History Commons^™

Pillars Of Youth Drug Abuse Prevention: Parents, Police, And Project Dare (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), Jonathon Stuever

Theses and Dissertations

In 1983 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officials teamed with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) health curriculum specialist, Dr. Ruth Rich, to redesign an anti-tobacco curriculum, Project Self-Management and Resistance Training (SMART), into Project Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). In the first four years of Project DARE, local, state, and, federal government branches endorsed the program as an efficient tool in the local and national fight against youth drug abuse. Early program evaluations, conducted by the Evaluation and Training Institute (ETI), demonstrated DARE’s ability to change attitudes of students, school faculty, and parents concerning social tolerance of underage drug …

Political Commitment Of Hmong Americans: A Study Of A Grassroots Feminist Movement Against Abusive International Marriages 2007-2022., Ni Made Frischa Aswarini

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Hmong American community-led movement against abusive international marriages (AIM) in Wisconsin as an instance of activism or resistance related to marriage-migration phenomena in the 21st century. Through an analysis of oral histories of Hmong American community activists, Hmong American community media, archival materials, born-digital sources, and other contemporary sources, this study incorporates experiences underexplored in U.S. historical scholarship. The findings unearth that the feminist movement against AIM emerged not solely as an active response to a trend of gender-based violence cases in the early 2000s but also as a resistance to the persisting stigmatization from the …

Let Go And Let God: An Ethnographic Study Of Overeaters Anonymous, Subjectivity, And Extreme Eating Distress, Abby Forster

Theses and Dissertations

Academic discussions regarding eating disorders have been dominated by two frameworks: biomedical and feminist. While the former explains eating disorders as a product of individual pathology, the latter asserts the cause is culture. An aspect of culture that is often suggested is neoliberalism. This ethnographic study utilizes the term “eating distress” to acknowledge the localized idioms that occur outside of the bounds of biomedical settings. The research documents the experiences of many members of Overeaters Anonymous dealing with eating distress within a social context in which their body types are stigmatized. The dissertation examines the relationship between subjectivity, Overeaters Anonymous, …

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, …

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 …

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, …

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 …

They Were Not Sitting Ducks: Rethinking Black Activism In Housing And Urban Renewal In Late Nineties Milwaukee, Bernard Apeku

History and Urban Studies 971: Seminar on the History of American Urban Problems

No abstract provided.

The Little Man With The Big Mouth Stands Up For Wisconsin: George Wallace And The Political And Constitutional Struggles Between Federalism And Equal Protection In Wisconsin Elections From 1964 To 1976, Ben Hubing

Theses and Dissertations

Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for the presidency four times between 1964 and 1976, bringing his candidacy north of the Mason-Dixon Line to Wisconsin. Wallace’s campaign in the Badger State fostered a debate among residents regarding constitutional principles and values. Wallace weaponized federalism and states’ rights, arguing that the federal government should stay out of school segregation, promote law and order, restrict forced busing, and reduce burdensome taxation. White working-class Wisconsinites armed themselves with Wallace’s rhetoric, pushing back on social and political changes that threatened the status quo. Civil rights activists and the black community in Wisconsin armed themselves with …

Dimly Remembered, Largely Forgotten: The Mitchell Hall Tablet As A Mirror To American Great War Memory, Stephen Mark Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

War thrusts men and women, communities and nations into unfamiliar and otherwiseunlikely situations and associations. And it is war in general, and twentieth-century warfare in particular, that has engendered widespread commemoration and remembrance of its combatants and victims. This thesis recounts the story of ten men who share at least three things in common: they all attended the Milwaukee Normal School sometime during the early years of the twentieth century; they all perished in the service of the United States Armed Forces during the First World War; and they are all commemorated on a simple and somewhat forlorn bronze tablet …

People From Everywhere: Metis Identity, Kinship And Mobility 1600s-1800s, Mark Edward Langenfeld

