History Commons^™

To Build A Hero: Douglas Macarthur And The War That Wasn’T, Ian Garrett Morris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Douglas MacArthur, General of the Army and Commander in Chief of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area during the Second World War, and those acting under his purview, did knowingly and deliberately engage in a campaign of misinformation – during and after the war – with the intention of enhancing his reputation. The goal of this campaign was twofold: He would secure enough popular support to make him politically unassailable at the time and he would protect his legacy for posterity. Unlike previous surveys, which fail to hold MacArthur accountable for the deep and pervasive …

"We May Not Be Goliath But We Have David’S Sling": Media And The Perception Of The New Zealand Home Guard, 1940-1942, Noah Szajowitz

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on New Zealanders’ perception of the Home Guard through a specific lens of culture demonstrated through wartime printed newspapers across New Zealand. These newspapers allowed for a public forum for New Zealander’s thoughts on the Home Guard, enabling a national debate on the purpose of the Home Guard over the course of the Second World War. Critically, these print newspapers and public opinion drastically influenced the direction of the Home Guard, illuminated the problems the Home Guard faced, and often received a response from the New Zealand Government. The Home Guard’s initial difficulty with recruitment, the impressment …

Anti-Fascism, Anti-Communism, And Memorial Cultures: A Global Study Of International Brigade Veterans, Jacob Todd Bernhardt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The International Brigades were volunteer military units that fought for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1938. Some 40,000-45,000 men fought in the International Brigades as an act of anti-Fascism, international solidarity, and national preservation. Although many historians have examined the volunteer soldiers’ motivations, wartime experiences, and reintegration into their home societies on a national basis, there has not yet been a global study of veteran reintegration and memorial culture. This global comparative study demonstrates that a state’s acceptance or rejection of their Brigade veterans was dictated by a global anti-Fascist and anti-Communist divide. In …

Freeport, The Environment, And The Amungme: An Environmental History Of The Freeport Mcmorran Copper And Gold Mine In Papua, Indonesia, Kole A. Dawson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Amungme and Kamoro managed their environments for thousands of years in what is now Papua, Indonesia. In the late 1960s, seeking foreign capital to boost the nation’s economy, the president of Indonesia signed a contract with Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold, which by 1988 began mining one of the world’s largest gold mines with almost no environmental regulations in place. Freeport’s close relationship to the Suharto regime resulted in the company’s ability to evade consequences for environmental and social damage. In the 1990s, NGOs began publicly criticizing the company’s substandard environmental and social record, pressuring the company through negative …

The Marsi: The Construction Of An Identity, Inaki Sagarna Urzelai

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Up until now Marsian cultural identity has been approached from an old-fashioned theoretical angle of autoromanizazzione (“self-Romanization” or “emulation”). This perspective was one response to the unsatisfactory explanation of the previous paradigm (“Romanization”) to assess the incorporation faced by pre-Roman people. Nonetheless, current scholars have found the “self-Romanization” approach untenable. This view changes the scope of the agency from Roman to Native in the assimilation process of the Italians in the Roman culture, turning the whole influence into the Native elites, but all of it has an irremediable ending of exactly the same cultural convergence. Besides, the concept is still …

The Vietnam Syndrome And Its Effects On The U.S. Public And Foreign And Domestic Policy Decisions During The Post-Vietnam Era Between 1975-1991, Kyle Giovannini

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

First, the Vietnam Syndrome had a significant cultural impact on the American public which altered the U.S. public’s collective cultural view of war from an interventionist to an anti-interventionist stance. Naturally, this shift in public perception influenced U.S. presidents’ foreign and domestic policy decisions from President Gerald Ford to President George H.W. Bush. Second, the Vietnam Syndrome’s anti-interventionist effect challenged the established security of containment policy through military intervention, forcing presidents and their administrations to implement different rhetorical approaches and messages to unshackle, in their view, America from the anti-interventionist effects of the Vietnam Syndrome on foreign policy decisions. Third, …

Vauban In The Wilderness: The Military Revolution And The Seven Years' War In North America, Joseph M. Green

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

For the past thirty years there has been an ongoing debate regarding the nature of the Early Modern European Military Revolution. Much of this debate centers around whether the military and technological changes which are at the heart of the military revolution created the conditions for the bureaucratic systems of the modern nation state, or if those bureaucratic systems made possible the creation of larger, state sponsored armies and navies, as well as when these changes took place. Instead of focusing on what came first, the chicken or the egg, this thesis explores one aspect of the Military Revolution, focusing …

