Theses and Dissertations - Department of History

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Baseball diplomacy, baseball deployment: the national pastime in U.S.-Cuba relations
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Turner, Justin W. R.; Jones, Howard; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The game of baseball, a shared cultural affinity linking Cuba and the United States, has played a significant part in the relationship between those nations. Having arrived in Cuba as a symbol of growing American influence during the late nineteenth century, baseball would come to reflect the political and economic connections that developed into the 1900s. By the middle of the twentieth century, a significant baseball exchange saw talented Cuban players channeled into Major League Baseball, and American professionals compete in Cuba's Winter League. The 1959 Cuban Revolution permanently changed this relationship. Baseball's politicization as a symbol of the Revolution, coupled with political antagonism, an economic embargo, and an end to diplomatic ties between the Washington and Havana governments largely destroyed the U.S.-Cuba baseball exchange. By the end of the 1960s, Cuban and American baseball interactions were limited to a few international amateur competitions, and political hardball nearly ended some of these. During the 1970s, Cold War détente and the success of Ping Pong Diplomacy with China sparked American efforts to use baseball's common ground as a basis for improving U.S.-Cuba relations. Baseball diplomacy, as the idea came to be called, was designed to be a means toward coexistence and normalization with the Castro government. Ultimately, despite a taking few swings during that decade, baseball diplomacy--unable to surmount the obstacles, either within politics or within professional baseball--failed to produce any actual games between Cuban and Major League Baseball teams. As Cold War détente evaporated into the 1980s, baseball's role in the U.S.-Cuba political relationship changed. Efforts to boost Cuban exposure to Major League Baseball developed as part of a general policy to use American culture and influence to erode Communism. This practice of deploying baseball as a political weapon continued into the 1990s. Unlike earlier efforts at baseball diplomacy, which were designed to improve U.S.-Cuba relations, baseball deployment aimed to provoke a democratic regime change in Cuba. This dissertation examines how politics have complicated U.S.-Cuba baseball exchanges, and traces the sport's contradictory use through baseball diplomacy and baseball deployment.
Creating the modern South: political development in the Tar Heel State, 1945 to the present
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Menestres, Daniel Paul; Frederickson, Kari A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation describes the process of political development in North Carolina during the twentieth century. Beginning with the creation of the "solid South" in the early twentieth century, North Carolina's unique one-party system featured a spirited rivalry within the Democratic Party that was largely absent throughout the South. The political rivalry between conservative and progressive Democrats profoundly influenced the course of North Carolina's political development. Following the Second World War, the interaction between state and national politics played a significant role in the development of the state's two-party system. By the end of the twentieth century, a competitive two-party system supplanted one-party politics. Historians have written extensively about political development in the twentieth-century South, but there are few state-specific studies focusing on political change in the modern South. Using manuscripts, newspapers, and interviews, this dissertation traces the process by which one southern state gradually cast aside one-party politics and developed a strong, competitive two-party system. As such, this research provides insight into the development of two-party politics in the modern South.
Factors in the History of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1816-1846
(University of Alabama Libraries) Boucher, Morris Raymond; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The history of Tuscaloosa as a town goes back beyond the history of the state of which it forms a part. From a purely technical standpoint, it became an incorporated town one day earlier than Alabama became a state. Tuscaloosa was incorporated December 13, 1819, and Alabama became a state on the following day.