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

PEOPLE FROM EVERYWHERE: METIS IDENTITY, KINSHIP AND MOBILITY, 1600s-1800s

by

Mark Langenfeld

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2021Under the Supervision of Professor Margaret Noodin

People from Everywhere: Metis Identity, Kinship and Mobility, 1600s-1800s, is a discussion of how the Metis people of the American southern Great Lakes region in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin made individual and familial choices about ethnic identification from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries that enabled them to survive colonization in their homeland. I argue that Metis people maintained, through kinship networks, a private identity as a collective, distinct group of …

Performance, Representation, Reception, And The Lost Cause: Re-Framing The History Of Confederate Monuments Through Embodied Assemblies, Joshua Adam Rutherford

Theses and Dissertations

Discussion of Confederate monuments has been invigorated in academic, social, and political debates during the twenty-first century. As these monuments became entangled with police brutality following the George Floyd protests, scholars have tried to understand how this history connects with the systemic injustices faced by black Americans. Because financial inequities limited the ability of black Americans to erect monuments and photograph demonstrations during Reconstruction the archive is riddled with gaps in representation, which I close by following Diana Taylor’s suggestion that we turn to the “repertoire” of performance. My thesis turns away the monuments themselves by investigating the forms of …

"Accountable To No One": Confronting Police Power In Black Milwaukee, William I. Tchakirides

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uncovers the roots of discriminatory police power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traces Black-led efforts to make the city’s police bureaucracy more accountable to all citizens. It analyzes the politics of police reform in the century spanning the passage of two state laws that reconfigured Milwaukee’s law enforcement arrangements. The first (1885) removed City Hall’s managerial control over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Corporate elites and social reformers fearful of rising working-class power and moral degeneration in the immigrant-industrial city lobbied for the statute’s enactment. The second (1984) reversed course, re-empowering non-police officials after decades of Black-led campaigns for …

Houses Divided: New Perspectives On Antiwar Dissent In The American Civil War, Mark Ciccone

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACTHOUSES DIVIDED: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON ANTIWAR DISSENT IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

by

Mark Ciccone

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020Under the Supervision of Professor Lex Renda

Since the conclusion of the American Civil War, antiwar dissent in the Union and the Confederacy has predominantly been viewed through the lens of political treason alone, with limited exploration of other factors—judicial, social, economic, personal—which motivated its expression. Both explicitly and implicitly, the individuals and movements that advocated peaceful negotiations to end the conflict, or protested what they viewed as illegitimate or unjust war policies enacted by Washington, D.C. or Richmond, or demonstrated …

“I’M A Nurse, Not A Woman”: The Historical Significance Of The Uwm Nurse Romance Novel Collection, Katie Elisabeth Stollenwerk

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to promote future collection and preservation of popular culture resources at academic libraries by demonstrating the research potential and instructional value of a particular collection—the Nurse Romance Novel collection, held by the UWM Special Collections department. The study examines the history of American nursing and the history of romance fiction, raising questions about the role mass media and popular culture played in the professionalization of nursing and in the construction of dominant ideologies about gender roles in twentieth century America. This study treats romance novels as both consumer goods and as narratives, analyzing not only their literary …

Brew City Black Ball: Milwaukee As Microcosm Of The Early-Twentieth Century Black Baseball Experience, Ken Jon-Edward Bartelt

Theses and Dissertations

While historians have learned a great deal about the Black professional baseball played during organized baseball’s Jim Crow era, there are many teams whose stories are yet to be told. Two of these teams, the McCoy-Nolan Giants and Milwaukee Bears, played their home games in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 1920s. By exploring the untold histories of the McCoy-Nolan Giants and Milwaukee Bears, much can be learned about overarching themes in early-twentieth century Black professional baseball. By analyzing newspaper coverage of the McCoy-Nolan Giants, an independent barnstorming team without Negro League affiliation, important truths about the experience of Black baseball on …

Polish Organizations And Chicago's Polonia, 1880-1930, Anna Kathleen Leska

Theses and Dissertations

Despite a large, growing amount of literature on the Polish community in Chicago, there remains a lack of information about organizations in the Polish communities. Organizations in the Polish community are generally spoken about in one of two ways. Either one organization is spoken about in great depth or organizations are barely touched upon. This work seeks to bridge both of those types of work by focusing both on small organizations and large organizations and connecting them through the Poles who were members.