Pioneers At The Edge Of Their Universe: Japanese Railroad Workers In Idaho And The Intermountain West, Julie Ann Vance

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Although many scholars are aware of the history of Japanese Americans and their presence in the West Coast states, including their internment during World War II, few are familiar with the experiences of Japanese immigrants in Idaho and the surrounding Intermountain States. Little is written of the first Japanese who came to Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming at the end of the nineteenth century, or of the role of railroads in their moving inland. Because of this, scholars assume a similar experience of the Japanese in the Intermountain West with those who stayed on the West Coast. This thesis argues …

Queen Eleanor Of Aquitaine: Political Motherhood In The Middle Ages, Sherry Lynn Mason

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Historians have frequently written on the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) although few have studied her role as an affectionate, devoted, dutiful mother. This work is an attempt to address this situation through the study of available primary sources on Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Even though she was Queen of France (1137-1152) and England (1137-1189) she was considered less important than any man of her class because of the societal norms of the time. In reality she played an important part in the Angevin Empire for the power and influence she wielded in her own right. She used this …

The Art Of Healing: Mary Gove Nichols's Crusade For Women's Wellness, Marnie Nichole

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the life of 19^th-century American reformer Mary Gove Nichols to explore antebellum feminism through the lens of health and marriage reform. Using primary sources including the subjects own personal publications, this thesis traces one theme throughout Nichols’s life: her passionate drive to educate women on their own health, and to make such knowledge accessible, so that they could acquire it for themselves. This particular theme manifested in two forms: wellness acquired via homeopathic medicine, specifically the water cure; and wellness acquired from a safe and loving marriage. Her life’s work, an early form of feminism, …

American Hatred: Wild West Myths, Color-Coded Rhetoric, And The Shaping Of The Aryan Nations, Alisha Graefe

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the way the Aryan Nations from Northern Idaho used the Wild West mythology of independent cowboys and color-coded rhetoric popularized by Conservative politicians to form a unique white separatist group that has influenced current racist groups.

Military Working Dogs In The United States Armed Forces From World War I To Vietnam, Tristan J. Kelly

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

At the beginning of World War I, the only military working dogs the United States owned were sled dogs. In comparison, European nations in World War I used canines as sentries, messengers, ambulance, and draft dogs. In 1942, members of the American public, created Dogs for Defense Inc. to help recruit dogs for military use. By the end of the Vietnam War, dogs no longer were donated by the American public for use, rather the American military owned the dogs they deployed.

This thesis examines the use of dogs by the American military from World War I to the Vietnam …

Seventeenth-Century Basque Witchtrials: The Interaction Of Socio-Religious Norms Within The Contact Zone Of The Accused And The Inquisitor, Michelle Gizinski Earwicker

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

During the early seventeenth century, the Catholic Church sought to eradicate any belief systems that did not align with Catholic theology. In the Basque regions of Spain and France, these efforts produced a series of witch hunts between 1608 – 1614, in which the Church labeled as diabolical and nefarious the socio-religious belief systems the Basque people tried to incorporate into their practice of Catholicism. This thesis uses the confessions of accused Basque witches gathered during investigations and trials to explore Basques’ mention of pre-Christian symbols and beliefs, which I argue were often misunderstood by the Inquisitors as evidence of …

Becoming A Knight: The Social Transformation Of Common Mounted Soldiers Into Noble Warriors, Jared Dane Johns

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Between the years of 1066 and 1119 CE, knights and their families in Western Europe rose from the highest stratification of the common folk to be included as the lowest incarnation of the nobility. This occurred primarily due to an emerging collective warrior identity among the nobility, the Catholic Church’s attempts to contain and sanction violence, and the implementation of the Three Estates political philosophy. This timeline challenges the dominant historical narrative on when knighthood transformed from a military rank into a social rank of nobility, which is usually placed sometime around the end of the 13^th Century.

