In 2020, as the nation experienced a racial reckoning, the North Carolina State Board of Education was in the process of adopting new social studies standards. The racial reckoning constituted a policy window to advocate for standards that better included marginalized experiences. In response, conservative lawmakers engaged in a political…

This study examines North Carolina's past educational politics from the desegregation era as a means to better contextualize its modern-day school pushout crisis. It marks desegregation as the bedrock for racialized school pushout as white resistance to integration proved difficult and at times dangerous for Black students as they entered formerly…

The U.S. South, in spite of its racist Jim Crow era laws and political history, has the fastest growing Latine immigrant population in the country. In North Carolina alone, the Latine population is responsible for over one-third of the state's growth exceeding all other population groups. Despite this rapid-growing change, the state is third to…

This dissertation examines how Black students and workers engaged in movements for racial justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1951 to 2018 challenged the University's dominant cultural landscape of white supremacy -- a landscape in direct conflict with the University's mission to be a public university in service to all…

The use of GIS technology for the humanities has opened up new avenues for visually exploring and asking questions of our nation's historical record. The potential to harness new knowledge with tools designed to capture and preserve geographic links to the artifacts of our past is within our grasp. This research explores the common information…

May 1970 became a pivotal moment in higher education. In that month, the backlash over two events, the announcement of the American invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard killing four Kent State University students protesting that military offensive, triggered the largest student protest in history. Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of…

The purpose of this study was to find out how W. S. King School, a school for African American students that operated during segregation, impacted student learning and thereby, influenced the community. Because the former all-black W. S. King School was known to have produced graduates who went on to become successful, productive citizens in…

This study examined whether students who graded and corrected their own test papers improved their learning and standardized test scores on the North Carolina end-of-course test in United States History. Four preexisting, intact classrooms of 11th grade United States History students in two different high schools formed the basis of this…