Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Summer camp's color line: racialized landscapes and the struggle for integration, 1890-1950(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2017) Hardin, Amanda Suzanne; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Billy SmithThough seldom discussed in the larger struggle for African American equality, the ideological and physical exclusion of people of color from outdoor spaces reveals the pervasive, and insidiously widespread nature of white supremacy in the United States. The common historical narrative of the American outdoors focuses on prominent white male figures, such as John Muir or Theodore Roosevelt. This study interrogates the largely unexamined intersections of race and outdoor recreation during the first half of the twentieth century through examining the archival records of three integration-focused summer camps: the Union Settlement Association, the Wiltwyck School for Boys, and Camp Atwater. Analysis of these archives complicates the historiographical concept of 'outdoor recreation' by revealing its connection with white supremacist mentalities and demonstrating the ways in which some people resisted the black-white, urban-nature binary that emerged during this ea. The stories of these camps illuminate more diverse perspectives about the outdoors, and add to an underdeveloped body of research on nonwhite perspectives about recreating in 'natural' environments. By centering these marginalized voices, this scholarship will contribute to future research about similar topics.Item Fear and desire : miscegenation in the postbellum South(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1998) Waldrip, Christopher Bart; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert W. RydellIn 1863, a pamphlet, "Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to American White Man and the Negro," gave birth to an idea: "free" black men sexually desired white women. This idea eventually developed into an ideology and translated into southern white fears of miscegenation. This thesis examines the medium of popular literature and its influence on this ideological development in southern culture. Two southern authors wrote prolifically about miscegenation: Thomas Dixon, whose writings exacerbated white fears, and William Faulkner, whose writings exposed those fears as a negative underpinning of southern culture. My study is not exclusive to literary theory; it combines historical and literary analyses to show how an ideology affected southern culture. I focus on Dixon's writings from 1903 to 1912 and Faulkner's from 1931 to 1936 and argue that both authors accurately captured the fears' effects. A bulk of my study concentrates on Mississippi; however, it devotes portions to Dixon's native North Carolina and the South as a whole. My major objective is to analyze the evolution of miscegenation from idea to ideology: how white southern culture perceived miscegenation and how fears of miscegenation endured and changed, if they changed at all.