Medgar Evers was gunned down in front of his home in June 1963, a murder that went unpunished for almost thirty years. Assassinated at the height of the civil rights movement, Evers is a relatively untreated figure in either popular or academic writing. This dissertation includes three themes. Evers's death defined his life, particularly his public role. The other two themes define his relationship with the press in Mississippi (and its structure), and his relationship to the various civil rights organizations, including his employer, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Was the newspaper press, both state and national, fair in its treatment of Evers? Did the press use Evers to further the civil rights agenda or to retard that movement, and was Evers able to employ the press as a public relations tool in promoting the NAACP agenda? The obvious answers have been that the Mississippi press editors and publishers defended segregation and that Evers played a minor role in the civil rights movement. Most newspaper publishers and editorial writers slanted the news to promote segregation but not all newspapers editors. The Carters of Greenville, J. Oliver Emmerich of McComb and weekly editors Ira Harkey and Hazel …

Edward C. Fritz was one of the most influential environmentalists in Texas history. Although he took a circuitous route to environmental activism, Fritz evolved into a powerful force fighting on behalf of Texan nature. Participating in substantial actions throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Fritz's contributions to environmental activism resulted in the successful preservation of thousands of acres and multiple wildlife species. Fritz parlayed his legal background into effective activism, beginning his career with a successful lobbying campaign for protection of Harris Hawks. He led the campaign to stop a decades old plan for canalization of the Trinity River. The creation of COST combined Fritz's environmental focus with the concerns of economic conservatives to prevent a billion dollar government funded project that would have significantly altered the river. Fritz then led a cadre who took over efforts to establish a preserve in the Big Thicket national forest. He oversaw the foundation of a protected area far larger than original expectations, capitalizing on the growing awareness of environmental issues in the 1970s. Fritz's interest in the Big Thicket led to a fight against the Forest Service's practice of clearcutting and its effect on Red Cockaded Woodpeckers. Through litigation and …

This thesis is about the self-identity of antebellum New Orleans's free people of color. The emphasis of this work is that French culture, mixed Gallic and African ancestry, and freedom from slavery served as the three keys to the identity of this class of people. Taken together, these three factors separated the free people of color from the other major groups residing in New Orleans - Anglo-Americans, white Creoles and black slaves. The introduction provides an overview of the topic and states the need for this study. Chapter 1 provides a look at New Orleans from the perspective of the free people of color. Chapter 2 investigates the slaveownership of these people. Chapter 3 examines the published literature of the free people of color. The conclusion summarizes the significance found in the preceding three chapters and puts their findings into a broader interpretive framework.

The Texas Constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres of Texas public land in exchange for construction of the monumental red granite Capitol that continues to house Texas state government today. The Capitol project and the land went to an Illinois syndicate led by men influential in business and politics. Austin's statehouse is a recognizable symbol of Texas around the world. So too, the massive Panhandle tract given in exchange -- what became the "fabulous" XIT Ranch -- has come to, for many, symbolize Texas and its role in the nineteenth century cattle boom. After finding sales prospects for the land, known as the Capitol Reservation, weak at the time, backed by British capital, the Illinois group, often called the Capitol Syndicate, turned their efforts to cattle ranching to satisfy investors until demand for the land increased. The operation included a satellite ranch in Montana to which two-year-old steers from Texas were sent for fattening, often "over the trail" on a route increasingly blocked by people and settlement. Rather than a study focused on ranching operations on the ground -- the roundups, the cattle drives, the cowboys -- this instead uncovers the business and political side of the Syndicate's …

Eagles Overhead provides a critical history of US Air Force Forward Air Controllers and examines their role, status, and performance in the Air Force's history. It begins by examining the US's initial adoption of air power, and American participation in aerial combat during World War I and traces the FACs' contributions to every US Air Force air campaign from the Marne in 1918 to Mosul in 2017. However, since 2001 FACs' contributions have been sporadic. Eagles Overhead asks why, despite the critical importance of FACs, have they not been heavily used on US battlefields since 2001? It examines the Air Force FAC's theoretical, doctrinal, institutional, and historical frameworks in the first nine chapters to assess if the nature of air warfare has changed so significantly that the concept and utility of the FAC has been left behind. Or, has the FAC been neglected since 2001 because the Air Force dislikes the capability as it clouds the service's doctrinal preferences? From these examinations, Eagles Overhead draws conclusions about the potential future of Air Force FACs.