Digital Commons Network^™

Common Ground Over Common Water: Defining The Public Interest In The Milwaukee Watershed, Thomas Anthony Gentine

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines government and nongovernment entities’ attempts to restore and protect the use and health of the Milwaukee River and its watershed from 1960 to 2000. Under Mayor Henry Maier’s leadership, Milwaukee worked to reclaim the urban riverway to stimulate economic growth. However, state and federal representatives, after the passage of the 1965 Water Quality Act, demanded that the city government prioritize updating the combined storm and sewer system to lessen pollution in the Milwaukee River. At the same time, other groups worked to save rural areas from unplanned development and further degradation of the waterway. Influential groups included …

Ocon At War: The Oconomowoc Home Front During The Second World War, Erika L. Laabs

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

OCON AT WAR:THE OCONOMOWOC HOME FRONT DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

This thesis will examine the local home front propaganda in and around Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (Waukesha County) during the Second World War and compare the Oconomowoc area propaganda to Wisconsin overall and to the national experience. Enlistments, war bond sales, USO events, parades, radio programs/speeches, films, music, popular books/comic books, and images, are the main types of “cultural locations” that I am using as propaganda. I have found solid examples of posters and advertisement images from local newspapers that provide a wealth of information about the way fear, love, …

Simeon Hart, The "Milmo Affair," And The Confederate Cotton Trade On The Rio Grande, 1861-65, Leonel Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

The cotton trade on the Rio Grande played a crucial role in the transnational history of Confederate-Mexican diplomacy as well as the history of the American Civil War and the Second French Intervention in Mexico. The renowned merchant from El Paso, Simeon Hart, was an important figure in the cotton trade since he helped facilitate diplomatic and commercial relations between Mexico and the Confederacy. Due to his reputation as an emissary and supplier for the Confederate Army of New Mexico, Hart was appointed quartermaster of the Trans-Mississippi Department. During the winter of 1863-64, the son-in-law of the Governor of Nuevo …

(Re)Constructing Homescapes: “Archaeological Remote Sensing” And Ground-Truthing Of The Walker Place Homestead At Spirit Hill Farm, Tate County, Mississippi, Gabriel Griffin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on an early nineteenth-century homestead known as the Walker Place homestead at Spirit Hill Farm in northern Mississippi. The goal of this thesis is to conduct a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and shovel test survey to explore how changing landscapes simultaneously (re)create and destroy senses of place or Homescapes. Homescapes have received little attention in the field of archaeology and have not been applied to Euro-American Homescapes. I apply this theoretical construct in a novel way as a venture to further develop an avenue in archaeology to be collaborative and understand the past in a way that accurately …

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

The Roadmap To Iraq: How 9/11 Facilitated The 2003 Invasion, Michael Loren Shumway

Theses and Dissertations

The attacks of 11 September 2001 not only resulted in retaliatory attacks upon the nation of Afghanistan for its harboring of the terror cell al Qaeda but also for the later U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Although initial intelligence connected the terrorist group al Qaeda to the attacks, Bush’s administration officials began assembling intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities and its possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. In this 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush announced his administration’s position that the United States would react pre-emptively to threats against the United States or its global interests. This pre-emptive position opened the …

“Infantry Would Not Do:” Appalachia, The Environment, And The Evolution Of Mountain Warfare During The American Civil War, Lucas Michael Wilder

Theses and Dissertations

Union General Ambrose E. Burnside launched his invasion of East Tennessee in the summer of 1863. The corps he used consisted of half-infantry and half-mounted units to utilize their speed to overcome mountain obstacles. The successful campaign and the capture of the agriculturally rich region of East Tennessee and its vital East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad deprived the Confederacy of resources, ultimately contributing to Confederate defeat. The American Civil War saw commanders plunge into the mountains of Appalachia and encounter a terrain and a people with which many were unacquainted. This dissertation argues that their tactics and strategies for dealing …

Uncovering The Domesticated Spectator: Film Exhibition And Spectatorship In The Home, 1920-1950, Patrick Brame

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation builds on recent historical scholarship that adds complexity to apparatus theory from the 1970s by examining the experience of film exhibition and spectatorship in the American home from 1920 to 1950. While the screen, projector, and content of home exhibition influenced the spectator’s experience, so too did the domestic environment: blurring private and public spaces loaded with sociocultural tensions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Through my investigation of amateur filmmaking magazines, primarily Movie Makers, Home Movies, industry journals such as The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and more widely read magazines like Popular Mechanics, …

Evidence Of Lives Not Seen: The Bioarchaeology Of Material Personhood At The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery, Catherine Rebecca Jones

Theses and Dissertations

Cadaverized individuals in nineteenth and twentieth-century America were overwhelmingly poor, indigent, institutionalized, and unidentified. Their bodies were utilized to transform medical students into professionals while they, in turn, were transformed from human to medical waste, and disposed of as such. The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery was one such disposal site utilized from 1882-1925. Archaeological excavations at the site recovered cadaverized remains in multiple individual burial contexts. Analysis of mortuary patterns provides a richly nuanced medium through which this project examines the creation of social personhood and the formation and maintenance of community boundaries. These shared patterns, evident in burial …

Weeping All The Way To Zion: Vatican Ii, Catholic Social Ethics, And The Black Freedom Struggle In Milwaukee, Samuel Cocar

Theses and Dissertations

The Second Vatican Council convened between October 1962 and December 1965. In the years immediately following, American Catholics, as well as co-religionists the world over, were left to interpret and navigate an event and literary corpus which had fundamentally recalibrated not only the dominant theological method for the Church, but also redefined its posture toward the world and social issues. The established traditions of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) as well as the paroxysms of Vatican II, figured prominently in the Milwaukee iteration of the Civil Rights Movement/Black Freedom Struggle, in which one of the most visible figures was progressive priest …

Original Intent: Brown Vs. Board Of Education, White Backlash, & The Enduring Power Of De Facto Segregation, Aaron Brand

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the factors and outcomes surrounding Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. The events that predated it and the resistance that followed determined the chain of consequences from this perceived victory over racial bias. The calculated and persistent backlash against integration obscured Brown’s intent of educational opportunity.

Roots And Webs And Nets And Branches And Bulletin Boards And Banners And Newsletters And Mutual Aid Text Threads And Kin And Caretakers And Porches And Poems Of Today And Spaces Of Survival, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo

Theses and Dissertations

As I welcome Richmond, VA into my family, I find myself needing to make roots and webs and nets and branches that ground me, that place myself as a Black, queer, mixed race, artist, activist, educator, storyteller, and cultural worker in this city. I am called to the streets before I am called to my studio. I question what it means to be a part of an institution that is slowly eating this city up. I become a story collector. I need to know where I am and whose land I now call home.

“What Have We Got To Celebrate?”: Native American Contestation To Commemoration During The Late 20th Century, Jennifer C. Tennison

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Indigenous groups in the United States have contested mainstream historical narratives of America’s founding during major commemorative events in the late twentieth century. To analyze this, I have examined two major national commemorative events during which Native Americans spearheaded a marked shift in the popular interpretation of national origins. The first event I analyze is the 1976 Bicentennial of the American Revolution; the second event is the 1992 Columbus Quincentenary. Native Americans contested the ways that the federal planning bodies for both events represented the history of the nation’s founding. How could they be called on …