The Oral History of Chicago’s Polonia project, 1880-1930, is used in this work to limit the number …

Historical Dissidence: The Temporalities And Radical Possibilities Of American Comics, Jeremy M. Carnes

Theses and Dissertations

Formal criticism of comics has often focused on the importance of sequence and the filling of gutters with causative logics. Practitioner-theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have focused on “sequentiality” and “closure” to conceive of how readers connect the disparate panels of a given comic. More contemporary scholars of the form have followed Eisner and McCloud, foregrounding the causative logics that create narrative progression in the comics form. Yet, these approaches implicitly rely on dominant, western logics of temporality in the construction of narrative in comics.

This project considers how comics form actually relies on various temporalities and thus …

The Business Of The Girl: Celebrity And The Professionalization Of Girlhood In Early Twenty-First Century Media Culture, Jessica Elizabeth Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

The achieving “can-do” girl, who thrives in her personal, academic, and aspirational endeavors, emerged in response to self-help crisis literature of the 1990s urging mothers to manage their daughters’ low self-esteem. However, even as media industries have adopted the successful girl subject in popular film, television, and digital marketing campaigns, public conversations of tween and teenage girls still identify rising levels of anxiety and self-doubt that diminish girls’ confidence well into adulthood. Responding to what critics call the “confidence gap,” girl culture of the twenty-first century has organized itself around the affordances of social media and digital celebrity in the …

Built Of Pine And People: Adaptability And Stability In The Wisconsin Lumbering Community Of Oconto, 1850-1950, Amy Fels

Theses and Dissertations

Near the midpoint of the nineteenth century, logging enterprises began to emerge across the northern half of Wisconsin at an increasing rate. Though the lumber boom dwindled throughout the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century, hundreds of new communities had been established throughout the northwoods region as a result of the industry’s growth. Traditionally, historians have examined Wisconsin’s logging history from a regional or industry perspective, favoring broader conclusions over detailed microhistories. In order to shift this perspective and enrich the existing body of scholarship by offering a significantly more focused narrative, this thesis examines the growth and development …

Heirloom And Hybrid Corn In The American Corn Belt: An Ethnography Of Seed Saving Practices, Rachelle Halaska

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnographic study examines the practices and context of contemporary heirloom corn seed saving practices and projects in the American Corn Belt. It examines heirloom corn conservation and hand pollination practices at Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa in 2015. From there the study extends to interviews with heirloom farmers, breeders and gardeners in Wisconsin and Illinois. The findings indicate that the lines between the mainstream and the margins of corn production are highly blurred, and that there is a considerable amount of cross-pollination of ideas and practices between alternative corn farming and dominant industrial hybrid production in the American …

Looking For Group: Sociality, Embodiment, And Institutions In World Of Warcraft, Christopher J. Cooley

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography examines the varying degrees of conflict between multiple stakeholders involved in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). The game’s designers, like many software developers in the contemporary world, tend to be guided by an ideology influenced by classical liberalism, but also inspired by a utopian view of technology in general. That ideological position has directly affected many aspects of the game, from the largely unregulated in-game economy, to the strong emphasis on individual mastery of the game’s systems to progress through the complete content of the game world. World of Warcraft advertises itself not …

An Entangled History: Native American And Euro-American National And Cultural Identities (1768-1833), Paul Edward Jentz

