R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Boles, John B."

Browsing by Author "Boles, John B."

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A grassroots war on poverty: Community action and urban politics in Houston, 1964-1976
(2010) Phelps, Wesley G.; Matusow, Allen J.; Boles, John B.
Grassroots studies of the implementation of the federal antipoverty initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s are showing that the War on Poverty did not operate in a vacuum; rather, it was profoundly shaped by a multifarious group of local actors that included public officials, local elites, grassroots antipoverty activists, program administrators, federal volunteers, civil rights activists, and poor people themselves. In Houston, grassroots activists created a local context in which to implement the War on Poverty that was much more diverse in its intellectual and political influences than the rather narrow confines of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. The moderate liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal War on Poverty certainly helped galvanize local antipoverty activists in Houston, but even more prominent in their antipoverty philosophy were Prophetic Christianity, radical civil rights activism, and the vision of participatory democracy and community organizing espoused by members of the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. This local context created a favorable environment for these activists to use the War on Poverty to advance an agenda of social change by empowering the poor and helping then engage in confrontations with the city's elite. By the same token, the diversity of ideas that fueled the implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston---and especially the small victories that grassroots activists were able to achieve in their quest to empower the city's poor---provoked a swift and powerful backlash from local public officials and conservative defenders of the status quo. In Houston, therefore, local political conditions and contests, even more than federal politics, determined how the War on Poverty was fought, and the interaction between the federal antipoverty program and a broad range of local ideas gave the War on Poverty a distinctive flavor in Houston that both created opportunities for grassroots activists to bring about social change and set limits on what those activists could accomplish.
A mingled yarn: Race and religion in Mississippi, 1800-1876
(1988) Sparks, Randy Jay; Boles, John B.
From their inauspicious beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Mississippi evangelical churches--the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian-- expanded dramatically and set the moral tone of society. Early churches were founded on egalitarian principles by members of both races. A study of unpublished church records reveals that before 1830, blacks and whites received equal treatment in the churches. White evangelicals welcomed slaves into the churches, often opposed slavery, and defended slaves' religious freedom. The rapid expansion of slavery in the state, the movement of slaveholders into the churches, and the growing wealth of the membership presented evangelicals with a serious moral dilemma. As sectional tensions rose and the debate over slavery intensified after 1830, most evangelicals embraced slavery. Religious leaders articulated the most accepted justification of slavery, one based on Biblical teachings. The Biblical defense of slavery emphasized the spiritual welfare of slaves. After 1830 evangelical efforts to minister to blacks increased, and black church membership grew. As they moved from sect to denomination, churches became more hierarchical and less egalitarian. Ministers sought a higher social position and placed greater emphasis on the ministerial gift. Lay participation in worship services was discouraged. Because of their preference for a different style of worship and because of white discrimination, blacks often preferred segregated services. Some historians have characterized biracial churches as simply another white control device against slaves, but an analysis of approximately 1600 disciplinary actions from 30 churches demonstrates that while whites sometimes used church courts to punish slaves who violated the slave code, most cases against blacks involved the same charges made against white offenders. The coming of the Civil War highlighted the divergent goals held by black and white evangelicals. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, white evangelicals lent their support to sectionalism, secession, and war. War and defeat brought about a crisis in many churches, yet out of that malaise grew a powerful, and heretofore unexamined, revival on the home front. Blacks joined in the revivals. The war disrupted life in the slave community, but many slaves saw the war as an answered prayer for freedom. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)
A People Between: Servitude in Colonial Virginia, 1700-1783
(2013-09-16) Madar, Allison; Boles, John B.; Goetz, Rebecca A.; Joseph, Betty; Ekirch, A. Roger
This dissertation recasts how historians and scholars have come to understand bound labor in eighteenth-century Virginia. Servants—including indentured servants, customary servants, convicts, Virginia-born servants, and apprentices—remained a part of Virginia’s work force throughout the eighteenth century. Servants were a people between and navigated the worlds of freedom and unfreedom on a daily basis, working alongside slaves, negotiating with their masters, and attempting to make sense of their place in Virginia society as an alternative source of bound labor. Some historians, however, dismiss servants, claiming that by the end of the seventeenth century they had all but disappeared and that a general solidarity existed between all whites by the early eighteenth century. Other scholars acknowledge the presence of servants after the turn of the century, but rarely discuss their significance outside of economic analyses or migration studies. Throughout the eighteenth century Virginia masters failed to find common cause with this white labor force—despite its largely European origins and temporary bondage—and servants were constantly ensnared in the power relationships dictated by race, gender, and labor in colonial Virginia. The presence of servants throughout the eighteenth century suggests a need to reconsider colonial society not only across the lines of color but also along the lines of condition.
