Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ship Shaping: How Congress And Industry Influenced U.S. Naval Acquisitions From 1933-1938, Henry H. Carroll

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

Studying shipbuilding politics across time can yield key insights into present-day shipbuilding acquisition reform issues, such as the effects of naval industry consolidation and potential “ally-shoring” of warship production on domestic political support for future naval funding. Past studies of naval acquisitions during the late interwar period often focus on how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Navy Department prepared the nation for the beginning of World War II. However, Congress and the shipbuilding industry played an often-overlooked role in creating the political support needed to expand the Navy during the tumultuous late interwar period. Self-interested domestic interest groups were …

Militants In The Model City: Richard Lee, The Hill Parents Association, And The Limits Of Citizen Participation In New Haven's Urban Renewal Anti-Poverty Programs, Lydia Broderick

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

When Richard Lee was elected Mayor of New Haven in 1953, the city desperately needed change. It had suffered from decades of decline as, in political scientist Douglas Rae’s assessment, “what had been a convergence of accidents favoring urbanism had turned into a convergence of accidents working against it”: steam-driven manufacturing and freight rail became obsolete, the development of cars drove suburbanization, restrictions on immigration stopped the flow of cheap labor, and local manufacturers were bought out by big corporations or closed down altogether. At the same time, Black Southerners migrated to northern cities like New Haven in large numbers …

Battling Over Bargain-Hunting: Defining The American Consumer Through Mass-Consumption Shopping Practices, 1909- 1915, Angela Xiao

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This essay examines the debate and backlash against bargain-hunting in the first two decades of the 20th century across the United States. Using newspaper coverage and advertisements, congressional testimony, and the writings and speeches of businessman Ed Filene, it provides an account of the social and political discussion surrounding the practice of bargain-hunting, which include tensions at various levels. It concludes that the debate surrounding bargain-hunting and bargain-hunters, the women who most often engaged in such practices, reflected the challenges of imagining the concept of the American consumer and grappling with the role and relationship of the consumer as a …

Railroad Ties: Tracks To The White Earth And Red Lake Ojibwe Reservations, 1860s-1910s, Heidi Katter

Library Map Prize

This essay interrogates the comparative effects of railroad colonialism at the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe Reservations in northwestern Minnesota. Charting the history of railroad expansion in Minnesota from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries using maps, railroad promotional materials, and Indian agent correspondence reveals how, when, and why the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe experienced land dispossession and environmental degradation. Despite their geographic proximity, White Earth and Red Lake faced different federal policies. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century, both the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe lived upon deforested reservation lands. While existing historiography analyzes …

The 1950s “War On Narcotics”: Harry Anslinger, The Federal Bureau Of Narcotics, And Senator Price Daniel’S Probe, William J. Horvath

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

No abstract provided.

"Its Cargo Is People": Repositioning Commuter Rail As Public Transit To Save The New York–New Haven Line, 1960–1990, Seamus C. Joyce-Johnson

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This essay explores the creation of the Metro-North Railroad in 1983 as a public agency to provide commuter train services on the New York–New Haven Line. The essay begins by bringing out the central role commuter rail services played in the negotiations over the New Haven Railroad’s bankruptcy in the 1960s. I argue that New Haven Line’s near liquidation during the bankruptcy prompted advocacy from commuters, urban planners, and politicians that pushed back against the trend towards automobile-centric urban transportation planning. In the next section, I use the New Haven Line’s subsequent operation in the 1970s under subsidy arrangements with …

Young Americans For Freedom And The Anti-War Movement: Pro-War Encounters With The New Left At The Height Of The Vietnam War, Ethan Swift

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

While a vast amount of contemporary scholarship has been dedicated to student activism during the late 1960s and early 1970s, very little of it has focused on those who supported the war in Vietnam. The few authors who have written on the topic tend to present pro-war activists as a mild-mannered force that used conventional and congenial tactics to advocate for victory in southeast Asia. This paper will upend this characterization by examining how members of the conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) saw themselves as a besieged minority at American universities and responded to the radicalism of the …

"A Critic Friendly To Mccarthy": How William F. Buckley, Jr. Brought Senator Joseph R. Mccarthy Into The American Conservative Movement Between 1951 And 1959, Samuel Bennett

