Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    The Educational Imaginary in Radical Reconstruction: Congressional Public Policy Rhetoric and American Federalism, 1862-1872
    (2016) Steudeman, Michael Joseph; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Facing the exigencies of Emancipation, a South in ruins, and ongoing violence, between 1862 and 1872 the United States Congress debated the role education would play in the postbellum polity. Positing schooling as a panacea for the nation’s problems, a determiner of individual worth, and a way of ameliorating state and federal tensions, congressional leaders envisioned education as a way of reshaping American political life. In pursuit of this vision, many policymakers advocated national school agencies and assertive interventions into state educational systems. Interrogating the meaning of “education” for congressional leaders, this study examines the role of this ambiguous concept in negotiating the contradictions of federal and state identity, projecting visions of social change, evaluating civic preparedness, and enabling broader debates over the nation’s future. Examining legislative debates over the Reconstruction Acts, Freedmen’s Bureau, Bureau of Education, and two bills for national education reform in the early 1870s, this project examines how disparate educational visions of Republicans and Democrats collided and mutated amid the vicissitudes of public policy argument. Engaging rhetorical concepts of temporality, disposition, and political judgment, it examines the allure and limitations of education policy rhetoric, and how this rhetoric shifted amid the difficult process of coming to policy agreements in a tumultuous era. In a broader historical sense, this project considers the role of Reconstruction Era congressional rhetoric in shaping the long-term development of contemporary Americans’ “educational imaginary,” the tacit, often unarticulated assumptions about schooling that inflect how contemporary Americans engage in political life, civic judgment, and social reform. Treating the analysis of public policy debate as a way to gain insights into transitions in American political life, the study considers how Reconstruction Era debate converged upon certain common agreements, and obfuscated significant fault lines, that persist in contemporary arguments.
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    "The Sacred Cause of State Rights": Theories of Union and Sovereignty in the Antebellum North
    (2006-08-09) Esh, Christian R.; Belz, Herman J.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    "The Sacred Cause of State Rights" examines the problem of federalism as the central issue in U.S. constitutional history before the Civil War. Drawing on Keith Whittington's insight into the political construction of the Constitution, the argument focuses on the role of state legislatures and courts, particularly in the North, relative to their claims of co-equal authority to the national government in the struggle to determine constitutional meaning. The project seeks to rescue the political history of federalism from the post-Civil War view that the Union had been polarized into patriotic nationalists and traitorous defenders of state rights. In fact, most Northerners occupied a middle ground between the arch-nationalism of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun's exposition of nullification. Martin Van Buren appealed to Northern moderates when he fought to defend "the sacred cause of state rights" against the heresy of nullification in 1833. Analytically, the dissertation strives to establish the core theoretical components of representative debates. It begins with the formulation of the first national Union under the Articles of Association (1774) and then moves to the constitutional compromise of 1787 and the debate over its meaning in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (1798). These chapters analyze the revolutionary political grammar of association and its importance to American constitutional deliberation. Subsequent chapters treat the issue of sovereignty through a study of the Olmsted Crisis in Philadelphia and the issue of concurrent state powers in New York by examining the Steamboat Cases. Then, the dissertation explains how Northern states' claim to interpret the Constitution for themselves was sorely discredited by the national attention given to Calhoun's radical theory of nullification in 1833. Finally, it examines the North's turn away from state rights and social contract theory and toward the organic nationalist theories of the Union espoused by Daniel Webster and Joseph Story.
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    "A LIGHT WHICH REVEALS ITS TRUE MEANING": STATE SUPREME COURTS AND THE CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION
    (2004-04-30) Stelluto, Jr., Donald Louis; Belz, Herman J.; History
    During the Civil War, Confederate wartime legislation, chiefly conscription, exemption, and impressments statutes, raised fundamental constitutional issues. These actions by the national government became a prolific source of litigation in many southern states. Yet, in the absence of a national Confederate Supreme Court, it fell to state supreme courts and state jurists to resolve these challenges to the national government's exercise of constitutional war powers and to enunciate key constitutional principles and explain the tenets of Confederate political philosophy. As a result, southern state supreme courts became the primary venues in which national constitutional issues were adjudicated. The constitutional purposes and goals of the Confederacy were national- rather than state-oriented and provided for limited but effective national government, a truly federal union in which state and national governments were to both operate effectively and energetically, and within the national government, the powers of the national government were to be separated to promote efficiency and prevent usurpation. In these cases, state supreme courts enunciated key Confederate constitutional doctrines and principles namely, limited government or constitutionalism, federalism, the separation of powers, and national purposes. State jurists established that the Confederate Constitution was a substantive and purposeful constitutive consisting of conservative principles and innovative forms and features. Operating as a de facto supreme court, these state supreme courts considered scores of wartime decisions. Consistently, across jurisdictions, these justices rejected states' rights as the political philosophy of the Confederacy, they upheld the exercise of constitutional Confederate war powers within a carefully articulated doctrine of federalism, they limited national government within its delegated authority without handicapping its capabilities to fulfill its duties, and maintained a strict separation of government powers between the three national branches. State supreme court cases have been largely ignored by Civil War scholars. However, these decisions reveal the substantive and normative nature of constitutional principles in the Confederacy. The specific holdings in these cases contradict earlier historiographical understandings of the Confederacy as a loose confederation of states with each acting independently.