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Portland State University

2021

Theses/Dissertations

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Full-Text Articles in History

Methods Of Memorialization: Holocaust Commemoration In The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kylee Bolinger Dec 2021

Methods Of Memorialization: Holocaust Commemoration In The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kylee Bolinger

University Honors Theses

Memorials, both formal and informal, both private and public, have long participated in the pursuit to honor the victims of tragedy, disaster, or genocide. Memorial museums serve both to memorialize victims and to foster an environment conducive to reflection and education about these stories. Such memorial museums have especially made their mark after one of the most notable and devastating genocide events in history: the Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe. This thesis examines how memorialization methods utilized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) make up the American interpretation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the concept typically applied to how Germans deal …


Partizan: Separating The Human From Propaganda With Film, Raymond Hill Dec 2021

Partizan: Separating The Human From Propaganda With Film, Raymond Hill

University Honors Theses

The relative protection Americans have for freedom of expression can allow stories to be told that would not be able to be told elsewhere. However, telling a story that does not belong to the storyteller and represents people of a different culture or nation can problematize the retelling of events and its perspective. The long-standing rivalry between United States and Russia complicates the matter further, making it difficult to find American film relating to Russia without the inclusion of propaganda and uneducated assumptions in film. Despite these issues, authentic storytelling can provide an informative view of events that the average …


Letitia Carson In Court: African American Women, Property, And Wages In The Pacific Northwest, Stephanie Marie Vallance Nov 2021

Letitia Carson In Court: African American Women, Property, And Wages In The Pacific Northwest, Stephanie Marie Vallance

Dissertations and Theses

Letitia Carson arrived in Oregon from Missouri in 1845, accompanied by David Carson and their newborn child, a daughter named Martha. The Carsons settled in the Soap Creek Valley and took advantage of Oregon's Provisional Government's donation land claim program, living on 640 acres in the newly formed Benton County with Martha and a second child, a son named Adam, born a few years after arriving in Oregon. Within ten years, however, David would be dead and Letitia would be dispossessed of all property and belongings. A former slave, Letitia had little social standing in the new territory and no …


Regionalist Romance: "America Eats" And The Culinary Myth-Making Of The Federal Writers' Project, Icarus J. Smith Sep 2021

Regionalist Romance: "America Eats" And The Culinary Myth-Making Of The Federal Writers' Project, Icarus J. Smith

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis expands upon food historian Camille Bégin's assertion that the "America Eats" manuscript of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project was "in tune with the interwar revival of regionalism" in the United States. Using archival material associated with the project and regionalist literature of the period, this study explores the dichotomies inherent in the broader regionalist movement of the Depression Era -- particularly using the project's treatment of the American West. Using foodways as the topic and regionalism as the intellectual framework, the FWP employees sought to document what they believed was the authentic culinary character of the nation …


Serfs, Excluded Or Governed By The State? Serfdom In Russia, An Historiographical Analysis, Jason Ferguson Sep 2021

Serfs, Excluded Or Governed By The State? Serfdom In Russia, An Historiographical Analysis, Jason Ferguson

Dissertations and Theses

Serfdom in Russia has often been viewed in Anglo-U.S. historiography as an exceptional institution in that it emerged in the early-modern age, after serfdom in Western Europe had ended, and that it persisted for well over two centuries, spanning the Muscovite and the Imperial eras. Many historians have thus compared serfdom in Russia unfavorably to labor systems that developed in Western European nations at that time, considered to be "modern" and "free," in contrast to the "unfree" labor obtained through Russian serfdom. This thesis presents the scholars who take this view, and refers to them as "Consensus Historians," as their …


Finding A Community Niche: Rethinking Historic House Museums In Oregon, Liza Julene Schade Sep 2021

Finding A Community Niche: Rethinking Historic House Museums In Oregon, Liza Julene Schade

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis discusses current preservation and public history in the field of historic house museums in Oregon, looking at two case studies that are undergoing processes of reinterpretation. The first chapter provides a brief history of heritage preservation in the United States, describes the spectrum of historic homes, and presents a key framework of four factors that need to be addressed when evaluating sites today. Current methodology refers to reinterpretation of sites to be more diverse, working with collections, doing research and restaging, along with innovating new programs. Public access and engagement pertain to finding a unique niche in the …


Battle Rock: Anatomy Of A Massacre, Adam R. Fitzhugh Jul 2021

Battle Rock: Anatomy Of A Massacre, Adam R. Fitzhugh

Dissertations and Theses

On June 9, 1851, nine men under the direction of a steamboat captain and land speculator named William Tichenor landed on the southern coast of the Oregon Territory at present-day Port Orford with the intention of establishing a permanent settlement. Tichenor's plan was to establish a commercial port that would supply gold mining endeavors in the interior. The landing party's instructions were to survey the townsite while Tichenor traveled to San Francisco to gather more men and supplies. Before departing, he promised the group he would return in exactly two weeks. He also assured them that the local Quatomah Indians, …