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

William F. Buckley, Jr. has been revered among American conservatives, and even some scholars of the field, for fathering what would come to be known as movement conservatism through his National Review. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, has not been so fondly remembered; he was best known for his paranoid style of politics and eventual censure in the Senate. While Buckley and McCarthy’s worlds clearly overlapped in the fervent anticommunist conservatism of the 1950s, few historians have recognized the extent to which McCarthy was a part of Buckley’s conservative movement, if it is to be acknowledged …

Of A Healthy Constitution: Socialized Medicine Between The Triumphs Of Social Security And Medicare, Sarah D. Kim

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

In January 1937, Thomas Thacher, a former solicitor general of the United States under President Hoover, gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Medicine. He attacked socialized medicine as a “fallacy” that would “blanket the country without regard to local conditions and individuals.” He also expressed doubts about the constitutionality of socialized medicine under the proposed system of compulsory health insurance, adding that states had no power to enforce funding for it. (Funding for such insurance would entail a sliding scale of costs between those in the upper and middle-income brackets, or to take money …

Doctors, Death, And Denial: The Origins Of Hospice Care In 20th Century America, Sarah E. Pajka

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

This essay provides insight into the social and cultural trends that led to the creation of hospice care in the United States. The essay covers the changes in treatment of death by the medical profession, from the discussion of tuberculosis sanatoriums and cancer centers in the early 1900s through the rise of medical authority, and the pivotal role of Yale School of Nursing dean Florence Wald in the 1980 opening of Connecticut Hospice, the first modern American hospice facility.

Of A Healthy Constitution: Socialized Medicine Between The Triumphs Of Social Security And Medicare, Sarah D. Kim

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

No abstract provided.

Kissinger’S Strategy In The Iraqi Kurdish Rebellion Of 1972-75: False Start Or Foundation Of American-Kurdish Partnership?, Jonathan C. Esty

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

No abstract provided.

Influence And Effectiveness In The Years Of Upheaval: Winston Lord And The Policy Planning Staff From 1973 To 1977, Max L.B. Cook

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This two-semester senior essay submitted in completion of the History major at Yale University focuses broadly on the formation of U.S. long-term foreign policy in the Cold War period. More specifically, it analyzes the influence of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (S/P) and its Director Winston Lord (YC ’59) from 1973 to 1977 on the decision-making and policy formulation of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In this period, the S/P took the lead on cross-agency issues, linked operational policy decisions with established long-term U.S. strategic principles, and in some issue areas directly defined U.S. policy on behalf of Secretary …

Internal Affairs: Untold Case Studies Of World War I German Internment, Jacob L. Wasserman

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

Internment of German-Americans and Germans in the United States as the country entered World War I marked a turn in the relationship between America’s governing institutions, its citizens, and its non-citizen aliens. The power and reach of the American state inflected upwards during World War I. Internment was the most drastic facet of a new state involvement in the makeup and dynamics of communities and the liberties and perceptions of minorities. Aside from whether such an effort was justified, internment lies at a crucial point in a sustained American history of powerful state (and state-like) actors interacting with newcomers and …

The Roots Of Radicalism: Natural Rights, Corporate Liberty, And Regional Factions In Colonial Connecticut, 1740-1766, Thomas Hopson

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

This essay traces the roots of radicalism in Connecticut to the religious and economic upheavals of the early 1740s. Thereafter, radical ideas developed through debates over the independence of Yale College, the nature of the colony's religious institutions, and the territorial expansion of a proprietary company. These debates had important similarities: All three addressed the validity of natural rights and the scope of corporate liberty, the right of groups to run themselves without outside interference. Moreover, the debates were politically bundled; the same men who held radical views on religion also held radical views on expansion. This faction led the …

The President's Wartime Detention Authority : What History Teaches Us, Anirudh Sivaram

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This thesis examines the extent of the President’s wartime detention authority over citizens (in particular, detention authority pursuant to Article II of the U.S. Constitution) through a legal-historical lens. Some Presidents (Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush) have historically relied on Article II authority for detention, while others (Ulysses Grant, Barack Obama) have disclaimed the notion that such authority exists. Clarifying the scope and source of the Presidential detention authority over citizens bears both theoretical and real-world relevance. Theoretically, it lies at the confluence of two central American constitutional traditions – the separation of powers, and the protection of …

