This research examines the role of Barbara Hackman Franklin, Staff Assistant to President Nixon in the White House Personnel Office. By examining this historically significant subject, I gain insight into the reception of the first systemic effort to place women in the federal government. Franklin’s results were unprecedented as she appointed more women to full-time policy-making positions in the federal government than ever before. This research takes into consideration the previously unexamined White House papers of Barbara Franklin which were released by the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in the summer of 2013. An in-depth analysis of Franklin’s White House Papers reveals her as a juggernaut for the burgeoning women’s movement. Through primary source research, this study challenges previous scholarship which champions Franklin’s efforts without complicating her successes within the context of the environment of chauvinism she faced in the White House. Instead, this paper uncovers how sex discrimination operated within the federal government to thwart Franklin’s office and exposes chauvinist attitudes perpetuated by Franklin’s male colleagues. Moreover, this paper reveals Franklin’s interactions with her male colleagues, both cooperative and adversarial, which demonstrate how Franklin flexed political muscle outside of her immediate job description and, by increasing her own visibility in the White House, transformed attitudes regarding the capability of women in government.

The United States has the highest rate of gun violence for a fully developed nation inthe world. Most gun regulations exist at the state, rather than national, level. When Americans worry about gun violence, they probably think about reforming the laws of the state where they live. I hypothesize that neighboring state gun legislation can impact in-state gun violence phenomenon I call “bleed”. In this paper I test the relationship between in-state gun violence levels and the restrictiveness of gun laws in bordering states, controlling for current levels of existing in state legislation, crime, poverty, and education. Data for this has been provided by the Center for Disease Control, the FBI Crime statistics, US Dept. of Education, and the US Dept. of Health and Human Services respectively. This research will show how the impact how state’s gun laws ‘bleed’ into neighboring states. This impact can suggest that firearm legislation should not be left to the states, because the decisions of one state can adversely impact the citizens of other states.

In the past two decades, immigration into the United States has shifted away from traditional destinations like California and New York towards the Southeast and Midwest. How have regions unaccustomed to large-scale immigration responded to this influx of migrants? What do their political responses tell us about how immigration is received across different areas of the United States? Both scholars and those on the ground have suggested that there are similar patterns of response accross both the Midwest and the Southeast despite their social, economic, and historical differences. We compare state-level political responses to new immigration in North Carolina and Iowa, two states that represent the new destination regions. We focus on state policies, both proposed and enacted, as well as the rhetoric used to characterize immigrants and immigration in the local press. Through this analysis we can examine the impact of each state's cultural attitudes towards newcomers, economic situation, and history of race relations. In doing so, we will be able to suggest where activists may direct their efforts to most effectively facilitate positive responses to new immigrants.

The phenomenon of “illegal” immigration, a category produced by post-1965 qualitative restrictions, has created a second phenomenon: undocumented students. These students are brought to the United States illegally as minors, attend public schools, but are without legal relief to adjust their status. They find themselves as at once a social reality and a legal impossibility. In 2001, federal lawmakers introduced a proposal to provide these children with a path to citizenship: the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act). In the fifteen years following its conception, the DREAM Act’s failure in Congress has left an estimated 2.1 million potential beneficiaries in a liminal state. I study how lawmakers frame the debate over the DREAM Act. I code opposing lawmaker’s official floor statements and press releases from 2001 to the most recent legislative effort in 2010. I find that the use of ahistorical and nativist frames construct undocumented students, their condition and claims, in ways that reinforce their status quo.

Do early reading scores actually predict future incarceration rates? For years, politicians have claimed that prison projections use elementary reading scores to forecast future prison populations, despite a lack of credible evidence. The existing criminal justice literature finds a connection between higher educational attainment and future criminal behavior, but does not widely examine the relationship at the elementary age. Using 4th grade reading scores and prison admission rates at the state level, I examine this question using multivariate linear regression. Controlling for other factors that may influence prison populations, such as socioeconomic status and sentencing practices, I find that lower average reading scores at the fourth grade level are predictive of future prison admissions. Therefore, in addition to its other benefits, greater investment in elementary education may help to reduce future incarceration rates. 

My thesis centers on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

I argue that racism and racial innocence best explain the systemic failures of two interrelated phenomena respectively: (1) the failure to equally recognize and apply the same American principles of constitutional liberty to Asian immigrants and Asian Americans as evident from the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and (2) the failure to educate Americans on historical discrimination, as evident from the consequent lack of educational literature concerning the imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

I present racism and racial innocence as the primary variables that enabled failure among multiple institutions. Racial innocence is a concept in Critical Race Theory (CRT) originally coined to describe the predominant white American response to long-lasting effects of slavery— particularly highlighting the propensity toward forgetfulness, erasure, and denial of past accounts of racial discrimination. Racial innocence is perpetuated by focusing largely on racial intent with a false distinction between individuals with racist intent and the racially innocent institutions in which they reside. Critical race theorists have traditionally attributed “innocence” to the white majority population who retrospectively confine racism to its original historical contexts, deem historical racism as largely irrelevant to the present, and disregard the notion that past racism still has consequences today.

I first analyze how the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was not a justifiable aberration of civil rights violations, but rather the inevitable climax of consistent exclusionary immigration policy. Establishing this pattern of anti-Japanese policy is necessary to demonstrate the current role of racial innocence, which rationalizes instances of racial injustice as mere historical aberrations. This examination of Asian immigration provides the context to the very patterns of racism that enabled the incarceration and the racial innocent culture that currently pervades the contemporary American education system. Subsequently, I examine some of the current history textbooks used to educate America’s youth in order to stress the influence of racial innocence on American education.