of the welfare rolls and in the labor market as quickly as possible. I conclude that this served to push refugees into low-wage, unskilled, insecure positions such as electronics assembly, and also led to an institutionalized neglect of the broad range of services refugees required. This neglect had a hand in creating the very poverty the Act originally sought to prevent. The archive also offered the opportunity to highlight two unexpected ways that Cold War militarism reshaped urban landscapes. First, the demography and culture of Lowell were profoundly reshaped by refugees resettled partly as a result of American Cold War foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Second, the expansion of Defense Department funded high-technology temporarily revitalized the city’s economic base and drew refugees to the city with the promise of employment.

This is a study of an ethnic hierarchical division of labor on Iföverken in the south of Sweden between 1895-1930. The study aims to see if migrants got different kind of profession at Iföverken and if there were in fact ethnic hierarchical distribution of work. It also aims to see if the pattern of ethnic hierarchical division of labor was different before and after the First World War. Also, the study aims to see in what regard these labor migrants became members of the local union, division 227. By studying if labor migrants got different kind of professions using the concept of class in a structuralist perspective, hierarchical positions become visible. Using moving in and out records that the priests wrote as migrants arrived and member list of the union as the main sources, the study shows that there existed a pattern of ethnic hierarchical division of labor. The results show that migrants from regions with Slavic population got the most unskilled work while migrants from regions with German population made most of the professional and higher valued workforce. There where some migrants that became active members of the union division 227, consequently it can be argued that these migrants where a part of a collective movement and class struggle.

Why at the present time do we need added sources of labor beyond that available within the country? One faction would cry, "We don't!" Another would say, "We decry the importation of labor, but there simply aren't United States citizens in sufficient numbers to get these jobs done." A third group would probably answer, "Why worry about it? These laborers will come across the border, legally or illegally; we may as well avail ourselves of their services." Perhaps we should let a fourth group speak: "We must see that you do not misuse these people."

This dissertation is a labor history of the Laie sugar plantation between 1865 and 1931. It explores intercultural and race relations that were inherent to colonial and plantation processes in Hawaii. Particular attention is given to the role of religion in advancing the colonial project. In 1865 Mormon missionaries bought approximately 6,000 acres with the hope of creating a gathering place for Hawaiian converts to settle in. The ideal of the gathering was a metaphor the missionaries brought with them from Utah, and it was a metaphor appropriated by Hawaiians and infused with their own cultural meanings, particularly the importance of the land. In order to economically support the gathering place, the missionaries turned to a plantation model. The plantation they developed was unusual in several respects. First, for most of the plantation's history, labor was done predominantly by Hawaiians. On the majority of other plantations, immigrant labor was used. Second, on Laie Plantation the cultivation of kalo was as important as sugar. Both crops were promoted by both Hawaiians and missionaries. Thus kalo production was one of the chief reasons Hawaiians stayed on Laie Plantation. It appears that many of those who gathered to Laie did so because to a large extent they could reconstruct traditional Hawaiian culture and foodways. Finally, the metaphor of the gathering mitigated some of the most onerous aspects of plantation life. The gathering was for Hawaiians and thus for the first thirty years, only Hawaiians were hired to work as laborers. This created a labor shortage that Hawaiians were able to use as they negotiated labor relations and the continuation of their cultural practices. However, in 1897 the metaphor of gathering began to diminish as a guiding ideal in shaping the structure of the plantation. Hawaiians began to be more dissatisfied with plantation work and increasingly had less voice in choices regarding the land. By the early 1900s, Laie began to resemble other Hawaiian plantations in terms of its ethnic makeup, landscape, and emphasis on capital development. After 1920 very few Hawaiians continued to work on Laie plantation.

Margaret Haughery (1813-1882), a widowed, illiterate Irish immigrant who became known as “the Bread Woman” of New Orleans and the “Angel of the Delta” had grossed over $40,000 by the time of her death. She owned and ran a dairy farm and nationally-known bakery, donated to orphanages, leased property, owned slaves, joined with business partners and brought lawsuits. Although Haughery accomplished much in her life, she is commonly remembered only for her benevolent work with orphans and the poor. In 1884, a statue of her, posed with orphans, was erected by the city’s elite, one of the earliest statues of a woman in the nation. This thesis argues that it was Haughery’s willingness to engage in the mundane business practices of the day, including slaveholding, that made her veneration as a benefactress possible. Using acts of sale, property records, wills, newspaper articles, advertisements, and representations of Haughery, this thesis explores the life behind the image of the “Bread Woman.”

This thesis concentrates on a local union of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), District Lodge 776, of Fort Worth, Texas, during the war years. The main argument of the thesis runs along three basic lines. First, it demonstrates that the experiences of the Fort Worth Machinists clearly fit into the national labor movement during the war years. Second, it argues that the existence, survival, and strength of the union depended greatly on outside forcesan expanding national economy, a powerful national union, and a generally labor-friendly government. Third, it shows that union officers and rank-and-file members used their bases of strengththe national economy, the national IAM, and the federal governmentto build an effective local labor organization.