Department of History

When former Confederates and their conservative allies retook power in the South after Reconstruction, they rewrote state constitutions. Lawmakers in the individual states gave their governors different powers based on their state’s experience throughout Reconstruction and Redemption. The Texas Constitution of 1876 created a weak governor, producing a state governed by elected county leaders and court judges. The Florida Constitution of 1885 on the other hand, kept a strong executive but placed it underneath the power of a private organization, the Democratic State Executive Committee – the Democratic Party. The state governments - and governors – redeemers designed in the 1870s and 1880s still governed Texas and Florida well into the twenty first century. Reconstruction directly shaped the size and scope of these modern-day state executives.

Occurring in the context of the Cold War, the 1958 Lebanese Crisis forced U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and top policymakers to balance a multitude of factors when considering an appropriate response to the crisis. While Eisenhower claimed publicly that Operation Blue Bat was an intervention aimed at containing the every looming threat of communism, meeting records of top U.S. policy makers contradict such explanations and offer insight to the President’s true motivations. Eisenhower instead sought to maintain U.S. influence among a coalition of Middle Eastern conservative governments operating in a U.S. led regional military alliance. The crisis forced the President to reconcile his foreign policy objectives with the political and cultural reality of the region and prompted a major foreign policy reassessment in which Eisenhower turned away from top-down international alliance building and instead, worked to address the obvious need to court public opinion in the Arab world.

This thesis analyses the foreign economic policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration toward Venezuela from 1957 to 1963. By examining material from U.S. diplomatic document collections, my research intervenes in the historiography of the Alliance for Progress by demonstrating the failures of U.S. policy in Venezuela during the Latin American Cold War. Although the United States supported the democratic government of Rómulo Betancourt politically, it hamstrung his government economically. The Kennedy administration at first provided loans for economic development to Venezuela, though they quickly eliminated this aid and began prioritizing military assistance as the most efficient way of supporting Betancourt’s government. More importantly, by continually limiting imports of Venezuelan oil into the United States, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations hurt Venezuela’s economy and caused Betancourt to face a crisis of legitimacy as his capacity to manage the nation’s natural wealth came into question.

On August 11, 1868, Thaddeus Stevens died. He left behind him an unfinished and unjust nation. In his 76 years, he attempted to articulate a vision of American society as a raceblind meritocracy where the rights of individual citizens were safeguarded by a state they directed in common regardless of race, class, or gender. This thesis traces the intellectual path Stevens blazed through politics, economics, and religion as he tried to craft a version of American liberalism equal to the fundamental problems of racism and economic inequality exposed by the Civil War, also treating his unorthodox personal and religious lives. It concludes with a survey of radical remembrances and reassessments of Stevens by activists seeking to follow in his footsteps and remold American society between the counter-revolution of 1877 and the appearance of Eric Foner's revisionist opus Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution.

This thesis is an international comparative analysis on the women pilots of Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, the Soviet Union’s Aviation Group 122, and the United States’ Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Women’s Flying Training Detachment, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots during World War II. Women pilots in these groups were motivated by three different factors in each country to aid the war effort and that determination was a common thread among these groups that drove them to serve their countries’ militaries. What made the pilots’ efforts stand out was that they offered the Allies an advantage over the Axis Powers in terms of utilizing an additional workforce. Unfortunately, these women are widely unrecognized for this advantage and are brushed aside. It is important to recognize the significance of how these women impacted the Allies socially and militarily, and this work aims to expand the discussion in World War II studies.

In 1628, the English Parliament demanded that King Charles I sign the Petition of Right, causing the English Civil War. This war led to laws that legitimized slavery and the impressment of Anglo sailors and left behind an insurrectionary ideology that American colonists adapted during the American Revolutionary War. After the war, this ideology inspired the Constitution and later inspired slave revolts, and sailor mutinies for civil liberties won during the Revolution. As the capitalist economy grew and ensnared the new nation, this ideology entered reformer communities. American law relied on lawyers, jurists, and politicians to balance liberty, property, and a racial divide. White sailors did not face racialized slavery but experienced exploitation through American law. This relationship's intersection of economy and identity helps explain why sailors' rights helped reform American law and emancipate the slave.

The two and a half decades following the ending of the American Revolution was filled with change. The formation of government and the ratification of the Constitution at the state and federal levels created spaces where topics were hotly debated. Specifically, religion and its role in the United States government generated much discussion: how much power should religious institutions have within this new country and should this new United States have an established religion? Historians have dissected and analyzed these topics for years. But, how informed were Americans during this period of these conversations which created the bedrock of American government? One conduit which was generally available to the masses was the newspaper. The creation of news and the dissemination of information to the expanding United States created a unique platform for newspaper printers and editors alike, touching all levels of society and politics. Using newspapers printed during this period and focusing specifically on the state of Virginia, this thesis analyzes newspaper content between 1784 – 1808 as a general guide as to what the Virginia common persons would have been exposed to regarding separation of church and state and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Based on the saturation of religion in society at this time, it is surprising to find that Americans were only minimally interested in the separation of church and state discussions happening in Virginia and the greater United States. It was when religious topics shifted into perceived morals and ethics, political campaigns, or the potential for land control through glebe land ownership that Virginians expressed their opinions and reactions to the separation of church and state.

This study argues that settler women-in the all-inclusive sense of the word rather than just white, middle-and-upper class women-were crucial in founding and stabilizing Southeastern Florida communities. Historians have focused almost exclusively on men in studying this area's development and settlement. Henry Flagler, the railroad and hotel tycoon, for example, is given much credit for his role in bringing settlers to Palm Beach and building a home there for himself. Small towns use similar narratives. The reality was that diverse populations of women were critical for Southeastern Florida's growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study thus seeks to recover the diverse actions, narratives, organizations, and systems of early Southeastern Florida and the roles women played to create, stabilize, and later maintain these aspects. This study will also discuss how these women subverted-whether subtly or overtly-factors of gender, race, and class to build unique and diverse communities in Southeastern Florida.

Newark, Asbury Park, and Paterson all suffered in the second half of the 20th century due to the failure of city governments to begin to remedy decades of racism and discrimination and respond to the causes of the 1960s riots. The history of racism and discrimination in New Jersey informed the riots that occurred across the state in the 1960s and 1970s. After the riots, local governments misunderstood or ignored the driving causes and attempted urban renewal projects that either did not work or were never built. While the 21st century has seen these three cities bring in new investment and attractions, those developments may hurt lower-income and minority residents as rents rise.

College football has long served as an apparatus for advancing racial equality, but the process by which it did so has been muddled and oversimplified. Popular histories have often reduced college football’s desegregation down to a singular event, the 1970 USC-Alabama game. Although the game was significant in its own right, it contributed very little to the desegregation of college football. Instead, the USC-Bama game gained exposure due to prominence of the teams involved rather than its historical significance.
The game propagated numerous myths, including the idea that the South was not ready to desegregate until Alabama lost to the desegregated USC team. This was not only untrue, but it took away from the factual history of college football’s desegregation, a process that took nearly 100 years. The story of the USC-Bama game also detracted from college football’s ongoing process of integration and African American equality, as if black players were suddenly granted legal rights and were no longer discriminated against. My overarching argument is that college football, and America’s love for the sport, uniquely placed African American players in a position which forced the country to confront racial inequality in a way that few other outlets at the time did or could.