While the migration of Abraham Lincoln’s family to the Northwest has often been documented as a significant event of his youth, historians have neglected the powerful repercussions this family decision had on Lincoln’s assessment of the South and the secession crisis in 1860 and 1861. Lincoln’s years living and working in the Northwest from 1831 to ...

My dissertation is a contextual biography of a white southern liberal. W. D. Weatherford lived from 1875 to 1970 and played a key role in many of the significant social and political issues of the day, namely race relations, education, religion, and Appalachian reform. He was a pioneer in interracial work in the U. S. South who became involved in ...

This thesis attempts to provide a better understanding of the urban black experience in the first decade and a half following the war by focusing on the development of a single black neighborhood called Freedmantown in Houston's Fourth Ward. In the post-Civil War period, the black population in Houston increased dramatically. Through blacks' efforts ...

This dissertation explores the nuances of how the religious community of Alabama responded to the development of a Latino population in the state, beginning in the mid-1980s, as well as how Latinos found a place among the preexisting religious institutions. Much of the academic focus on Latinos in the South has explored the topic from the perspectives ...

In the late nineteenth century the lives of many white middle- and upper-class women were transformed by the woman's club movement. The club movement became the crucible in which the ideology of "true womanhood" was infused with new content, relevance, and meaningfulness for non-wage-earning women in modern America. As a significant, but largely ...

Questioning why some white women in the South identified with Progressive reform movements, or became suffragists, provides the impetus for this case study based on women's organizations in Galveston, Texas. By employing the technology devised by urban historians to complement the already well-established methodologies of women 5 historians, this ...

From November 1864 to April 1865, the Confederacy conducted an open, often-heated debate concerning the introduction of slaves into the Confederate Army. Southerners in all sections of the Confederacy-Upper South, Deep South, and Trans-Mississippi West-seriously considered the introduction of black men into the gray ranks. This debate forced southerners ...

As the locus of cotton production shifted toward the newer southwestern states over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of New Orleans became increasingly important to the slave-plantation economy of the U.S. South. Moreover, because of its location near the base of the enormous Mississippi River system, the city also thrived on the ...

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 ...

Focusing on nineteenth-century American military occupation, this dissertation critically engages the existing literature on Civil War soldiers. It departs from the traditional historiographical paradigm of “why they fought and endured”—based on motivation and the experience of active combat—and instead emphasizes how the soldiering experience was ...