Browsing by Subject "American history"
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Item Open Access A Beautiful Noise: A History of Contemporary Worship Music in Modern America(2015) Reagan, WenHow did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.
This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.
Item Open Access After Eden: Religion and Labor in the American West, 1868-1914(2018) Keegan, Brennan LynnVariously romanticized as the repository of American Protestantism, free market capitalism, and self-sufficient individualism, or defined by material actions of conquest and colonization, the history of the Rocky Mountain West is a complicated constellation of myth and reality. This dissertation evaluates the efforts of three religious communities to negotiate a place within that constellation. Northern Arapaho wage laborers in central Wyoming, Mormon merchants in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Roman Catholic hard-rock miners in Butte, Montana, leveraged their religious and ethnic identities to negotiate places of sovereignty in the western landscape. While each case study presents a distinct relationship between religion and labor, each is grounded in the materiality of exchange and economics in order to show the inseparability of religion from the economic practices that enabled the creation and endurance of nineteenth-century Western communities. Despite the concealing mechanisms of a single, idealized trajectory of American nationhood, the narration of national space was haunted and disrupted by the persistence of alternate, but interconnected, religious geographies, which re-scripted hegemonic narratives of American religious and economic exceptionalism. Using the tools of archival research and the collection of oral histories, this dissertation explores the tension of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the pastoral heartland of the American myth.
Item Open Access “All War Arrangements are but Schools in Patience”: The North Carolina Council of Defense and the Associational State, 1917-1919(2022) Finney, Nathan KThis dissertation explores the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the North Carolina Council of Defense during the First World War. Its story, while particular to a single state and its people, also illuminates and explains the dynamic and compelling regional and national events that drove a massive wartime mobilization. The North Carolina Council of Defense is also an entry point into understanding the decisions and pathways seen in the American mobilization, helping to illuminate how and why the mobilization occurred in the ways that it did. Perhaps most importantly, the story of this state Council provides insight into the nature of American governance during wartime. Positioned between the national government and the people of North Carolina, the Council mediated the activities of public, private, and individual efforts in support of mobilization activities. Because of this intermediary positioning, it was instrumental in expanding state capacity and capability for military and resource mobilization, and therefore supporting an increase in the nation’s ability to mobilize for the war. However, the Council’s intermediary role also allowed those managing the state mobilization to prevent any significant challenge to the state’s white supremacist and patriarchal socio-political system, despite the dynamic changes wrought by the need to mobilize the nation for war.
Item Open Access 'Any Name That Has Power': The Black Panthers of Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 1948-1977(2013) Angelo, AnneMarieThe US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue.
This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.
Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.
This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.
Item Open Access At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz(2015) Mueller, DarrenAt the Vanguard of Vinyl investigates the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record (LP), 1948-1960. The technological advancements of the LP, along with the incipient use of magnetic tape recording, made it feasible to commercially issue recordings running beyond the three-minute restrictions of the 78-rpm record. LPs began to feature extended improvisations, musical mistakes, musicians' voices, and other moments of informal music making, revolutionizing the standard recording and production methods of the previous recording era. As the visual and sonic modes of representation shifted, so too did jazz's relationship to white mainstream culture, Western European musical aesthetics, US political structures, and streams of Afro-modernism. Jazz, as an African American social and musical practice, became a form of resistance against the violent structures of institutional racism within the United States in the 1950s.
Using the records of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley, this study outlines the diverse approaches to record making that characterized the transitional years as the LP became the standard recording format. Through archival research, close listening, and detailed discographical analyses of the era's most influential record labels, I show how jazz practices and musical "mistakes" caught on record provided opportunities for recording experimentation. I examine choices made during the record production process, such as tape edits, microphone placement, overdubbing, and other sound processing effects, connecting such choices to the visual and tactile attributes of these discs. Drawing on scholarship that considers how sound reproduction technologies mediate constructions of race and ethnicity, I argue that the history of jazz in the 1950s is one of social engagement by means of and through technology. At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a cultural history of the jazz LP that underscores the ways in which record making is a vital process to music and its circulation.