A question of honor: State character and the Lower South's defense of the African slave trade in Congress, 1789--1807
(2008) Connolly, David Hugh, Jr; Boles, John B.
The vehement defense of the African slave trade by Georgia and South Carolina in United States Congress during the trade's constitutionally protected period cannot be fully explained by a Lower South planter concern for the security of slavery. Honor and state character were critical considerations in shaping the arguments raised by Lower South representatives in defense of African importation. Accordingly, the debates were as much about honor and character as they were protection of slavery. Because of importation, antitrade congressmen attacked the Lower South's character as inconsistent with purported American ideals and republican values. Georgia and South Carolina representatives struggled to reconcile the trade with honorable conduct and the evolving American character by crafting constructions of republicanism, the United States Constitution, and American character that protected state reputation within the national community embodied by the Congress. The Lower South's proffered interpretations of republicanism, the Constitution, and American character sought to minimize the trade as an appropriate standard by which to judge South Carolina and Georgia. The trade was consistent with republican values as access to slaves was the only means by which the two states could develop their economies and thus gain sufficient economic independence to maintain their equality with the other states. Moreover, this productivity benefited the young nation as a whole through the export of its slave-based agricultural products to world markets. Lower South representatives argued that the region could not be disparaged morally for importation as the Constitution guaranteed that privilege. They saw anti-trade forces' attacks on moral grounds as an attempt to invest the Constitution with moral standards external to that document which were inappropriate to judging a member of the union by the federal government or other states. The rights provided by the Constitution were the only ones by which the region could be judged with regard. Georgia and South Carolina possessed an American character in spite of slave importation. Each had participated in the American Revolution and otherwise contributed to the country's well-being. Lower South representatives focused on patriotism and loyalty as the fundamental criteria by which the region should be judged.
Abraham Lincoln's Northwestern Approach to the Secession Crisis
(2013-09-16) Bischoff, Sarah; Boles, John B.; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Wilson, Rick K.; Walther, Eric H.
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 1861 exposed him to the anti–slave system ethos of that region’s southern-born migrants. Sensitive to the restraints they believed the social system of slavery placed upon their own liberties, these former southerners simultaneously despised the slave system, hated African Americans, and sympathized with white slaveholders and nonslaveholders who remained in the South. After building his initial sense of southern society from these migrants, Lincoln spent his years as a U.S. congressman learning the significance of the Northwest Ordinance in creating the free society in which they had thrived. Emphasizing Thomas Jefferson’s role in conceiving the Northwest Ordinance and utilizing statistical evidence to prove the superiority of free soil over slave, Lincoln’s colleagues further expanded Lincoln’s conception of the South. All these influences combined to produce Lincoln’s uniquely northwestern approach to slavery, the South, and the secession crisis. Believing that the self-interest of white nonslaveholding southerners naturally propelled them away from the South and toward free society, Lincoln perceived the slave South as a vastly unequal society controlled by a minority of aristocratic slaveholders who cajoled or chided their nonslaveholding neighbors into accepting a vision of the South’s proslavery, expansionist future. As president-elect, Lincoln therefore overestimated the Unionist sentiment of southerners before and during the secession crisis. He remained convinced that the majority of white nonslaveholders would not support a secessionist movement that he believed countered their own self-interest. With time, and through careful communications with the South, he remained convinced that he could settle secessionist passions and bring southerners to trust him and the Republican Party. This northwestern perception of the South therefore explains, in part, Lincoln’s silence and his refusal to compromise during the secession crisis.
Air Pollution, Politics, and Environmental Reform in Birmingham, Alabama 1940--1971
(2012) McKinney, J. Merritt; Boles, John B.
