Browsing by Author "Craig Thompson Friend, Committee Chair"

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    Absent Voices: Searching for Women and African Americans at Historic Stagville and Somerset Place Historic Sites
    (2010-04-30) Taft, Kimberly E.; Craig Thompson Friend, Committee Chair; David Zonderman, Committee Member; Katherine Mellen Charron, Committee Member; Susanna Lee, Committee Member
    This thesis examines the interpretation at Somerset Place and Historic Stagville, two North Carolina Historic Sites. While the interpretation of slavery at plantation museums has received increased attention, much remains to be explored regarding the interpretation of women. In addition to examining the interpretation, this thesis explores the history of both Somerset Place and Stagville as active plantations and later historic sites. This thesis proposes that interpretations of race and gender are interconnected but not always concurrent at plantation museums. While the first chapter explores the history of Somerset Place, the second examines Stagville. The final chapter focuses on the current interpretation found at both sites.
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    "Loved to Stayed On Like It Once Was": Southern Appalachian People's Responses to Socio-Economic Change--The New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the Rise of Tourism
    (2010-04-08) Gillespie, Jessica L.; Craig Thompson Friend, Committee Chair; Keith Luria, Committee Member; Susanna Lee, Committee Member
    GILLESPIE, JESSICA L. “Loved to Stayed On Like It Once Was†: Southern Appalachian People’s Responses to Socio-Economic Change—The New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the Rise of Tourism. (Under the direction of Dr. Craig Thompson Friend.)   Over the course of the twentieth century, southern Appalachian residents have been defined and described primarily by outside observers: travel writers, benevolent workers, politicians, government bureaucrats, and historians. While these onlookers have filled volumes with accounts of mountain residents, their accounts are often stereotypical: the mountaineer as backward, isolated, fatalistic, acquiescent, atomistic, or poverty-stricken. In all of these portrayals, outsiders defined Appalachia as a region needing to change and fall into line with mainstream America. In order to achieve such change, major efforts to develop Appalachia began in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, comprised of both governmental programs and partnerships between government and private interests.   Government and private developers seldom considered residents’ thoughts or opinions and adopted the pervasive cultural stereotypes as fact, designing projects with such ideas of locals in mind. Historians, too, have often repeated these time-worn stereotypes or overlooked local sentiment on such widespread development efforts. Local residents have often been portrayed as passively adapting to events that affected their lives and as reticent to create or shape their own futures. Southern Appalachian residents, however, did in fact possess and voice strong feelings on social and economic development programs. This thesis concentrates on the rich variety of local residents’ responses to two New Deal programs—the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority—as well as President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the tourism industry that developed over the past two centuries and continues to play a major role in southern Appalachian economics. Such development efforts reshaped the region, affecting individual lives, communities, and the mountain landscape itself.   Locals responded differently to each development effort, based on such variables as individual economic circumstances, social class, location, and occupation. They also voiced their reactions in a myriad of ways. In all instances, locals retained and defined their own identities and ideals through their reactions, openly declaring what was important to them: land and community. In their responses to the New Deal, War on Poverty, and the mountain tourism industry, southern Appalachian residents refuted pervasive stereotypes of the mountaineer while defending their own cultural values. Such engagement demonstrates how mountain residents actively preserved their traditions while shaping their own futures.