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines political and cultural interactions between Native Americans and Euro-Americans during the transition from imperial colonialism to settler colonialism. It employs the concept of entanglement to convey the inextricable linkages that arose between the two groups over time, linkages also marked by the dissimilar effects of contact between them. As such, this study adopts a world history lens, arguing that no culture has historically existed in isolation, so no culture can be effectively studied in isolation. Five case studies explore accelerated tensions between Indians and Whites that resulted through the shifts in negotiations of power between them as …

Everyday Perseverance & Meaningful Toil: Mapping The (In)Distinguishable Process Of Recovery Post-Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Louisiana, Monique Hassman

Theses and Dissertations

For nearly a century, anthropological scholarship on disaster has contributed to advancing emergency preparation and management, however examination focusing on survivors’ return and responses in the aftermath of catastrophe, specifically the ways in which residents work to recover—if at all—remains far from comprehensive, especially in urban, post-industrial settings.

Following calamity, what remains? What is disturbed? What becomes reconstructed? Who repairs the tattered social fabric or restores the built environment? And how do these processes transpire? These questions summarize the research interests of this dissertation, which examines the place-making practices not of experts or administrators, but, rather, those enacted by (extra) …

The Saintly Indian: American Catholic Identity In The Indian Sentinel, 1902-1922, Abigail Clare Joranger

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines how Catholics writing about Native Americans in the early twentieth century used the popular and political discourse surrounding Native Americans to Americanize the image of American Catholics. It also examines the ambiguity that many Catholic authors displayed towards becoming full participants in American culture, and how that ambiguity was expressed through these writings even while the authors expressed their wish to be accepted as American citizens. The pieces analyzed in this study consist of articles from The Indian Sentinel, a magazine published by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions for the purpose of raising funds for Catholic …

The Elaine Riot Of 1919: Race, Class, And Labor In The Arkansas Delta, Steven Anthony

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the racially motivated mob dominated violence that took place during the autumn of 1919 in rural Phillips County, Arkansas nearby Elaine. The efforts of white planters to supplant the loss of enslaved labor due to the abolition of American slavery played a crucial role in re-making the southern agrarian economy in the early twentieth century. My research explores how the conspicuous features of sharecropping, tenant farming, peonage, or other variations of debt servitude became a means for the re-enslavement of African Americans in the Arkansas Delta. However, as black sharecroppers faced economic, social, and political struggles rooted …

The Waiting Room: Re-Making Adulthood Among America’S Underemployed, Susan Hill

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation takes as its starting point the problem of underemployment among young adults in the post-recession United States. Recent studies have shown that the number of college-educated Americans employed in positions not requiring a degree has reached historic highs. Such analyses are limited, however, in that they do not capture the lived effects of such trends—how underemployment insinuates itself into a person's worldview and identity. This ethnographic study delves into the intimate correlates of macroeconomic change by investigating the impact of underemployment on notions of adulthood among recent college graduates working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul restaurant industry. For the …

The Jeremiad In American Science Fiction Literature, 1890-1970, Matthew Schneider

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship on the form of sermon known as the American jeremiad—a prophetic warning of national decline and the terms of promised renewal for a select remnant—draws heavily on the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. A wealth of scholarship has critiqued Bercovitch’s formulation of the jeremiad, which he argues is a rhetorical form that holds sway in American culture by forcing political discourse to hold onto an “America” as its frame of reference. But most interlocutors still work with the jeremiad primarily in American studies or in terms of national discourse. Rooted in the legacy of Puritan rhetoric, the …

The Elaine Riot Of 1919: Race, Class, And Labor In The Arkansas Delta, Steven Anthony

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the racially motivated mob dominated violence that took place during the autumn of 1919 in rural Phillips County, Arkansas nearby Elaine. The efforts of white planters to supplant the loss of enslaved labor due to the abolition of American slavery played a crucial role in re-making the southern agrarian economy in the early twentieth century. My research explores how the conspicuous features of sharecropping, tenant farming, peonage, or other variations of debt servitude became a means for the re-enslavement of African Americans in the Arkansas Delta. However, as black sharecroppers faced economic, social, and political struggles rooted …