This dissertation contends that efforts to reduce air pollution in Birmingham, Alabama, from the 1940s through the early 1970s relied on citizens who initially resisted federal involvement but eventually realized that they needed Washington's help. These activists had much in common with clean air groups in other U.S. cities, but they were somewhat less successful because of formidable industrial opposition. In the 1940s the political power of the Alabama coal industry kept Birmingham from following the example of cities that switched to cleaner-burning fuels. The coal industry's influence on Alabama politics had waned somewhat by the late 1960s, but U.S. Steel and its allies wielded enough political power in 1969 to win passage of a weak air pollution law over one favored by activists. Throughout this period the federal government gradually increased its involvement in Alabama's air pollution politics, culminating in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the enactment of environmental laws that empowered federal officials to pressure Alabama to pass a revised 1971 air pollution law that met national standards. After the passage of this law, but before the appointment of an air pollution control board to enforce it, a federal judge temporarily shut down Birmingham-area industries at the request of the Environmental Protection Agency, the first time that the agency had used such emergency powers. Over time, grassroots activists in Birmingham came to the realization that their efforts were doomed to fail, or at least to be significantly delayed, without the aid of the federal government. For nearly twenty-five years after the enactment of the 1945 smoke ordinance, supporters of air pollution control wanted the state government to deal with the problem of air pollution, with the federal government only providing technical expertise and funding for scientific research. But with their defeat in the 1969 legislative session, when the industry-backed air pollution bill passed, clean air campaigners in Alabama realized--and publicly stated--that only pressure from Washington would force Montgomery to clean up Alabama's air.
An Alternative Politics: Texas Baptist Leaders and the Rise of the Christian Right, 1960-1985
(2012) Ellis, Blake A.; Boles, John B.
This dissertation examines one of the most counter-intuitive southern responses to the rise of the Christian Right. Texas Baptists made up the largest state association of Southern Baptists in the country. They were theologically conservative, uniformly uncomfortable with abortion, and strident in their condemnation of homosexuality. Yet they not only rejected an alliance with the Christian Right and the Republican Party, but they did so emphatically. They ultimately offered a more robust critique of the Christian Right than even many of their secular counterparts. While their activities might seem surprising to contemporary readers, they were part of a long and proud Baptist tradition of supporting the separation of church and state. On issues like organized school prayer, government regulation of abortion, and private school vouchers, they were disturbed by the blurring of lines between church and state that characterized the Christian Right as it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Texas Baptists were also uncomfortable with the backlash against integration and sought to promote racial justice in any way they could. While many southerners adopted a politics of cultural resentment, Texas Baptists often worked for racial justice and promoted interracial cooperation. They also fought the move towards economic conservatism in the South. From their campaigns to raise the welfare cap in Texas to their promotion of Lyndon Johnson's Community Action Programs, Texas Baptists defended government activism to alleviate poverty. They embodied a very different economic ideology than that of the ultraconservative southerners who have dominated the scholarship of southern politics after 1960. On all of these issues, the experience of Texas Baptists challenges prevailing ideas about southern political change. Their story is one that undermines the notion of a unified evangelical reaction to the racial, economic, and political changes that swept the South (and the nation) after 1960. It should give pause to those who have assumed that the alliance between Southern Baptists and the Christian Right was inevitable or unavoidable and force us to reconsider the complexity of southern evangelicalism.
"At a most uncomfortable speed": The desegregation of the South's private universities, 1945--1964
(2000) Kean, Melissa Fitzsimons; Boles, John B.
This dissertation traces the debate about desegregation on the campuses of five elite private universities in the South from the end of World War II to the early 1960s. The presidents of Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt, charged with leading these schools to national prominence, quickly grasped that postwar realities---including pressure from federal grantmakers and national philanthropic foundations---would require some measure of racial change if the schools were to advance. In the interest of progress the presidents were willing to accept limited participation by "exceptional" blacks in the life of the university. The critical issue in their eyes was who would control the process of racial change. While acknowledging, some more grudgingly than others, that "outside" pressure for desegregation should be heeded, the presidents insisted that the pace and manner of loosening racial restrictions must remain the decisions of educated southern whites. Many powerful trustees and alumni staunchly opposed even this. These traditionalists strongly defended southern racial customs and fought any attempts to alter them for any reason, even the advancement of the schools they served. With varying degrees of energy and success, the presidents mediated between the proponents of progress and tradition, trying to avoid open conflict while gradually improving each school's academic quality. Only Vanderbilt took steps towards opening admissions, allowing black graduate students to enroll in its School of Religion beginning in 1953. The debate over the place of talented blacks on these campuses remained subdued until 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education and the growing grass-roots civil rights movement brought increased turmoil to the South. Although many trustees vowed not to bend to this pressure, the costs of maintaining segregation on campus became too high to bear. By the early 1960s, snowballing loss of faculty, student discontent, and above all, the threat of a funding cut-off by the federal government and the foundations led all these schools to abandon segregated admissions policies.