Freeing the slaves: an examination of emancipation military policy and the attitudes of Union officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Teters, Kristopher Allen; Rable, George C.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation examines the policies and attitudes of Union officers towards emancipation in the western theater during the Civil War. It looks at how both high-ranking and junior Federal officers carried out emancipation policy in the field and how this policy evolved over time. Alongside army policy this study discusses how western officers viewed emancipation, black troops, and race in general. It ultimately determines how much officers' attitudes towards these issues changed as a result of the war. From the beginning of the war to the middle of 1862, Union armies in the West pursued a very inconsistent emancipation policy. When Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in July 1862, army policy became much more consistent and emancipationist. Officers began to take in significant numbers of slaves and employ them in the army. After President Abraham Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the army increased its liberation efforts and this continued until the war's end. In fact, the army became the key instrument by which emancipation was implemented in the field. But always guiding these emancipation policies were military priorities. As much as they could, officers freed slaves for the army's benefit, focusing on taking in able-bodied males who could be employed as laborers, pioneers, and soldiers. Western Union officers were practical liberators. The attitudes of western-theater officers towards emancipation and black troops reflected these policies. Most officers eventually came to support emancipation (at first there was significant opposition to the measure among officers), largely for practical reasons, believing it was necessary to win the war. Similarly, they supported the use of black troops because they could help the army with valuable manpower. So most officers saw both freeing the slaves and enlisting blacks as soldiers as simply ways to crush the rebellion rather than uplift an oppressed race. Reinforcing this general lack of sympathy for slaves were the deep racial prejudices of western officers. Officers viewed blacks as an inferior race and this did not change as a result of the war. These intense racial prejudices would have profound consequences for the postwar period.
"Getting right with Reagan: conservatives and the fortieth president, 1980-2016"
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Witcher, Marcus M.; Frederickson, Kari A.; Beito, David T.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project examines the evolution of conservatives’ relationship with President Ronald Reagan from 1980 to 2016. The first half demonstrates that conservatives were often displeased with the Reagan administration’s fiscal, social, and foreign policy. I emphasize conservatives’ frustration with the disconnect that existed between Reagan’s rhetoric and his actual policy initiatives. Throughout, special attention is given to the various schools of conservative ideology. Although historians have noted the tension within the conservative movement, I argue that those involved in the “Reagan Revolution” often found that Reagan’s time in power was not revolutionary at all. The second half of the dissertation describes how conservatives crafted Reagan’s legacy from 1988 to the present. In chapter four I use the Reagan Library and Museum to recreate how Reagan wanted to frame his own legacy. By carefully examining the exhibits, I determine that Reagan emphasized economic recovery, rebuilding the military, reducing the threat of nuclear war, and restoring Americans’ belief in their country as the central tenets of his legacy. Contentious social issues, and the people who were at the heart of the culture wars of the 1980s, were not present in the museum’s exhibits. Throughout the 1990s conservatives framed themselves as fulfilling the Reagan Revolution and they attempted to use Reagan to achieve electoral success. By the 2000s, however, conservatives began to mythologize Reagan and his achievements. Reagan became a dogmatic conservative who single-handedly won the Cold War and reinvigorated a nation. Ironically, conservatives who had denounced Reagan during the 1980s manipulated Reagan’s record and recreated him as a principled conservative crusader whose successes were the result of his steadfast commitment to principles. The art of selectively remembering certain aspects of Reagan’s record and conveniently forgetting others were central to the creation of the Reagan myth. I conclude that Reagan’s achievements were a product of his pragmatic application of his conservative principles and his willingness to change course when necessary. Furthermore, the creation of the Reagan myth has contributed to many of the challenges that the GOP continues to wrestle with today.
The home front as battlefront: interactions between union soldiers and southern women during the American Civil War
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Mammina, Laura; Rable, George C.; Rothman, Joshua D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Union soldiers and southern women’s interactions during the American Civil War were more than passing exchanges between strangers. This project argues that their relationships had real effects on the battlefield and on the home front; they affected ideas about citizenship and republicanism; cultural notions of gender roles, racial difference, and socioeconomic status; and definitions of intimate space. Studying soldiers and women together reveals that wartime hostilities exacerbated conflicts over citizenship and inclusion in the republican nation. Focusing on these interactions demonstrates how individual Americans used wartime upheaval to redefine American citizenship. In addition, wartime exchanges between Union soldiers and southern women illuminate nineteenth-century social stratification, gender roles, and race relations. I argue that these interactions bridge a significant gap in the literature between studies of widespread antebellum social and cultural upheaval with the well-documented changes to gender, racial, and class barriers in the postwar period. The intermingling of soldiers and women during the American Civil War demonstrates the ways in which individual behavior, the fixity of racial divisions, and the supposed superior morals of socioeconomic elites, were constantly challenged by the actions of everyday people. This project frames these analyses through the lens of intimate space. When used in the context of the Civil War, intimate space reveals the tension in the relationship between the home front and battlefront by demonstrating that everyday actions in private spaces reverberated throughout the larger world of government and military decisions. In this way, intimate space encompasses not only “private” space—from privately owned land to the houses, slave dwellings, and other structures built upon it as well as to the human and inanimate property housed within—but also the relationships, labor, affective ties, and reproductive actions which occurred in these spaces. Ultimately, an analysis of intimate space reveals that southern homes were already political spaces even before the Union army set foot on southern soil, thus illustrating that the Civil War intensified rather than politicized southern homes. Examining relationships between soldiers and women reveals the complex political, social, and cultural ideas at the heart of the nineteenth-century American home and nation.