Insurgent Labor Activists At Yale, 1968-1971, Raymond L. Noonan Iii

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

At noon on April 30, 1971, some Yale students began busing their own trays. Others flipped food-filled plates and tables onto the floor. Almost 100 students broke chairs and other furniture.Commons, the main dining hall on campus, became a “slippery, sloshing pigpen,” according to the Yale Daily News. Soon, nearly 300 students flooded Commons, throwing metal trays across the hall while policemen and dining managers watched grimly nearby. “Support the Yale workers,” they chanted, doing all they could to halt Commons’s services. That day, over 1,000 service and maintenance employees at Yale, part of Local 35 of the Federation of …

The True University: Yale's Library From 1843 To 1931, Elizabeth D. James

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

By the summer of 1930, Sterling Memorial Library was nearing completion, lacking only the university’s 1.6 million books. At 6:00 AM on July 7, with a ceremonial parade of the library’s earliest accessions, the two-month project of moving the books commenced. Leading the trail of librarians was the head librarian, Andrew Keogh, and the head of the serials cataloguing department, Grace Pierpont Fuller. Fuller was the descendant of James Pierpont, one of the principal founders of Yale, and was carrying the Latin Bible given by her ancestor during the fabled 1701 donation of books that signaled the foundation of the …

Measuring "Problems Of Human Behavior": The Eugenic Origins Of Yale's Institute Of Psychology, 1921-1929, John Doyle

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

The Institute of Psychology at Yale was established in 1924 to study what its founders perceived as “problems of human behavior.” The Institute was Yale President James Angell’s first major step towards making the University a pre-eminent center for psychological research in the 1920s and 1930s. Endowed for a five-year term by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, the Institute brought three distinguished faculty to Yale: comparative psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, anthropologist Clark D. Wissler, and psychologist Raymond Dodge. While the Institute has been briefly cited in the historical literature as a precursor to the larger Institute of Human Relations …

From Practical Woodsman To Professional Forester: Henry S. Graves And The Professionalization Of Forestry In The United States, 1900-1920, Brendan D. Ross

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

This research paper looks at the life and career of Henry S. Graves (1871-1951), the founding dean of the Yale Forest School who, along with Gifford Pinchot, lead efforts to professionalize forest science in the United States. In working to bring a new applied science to the U.S., Graves sought to legitimize forestry within academia, federal bureaucracy, and the communities of the American West. Graves’ diverse career adds rich context to the environmental history of forestry and the history of professionalization. Drawing on Graves’ extensive archives, from his work at the Yale Forest School to his time as second chief …

Who Governed Yale? Kingman Brewster And Higher Education In The 1970s, Nathaniel Zelinsky

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

Relying on archival material and oral history, this essay examines two committees at Yale in the 1970s as case studies in how University President Kingman Brewster reshaped the school after the student unrest of the long 1960s. The first committee, led by the political scientist Robert Dahl, endorsed the equal admission of female students in 1972. The second committee, chaired by historian C. Vann Woodward, composed a nationally renowned report on the importance of “unfettered” free expression at the university in 1974-5. I show how each of these committees was a carefully calibrated political tool that allowed Brewster to moderate …

A Nowhere Between Two Somewheres: The Church Street South Project And Urban Renewal In New Haven, Emily Dominski

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

“It is altogether too easy to forget the New Haven of a decade ago” New Haven’s Mayor Richard C. Lee began as he addressed the members of his Citizens Action Commission in 1965. “Neither our eyes, nor our memories are any longer jolted by the vision of the old produce market that had operated near the Railroad Station for more than half a century. The old market was a tangle of stress, often so congested that normal business was impossible. Most business was conducted from the tailgates of trucks. This was a truck market in every sense of the word, …

"Two Days By Plane": America's First Transcontinental Passenger Airline And The Selling Of The Skies, Sean Fraga

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

Transcontinental Air Transport, the first transcontinental passenger airline in the U.S., cut the time necessary to cross the continent in half—and, in doing so, opened a new age in passenger aviation. In its brief life, the airline also captured the possibilities of flight, the limitations of technology, the power of celebrity, and the promise of national integration.

