This project presents an institutional history of women’s intercollegiate athletics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By looking to the individual campus, we learn about the ways in which administrators, coaches, faculty, and students understood the educational value of college sports. The UNC women’s program began in the 1950s as extramural play and quickly transformed into big-time college sports. By the early 1980s, the women experienced the same tension between academics and athletics at the heart of intercollegiate sports as the men. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, colleges, the media, and most Americans strongly associated the Big Time with the revenue-producing sports of football and men’s basketball. In Chapel Hill and across America, however, all sports teams, men’s and women’s, revenue and non-revenue, felt the effects of the increased professionalization and commercialization of the collegiate athletic enterprise. The history of women’s intercollegiate athletics provides a new window into exploring the benefits and challenges of big-time sports in higher education.

Frances Burns Hogan, Director of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, and her colleagues worked hard to expand sporting opportunities for women. They helped create the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which provided governance and began hosting national championships in 1971. They collaborated with university administrators and athletic officials to implement Title IX compliance during the 1970s. Hogan and many directors eagerly joined men’s athletic conferences to commence regular season play, and by the 1980s, supported the move to the NCAA. Providing the best competitive experiences for Carolina female student-athletes motivated Hogan’s decisions.

Frances Hogan and women’s directors nationwide determined the nature of women’s intercollegiate athletics. Hogan and her colleagues debated whether women’s sports should be inclusive and participatory or competitive and elitist. They struggled over the tension between the drive to expand women’s sporting opportunities and the desire to maintain educational priorities. They grappled with men in the athletic department who resisted their efforts to gain publicity, access to better facilities, adequate operational support, and the legitimacy enjoyed by men’s teams. By 1985, Hogan’s tireless efforts created the premier women’s athletic program in the Southeast.

This thesis examines the evolution of the interpretation of the battle of Gettysburg, as well as how the analysis and presentation of the battle by multiple stakeholders have affected the public's understanding of the violence of the engagement and subsequently its understanding of the war's repercussions. While multiple components of the visitor experience are examined throughout this thesis, the majority of analysis focuses on the interpretive wayside signs that dot the landscape throughout the Gettysburg National Military Park. These wayside signs are the creation of the Park Service, and while they are not strictly interpretive in nature, they remain an extremely visible component of the visitor's park experience. As such, they are an important reflection of the interpretive priorities of the Park Service, an agency which is likely the dominant public history entity shaping understanding of the American Civil War. Memory at Gettysburg in the first decades after the battle largely sought to focus on celebratory accounts of the clash that praised the valor of all white combatants as a means of bringing about resolution between the two sides. By focusing on triumphant memories of martial valor in a conflict fought over ambiguous reasons, veterans and the public at large neglected unsettling and difficult conversations. These avoided discussions primarily concerned what the war had really accomplished aside from preserving the Union, as white Americans appeared unwilling to confront the war's abolitionist legacy. Additionally, they avoided discussion of the horrific levels of violence that the war had truly required of its combatants. Reconciliationist memories of the conflict that did not discuss the violence and trauma of combat were thus incorporated into early interpretations of Civil War battlefields, and continued to hinder understanding of the true savagery of combat into the present. This thesis focuses on the presence (or lack thereof) of violence and trauma in the wayside interpretive signage at Gettysburg, and argues that a more active interpretation of the war's remarkably violent and traumatic legacies can assist in dislodging a faulty legacy of reconciliationist remembrance that continues to permeate public memory of the Civil War.

ABSTRACT Following the tragic events of 9-11, top Federal policy makers moved to establish the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This massive realignment of federal public safety agencies also loosely centralized all U.S. civilian security organizations under a single umbrella. Designed to respond rapidly to critical security threats, the DHS was vested with superseding authority and broad powers of enforcement. Serving as a cabinet member, the new agency was administered by a secretary who answered directly to the President of the United States or the national chief executive. At its creation, many touted this agency as a new security structure. This thesis argues that the formation of DHS was not innovative in nature. Rather, its formation was simply the next logical step in the tiered development of an increasingly centralized approach to policing in the United States. This development took place during the early settlement period of Texas and began with the formation of the Texas Rangers. As the nation's first border patrol, this organization greatly influenced the development of centralized policing and law enforcement culture in the United States. As such, subsequent agencies following this model frequently shared a startling number of parallel developments and experienced many of the same successes and failures. The history of this development is a contested narrative, one that connects directly to a number of current, critical social issues regarding race and police accountability. This thesis raises questions regarding the American homeland. Whose homeland was truly being protected? It also traces the origins of the power to justify the use of gratuitous violence and the casting of particular members of society as the symbolic enemy or outsiders. Lastly, this exploration hopes to bring about a better understanding of the traditional directionality of the use of coercive force towards particular members of society, while at the same time, justifying this use for the protection of the rights and safety of others. It is hoped that the culmination of this work will assist American society in learning to address the task of redressing past wrongs while building more effective and democratic public security structures. This is of the utmost importance as the United States continues to weigh the benefits of centralized security mechanisms and expanding police authority against the erosion of the tradition of states' rights and the personal civil liberties of its citizens. Because police power must continually be monitored and held in check, concerns regarding the increasing militarization of civilian policing may benefit from an objective evaluation of the rise of centralized policing as experienced through the development of the Texas Rangers and rural range policing.