Author: Madison Whipple             Major: History

Madison Whipple

My name is Madison Whipple and I just graduated Magna Cum Laude from the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences with a Bachelor of Arts in history and a minor in Spanish. My mentor is Dr. Louise Hancox, lecturer of history and Director of Career Innovation in the Honors College. I defended my thesis successfully in April 2021 and graduated in May of 2021, after my second semester of research. Next year I am moving to the region of Andalucia in Spain to be an English language and culture teaching assistant. Eventually, I would like to earn my Master of Arts in Public History and work for a museum or in the National Parks system.

My research centers around the actions of the Mildred Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the 1920s and 1930s in Fayetteville. The UDC was a Confederate memorial association that was established in Fayetteville in 1897 and was active until the early 1990s. Many UDC chapters are most famous for their public monuments, built to honor the Confederacy, as these statues and memorials have been a recent topic of controversy in the United States. However, the Fayetteville UDC never built a memorial, so my research focuses instead on the other facets of the UDC’s influence in Fayetteville. I will cover their power over literature, both in schools and in the Fayetteville Public Library, their influence over newspapers and local publications, the influence of visual memorials in non-monumental form, and the UDC’s performance of the Confederacy in the early twentieth century. I will use all of this evidence in an attempt to prove that the UDC’s influence in Fayetteville was still powerful, even without a public monument, in the two decades between the World Wars. The real-world application of this research is that I was able to dispute the long-held belief that Fayetteville is more progressive than its neighbors to the North (Bentonville) and the South (Fort Smith). This is especially important today, as we continue to identify and reconcile with systemic racism in our society, which stemmed, oftentimes, from the ideologies perpetuated by groups like the UDC. The UDC left traces in the lives of many people whose personal records now belong to the University, so I used those to my advantage and was able to build my research on concrete primary sources. However, there is not much secondary literature on the UDC in Arkansas. Despite this, I have been able to learn about the UDC on a national scale through authors like Karen L. Cox, who is the leading scholar on the influence of the UDC nationwide, and through books like Free Speech and the Lost Cause in Arkansas by Fred Arthur Bailey. Although the secondary literature does not directly address my topic, I have been able to structure an argument that localizes the work of other historians. Also, obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected my ability to research. However, I have stuck it out by utilizing the limited hours at the Special Collections department of the library and finding primary sources I can use from home, like books checked out from the library.

I chose this topic specifically because I have always been fascinated by both the Civil War, and the role of women in history. I knew that I had a particular interest in Southern women’s history, and in following that interest I found out about the UDC. This piqued my interest because it was a group of powerful women who exerted influence over a huge majority of the South in the twentieth century. I chose my mentor, Dr. Hancox because I knew that she had done professional projects in Arkansas history, as well as that she had an interest in women’s history. I knew Dr. Hancox through the Honors College, and I knew that she was not only interested in my topic, but she was also someone who I could rely on to give me honest and structured feedback.

My defense was on April 8, 2021. As I’m sure, every Honors student can relate to, I was very nervous about my defense. It is the culmination of all of your research- all packed into a one-hour Microsoft Teams call! I was not exactly sure what the defense would look like or how I would do it. However, it was far less intimidating than I previously thought. My committee was composed of three professors, in addition to my mentor. Two of my committee members were professors of history, both of whom I had had as teachers, and one was a professor assigned to my committee by the Honors College. Dr. Michael Pierce helped me turn a term paper from his class on America between the World Wars into a chapter of my thesis. In addition to this, he challenged me during my defense to think about additional research that could be done on my topic, namely the Unionist influence on Fayetteville and how that sort of disrupted the UDC’s version of history. Also, my committee member Dr. Michele Johnson helped to spark my interest in Southern women’s history through her class on women in US history and provided secondary resources that proved to be invaluable in my writing. Dr. Johnson also challenged me during my defense to think of a wider angle on the history of revisionist history in Fayetteville. Her research has to do with the Women’s KKK, and I was encouraged to possibly later explore the links between the two groups. All in all, my defense felt more like a productive discussion than a tribunal, which is what I expected. After a few minutes of conferring, the committee decided that I had passed my defense! It was such a relief that all of my research had paid off.

After successfully defending, I turned in my thesis to the Fulbright Honors office and I published it on the Arkansas Scholarworks website. In addition to these, I entered the University of Arkansas’ Nation Undergraduate Research Week Poster Competition, and I won first prize. It was very validating to have my research recognized, and I’m grateful I got to do such a thing! Next year, I will be moving to Spain in order to teach English, and I am excited to see what that opportunity holds for me!