History Commons^™

Model Minority Or Myth? Reexamining The Politics Of S.I. Hayakawa, Vivian Yan-Gonzalez

Asian American Studies Faculty Articles and Research

This article problematizes the model minority myth as an analytic in discussions of Asian American conservatism by reassessing the personal and political development of S.I. Hayakawa, Acting President of San Francisco State College during the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1968–1969. Contemporary activists and Asian American studies scholars influenced by the strike’s legacy have seen Hayakawa as a staunch conservative and an advocate of the model minority myth. However, Hayakawa was primarily motivated by his lifelong identification with the liberal tradition and his work as an advocate for racial equality. His realignment as a neoconservative Republican reflected the shifting …

Transimperial Networks And East Asia: Timeline, Menglu Gao, Sophia Hsu, Waiyee Loh, Hyungji Park, Jessica R. Valdez, Adrian S. Wisnicki, Rae X. Yan

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

To help instructors and students who may be unfamiliar with the history of East Asia and its transimperial exchanges with the Anglophone world, the creators of the “Transimperial Networks and East Asia” lesson plan cluster built this timeline, which includes some major historical events from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. This timeline comes out of our many discussions about the methodological issues that arise when the field of Victorian Studies seeks to expand its traditional geographical scope. As we quickly realized in the process of creating our cluster, the usual boundaries of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution …

The Radicalism Of Rebecca Felton: Reforming Southern Masculinty And Creating And Destroying History: Butte, Montana’S Model City Program, 1968-1975, John C. Stefanek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This professional paper is made up of two individual papers required for the M.A. degree in history. In my first paper, I discuss the radical suffragist Rebecca Felton. In 1897, Felton spoke to the Georgia Agricultural Society. Felton, a native Georgian who would later become the first female U.S. senator, gained prominence in the U.S. South as a politician, suffragist, and white supremacist. Her speech, “Woman on the Farm,” discussed the economic struggles of southern farmers. Felton’s speech also addressed a variety of controversial issues including agricultural economics on the farm, prison reform, and temperance. From the 1870s until her …

Charles A. Dana, The Civil War Era, And American Republicanism, Eric X. Rivas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Charles A. Dana bought the New York Sun in 1868, he used it to support the presidential candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party ticket to unify the post-Civil War nation. After a victory for the Civil War general and Republican Party, though, the first fifteen months of the new administration turned the editor against the president and his party. Dana’s Sun criticized Grant and his allies as corrupt, of using the military for political ends, and of growing the size and power of government beyond traditional American practice. Against the backdrop of Reconstruction, Dana also decried …

A Divided Generation: How Anti-Vietnam War Student Activists Overcame Internal And External Divisions To End The War In Vietnam, Jeffrey L. Lauck

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Far too often, student protest movements and organizations of the 1960s and 1970s are treated as monolithic in their ideologies, goals, and membership. This paper dives into the many divides within groups like Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Freedom during their heyday in the Vietnam War Era. Based on original primary source research on the “Radical Pamphlets Collection” in Musselman Library Special Collections, Gettysburg College, this study shows how these various student activist groups both overcame these differences and were torn apart by them. The paper concludes with a discussion about what made the Vietnam War …

Party Development And Political Conflict In Maine 1820-1860 From Statehood To The Civil War, Lee D. Webb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a history of politics in Maine during the state’s formative period, the years from statehood until 1860. The history focuses on party conflict and on the development of organized political parties, particularly the Democratic and Republican parties. It concentrates on the structures and processes that politicians built, including party newspapers, county conventions, state conventions, legislative caucuses, and ultimately state committees and the office of state committee chair – all to compete effectively for power. During this 40-year period, parties also develop powerful new messages, campaign strategies, and developed leaders with the skills to accomplish these tasks.