Magic city jews: integration and public memory in birmingham, alabama, 1871-1911
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2020-08) Young, Melissa Farah; Giggie, John M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The numerous books and articles that record the actions of Birmingham’s first Jewish residents generally discuss the actions of these transatlantic and domestic migrants in two ways. They either frame the individuals’ daily interactions in relation to common patterns of American Jewish community building or replicate the commercial tropes and ideals of nineteenth-century Protestant boosters. Neither captures the full diversity of the settlers or the numerous ways they contributed to Birmingham’s early growth and expansion. Using the lives of Jewish men and women who settled in the city between 1872 and 1911, including Herman Simon, Isaac Hochstadter, Emil Lesser, and Bertha Gelders, this dissertation explores the waves of immigration that brought Jewish residents to the town and the various paths that local Jews took to accomplish their professional, political, and religious goals. Like many of their counterparts in other American towns, the Jewish families who came to Birmingham in its first four decades drew from their experiences in other cities to form new connections and integrate into their local community. Although most remained socially and religiously distinct, they defined and practiced Judaism in different ways and possessed a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The activities of Birmingham’s most prominent Jewish citizens, however, can also be linked to their extensive networks with many non-Jewish white residents, including skilled laborers, civic-commercial elites, and German immigrants. The role they played in the city and its history was also deeply tied to upper- and middle-class boosters’ conceptions of success, progress, ideal citizenship, and social order. In contrast to other studies, this dissertation compares previous accounts of Jewish settlers to the city’s promotional materials, newspaper articles, and oral testimonies. In so doing, it highlights the work of Orthodox Jews, non-practicing residents, and Jewish women and investigates how local Jews minimized antisemitism through their daily interactions and the active role they played in public memory.
New York transformed: committees, militias, and the social effects of political mobilization in revolutionary New York
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Williams, Colin Jay; Selesky, Harold E.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Social mobilization during the American Revolution rapidly, fundamentally, and permanently changed the way New Yorkers related to government. By forcing residents to choose sides and regulating their access to commodities such as salt and tea, local committees made government integral to how people lived their lives. Rebel campaigns against the British army in 1776 and 1777 furthered this involvement, giving state-formed commissions for detecting and defeating conspiracies the warrant to investigate individual conduct and define acceptable political behavior. With Tories expelled from central New York and the disaffected persuaded to support rebellion in the war's later years, the rebel government redistributed loyalist property and enfranchised much of white society. By the 1788 Poughkeepsie Convention, New Yorkers - a people who had previously related to each other through their social class, religious affiliation, and position within a community - believed that government existed to expand political participation, provide citizens with economic opportunity, and protect the rights of the individual.
Objects of confidence and choice: professional communities in Alabama, 1804-1861
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2014) Reidy, Thomas Edward; Rothman, Joshua D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Objects of Confidence and Choice considered the centrality of professional communities in Alabama, from1804 to 1861. The dissertation highlighted what it meant to be a professional, as well as what professionals meant to their communities, by examining themes of education, family, wealth patterns, slaveholding, and professional identities This project defined professionals as men with professional degrees or licenses to practice: doctors, lawyers, clergymen, teachers, and others. Several men who appeared in this study have been widely studied: William Lowndes Yancey, Josiah Nott, Dr. J. Marion Sims, James Birney, Leroy Pope Walker, Clement Comer Clay, and his son, Clement Claiborne Clay. Others are less familiar today, but were, in many cases, leaders of their towns and cities. Names were culled from various censuses and tax records and put into a database that included items such as age, marital status, children, real property, personal property, and slaveholding. In total, the database included 453 names. The study also mined a rich vein of primary source material from the very articulate professional community. Objects of Confidence and Choice indicated that professionals were not a social class but a community of institution builders. In order to refine this conclusion, a more targeted investigation of professionals in a single antebellum Alabama town will be needed.