Item Open Access Caring for Korea: Engendering War and Aid in the American Century(2021) Ontiveros, Hannah Margaret“Caring for Korea” examines American relief work during and following the Korean War (1950-1953), and the way that humanitarianism shaped American Cold War approaches to empire. Centering aid workers, I highlight the lives and experiences of Americans who expressed concern for Koreans and mobilized that concern to build influence in East Asia. Utilizing records from government agencies, the United Nations, and church and relief organizations, I find incomplete American hegemony, even as the U.S. controlled and utilized many different institutions to exert its will in Korea. My research shows how through humanitarian work, the labor of empire was gendered, soft, and flexible; and that the agents of empire used American influence to work for their own goals.
Item Open Access Conservatism, Culture, and the Military: The U.S. Army 1973 to 1991(2019) Swinney, Joseph DThis dissertation explores the revitalization of the U.S. army during the two decades following the Vietnam War. It questions how the army went from a nearly broken institution in the early 1970s to, arguably, one of the nation’s most respected institutions after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Through an examination of collections of articles published in the extensive military press of the period, collections of personal papers from both senior and lower ranking army officers, and historical files from the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, this dissertation shows that the army’s revitalization was fundamentally a transformation in the institution’s culture and conceptions of professionalism. The military press articles and officers’ personal papers are used to show both how the army’s culture changed over time, and what ideas informed that cultural change. That exploration shows that the conservative turn shift in American political culture profoundly shaped the U.S. army. Members of the army appropriated many of the terms and languages of the conservative movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and applied those ideas to how they understood and described their institution. Ideals associated with the conservative movement not only shaped how members of the army understood their professional identities, but also how they idealized professional behavior and understood gender equality and race integration.
Item Open Access Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States(2018) Cooper, Mandy L.“Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States” explores the centrality of families to the new republic’s economy and governing institutions in the post-Revolutionary period. In so doing, my work brings the insights of scholarship on the early modern period to the post-Revolutionary United States, where the literature has tended to focus on men and women as individuals, rather than understanding them as members of far-flung family networks. While focusing specifically on several prominent families based in North Carolina and Virginia, the dissertation shows that during this period, wealthy elites during this period had extensive interests in their states and the federal government. They identified so closely with these bodies that they collapsed their interests with the public interest and used their access to them to advance their families’ interests in the name of the public good. By folding the institutions of federal and state government into their family networks, the new republic’s elites organized their own lives and these developing institutions around the metaphor and idea of family. As this dissertation argues, these dynamics were built into the institutional structure of the new nation, creating a governing system intertwined with the familial networks of the elite.
The focus is on two elite families: the Coles of Virginia and the Camerons of North Carolina. Both families were prominent members of the southern elite with networks centered in the South that extended throughout the country and stretched across the Atlantic. Members of both networks held prominent positions in state and national government, and both networks had extensive and varied business interests.
This dissertation combines the history of the Atlantic World with women’s, women’s, economic, political, and legal history to explore the economic and political implications of the connections between the “private,” domestic world of the family and the “public” world of governance at the federal, state, and local levels. The focus on family and affective labor, combined with the contributions of recent work in legal history, recasts our understanding of economic and political development in this period. Examining the intersections of politics with family business networks in the antebellum United States reveals the limitations of the power of governing institutions, particularly at the state and federal level, and the interdependent relationship between elite family networks and government. Government was not a unified, monopolizing force. Rather, governing authority lay in different arenas—at the local, state, and federal levels, and elite families used their networks to access government at these levels to support their economic interests.
“Cultures of Emotion” uses affective labor as a lens through which to examine a unique blend of sources: personal, business, and political correspondence, as well as ledgers, bonds, and other business and political documents. The personal correspondence allows me to reconstruct the basic outlines of kinship networks by revealing the work that men and women did in creating and maintaining familial ties through performances of specific emotional norms. The personal, business, and political correspondence of women and men in the families I study reveals repeated elements in correspondence that served as performances of emotional kinship bonds, as well as conventions to follow. Following the connections established in this correspondence to the ledgers, bonds, and other statements of credit and debt between the network’s members uncovers the webs of credit and debt that sustained elite families. These business and political records underscore the importance of kinship in maintaining these webs of credit and debt and constitute an important link in understanding the way the network’s political and economic power rested on familial bonds and incorporated the institutions of state and federal government as a member, firmly situating the economic and political networks in the domestic realm. Such an approach recasts our understanding of the nineteenth-century United States, centering families in the work of governance and highlighting women’s central role in their families’ economic and political work.