To …

The Transcendentalist’S Mind And Body: The Role Of Illness In Margaret Fuller’S Writing, Elizabeth Anne Slabaugh

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Margaret Fuller’s work is typically known for its influence on the American feminist movement between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century fostered a new way of looking at men and women as dual souls encompassing both male and female traits. While scholars recognize and draw attention to Margaret Fuller’s mental and physical illness, few scholars directly analyze her works through the lens of her illness. My thesis analyzes her writing by considering her illness (both physical and mental) in order to understand how it affected her writing. Scholars such as Jeffrey Steele, Cynthia Davis, …

Unpolished Emeralds In The Gem State: Hard-Rock Mining, Labor Unions, And Irish Nationalism In The Mountain West And Idaho, 1850-1900, Victor D. Higgins

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Irish immigration to the United States, extant since the 1600s, exponentially increased during the Irish Great Famine of 1845-52. For many Catholic Irish, the legacy of colonization and the Famine intensified an existing narrative of forced exile and dispossession. It also endowed them with a predisposition to identify similarities between colonial exploitation and capitalism. These factors fed a growing Irish nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, protean in the 1700s, which reified in the 1800s, around Anglophobia. In the Mountain West where mining spearheaded exploration and settlement, the Irish made up the largest ethnic group in hard-rock mines in …

The Other Side Of The Atomic Air Force: Artifacts Of The Air Force's People Programs, Yancy D. Mailes

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

From its inception recruitment and retention concerned Air Force leaders, more specifically Strategic Air Command (SAC) and Air Defense Command (ADC) leadership in the early years, and it continued as a recurring theme throughout the Air Force's very short lineage. Early Air Force leaders recognized a need for attracting the nation's most desirable and competent, as well as the need to retain those individuals for an extended amount of time. Recruiting methods that only targeted the Airmen quickly changed as Air Force leaders realized that the Air Force recruited Airmen, but retained families. Early airpower leaders, including SAC's longest serving …

The World Of Don Santo, Veiko Valencia

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The following paper is an investigation on the legacy of colonization, exploring the question of how to produce an object without the colonizers’ presence. By creating fictional characters, myths, and a fake computer software I am proposing a different way to respond to this question. Using the notion of the copy as the core to this alternative response, I am exploring the idea that the copy of the copy at some point can become its own original.

Higher Education: The Impact On Bosnian Women Who Came As Refugees To The United States, Belma Sadikovic

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the impact college education has on Bosnian refugee women who resettled to the United States. The research findings help us better understand the effect higher education has on female students who came to the United States as refugees, their self-sufficiency and their overall integration into their new society. Using Kunz’s refugee theory and Bourdieu’s theory on social and cultural capital as a theoretical framework, the study explores socio-cultural factors that enable and constrain the ability of Bosnian women to navigate the facets of higher education, and how those factors affect their self-sufficiency and overall integration. The participants …

Selling Narratives Of A Mexico In Crisis: Environmental Reporting In Excélsior And Uno Más Uno, 1983-84, Adam Behrman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the diverse environmental narratives found in more than 200 stories published by two Mexican national newspapers, Excélsior and Uno Más Uno, in 1983 and 1984, a period of economic and environmental crisis. It argues that the popularity of environmental issues permitted column space for journalists, environmentalists, researchers, rural peasants, the urban poor, and government administrators to present their many different environmental narratives for the reading public’s consideration. Focusing on how journalists and their sources described air pollution, forests, and water crises in the pages of Excélsior and Uno Más Uno, this thesis brings out many …

The Lex Sempronia Agraria: A Soldier’S Stipendum, Raymond Richard Hill

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines mid-second century BCE Roman society to determine the forces at work that resulted in the passing of a radical piece of legislation known as the lex Sempronia agraria. The advent of this legislation, named for the tribune of the plebs who promulgated it, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 BCE, has been heralded as a signal event, a turning point in the Roman Republic that led to revolution and the eventual overthrow of the Republic by Julius Caesar.

The historiography up through the twentieth century portrayed this event as a rising of the poor and down-trodden masses against …

The Elberfeld System: Poor Relief And The Fluidity Of German Identity In Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany, James Willis

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Elberfeld System is synonymous with the development of the welfare state in the German Empire. Historians underscore the Elberfeld System’s “Germanness” because of its adoption by numerous nineteenth-century Prussian industrial cities. Their interpretation is useful for understanding the development of the welfare state in the German Empire, but fails to appreciate the Elberfeld System within its own context. This thesis explores the social and economic reasons that the Elberfeld System succeeded when and where it did. Elberfeld was one of the earliest industrialized centers in continental Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Industrialization created class stratification …

“Right From Hades”: Water And Politics In Boise, Idaho, Molly Lorraine May

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The western United States has, arguably, been shaped by water—both through its presence and its absence. This thesis examines the history of the artesian and geothermal water resources of Boise, Idaho. The development of these resources has taken a trajectory that is defined by busy periods of expansion punctuated by long stretches of inactivity or stasis. These stages of development closely align with major trends in environmental history. Beyond merely providing additional insight to the history of the region, the commoditization of nature in Boise provides further elucidation of national trends of conservation, environmentalism, and green energy. By examining the …

