Browsing by Author "Keith Luria, Committee Member"

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    The Devil You Know: US-Haitian Relations, 1957-1968
    (2004-09-16) Coleman, Adam; David Zonderman, Committee Member; Keith Luria, Committee Member; Nancy Mitchell, Committee Chair
    This thesis studies the relationship between the United States and Haiti during the dictatorship of Dr. Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, the United States attempted to change its foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. In order to prevent social upheavals that increased the probability of communist revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States tried to move away from its policy of supporting dictatorships and toward an anti-dictatorship policy that encouraged US-backed economic development and mutual hemispheric cooperation. Nevertheless, the primary goal of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean remained preventing the spread of communism. Because the United States so doggedly pursued its anticommunist policy over its anti-dictatorship policy, it found it extremely difficult to exert influence on countries with harsh dictatorial governments. In Papa Doc's Haiti, the United States consistently failed in its efforts to operate an economic development program, peacefully push Duvalier from power, or influence him to reform his dictatorial policies. Because Duvalier efficiently and brutally suppressed all political opposition to his regime, there existed no one in or out of Haiti whom the United States trusted to replace him. As such, fearing that removing Duvalier from power would lead to anarchy (and possibly communist revolution) in Haiti, the United States felt it had no choice but to maintain relations with him. The United States' relationship with Duvalier exposed the flaws of its Latin American policy. Namely, that economic assistance did not grant the United States a significant degree of political influence in countries receiving aid, and that economic development projects were useless if the money never reached the people for whom it was meant. Moreover, so long as the United States treated the Caribbean as a Cold War battlefield, its anxiety about the spread of communism through the region made it virtually impossible to pursue an anti-dictatorship foreign policy.
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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.
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    To the Last Man and the Last Dollar': Governor Henry Toole Clark and Civil War North Carolina, July 1861 to September 1862.
    (2005-07-12) Poteat, R. Matthew; Keith Luria, Committee Member; William Harris, Committee Member; Joe A. Mobley, Committee Co-Chair; Nancy Mitchell, Committee Chair
    This thesis examines the life and political career of Henry Toole Clark, the second of North Carolina's three Civil War governors. Clark served one term as the state's chief executive from July 1861 to September 1862, a crucial period in which North Carolina established itself as a constituent member of the Confederate States and first suffered the hardships of war. As the leader of the state in that formative period, he mobilized thousands of troops for the Southern cause, established the first, and only, Confederate prison in North Carolina, arranged the production of salt for the war effort, created European purchasing connections, and built a successful and important gunpowder mill. Clark, however, found more success as an administrator than as a political figure. The Edgecombe County planter devoted over twenty years to the service of the Democratic Party at the local, state, and national levels, and over ten years as a state senator. As governor, he was unable to maneuver in the new political world ushered in by the Civil War, and he retired abruptly from public service at the end of his term. Clark's life and career offer insight into the larger world of the antebellum planter-politician, that dominant group of southern leaders who led the region into dependence upon slavery and, ultimately, to war. Though the planter class was diverted from power for a brief time during Reconstruction, the political and racial ideology of that class would shape conservative white southern thought for the next hundred years.