Paradise reclaimed: the end of frontier Florida and the birth of a modern state, 1900-1940
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Suarez, Scott; Frederickson, Kari A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The question of whether Florida remained a frontier region well into the twentieth century is examined. For the purposes of this study, the concept of a frontier is not based on geography, but on social perception and infrastructural development. Specific areas of interest include disease prevention, the development of roads and railroads, promotional literature, and advertising as a state sponsored business. Data gathered in pursuit of these questions comes from a variety of sources. A broad selection of Florida newspapers are combined with a detailed examination of the papers of several governors, a selection of prominent businessmen and boosters, and the personal recollections of individuals interviewed by the Works Progress Administration. Also included are travel accounts, promotional publications by individual towns and cities, and a selection of photographs and illustrations from the era. There are several limitations on the depth of the research, primarily due to the loss of materials in several disasters, both man-made and natural. The WPA also interviewed only a handful of individuals, resulting in a rather meager selection of recollections. The ultimate conclusion is that Florida was very much a frontier, both physically and psychologically, until the Great Depression of the 1930s. At that point, the state was fully integrated into the United States and ceased to be a place apart. There is more work to be done, with greater emphasis on federal legislation and perhaps starting earlier in the nineteenth century, should anyone wish to delve deeper.
Recasting the image of God: faith and identity in the Deep South, 1877-1915
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Chapell, Colin; Giggie, John Michael; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Individuals construct their own identity in large part through their conceptions of gender. Few historians, however, have explored how religion shaped gender construction in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia during the New South period. Scholars have primarily concentrated on the roles various denominations allowed men and women to hold in church leadership rather than how different theological understandings changed the ways individuals understood manhood and womanhood. My dissertation explores how church officials used Protestant theology in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to argue for new constructions of gender. By using archival sources as diverse as diaries, sermons, speeches, unpublished memoirs, and published works, my research examines three theological groups in the American Deep South between 1877 and 1915. These three groups are the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC); the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS); and the emerging Holiness movement. I argue that these groups had specific theological emphases that changed how they conceived of manhood, womanhood, and family life. While class, race, and regional identities were important for the denominational officials studied, theology was also an influential factor in formulating their personal understandings of self.
The remembered war: the Korean war in American culture, 1953-1995
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Merritt, Jonathan Clay; Huebner, Andrew J.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
After three years of bitter fighting, the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953. It profoundly shaped and directed American Cold War policy for the next four decades. Korea’s place in American culture and memory, however, has seemingly been less profound. This dissertation reassesses the war’s legacy from the armistice in 1953 through the construction of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in 1995. It argues that representations of the war have shifted over time in response to contemporary social concerns, emphasizing different aspects of the war that resonated with Americans at the time. Simultaneously, the image of Korea as the Forgotten War has also shaped the war’s meaning. Such a label, ironically, has had an important impact on how it has been remembered. Finally, the memory of Korea has been unable to escape the long shadows cast by other conflicts of the twentieth century, especially World War II and Vietnam. These wars have simultaneously limited and broadened the Korean War’s legacy. Taking these factors into consideration, this dissertation reassesses the Korean War’s place in American culture by tracing the various ways it has been remembered and represented.