I …

Summoning The State: Northern Farmers And The Transformation Of American Politics In The Mid-Nineteenth Century, Ariel Ron

History Faculty Publications

A vast agricultural reform movement emerged in the northeastern countryside during the antebellum era. The massive popularity of state and county agricultural fairs, starting in the late 1840s, formed the most visible manifestation of this phenomenon, while the earlier rise of an independent agricultural press formed its essential precondition. Surprisingly, historians have paid relatively little attention either to the social determinants or to the political consequences of the agricultural reform movement. Socially, the movement was rooted in a set of economic conditions and the thick print and associational networks characteristic of what I call the “Greater Northeast.” This article thus …

Scientific Agriculture And The Agricultural State: Farmers, Capitalism, And Government In The Late Nineteenth Century, Ariel Ron

History Faculty Publications

The history of American capitalism in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century usually focuses on labor and industry to the relative neglect of important changes in agriculture. Landmark federal policies from the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) to the Smith-Lever Act (1914) indicate that these changes involved a tightening and self-reinforcing relationship between commercial farming and national governing power. To understand this trajectory, which contrasts markedly with the experience of business and labor, we have to consider a long-developing movement for “scientific agriculture” that allowed well-organized farmers to exert decisive influence on federal policy from about the …

Machines In The Valley: Community, Urban Change, And Environmental Politics In Silicon Valley, 1945-1990, Jason A. Heppler

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Using Silicon Valley as a case study, this dissertation examines how activists influenced by the environmental movement reconfigured urban culture in the American West. *Machines in the Valley* argues that the spatial influences of the region's urban development gave rise to modern environmentalism that arose to criticize growth, but along the way failed to ultimately shape growth policies. While high technology sought to introduce a new urban form predicated on "clean and green" industries and an environmental urbanism, the premise of "clean" industry proved elusive.

High technology industrialization emerged as a key component of economic and urban development in postwar …

Chinese, Russian, And U.S. Space Warfare And Defense Developments, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Creative Materials

Provides information on the historical development and evolution of Chinese, Russian, and U.S. military space programs from 1985-2015. Places particular emphasis on the multiple U.S. Government agencies involved in military space programs.

Professed Values, Constructive Interpretation, And Political History: Comments On Sotirios Barber, The Fallacies Of States' Rights, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Our barely functioning Congress seems to embody the issues that this conference on constitutional dysfunction is meant to address. At this moment, however, congressional disarray may result less from institutional design than from our lasting heritage of white supremacy. Republican control of the House owes much to the party's Southern Strategy, which has exploited widespread dissatisfaction with the Democrats' official renunciation of racial stratification. That challenge to the American Way is exacerbated by the idea, outrageous to some, of a black President. That context has some bearing on this Symposium's topic of federalism. For, as Professor Larry Yackle reminds us, …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Education And Legislation: Affluent Women's Political Engagement In The Consumers' Leagues Of The Progressive Era, Scott R. St. Louis

Grand Valley Journal of History

This paper examines the extent to which the National Consumers’ League and similar localized leagues provided middle- and upper-class women with new opportunities for involvement in American politics during the early Progressive Era, or roughly the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. These organizations undertook various efforts – including “list” and “label” campaigns – to educate the consuming public about the poor working conditions suffered by retail employees and especially factory workers in the garment industry, with a focus on employed women and child laborers. Later on, the leagues provided their female members …

Las Declaraciones De Independencia: Los Textos Fundamentales De Las Independencias Americanas, Jordana Dym, Erika Pani, Alfredo Ávila

Jordana Dym

No abstract provided.

[Review Of The Book Icons Of Democracy: American Leaders As Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters And Democrats], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Icons of Democracy is a welcome change from the rather arid, often quantified analyses of political leadership so prevalent in academic writing. Well read in both primary and secondary sources, Miroff has deeply grounded his ideas in the rich historical context. In addition, he carefully chose his subjects and drew from their experiences central themes which, in divergent fashion, they also held in common. The resulting collective biography engages and challenges the reader. While partial to leaders in the dissenting tradition (they are "our true subversives and at times our truest democrats"), Miroff consistently points to the complexity of …

The Price Of Conflict: War, Taxes, And The Politics Of Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Since 2003 American political leaders and lawmakers have been committed to the simultaneous pursuit of tax cuts and military excursions abroad. Just a few decades ago, when military hawks were also deficit hawks, such a position would have seemed incongruous. This essay reviews, War and Taxes, a provocative and fascinating new book that seeks to explain the apparent dissonance of recent American wartime tax policy. In contrast to conventional wisdom which presumes that wartime patriotism has always and everywhere trumped self-interest, War and Taxes shows that the history of U.S. wartime taxation is not quite such a heroic tale. By …