Item Open Access Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America(2021) Howell, Christopher WilliamDesigner Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America undertakes the first full-length historical overview of the intelligent design movement (ID), a popular and influential antievolutionary ideology prominent at the turn of the 21st century. To date, on one hand, full length treatments of ID have been primarily polemical, consisting of either critical refutations or hagiographic defenses. The scholarly, non-polemical assessments, on the other hand, have folded ID into a larger story of American creationism and in general do not focus on ID on its own. Rather than making ID a small part of a history of creationism or engaging in polemical conflict, this dissertation treats intelligent design it as its own subject.
In contrast to some critics and scholars who have interpreted intelligent design as a sleeker, deceptive, or “stealth” version of creationism, I find that ID is better understood as an evolution of creationist views into a distinct movement and ideology. The differences are especially stark if creationism is understood as young-Earth creationism, from which ID’s worldview was a significant departure. ID was animated less by the Biblical literalism and geological focus of young-Earth creationism and more by theistic metaphysics, the argument from design, and post-WWII intellectual conservatism. Its minimalist theological principles entailed a jettisoning of many of young-Earth creationism’s most important features, and its resultant lowest-common-denominator approach to antievolution (and reluctance to engage in doctrinal disputes) allowed ID to build a broad but shallow political coalition across antievolutionary movements. It was an expansive “big tent” with influence across the spectrum of antievolutionists and conservative political groups, and so creationists of all kinds were welcome (provided they sidelined doctrinal issues). However, ID and its supporters met their Waterloo in 2005, at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in Pennsylvania, where ID’s leaders struggled to clearly articulate a scientific vision for the concept and were dealt a disastrous legal defeat. Though ID did not disappear after the Dover trial, it was considerably reduced. Media interest declined, scientists reveled in their victory, and ID’s intellectual leaders responded by doubling down on existing arguments. ID’s general appeal meant that its leaders’ allegations of scientific bias legitimated a narrative of persecution that found great receptivity with its conservative religious supporters. In spite of its public decline, ID’s influence continued to be felt from the cultural margins, and the movement’s transition from an empirical challenge against Darwin to a radical rejection of scientific expertise is an illuminating development in the popular perception of science in the early 21st century. ID had little impact on the way science was practiced in America, but its influence on culture persists.
In order to chart a historical narrative of the movement’s rise, climax, and fall, I have focused primarily on ID’s intellectual history, for it was a movement concerned about the origins and effects of ideas. Supplemental research into the history of American conservatism and populist creationism is incorporated into a fuller picture of ID’s similarities and differences from the antievolutionary movements that came before it, and the latter half of the dissertation focuses on the legal and cultural context of ID in conjunction with its intellectual history. This project aims for a better understanding of what ID was—and what it was not—so as to make sense of its socio-political consequences, which are still being felt in 21st century America.
Item Open Access Eruditio et Religio: A Comparative History of Religious Life on Four Campuses(2018) Muir, ScottThis dissertation examines the relationship between religion and higher education in the United States through analyses of the religious histories of four distinct educational institutions in North Carolina’s Research Triangle—Duke University, Meredith College, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It places three seemingly contradictory scholarly representations of this relationship in conversation with one another. The first, represented by evangelical historians George Marsden and John Sommerville, claims that American higher education has come to be characterized by exclusive secularism. The second, represented by scholars of education, including Tricia Seifert, Lewis Schlosser, and Sherry Watt et al. claims by contrast that Christian privilege continues to obstruct the full inclusion of religious and non-religious minorities. And a third, represented by Rhonda and Jake Jacobsen, contends that historical Protestant and secularist predominance have been transcended by inclusive pluralism in the “postsecular” 21st century. This dissertation draws on archival research, participant observation, interviews, quantitative survey analysis, and secondary sources to demonstrate how Protestant, secular, and pluralist forces have coexisted and interacted throughout these four institutions’ histories. It illuminates how their campus religious climates have evolved in distinct ways through contingent interactions among these forces conditioned by a variety of institutional identity factors, including race, gender, affiliation, prestige, and geographical reach. As a result, we see that the relationship between religion and higher education is not uniformly characterized by either Christian privilege, exclusive secularism, or inclusive pluralism. Distinct institutional trajectories shape coexisting forms of privilege, secularism, and pluralism that interact in specific contexts, producing unique campus religious climates that shape undergraduate identity formation.
