The confidence of Confederate evangelicals in the support of providence inspired southern clergymen to demand the transformation of the independent South into a nineteenth-century covenant nation--a "Confederate Israel." Such a Confederate Israel was needed to impede the spread of liberalism in the South and in the world, and also to serve as prelude ...

William Louis Poteat (1856-1938) was a prominent educator, Progressive reformer, and leader in the Baptist denomination in North Carolina. He was the son of a slaveholder and grew up on a large tobacco plantation in Caswell County, North Carolina. From 1872 until 1877 he attended Wake Forest College, a Baptist school near Raleigh. He returned there ...

Using a developmental model as a heuristic tool for understanding the main contours of socioeconomic and cultural development in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South Carolina, and following Samuel S. Hill's advice that southern religious historians "must consider how religion is related to developments in other aspects of southern life ... as ...

Contributing to the movement to separate church and state in revolutionary Virginia, John Leland formed a unique discourse that utiltized the similarities inherent in evangelical religion and republican ideology. Building upon the language of his New England brethren, which stressed the inconsistencies of republican rhetoric and religious persecution, ...

Since its founding in London in 1844 and its arrival in Houston in 1886, the Young Men's Christian Association has always been a social service agency, attending to the needs of its clientele. Though the types of services the YMCA has offered have changed over time, its commitment to social service has not. In the first one hundred years in Houston, ...

The desegregation of American public school systems in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was a vast, protracted, and, in many cases, frustrated historical project that impacted individual communities in a multitude of ways. Drawing upon official school board records, court documents, oral histories, newspaper accounts, government reports, ...

This dissertation engages the historiography of American citizenship and identity, republican traditions in American life and thought, and explores the evolution of military leadership in American society during the American Civil War. The nature, experiences and evolution of citizen-soldiers and citizen-officers, both Union and Confederate, reveal ...

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 proved to be a watershed that altered the demographic composition of the United States in unexpected and unprecedented ways. Immigrants from India and Pakistan (part of South Asia) represented a highly educated elite migration in the 1960s and 1970s and filled a gap in the American economy for technical and ...

Maryland in the mid-nineteenth century was a state trying to balance its regional ties to both an agrarian culture based on the institution of slavery and an industrializing, urban culture. Caught in between two warring societies, Marylanders themselves were unsure of their identity given the rapid changes of the late antebellum decades. This study ...

H.L. Mencken coined “the Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and regional life in the American South. But the reality Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Like the label itself, the Bible Belt was something new, and everything new must be made. This dissertation is the history ...