The Buckley-Coffin Crusade: Preaching The Gospel Of Political Ideology To Yale And America In The 1960s, Danielle Kehl

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

The story of William Sloane Coffin Jr. and William F. Buckley Jr. sheds some light on the complexity of student politics in the 1960s, challenging the simplistic historical analysis so often applied to the period. In large measure, liberal and conservative student movements evolved, like Buckley and Coffin, in conversation with one another in the 1960s, with roots that extended back to the beginning of the decade and before. These movements did not emerge organically on college campuses, in a sphere free of adult influences; many of these student visionaries found their mission with the encouragement and support of generational …

A Struggle Between Brothers: A Reexamination Of The Idea Of A Cohesive Conservative Movement Through The Intellectual Life And Personal Conflict Surrounding L. Brent Bozell, Kevin Michel

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

The conservative movement, while ultimately successful, was actually a story of failures and fracture. This reality is captured in the life of Brent Bozell. Historians should recognize that when writing the history of conservatism it is as important to look at the schismatic and often extreme experience of Brent Bozell as it is to consider the life of the leader of mainstream conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. It is unfortunate that no biography has been written on Brent Bozell because his criticisms of mainstream conservatism can shed some light on the underlying reasons for the recent electoral demise of the …

Becoming A Yale Man: Intimacy Among Yale Students In The Nineteenth Century, Matthew Busick

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

This essays demonstrates that relationships between men at Yale College in the nineteenth century were largely the product of the environment in which they occurred. The atmosphere on campus was such that intense intimacy between men was not an anomaly or a perversion, but rather a culmination of the deep bonds forged among all students. Behavior that in another time and place would have aroused suspicion was perfectly acceptable on campus grounds. The elite background of the students, the fact that the school was predominantly Christian, the nature of the college as an all-boys institution, the pressure on the students …

Surviving The Death Of God: Existentialism, God, And Man At Post-Wwii Yale, Robert Tice Lalka

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

“This is our world to build, adorn, or destroy, not God's or anyone else's.”

These were the words of Hugh McClean, a Yale student both before and after the Second World War. When the war ended, McClean and thousands of his peers returned from duty in Europe and the Pacific to complete their education at colleges across the United States. They saw the world differently than they had before; they certainly viewed the world differently than their parents and grandparents. They had heard leaders of the world’s warring nations invoke destiny to validate their warfare. Some of these teenagers had …

From The "Bland Leading The Bland" To The Mississippi Freedom Vote: William Sloane Coffin Jr. And The Civil Rights Movement At Yale University, 1958 - 1963, Wallis Finger

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

When Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. arrived at Yale University in 1958, he found a campus he characterized as "the bland leading the bland." By the time sixty-seven Yale students went to Mississippi in 1963 to register voters during the freedom vote, Coffin had played a crucial role in creating a politically aware and directly involved student population. Coffin had infused the Yale campus with "energy." He did this gradually by preaching, introducing outside motivators and leading by example. Through his weekly Sunday sermons in Yale's Battell Chapel, the civil rights leaders he brought to campus and his participation in …

Buildings And Grounds Of Yale University, Richard C. Carroll Ed.

Publications on Yale History

This third edition has been expanded to include the grounds as well as the buildings of Yale University. The date of publication follows closely the retirement of President Brewster and therefore includes the new buildings and the renovations of older structures completed during his term of office. The book also lists all Yale buildings now standing and used for university purposes and, where information is available, it records buildings no longer standing. Thus its purpose is mainly historical, to catalogue such basic facts as the date and style of construction, location, name of the architect, and the uses which the …

The Buildings Of Yale University (Bulletin Of Yale University, Series 61, Number 3), Lottie G. Bishop Ed.

Publications on Yale History

This second edition of The Buildings of Yale University is published in order to include the last of the buildings commissioned during President Griswold's administration.

... Today [1965] Yale has about 150 buildings devoted to educational use. They represent over twenty styles of architecture and, at the time of construction, cost a total of more than $130,000,000, given directly or indirectly by thousands of friends. Yale is happy to record its gratitude to all those who have in this way made the University such a special part of their lives. Many of the buildings are also memorial in nature and …