Item Open Access From Wastelands to Wetlands: The Story of Coastal Wetlands in the United States(2023-04-26) Kendall, MarianaCovering about 40 million acres of the United States, coastal wetlands are incredibly important ecosystems for humans and non-humans alike. Each year, coastal wetlands provide significant benefits due to their ability to protect coastlines from storm damage, sequester large amounts of carbon, and provide habitat for ecologically and economically valuable wildlife. Unfortunately, coastal wetlands are being lost at a rate of 80,000 acres per year, equivalent to 7 football fields lost per hour. This loss is largely driven by human development and related activities, as well as the effects of climate change and sea level rise. This project seeks to answer the question of how we got to this point of loss by discussing the ways humans have used coastal wetlands in the Eastern and Gulf Coasts of the United States throughout history, as well as analyzing the way entertainment media’s negative portrayal of wetlands has helped to form a negative association with wetlands in the eyes of the public.Item Open Access Gatecrashers: The First Generation of Outsider Artists in America(2015) Jentleson, Katherine LauraAlthough interest in the work of untrained artists has surged recently, appearing everywhere from the Venice Biennale to The New Yorker, the art world’s fascination with American autodidacts began nearly a century ago. My dissertation examines how and why American artists without formal training first crashed the gates of major museums and galleries between 1927 and 1940 through case studies on the most celebrated figures of the period: John Kane (1860–1934), Horace Pippin (1888–1946), and Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860–1961). All three painters were exhibited as “modern primitives,” a category that emerged in the wake of the French naïve Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) but which took on a distinct character in the United States where it became a space for negotiating renewed debates about authenticity in American art as well as pervasive social anxieties over how immigration, race, and industrialization were changing the country. In addition to establishing how the “modern primitive" fit into the pluralistic landscape of American modernism, my dissertation reaches into the present, exploring how the interwar breakthroughs of Kane, Pippin, and Moses prefigured the ubiquity of self-taught artists—often referred to as “outsider” artists—in American museums today.
Item Open Access GIs and 'Jeep Girls': Sex and American Soldiers in Wartime China(Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2019) Fredman, ZachThis article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.Item Open Access If Selma Were Heaven: Economic Transformation and Black Freedom Struggles in the Alabama Black Belt, 1901 - 2000(2014) Forner, KarlynIn Selma, Alabama in 1965, local African Americans partnered with civil rights organizations to stage a movement for voting rights. The beating of peaceful black marchers by white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that March catapulted the city and black demands for the ballot into the national spotlight. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later, it cemented Selma as a symbol of voting rights. Since then, Selma has become a triumphal moment in the grand narrative of American democracy and citizenship. However, the years after the voting rights movement failed to bring economic opportunities and justice for black citizens in Selma. At the end of the twentieth century, numbing unemployment, gutted houses, and government transfer payments attested to barriers left unbroken by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How, then, did Selma become the site of a nationally-geared campaign for voting rights, and why was the right to vote not enough to bring economic justice for African Americans?
This dissertation is a local study that spans the course of century, one that looks at Selma and Dallas County as a place with a long history shaped by white supremacy and agricultural transformation, as well as local relationships and national developments. It begins in 1901, the year that the newly-passed Alabama constitution took the ballot away from nearly every African American in the state, and ends in 2000, when Selma's residents elected their first black mayor. Using newspapers and magazines, personal papers, organizational records, municipal records, federal publications, and oral histories, it examines how municipal, state, and national politics, as well as enormous economic shifts, intersected with and altered the lives of black and white residents in Dallas County, Alabama.
The multifaceted struggle of African Americans for freedom in Dallas County unfolded within the context of a century-long agricultural revolution in the Black Belt. African Americans' overlapping demands for economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, quality education, and meaningful political representation reflected and responded to local economic shifts from cotton to cattle to industry. The semi-autonomous community black Dallas County residents forged through farmers' organizations, schools, and societies under segregation later helped them mount a frontal challenge to the ramparts of white supremacy. The civil rights movement, however, grew to maturity at exactly the moment when cattle had usurped cotton's reign over the fields, altering the Black Belt's economic and social fabric.
