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Reconciling Memory: Landscapes, Commemorations, And Enduring Conflicts Of The U.S.-Dakota War Of 1862, Julie A. Anderson Dec 2011

Reconciling Memory: Landscapes, Commemorations, And Enduring Conflicts Of The U.S.-Dakota War Of 1862, Julie A. Anderson

History Dissertations

The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 resulted in the deaths of more than 500 Minnesota settlers, the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homeland, and the largest mass execution in U.S. history. For more than a century, white Minnesotans declared themselves innocent victims of Indian brutality and actively remembered this war by erecting monuments, preserving historic landscapes, publishing first-person narratives, and hosting anniversary celebrations. However, as the centennial anniversary approached, new awareness for the sufferings of the Dakota both before and after the war prompted retellings of the traditional story that gave the status of victimhood to the Dakota as …


The Apocalypse Will Be Televised: Representations Of The Cold War On Network Television, 1976-1987, Aubrey Underwood Aug 2011

The Apocalypse Will Be Televised: Representations Of The Cold War On Network Television, 1976-1987, Aubrey Underwood

History Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the major television networks, in conjunction with the Reagan administration, launched a lingering cloud of nuclear anxiety that helped to revive the Cold War during the 1980s. Placed within a larger political and cultural post-war context, this national preoccupation with a global show-down with the Soviet Union at times both hindered and bolstered Reagan’s image as the archetypal conservative, cowboy President that could free America from its liberal adolescent past now caustically referred to as “the sixties.” This stalwart image of Reagan, created and carefully managed by a number of highly-paid marketing executives, as one of …


The African-American Emigration Movement In Georgia During Reconstruction, Falechiondro Karcheik Sims-Alvarado Jun 2011

The African-American Emigration Movement In Georgia During Reconstruction, Falechiondro Karcheik Sims-Alvarado

History Dissertations

This dissertation is a narrative history about nearly 800 newly freed black Georgians who sought freedom beyond the borders of the Unites States by emigrating to Liberia during the years of 1866 and 1868. This work fulfills three overarching goals. First, I demonstrate that during the wake of Reconstruction, newly freed persons’ interest in returning to Africa did not die with the Civil War. Second, I identify and analyze the motivations of blacks seeking autonomy in Africa. Third, I tell the stories and challenges of those black Georgians who chose emigration as the means to civil and political freedom in …


Nationalizing The Dead: The Contested Making Of An American Commemorative Tradition From The Civil War To The Great War, Shannon T. Bontrager Ph.D. May 2011

Nationalizing The Dead: The Contested Making Of An American Commemorative Tradition From The Civil War To The Great War, Shannon T. Bontrager Ph.D.

History Dissertations

In recent years, scholars have emphasized the importance of collective memory in the making of national identity. Where does death fit into the collective memory of American identity, particularly in the economic and social chaos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did death shape the collective memory of American national identity in the midst of a pluralism brought on by immigration, civil and labor rights, and a transforming culture? On the one hand, the commemorations of public figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt constructed an identity based on Anglo-Saxonism, American imperialism, and …


Most Desperate People: The Genesis Of Texas Exceptionalism, Michael G. Kelley May 2011

Most Desperate People: The Genesis Of Texas Exceptionalism, Michael G. Kelley

History Dissertations

Six different nations have claimed sovereignty over some or all of the current state of Texas. In the early nineteenth century, Spain ruled Texas. Then Mexico rebelled against Spain, and from 1821 to 1836 Texas was a Mexican province. In 1836, Texas Anglo settlers rebelled against Mexican rule and established a separate republic. The early Anglo settlers brought their form of civilization to a region that the Spanish had not been able to subdue for three centuries. They defeated a professional army and eventually overwhelmed Native American tribes who wished to maintain their way of life without inference from intruding …


Finding Their Place In The World: Meiji Intellectuals And The Japanese Construction Of An East-West Binary, 1868-1912, Masako N. Racel May 2011

Finding Their Place In The World: Meiji Intellectuals And The Japanese Construction Of An East-West Binary, 1868-1912, Masako N. Racel

History Dissertations

The Meiji era (1868-1912) in Japanese history was characterized by the extensive adoption of Western institutions, technology, and customs. The dramatic changes that took place caused the era’s intellectuals to ponder Japan's position within the larger global context. The East-West binary was a particularly important part of the discourse as the intellectuals analyzed and criticized the current state of affairs and offered their visions of Japan’s future. This dissertation examines five Meiji intellectuals who had very different orientations and agendas: Fukuzawa Yukichi, an influential philosopher and political theorist; Shimoda Utako, a pioneer of women's education; Uchimura Kanzō, a Christian leader; …


Race And Cricket: The West Indies And England At Lord's, 1963, Harold Richard Herbert Harris May 2011

Race And Cricket: The West Indies And England At Lord's, 1963, Harold Richard Herbert Harris

History Dissertations

Cricket became a sport in which there was a clear separation based on race and class; and these distinctions initially determined function within the sport. In England, where the distinction was based mostly on class, the aristocracy, who initially enjoyed watching their workers at play, became involved in playing the game, and determined roles aligned to class. In the West Indies, the distinction was determined by race. However, racial mixing blurred these demarcations and soon the underclass began to encroach onto a space that the sport had created for them. In due course, function within the sport faded into insignificance …


Transatlantic Brinksmanship: The Anglo-American Alliance And Conservative Ideology, 1953-1956, David M. Watry Jan 2011

Transatlantic Brinksmanship: The Anglo-American Alliance And Conservative Ideology, 1953-1956, David M. Watry

History Dissertations

The purpose of this transatlantic dissertation is to produce a new post-revisionist history of Anglo-American relations from 1953 to 1956 that seriously re-assesses Eisenhower's "middle path" foreign policy and the differing responses to it from Churchill and Eden. This reexamination challenges the notion that Eisenhower's foreign policy represented a mere continuation of Truman's containment policy or a "middle path" between Democrats and far-right Republicans. Instead, Eisenhower intentionally adopted a distinctly far-right Republican foreign policy that overwhelmed two Conservative British prime ministers and accelerated the end of the British Empire. This transatlantic history argues that American foreign policy went from one …


Place-Names, Conquest, And Empire: Spanish And Amerindian Conceptions Of Place In The New World, Gene Rhea Tucker Jan 2011

Place-Names, Conquest, And Empire: Spanish And Amerindian Conceptions Of Place In The New World, Gene Rhea Tucker

History Dissertations

This research corrects the one-sided historiography of toponyms in the New World, which focus only on the European imposition of place-names, viewed by many postmodernist scholars as a way to oppress and suppress the native Indians. Instead this transatlantic dissertation recognizes that the Spanish brought patterns of place-naming created in the Old World over to the New World. The naming of the New World was not a unilateral Spanish undertaking. The Spanish did create new toponyms in the Americas. They described the land, honored their Catholic faith and their nobility, and they transferred Old World place-names to the New World--but …