College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item “THE VERY MESSENGERS OF GOD”: THE TEACHERS OF ALABAMA’S FREEDPEOPLE, 1865-1870(2017) Jordan, Sylvia Alyssa; Rowland, Leslie S.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using Freedmen’s Bureau records, the papers of the American Missionary Association, and other materials, the author identified 585 individuals who taught ex-slaves in Alabama between 1865 and 1870. The thesis describes their sex, race, and geographical origins, their motives for teaching, the high rate of turnover, and a growing number of black teachers. It examines the teachers’ work in the classroom and the many challenges they faced. It argues that the schools survived only because of the ex-slaves’ own commitment to education and the lengths to which the teachers went in order to keep their schools in operation. Finally, the thesis explores the teachers’ interactions with their surrounding communities. While some white Alabamians were supportive, others expressed hostility through social ostracism, physical assault, arson, and even murder. Especially in the face of such white opposition, the teachers relied heavily upon freedpeople to help build, maintain, and protect the schools.Item Someone Else's Textbooks: German Education 1945-2014(2016) Abney, Ann; Kosicki, Piotr; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 20th century, German education repeatedly transformed as the occupying Americans, Soviets, and western-dominated reunification governments used their control of the German secondary education system to create new definitions of what it meant to be German. In each case, the dominant political force established the paradigm for a new generation of Germans. The victors altered the German education system to ensure that their versions of history would be the prevailing narrative. In the American Occupation Zones from 1945-1949, this meant democratic initiatives; for the Soviet Zone in those same years, Marxist-Leninist pedagogy; and for the Bundesrepublik after reunification, integrated East and West German narratives. In practice, this meant succeeding generations of German students learned very different versions of history depending on the temporal and geographic space they inhabited, as each new prevailing regime supplanted the previous version of “Germanness” with its own.