Political rights for African Americans in Dallas County did not solve the postwar economic challenges of vanishing farms and the rise of low-wage industry. Meanwhile, local white officials vigorously fought to maintain political control in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their calculated intransigence delayed the meaningful participation of black residents in the economic and political life of Selma. The rise of the Sunbelt South and globalization further siphoned resources away from the struggling Black Belt. As the federal government retracted and nearby military bases closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, rural areas like Dallas County were left without resources in a new economy that favored high-skilled workers in urban centers. Examining black freedom struggles and economic transformation side-by-side illuminates how voting rights alone did not alter the regional network that concentrated both resources and poverty in an uneven process of development.
The vote brought political power, but it did not bring the economic justice, security, or quality education that made up the other half of African Americans' demands for freedom. By singularly focusing on the securing of voting rights, Selma became a pivotal moment in the story of American democracy, but black Dallas County residents' parallel demands for equal economic opportunities remained long after African Americans had won the vote. The triumphal narrative ignores the economic transformation that fundamentally altered the Black Belt. From cotton to cattle, industry to unemployment checks, black citizens perpetually found themselves on the losing end of economic change. At the end of the century, nearly four decades of federal divestment and globalization had sapped Dallas County of jobs, and the government's presence was felt mainly in the form of disability checks and food assistance. The political rights black Dallas County citizens had shed blood for in 1965 could not alone undo this legacy of economic inequality.
Item Open Access "Into the Mainstream and Oblivion": Julian Mayfield's Black Radical Tradition, 1948-1984(2018) Romine, David Tyroler“Into the Mainstream and Oblivion” is a study of the intellectual and political biography of the African American writer and political activist Julian Hudson Mayfield. As a member of the black Left, Mayfield’s life of activism and art bring the complex network of artists, activists, and political theorists who influenced the construction, tactics, and strategies of social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century into sharper focus revealing the ways in which black, modernist writing served as a critical site of political, social, and cultural ferment during the Cold War. Using art to communicate ideas and arguments about the relationship between race, gender, and political economy, Mayfield and his contemporaries illuminate the broader influence of black writers on American culture and politics. In addition, the state’s response to Mayfield’s life of literary activism sheds light on the ways in which anti-communism worked to disrupt, marginalize, and dampen the effect of challenges to white supremacy.
The project makes extensive use of archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Life in Harlem, which houses the archives of Julian Mayfield and many of his contemporaries. In addition to these primary source documents, this project examines government documents produced by the extensive surveillance of African American writers by various government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of State, and United States Information Agency. Finally, the dissertation has benefitted from a close working relationship with the family of Julian Mayfield and oral histories from contemporaries which sheds light on the complex interplay of gender and class among black social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Item Embargo Knowledge and Conversion in the Making of Western History, a Philosophical Investigation(2023) Ali, Mohammed SyedIn academia in general, and in the humanistic social sciences in particular, there is a problem. The "cruel optimism" of concepts is a problem faced by every specialization, and every discipline (Berlant 2011). In the social sciences, and history especially, cruel optimism takes the form of an endless quest to prove that our concepts today are superior to the concepts of yesterday, that if we work hard enough and get our methods just right, we will finally find pure, objective, true concepts to express historical reality. I use this dissertation in order to reconfigure our relationship with our concepts, to try to grapple with and ultimately subdue the cruel optimism of concepts. I employ discourse analysis, a method of analyzing knowledge as the imprint of dynamic relations of force and friction between institutions and human beings. Rather than seeing our social scientific concepts as the result of methodical research applied to a critical mass of archival documents, I see them as the result of power relations that are used to control reality as much as they purport to describe it. My materials are documentary sources—published social science scholarship and declassified intelligence reports using social scientific analysis. My conclusion is that we can use our concepts in a way that releases us from the dread of cruel optimism, so long as we see them as "snapshots of processes" (Levins 2006) rather than things in themselves.