The Realities Of Foreign Humanitarianism And The U.S. Military: Nineteenth Century Roots, David Mock

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

For nearly two centuries, United States (U.S.) political policy and non-government organizations (NGOs) had delivered foreign humanitarian assistance (FHA) when and where needed. The logistical capability of the professional U.S. military has allowed it to become an enduring delivery method for FHA. Since the 2000s, Congress has actively shaped the Department of Defense’s (DoD) role in humanitarian operations through a wide variety of authorities contained in the Armed Services (Title 10 U.S. Code) and Foreign Relations and Intercourse (Title 22 U.S. Code) statutes, and through annual legislation. Each branch of the military has also developed more defined doctrines in response …

The Evolution Of Prometheanism: Józef Piłsudski’S Strategy And Its Impact On Twenty-First Century World Affairs, Phillip Tadeusz Turner

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

As the Bolsheviks attempted to assert their control over the territory of the Russian Empire during the chaotic years of the Russian Civil War many ethnic groups and nations formerly part of the empire declared their independence. Józef Piłsudski as the leader of the Second Polish Republic implemented a strategy called Prometheanism that sought to secure Poland’s newly won independence by helping neighboring nations, such as Ukraine, break away from Russian control. Promethean ideas survived the destruction of the Polish state in 1939 when Poles with ties to Piłsudski or Prometheanism who fled to the West after the start of …

Lawyers And Sawyers: Venetian Forest Law And The Conquest Of Terraferma (1350-1476), Michael S. Beaudoin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Venice played a direct role in shaping the future of Northeastern Italy. The standing scholarship views Venetian involvement on the mainland as either an abandonment of the city’s maritime tradition or as a buffer zone against rival powers, like Milan. Venice’s western mainland empire, Terraferma, provided Venice with many commercial products that the Eastern Mediterranean did not. One mainland product, timber, was a central focus of Venetian expansion into Terraferma and has thus far been neglected by historians. This thesis argues that the Venetian Republic manipulated mainland legal traditions in order to obtain …

Mass Rape In Foča: The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia Vs. Dragoljub Kunarac, Mark William Iverson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Bosnian war witnessed the organized expulsion of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian and Bosnian Serb military forces from 1992 until 1995. As a tactic aimed at creating mono-ethnic towns from multicultural populations, rape was perpetrated against all women, but particularly Muslim women, as part of a larger plan to terrorize populations into permanently abandoning their homes. The Muslims of Foča, a township close to the border with Montenegro, were one of the first multiethnic populations to be attacked and terrorized by Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces. Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovač, and Zoran Vuković were three Bosnian Serb soldiers, among thousands, …

Joan Of Arc And The Franco-Burgundian Reconciliation, Ryan Andrew Schaff

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the year 1429 France was a torn kingdom with Burgundy, a vassal and valuable ally to France, assisting the English in the war that historians would later dub the Hundred Years War. The war had been fought since the early-mid fourteenth century and France had seen little success in those years save for a brief period towards the end of the fourteenth century. France’s heir, who hid in southern France, was disinherited as a result of the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 which passed the throne to the English. Without Burgundy, France faced a two-front war with Burgundy in …

Fragmented Ties: Colombian Immigrant Experiences, Carolina Valderrama-Echavarria

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Social networks at places of destination play a critical role in the adaptation, adjustment and, at times, the success of immigrant groups abroad. However, despite that importance, Colombian immigrant social networks often fragment. What causes this group to do this? Three reasons for this fragmentation are domestic conflict and violence, exported divisions, and stigma and stereotypes. This paper extends the argument that the three reasons posited by scholars, together, are evidence of Historical Trauma. In order to do so it required the interweaving of three disciplinary fields, history, sociology, and psychology to answer the research question. This paper analyses the …

A Leatherneck In Congress: Melvin Maas's Fight For A Modern Marine Corps Reserve, Timothy A. Guill

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Melvin J. Maas was a Marine Corps officer, combat pilot, and member of Congress. Maas’s unique view of American defense in the Interwar Period led him to promote the modernization the Navy and Marine Corps Reserve, which resulted in the formation of a well trained pool of semi-professional personnel prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. This study first examines the evolution of the formation of the reserve system of the American Armed Forces during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in order to understand the state of the Marine Corps Reserve that Maas joined in 1925. …