Black and white perceptions of interracial sex: The paradox of passion
(1990) Robinson, Charles Frank, II; Boles, John B.
In this work, I make three very important assertions. First, whites were fanatical about keeping black men and white women sexually separated. In the white mind, no contamination of the Caucasian race could result unless white women came into sexual contact with black men. As a result, whites used both lawful and extra-legal methods to keep black men from their white women, despite taking sexual licenses with black women. Second, whites assumed that black men desired white women sexually. This assumption increased white hysteria and strengthened the resolve of whites to keep blacks segregated and subjugated. Finally, although whites assumed that blacks wanted to sexually intermingle, black leaders repeatedly disavowed any desire to do so. Blacks were content with being black and had no aspirations of losing their color or their culture.
Bless the Pure & Humble: Texas Lawyers & Oil Regulation, 1919-1936
(1994) Malavis, Nicholas G.; Hyman, Harold M.; Boles, John B.; Davidson, Chandler
Both Native South and Deep South: The Native Transformation of the Gulf South Borderlands, 1770–1835
(2013-09-16) Wainwright, James; Boles, John B.; Goetz, Rebecca A.; Bratter, Jenifer L.
How did the Native South become the Deep South within the span of a single generation? This dissertation argues that these ostensibly separate societies were in fact one and the same for several decades. It significantly revises the history of the origins of antebellum America’s slave-based economy and shows that the emergence of a plantation society in Alabama and Mississippi was in large part a grassroots phenomenon forged by Indians and other native inhabitants as much as by Anglo-American migrants. This native transformation occurred because of a combination of weak European colonial regimes, the rise of cattle, cotton, and chattel slavery in the region, and the increasingly complex ethnic and racial geography of the Gulf South. Inhabitants of the Gulf South between the American Revolution and Indian removal occupied a racial and social milieu that was not distinctly Indian, African, or European. Nor can it be adequately defined by hybridity. Instead, Gulf southerners constructed something unique. Indians and native non-Indians—white and black—owned ranches and plantations, employed slave labor, and pioneered the infrastructure for cotton production and transportation. Scotsmen and Spaniards married Indians and embraced their matrilineal traditions. Anglo- and Afro-American migrants integrated into an emergent native cotton culture in which racial and cultural identities remained permeable and flexible. Thus, colonial and borderland-style interactions persisted well into the nineteenth century, even as the region grew ever more tightly bound to an expansionist United States. The history of the Gulf South offers a perfect opportunity to bridge the imagined divide between the colonial and early republic eras. Based on research in multiple archives across five states, my work thus alters our understanding of the history and people of an American region before the Civil War and reshapes our framework for interpreting the nature of racial and cultural formation over the long course of American history.
Catholics in Beulahland: The Church's encounter with anti-Catholicism, nativism, and anti-abolitionism in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1820--1845
(2001) Stokes, Christopher Daniel; Boles, John B.
In July 1835, a northern anti-slavery society sent bundles of abolitionist literature through the United States postal service to the South. Arriving at South Carolina's port city, the mailing became the focus of white Charlestonians' fears of slave uprisings and those Who might assist a servile insurrection. During an attack on the post office to destroy the papers, someone in the crowd shouted for a lynching of Charleston's Catholic bishop and the destruction of the Catholic cathedral and surrounding buildings, including a parochial school for free black children. Using the Charleston Post Office Raid as a backdrop, this study explores both the connections between anti-abolitionism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism in the antebellum South and the reaction to these pressures from southern Catholics, mostly recent immigrants, as they made a place for themselves in their new homeland. At the heart of the work is a consideration of the effects of the ethnic and racial stereotypes and cultural assumptions at play in the antebellum South.
Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War, 1861-1865
(2012-09-05) Bledsoe, Andrew; Boles, John B.; Gruber, Ira D.; Stoll, Richard J.; Parrish, Michael
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 that the sentimental, often romantic expectations and ideologies forged in the American Revolution and modified during the antebellum era were recast, adapted, and modified under the extreme pressures of four years of conflict. Civil War citizen-officers experienced extreme pressures to emulate the professional officers of the regular army and to accommodate the ideological expectations of the independent, civic-minded volunteers they led. These junior leaders arrived at creative, often ingenious solutions to overcome the unique leadership challenges posed by the tension between antebellum democratic values and the demands of military necessity. Though the nature and identity of the officers in both armies evolved over time, the ideological foundations that informed Civil War Americans’ conceptions of military service persisted throughout the conflict. The key to the persistence of the citizen-soldier ethos and citizen-officer image during and after the Civil War era lies in the considerable power of antebellum Americans’ shared but malleable republican tradition. By focusing on the experience of volunteer company-grade officers in the Civil War era, we discover how the ordeal of the Civil War forced Americans to reevaluate and reconcile the role of the individual in this arrangement, both elevating and de-emphasizing the centrality of the citizen-soldier to the evolving narrative of American identity, citizenship, and leadership.
Communities of kinship: Antebellum families on the cotton frontier
(2001) Billingsley, Carolyn Earle; Boles, John B.
The evidentiary base for this study is the compilation of almost 7,000 individuals connected by kinship to George Keesee, who immigrated to Virginia about 1700. The major focus is Thomas Keesee Sr. (the great grandson of George Keesee) and his descendants, who were mostly of the planter class. This family migrated across the southern cotton frontier, from Virginia, to Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Studies of various family members and groups demonstrate kinship's significance as an analytical tool in studying migration, settlement patterns, religion, communication, and political and economic power. Kinship was the most potent factor in the organization of everyday life for antebellum southerners. Historians have long recognized the importance of family but have failed to articulate an interpretive framework for the systematic study of kinship in southern society. Moreover, they have allowed disdain for genealogy to obscure the effectiveness of genealogical methodology in such studies. First this work mines anthropological kinship theory to construct a workable theory of kinship for historians of the South. Although families and kinship are often discussed, the disciple of history has yet to define and articulate the definition and meaning of kinship or to explicitly recognize kinship ties as broader and more intense than is generally the case in the United States today. Secondly, I argue for the incorporation of genealogical methodology into standard methods of historical inquiry. This involves using sources generally deemed genealogical in nature to focus on links of kinship within groups of antebellum southerners, in contrast to the method often used by historians-using surname matching to ascertain kinship links, a method that not only leaves the majority of kinship links hidden, but is also gender-biased. And third, I argue for the establishment of the study of kinship as a category of analysis on a par with race, class, and gender in the antebellum South. We can lay yet another patina of understanding over topics including migration, settlement patterns, religion, class, politics, and economics by analyzing them vis-a-vis their relationship to kinship. Kinship relationships were a causative factor in virtually all elements of antebellum southern society.
Contentious liberties: Gendered power and religious freedom in the nineteenth-century American mission to Jamaica
(2008) Kenny, Gale L.; Boles, John B.
In 1839, the year after slavery's end in the British West Indies, a group of young abolitionist graduates of Ohio's Oberlin College established a Protestant mission in Jamaica. Joining the already numerous British missionaries on the island, these mostly Congregationalist white American men and women created mission churches and schools to aid and convert black Jamaicans as well as to show skeptical whites in the United States a successful model of an emancipated society. The fledgling American Missionary Association adopted their project in 1847, and it continued until the end of the American Civil War. The mission failed to be the shining example of an interracial society its founders had intended because in spite of their devotion to their doctrine of Christian liberty, the missionary men and women positioned themselves as perpetual parents over "childlike" Jamaican converts. The dissertation focuses on the conflicts over the meaning of liberty as different factions in the mission defined it. It does this in two parts: first by showing how abolitionist men committed to liberty instituted mission churches and households based in strictly controlled hierarchies, and second, by examining the challenges brought to those hierarchies by black Jamaicans, white women, and others. The Americans went to Jamaica with an idea of Christian liberty that conflated religious conversion and emancipation. When the missionary men found that few black Jamaicans lived up this initial expectation of a "born again" society, they managed this "licentiousness" by imposing strict church discipline and by becoming increasingly attached to their power as infallible "fathers" overseeing their mission households. Over the course of the mission's almost thirty-year history, disgruntled members of the mission---both black and white---challenged this hierarchy in direct and indirect ways, and most interestingly, the ministers could, at times, be convinced that they were wrong, especially when a white man had raised the complaint. Black Jamaican men and women and the mission's white women had less success. Occurring as they did in the missionary setting, these periodic disputes over the mission's power structure reflected and distorted American discussions about gender and race, religion, and Christian reform.