Item Open Access Labor, Civil Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Mid-Twentieth Century Texas(2011) Krochmal, MaximilianWhat happens when the dominant binary categories used to describe American race relations--either "black and white," or "Anglo and Mexican"--are examined contemporaneously, not comparatively, but in relation to one another? How do the long African American and Chicano/a struggles for racial equality and economic opportunity look different? And what role did ordinary people play in shaping these movements? Using oral history interviews, the Texas Labor Archives, and the papers of dozens of black, brown, and white activists, this dissertation follows diverse labor, civil rights, and political organizers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.
Tracing their movements revealed a startling story. Beginning in the mid-1930s, African American and ethnic Mexican working people across Texas quietly and tentatively approached one another as well as white laborers for support in their efforts to counter discrimination at work, in their unions, and in the cities in which they lived. Such efforts evolved in different ways due to the repression of the early Cold War, but most organizers simply redirected their activism into new channels. By the close of the 1950s, new forms of multiracial alliances were beginning to take hold. Mutual suspicion slowly gave way to mutual trust, especially in San Antonio. There, and increasingly statewide, black and brown activists separately developed robust civil rights movements that encompassed demands not only for integration but also equal economic opportunities and the quest for independent political power.
The distinct civil rights and labor movements overlapped, especially in the realm of electoral politics. By the mid-1960s, what began as inchoate collaboration at the local level had gradually expanded from its origins in the barrios, ghettos, union halls, and shop floors to become a broad-based, state-wide coalition in support of liberal politicians and an expansive civil rights agenda. At the same time, African American and ethnic Mexican activists were engaged in new waves of organizing for both political power and civil rights, but they encountered opposition from members of their own ethnic groups. Thus the activists' efforts to forge inter-ethnic coalitions coexisted with protracted intra-ethnic conflict. In many cases distinctions of class and political philosophy and tactics mattered at least as much as did ties of ethnicity. Activists learned this lesson experientially: in the trenches, through countless small conflicts over several decades, they slowly separated themselves from their more conservative counterparts and looked to multiracial coalitions as their primary strategy for outflanking their intra-ethnic opponents. Meanwhile, organized labor and white liberals had been searching for allies in their efforts to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from its conservative wing. In the early 1960s, they reached the conclusion that black and brown voters would prove key to their own success, so they gradually transitioned toward civil rights organizing in order to build a coalition with the black and brown civil rights movements.
After decades of fighting separately and dabbling in experimental partnerships, veteran ethnic Mexican, African American, and white labor and liberal activists finally came together into a powerful statewide Democratic Coalition. Between 1962 and 1964, their collaborative campaign for civil rights, economic opportunity, and political power reached a fever pitch, resulting in the state's largest ever direct action protests, massive door-to-door electoral initiatives, and an ever-deepening commitment by labor to putting boots on the ground for community organizing. In the late 1960s the statewide multiracial coalition reached its apex and began to lose steam. At the same time, local multiracial coalitions continued to thrive, underpinning both the African American and Chicano/a urban electoral mobilizations and the rising Black and Brown Power movements. At the local level and in the short term, black, brown, and white working-class civil rights activists won--they achieved a degree of economic and political democracy in Texas that was scarcely imaginable in the age of Jim Crow just a few decades earlier. But as they won local battles they also lost the larger war.
Working-class civil rights organizers thus failed in the end to democratize Texas and America. Their goals remain distant to this day. Yet they were themselves transformed by their experiences in the struggle. Most transitioned from near-complete political and economic exclusion to having a voice. Their collective story indicates that scholars have much to gain from studying organized labor, electoral politics, and the African American and ethnic Mexican civil rights movements simultaneously. Doing so not only adds to the emerging historical sub-field of black-brown relations but also makes each of the individual movements look different. It reconnects class to the black freedom struggle, militancy to the ethnic Mexican civil rights movement, organized labor to community activism, and all three movements to the creation of today's urban politics.