To live and dine in Dixie: foodways and culture in the twentieth-century South
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Cooley, Angela Jill; Frederickson, Kari A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation explores the transformation of food culture in urban areas of the American South during the first part of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1964, southern culinary practices became more public and more in line with national trends. The first three decades of the twentieth century marked an important period of change. In southern homes, white, middle-class, urban women formed a commitment to scientific cooking and used its strict rules to construct new racial and class identities within the urban environment. At the same time, newly urban peoples began frequenting a variety of different types of public eating places. Socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and gender diversity within these spaces encouraged the white power structure in southern cities to implement laws to regulate these public spaces. Such regulation included municipal ordinances that restricted eating places based on race and contributing to the development of a system of racial segregation within the region's urban areas. White southerners maintained racial segregation in public eating places through images and everyday rituals that identified the black consumption of food as subordinate to white consumption. At the height of Jim Crow, however, southern consumption culture also cultivated the seeds of segregation's destruction. Segregated black cafes stimulated African American community building and empowerment, both of which served to undermine the strength of segregation. At the same time, as southern food practices became more entwined with national standards, food systems emerged and spread across the South that encouraged more democratized spaces for the consumption of food. The nationalization of southern food culture, the determined efforts of civil rights activists to end segregated eating patterns, and the continued intransigence of white supremacists to maintain racial segregation in food venues encouraged the United States Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which, among other things, required the desegregation of public eating places.
Virginia's wilderness: investigating the landscape of war
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2018) Petty, Adam; Rable, George C.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This work reconsiders the myth surrounding the Wilderness, a forest in Virginia, which played host to three Civil War campaigns. This Wilderness myth has several components. First, the Wilderness was a battlefield unlike any other and created unique battle conditions. Second, these conditions favored the Confederates who tried to trap the Federals in the Wilderness. Third, there was a mystique surrounding the Wilderness, which associated it with woe, gloom, death, destruction, hell, fire, and the supernatural among other things. While evocative, this traditional interpretation reflects a distorted understanding of the forest as well as what actually took place within its bounds. This dissertation argues that the Wilderness myth was the product of hindsight and of a desire to explain away Union failures and highlight Robert E. Lee’s generalship. While the Wilderness truly was a very difficult battlefield that created trying combat conditions, many of the claims of Wilderness exceptionalism are unfounded, and consequently, the Wilderness did not give the Confederates a special advantage, nor did they try to trap the Union army there. The Wilderness’s threatening mystique, however, did set it apart from any other battlefield of the war.
War is a terrible enemy to temperance: drinking, self-control, and the meaning of loyalty in the Civil War era
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2014) Bever, Megan Leigh; Rable, George C.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
When the American Civil War began in 1861, people on both sides of the conflict believed that the conduct of soldiers and civilians would shape if not determine the war's outcome. In this context, the nation-wide temperance movement began a period of transition. Before the 1860s, interest in temperance was waning nationally; local and state regulatory measures had curbed excessive drinking. Once war broke out, however, alcohol became increasingly threatening. Soldiers and officers drank heavily, lacked discipline, and harassed civilians. Distillers and traffickers wasted grain and profited during a time of scarcity, when most civilians practiced patriotic self-sacrifice. Temperance reformers believed that ridding the nation - either the Union or the Confederacy - of alcohol was the only way to curb immorality, whip the armies into fighting shape, and win the war. Many Americans outside of the temperance movement agreed. Debates over alcohol's manufacture and consumption became essential components for understanding what it meant to be a patriotic citizen during the Civil War. In turn, examining these wartime issues recasts historical understandings of the centrality of temperance to conceptions of nationalism in the post-bellum United States. This study relies on a variety of sources: military records, legislative journals, temperance and religious publications, personal accounts, and newspapers. It examines soldiers' uses and beliefs about drinking; the supply of alcohol in the armies; regulatory debates on the northern and southern home fronts; and northern and southern temperance reformers' understandings of the war's purposes. It argues that when it came to alcohol northern and southern civilians clashed with military officials. Union and Confederate military officials knew that whiskey was responsible for chronic indiscipline, but they nevertheless supplied alcohol to soldiers to stave off illness and fatigue. Soldiers drank willingly. Alcohol took the edge off the war. On the home front, however, civilians regarded liquor as an enemy in its own right. Temperance reformers implored soldiers to put down the bottle. Union and Confederate civilians demanded that military and civil authorities prohibit distilling to restore order and preserve food. In doing so, they laid the foundations for the post-war prohibition movement.

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