Browsing by Author "Bratter, Jenifer L."

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    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.
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    Single mother families and employment, race, and poverty in changing economic times
    (Elsevier, 2017) Damaske, Sarah; Bratter, Jenifer L.; Frech, Adrianne
    Using American Community Survey data from 2001, 2005, and 2010, this paper assesses the relationships between employment, race, and poverty for households headed by single women across different economic periods. While poverty rates rose dramatically among single-mother families between 2001 and 2010, surprisingly many racial disparities in poverty narrowed by the end of the decade. This was due to a greater increase in poverty among whites, although gaps between whites and Blacks, whites and Hispanics, and whites and American Indians remained quite large in 2010. All employment statuses were at higher risk of poverty in 2010 than 2001 and the risk increased most sharply for those employed part-time, the unemployed, and those not in the labor force. Given the concurrent increase in part-time employment and unemployment between 2000 and 2010, findings paint a bleak picture of the toll the last decade has had on the well being of single-mother families.
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    Teacher-Student Congruence and Student Achievement in Segregated Schools
    (2015-10-30) Chukhray, Irina; Turley, Ruth N.L.; Bratter, Jenifer L.; Cech, Erin
    Students’ academic achievement is crucial to life opportunities and chances, yet minorities continue to underperform compared to whites in reading and math. One mechanism that makes a difference in student success is teachers, and especially teacher-student relationships. Since research emphasizes that feelings of social belonging positively influence student achievement, some suggest that good teacher-student relationships, potentially cultivated by sharing race (race congruence), may improve students’ achievement. This study uses data on a census of elementary and middle school students (white, Black, and Hispanic) in a large urban school district in Texas from 2009-10 through 2010-11 to investigate the potential benefits of race congruence between teachers and students on a standardized math and reading assessment. This study contributes by focusing on a heavily segregated school district. Using regression modeling to isolate the effects of congruence independent of other student and teacher characteristics, I examine race differences in any effects of congruence. The results indicate little evidence for race congruence benefiting students except for one situation: black students in reading, which may be driven by school racial composition.
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    The Strong Island Sound: Sociolinguistic Evidence for Emerging American Ethnicities
    (2013-08-05) Olivo, Ann; Niedzielski, Nancy; Englebretson, Robert; Bratter, Jenifer L.
    This dissertation presents evidence for the usage of New York City English (NYCE) out on Long Island, NY. Many residents on this 118-mile long island are descendents of the European immigrants who moved to NYC around the turn of the twentieth century—mainly Italians, Irish, and Polish. When these groups moved out to the suburbs of Long Island half a century later, they brought their NYCE with them. Today, this ancestral connection, as well as age and gender, serves as a motivation for Long Islanders’ continued usage of NYCE. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews conducted over two years with local residents of Suffolk and Nassau counties on Long Island. Participants were interviewed about their personal histories and asked to read a word list. A discourse analysis of the personal history interviews informed the categories used for multiple regression analyses to ensure the coded categories matched onto speakers’ self-identification practices. The discourse analysis also provides evidence for the attitudes Long Islanders hold about themselves as “real New Yorkers”, about their own language usage, and about the language spoken by “people from the city”. Multiple regression analyses fit with mixed effects models were run to demonstrate the state of NYCE as it is spoken on Long Island. Results are presented for the long ingliding vowels (raised-/oh/ and the split short-a system), the long upgliding vowels, and r-vocalization. Although some younger speakers are using fewer traditional NYCE features, those who identify with their families’ ancestral immigrant pasts tend to prefer the traditional NYCE features, retaining a “Strong Island” sound to their speech.