Item Open Access Learning (Re)formation: An Ethnographic Study of Theological Vision and Educational Praxis at Grand Rapids Christian Schools(2015) DeGaynor, Elizabeth AnneThe West Michigan Dutch enclave of the Christian Reformed Church has made private, Christian education a centerpoint of its tradition. While Horace Mann was advocating for national common schools, forming youth into civil religious adherents, this group chose to be separatist. What began with one school in 1856 has now become a network (Christian Schools International) of nearly 500 Reformed Christian schools enrolling 100,000 students. When Grand Rapids Christian High School was founded as a spin-off from Calvin College and Seminary in 1920, there was a clear theological mission steeped in a Kuyperian worldview. Although there have been numerous studies of schools in America, none focus on the significance of mission statement (its evolution over time and its implementation within the educational community). This school developed in a city whose racialized geography allowed the community to prosper as white American Protestant citizens insofar as they were willing to assimilate. This school currently displays American capitalism and an evangelicalism which extends beyond strict Calvinism. Although it began as an insular site for ethnic and religious formation, Grand Rapids Christian High School now aims to prepare American Christians for success and servant-leadership in the world.
This dissertation seeks to describe the historical, sociological, and theological foundations of Grand Rapids Christian Schools and to trace changes over time; to observe the formational practices which occur in this educational community; and to consider which theological and pedagogical precepts might be useful in this particular context. This project involves an ethnographic study at Grand Rapids Christian High School and a constructive theological and pedagogical response. Along with data gleaned from historical archives about the school’s founding and development, there are daily observations and interviews. The goal is to explore the explicit manifestations of the school’s theological vision and the implicit practices that reinforce or undermine it. Potential results include heightened awareness of the school’s theological vision throughout the school community and increased connectivity between theory and praxis. By using the microcosm of one school, this research will highlight the place of myriad Christian schools in the American educational landscape. My work brings history, theology, and pedagogy together in order to trace the cultural forces that shape learning communities.
Item Open Access Mormon Polygamy and the Construction of American Citizenship, 1852-1910(2011) Wood Crowley, JenetteFrom 1852 to 1910 Congress labored to find the right instruments to eliminate polygamy among the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled to retain its claim as the most American of institutions. What these struggles reveal about the shifting role of religion in the developing definition of American citizenship is at the heart of this dissertation. By looking at developing ideas about citizenship in this particular frame, the social and political history of exclusion and inclusion comes into focus and exposes the role religion played in determining who could lay claim to citizenship and who could not, who tried and failed, who succeeded, and why. In the end, the coercive measures of the state and their own desire to join the body politic drove the Saints to unquestionably abandon the practice of polygamy, a central tenet of their faith, so that they could be accepted as American citizens.
The battle over polygamy and the rights of polygamists was not limited to the floor of the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court, although those sources are carefully examined here. Debates over polygamy and Mormons' right to be Americans also took place in sermons, novels, newspapers, and popular periodicals. Official actions of the state and popular discourses simultaneously defined citizenship and influenced how Mormons understood their own citizenship. This dissertation is a history of the discourse generated by Mormons and their antagonists, laws passed by Congress, and court cases fought to defend or deny the civil, political and social rights of Latter-day Saints.
Item Open Access National Crimes and Southern Horrors: Trans-Atlantic Conversations about Race, Empire, and Civilization, 1880-1900(2011) Weber, EricNational Crimes and Southern Horrors examines the contested meanings of the terms civilization, race, and empire in trans-Atlantic conversations during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that understanding these dialogues requires us to understand the interplay between regional and transnational definitions of these terms. It further explains both white Southern opposition to empire at the end of the nineteenth century as well as white Southern acceptance of their region as similar to European empires and imperial mission described in Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The White Man's Burden." Reading newspaper US and British articles and editorials, international periodicals, personal papers of activists and politicians in both the US South and Britain, it uncovers the dynamic definitions of race, empire, and civilization at play in the work of constructing the US South as both a part of and distinct from the imperial world. Reading conversations about Irish home rule, the gold standard, international bimetallism, British interactions with white and black Southerners, the disfranchisement of black men in the US South, the construction of Jim Crow, lynching in the US South, Turkish atrocities in Armenia, the Philippine American War and the Boer War, it reveals that to understand the transnational development of white supremacy in imperial sites in Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and the US South requires to look not only at the ways whites within each site defined their right to rule but also in the ways they looked to each other. It also argues that understanding the place of the US South within trans-Atlantic conversations about race and civilization but also regional politics and the ways that regional concerns structured and limited how people in Britain and the US South saw each other. Through comparison and conflict, the US South was an essential part in constructing global color lines, and imperial ideologies worked to prop up white Southern defenses for segregation and Jim Crow.