Cosmopolitan Southerner: The life and world of William Alexander Percy
(2008) Wise, Benjamin E.; Boles, John B.
The Mississippi planter and poet William Alexander Percy (1885-1942) is best remembered for his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1941), which was a bestseller and remains a seminal book in the study of the American South. Although scholars have traditionally portrayed Percy as an iconic provincial, he maintained an ambivalence towards his region---particularly towards local values regarding masculinity and sexuality. Percy left the South regularly and traveled across the world, and his encounters abroad informed his views about gender, sexuality, and race at home. Cosmopolitan Southerner maps connections between the American South and the broader world by tracing Will Percy's travels across the globe: from Mississippi to the Mediterranean, to such places as Paris and Japan and Samoa, back to Mississippi. Will Percy's life story invites consideration of how one man became a sexual liberationist, cultural relativist, white supremacist in late Victorian Mississippi. I engage the paradox of Percy's life and personality to make three main arguments. First, I examine the ways the experience, performance, and construction of gender and sexuality were connected to the concept of place. Will Percy's heterodox views of sexuality and what it meant to be a man---namely, his belief that love between men was not only legitimate but a superior form of love---can only be understood by studying the ways he experienced reality in different cultural contexts. Second, I examine the ways Percy participated in an international intellectual tradition centered on the idea of ancient Greece as a kind of spiritual "home" for men with gay desire. The nostalgia that many have interpreted as Percy's longing for the Old South was, in fact, an important imaginative vehicle many men used to express homoerotic desire in a culturally sanctioned idiom. Finally, I examine Percy's essentially racist critique of modernity---a critique also grounded in values of cultural relativism and sexual liberation. In situating Percy's view of racial difference in the context of his cross-cultural encounters. I find that his interpretations of race and "primitivism" worked to simultaneously critique bourgeois sexual ethics and reinforce the structures of racial inequality in the American South.
Earnest women: The white woman's club movement in Progressive Era Texas, 1880-1920
(1988) Seaholm, Megan; Boles, John B.
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 unchronicled, aspect of both the turn-of-the-century "woman's movement" and the early-twentieth-century Progressive movement, the work and the experience of club women constitute an important aspect of the history of American women, the history of Progressive Era reform, and the cultural history of the United States. White middle- and upper-class women in Texas were enthusiastic participants in this movement beginning with the creation of self-culture clubs in the 1880s and 1890s and continuing into the twentieth century with a dynamic, elaborately organized, and reform-oriented union of clubs, the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs. Texas club women energetically committed themselves to the reclamation of their communities convinced that womanly values were crucial for enlightened progress. At the municipal, state, and national level, white Texas club women were among the most ardent of Progressive Era reformers. Texas club women maximized their resources of leisure time and class status to compensate for their political disabilities. These resources enabled club women to initiate projects that they would later become public responsibilities. The prodigious activity of the state federation emerged from an unarticulated quartet of political strategies: the Politics of Righteousness, the Politics of Enthusiasm, the Politics of Harmony, and the Politics of Influence. In their study clubs Texas women found a space for reflection upon the essential and instrumental aspects of womanhood. In their club work they created new opportunities for their talents and gained new recognition for their accomplishments. Most important, as white club women altered the geography of woman's sphere, they rehearsed a significantly modified model of womanhood. They created a new norm--that of professional volunteer--for subsequent generations of non-wage-earning women.
Educational Politics and the Making of School Desegregation Policy in Houston, Texas
(2018-05-09) Breeden, Edwin C.; Boles, John B.