Judicial Review As An Instrument Of Natural Rights Theory: An Intellectual History, James M. Masnov Jun 2021

Judicial Review As An Instrument Of Natural Rights Theory: An Intellectual History, James M. Masnov

Dissertations and Theses

The unique and antidemocratic power of judicial review by the United States Supreme Court is not a bug, but a feature. Its role was critical in establishing and affirming a separation of powers horizontally among the federal branches as well as vertically between the federal government and the individual states. More than this, the Court's power of judicial review acts as an instrument of rights theory and is informed by a rich and rarely-discussed intellectual history. Though judicial review as a mode of constitutional law and the legal history surrounding it has been discussed by various legal scholars, political scientists, …


When I Was A Young Girl: Gender And Race In The Life Archives Of Criminal Transportation, Nick Townsend Jun 2021

When I Was A Young Girl: Gender And Race In The Life Archives Of Criminal Transportation, Nick Townsend

University Honors Theses

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the carceral system in England shifted away from corporal punishment and moved towards containing and policing those deemed criminal in different ways. One notable way was transportation, the practice of moving convicts out of the imperial core into a colony. This practice became a way to remove "lesser" populations from England and regulate social behavior while also expanding the British Empire and allowed convicts a new purpose in expanding the carceral state. This developed alongside the broader trends of racialization and colonization in the British Empire, which drew a global color line separating "white" …


Vestiges Of Propaganda: Postage Stamps Issued By The Third Reich In Poland And The Netherlands During The Second World War, Olivia Phillips Jun 2021

Vestiges Of Propaganda: Postage Stamps Issued By The Third Reich In Poland And The Netherlands During The Second World War, Olivia Phillips

University Honors Theses

This thesis hopes to bridge the gap between philately and history and examines how postage stamps issued by the Third Reich during the Second World War portrayed their colonial and racial policy in the Netherlands and Poland. Through my research where I examine Nazi primary source documents and rely on an expansive discourse community whose focus is communications theory, postal history, and colonial history, I focus on how these stamps were an extension of the Reich’s Ministry for Propaganda. Dutch stamps closely align with German-issued stamps from the same period, through the depiction of hypermasculine men in a rural setting …


Mutual Aid As Spiritual Tacit Knowledge Within Doukhobor Epistemology, Rachel L. Neubuhr Torres May 2021

Mutual Aid As Spiritual Tacit Knowledge Within Doukhobor Epistemology, Rachel L. Neubuhr Torres

University Honors Theses

The relationship between Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge and religion is a topic that is rarely explored. Applying tacit knowledge to the study of religion and spirituality allows us to think about how we connect with the world and how we address the concern of what one feels to be true of their existence, or existential intuition. In the latter half of the 1800s the Russian prince turned anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote extensively on the theory of mutually beneficial cooperation, or mutual aid, as being one of the most important factors of evolution. As Kropotkin began writing his series …


Oregon's Racial Purity Regime: The Influence Of International Scientific Racism On Law Enforcement, Legislation, Public Health, And Incarceration In Portland, Oregon During The Victorian And Progressive Eras (1851-1917), Katherine N. Bush Apr 2021

Oregon's Racial Purity Regime: The Influence Of International Scientific Racism On Law Enforcement, Legislation, Public Health, And Incarceration In Portland, Oregon During The Victorian And Progressive Eras (1851-1917), Katherine N. Bush

Dissertations and Theses

In 1983, the Oregon State legislature repealed the eugenic sterilization law that had been in use for 60 years. Initially passed during the Progressive era, this law epitomized the State's legacy of surveilling, policing, caging, and inflicting brutality on marginalized and racialized communities who were deemed dangerous, threatening, or contagious. Public health leaders, political officials, law enforcement authorities, and private charities worked together as a multivalent system to maintain racial purity in the State. This racial purity regime drew upon a legacy of international pseudo-scientific racism to justify and bolster policies, legislation, and practices that targeted impoverished communities, people of …


Black Gold, White Gold, And The Bear's Influence Over Central Asian Economies, Jennifer Leo Feb 2021

Black Gold, White Gold, And The Bear's Influence Over Central Asian Economies, Jennifer Leo

University Honors Theses

In examining the socioeconomic state of former Soviet republics in Central Asia, it becomes clear that the current economies of nations such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan have been shaped by a history of Russian dominance, followed by turbulent developments that took place during the "perestroika" and post-independence period. These periods were marked by significant changes in governance which allowed Central Asian nations to gain inclusion in the global economy, forge partnerships with economically thriving world superpowers (US and China), and emerge from the Soviet system of mono-product economies. As a result of such developments, former republics of the Soviet …