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, and private correspondence, this dissertation blends legal, political, and social history to highlight the contingent process by which local and federal power intersected and interacted to guide the course of desegregation policymaking in individual cities and communities. By examining the actual policies that guided local people’s access to particular educational spaces—including those policies’ underlying intentions, the debates surrounding them, and their results—this project seeks to interpret this complex historical project with greater specificity and clarity than obtains from merely considering whether actors supported or opposed desegregation. Ultimately, numerous forms of “desegregation” emerged in the decades after Brown, each of which inspired unique mixtures of support and opposition from location to location. This study’s policy-centered framework is applied in the specific context of Houston, Texas, and the Houston Independent School District (HISD), the largest segregated school system in the American South at the time of Brown. Desegregation began in HISD in 1960, but the district’s desegregation policies were not firmly established until the early 1970s when it adopted a mixture of neighborhood-based student zoning, voluntary pupil transfers, and racially balanced faculty assignment. These policies satisfied federal mandates yet left desegregation subject to the constraints of Houston’s segregated residential geography and thus failed to achieve meaningful tri-ethnic integration of the district’s African American, Mexican American, and Anglo students. This project unpacks the complicated history that led to those policies by situating the development of HISD’s nearly thirty-year-long desegregation lawsuit, Delores Ross v. Houston Independent School District (1956 – 1984), within the constant and contentious struggles for control of the Houston school board and district policymaking in the 1950s through 1970s. In so doing, it highlights how integration supporters worked to dismantle segregation and secure greater power over local education through multiple venues, as well as how resistant school officials worked to stifle those ambitions in strategic ways. By integrating the experiences of school officials, activists, lawyers, district employees, and ordinary families, this study reveals multiple visions of desegregation and education reform that circulated at the local level and informed actors’ goals and the power they had or did not have to achieve them.
Elder John Leland: Evangelical minister and republican rhetorician (Virginia)
(1992) Kugler, Rosemary; Boles, John B.
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, Leland merged this language with the evangelical movement in Virginia. Through his actions in Virginia, Leland became an important Baptist leader and political ally. He joined the Baptist associations fighting to disestablish religion in that state and became immersed in the politics affecting the region. This involvement included influencing his congregations at the polls and affecting the elections of prominent constitutional figures such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
Envisioning a progressive city: Hogg family philanthropy and the urban ideal in Houston, Texas, 1910--1975
(2004) Kirkland, Kate Sayen; Boles, John B.
Houston, Texas, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States, is home, to professional teams for all major sports, internationally acclaimed museums, a symphony orchestra, ballet and opera companies, commercial and repertory theaters, respected universities, the Texas Medical Center, and the Manned Spacecraft Center. Yet historians of the American city seldom include Houston in general surveys. Scholars who tackle Houston's history focus on the city's reputation as a "free-enterprise" business arena but ignore its citizens' philanthropic generosity, which has sustained the city's cultural, educational, and service institutions. For generations Houston pacesetters have espoused bold visions for urban development, but most biographers focus attention instead on their subjects' entrepreneurial genius. Among the many generous families that merit study, the three children of Progressive Governor James Stephen Hogg (1891--1895) were exemplary civic activists who articulated an urban ideal of good citizenship within a healthy community. They believed that public service through political participation, economic development through good business practice, and civic leadership through voluntarism were necessary components of community life. They served in appointive and elective offices and amassed a fortune in oil, real estate, and other enterprises. Their greatest impact lay in philanthropic careers: they supported city planning; pioneered preventive mental health care; established the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health; and sponsored lectures and university scholarships. Will was a University of Texas regent; Ima served on Houston's Board of Education; Ima founded and sustained the Houston Symphony; and family generosity nurtured the Museum of Fine Arts for fifty years. Profoundly influenced by their parents' examples, the Hoggs' activism illuminates Progressivism, philanthropy, and civil society in the United States. Progressives like the Hoggs were proactive optimists whose moral response to social dislocations taught citizens they could improve their lives. Hogg philanthropies, which interpreted this promise of American life, help explain how millions of generous Americans build community institutions. The Hoggs' efforts to unite business leaders, politicians, and volunteers in partnerships of civic responsibility show how cooperation promotes democracy and fosters civil society. As the Hoggs were challenged a century ago to husband their oil wealth and build a great city, so must Houstonians today conserve resources to promote community goals and preserve diverse values.

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