History Commons^™

Germs, Pigs And Silver: King Philip's War And The Deconstruction Of The Middle Ground In New England, Benjamin M. Roine

Graduate Masters Theses

Early in the seventeenth century Algonquians peoples of southern New England and English colonists built a middle ground which benefitted both groups. Trade, the existence of competition from Dutch and French colonies and powerful Algonquian tribes maintained this middle ground. However, as trade items, such as beaver pelts and wampum became rare or lost value and continued English immigration to New England weakened Dutch claims to the area, the middle ground began to crumble. As English-style farms and livestock changed the ecology of New England and the colonists sought to assert their will, Algonquians lost the ability to live as …

Bacteria And Politics: The Application Of Science To The Yellow Fever Crisis In Reconstruction New Orleans, Polly M. Rolman-Smith

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of germ theory during the nineteenth century transformed Western medicine. By the 1870s, public health officials in the American South used germ theory to promote sanitation efforts to control public health crises, such as yellow fever epidemics. Before the discovery of mosquito transmission of yellow fever, physicians of the late nineteenth century believed the disease was spread by a highly contagious germ. Prominent medical practitioners of New Orleans, such as Confederate Army veteran Dr. Joseph Jones, used available scientific knowledge and investigation to attempt to control yellow fever during the Reconstruction period, a period rife with political and …

Who Owns This Body? Enslaved Women's Claim On Themselves, Loucynda Elayne Sandeen

Dissertations and Theses

During the antebellum period of U.S. slavery (1830-1861), many people claimed ownership of the enslaved woman's body, both legally and figuratively. The assumption that they were merely property, however, belies the unstable, shifting truths about bodily ownership. This thesis inquires into the gendered specifics and ambiguities of the law, the body, and women under slavery. By examining the particular bodily regulation and exploitation of enslaved women, especially around their reproductive labor, I suggest that new operations of oppression and also of resistance come into focus.

The legal structure recognized enslaved women in the interest of owners, and this limitation was …

Face Down In The Wishkah, Andrew Osborn

History Undergraduate Theses

This thesis will reexamine the life of America’s greatest unknown serial killer William (Billy) Gohl. Spanning an eight year period (1902-1910) Gohl was able to amass over one hundred victims in the port city of Aberdeen Washington. Gohl did this through taking advantage of people’s trust and integrating techniques from 19th century San Franciscan criminals to produce a systematic murder enterprise. It took a new mayor, chief of police, and over two years of investigation to finally bring Gohl to trial and conviction. Gohl’s story is one that covers a variety of historical studies and hinges on a fascinating narrative. …

Razing Awareness: The Bethlehem Steel Administration Building, Steve Bukowski

Museum Studies Projects

Razing Awareness: The Bethlehem Steel Administration Building is a practice in the process of coordinating and opening a professional-grade museum exhibit. Hosted by the Steel Plant Museum of Western New York, "Razing Awareness" explored the history and controversial demolition of the Bethlehem Steel Administration Building in Lackawanna, New York. The exhibit featured artwork, photography, and artifacts from the building itself, weaving art and history together to construct a narrative about historic preservation and the establishment of a sense of place.

The Art Of Steel: As Seen Through The Eyes Of Norman Rockwell, Megan S. Hahin

Museum Studies Projects

For this project the author partnered with the Steel Plant Museum of Western New York (SPM) in South Buffalo to create a special exhibition focused on their 14 prints of Norman Rockwell paintings in the museum’s collection. The exhibition used supplementary artifacts to add personal narratives to Rockwell’s paintings. The exhibit diversified the audience of the SPM and created a potential new audience the museum could target, while still appealing to their current audience through the use of personal narrative. The museum had not curated an art exhibition before and this project proved to be beneficial by exploring new themes …

A Historical Comparative Analysis Of Executions In The United States From 1608 To 2009, Emily Jean Abili

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The death penalty has been a contested issue throughout American history. The United States has been executing offenders since Jamestown became a colony in 1608 (Allen & Clubb, 2008). Since that time, many issues have been raised about the death penalty including whether or not it is moral, discriminatory, or a deterrent.

This study examines the history of executions, including lynchings, in the United States from 1608 to 2009 using a variety of sociological theories on law and society. Some of the research questions that guide this project are:

* What is the nature of change in the relative prevalence …

The Ethics Glass Ceiling: A Historical Analysis Of Actions By The U.S. House Of Representatives Committee On Ethics, Michael James Gordon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The breaking of moral and ethical codes has been with humankind since history was first recorded. As such, the public wants to know that their elected officials are held accountable and cannot disregard enshrined legal rights without incurring broader personal and societal consequences. Within the hallowed halls of government, the "unrequested" House Committee on Ethics (HCE) provides the forum of accountability.

In this qualitative, historical case study, HCE documents are analyzed and both the internal and external motivating factors behind the actions of the HCE members are examined. Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software, namely ATLAS.ti, was used to look …

Direct Responsibility: Caspar Weinberger And The Reagan Defense Buildup, Robert Howard Wieland

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the life of Caspar Weinberger and explains why President Reagan chose him for Secretary of Defense. Weinberger, not a defense technocrat, managed a massive defense buildup of 1.5 trillion dollars over a four year period. A biographical approach to Weinberger illuminates Reagan’s selection, for in many ways Weinberger harkens back to an earlier type of defense manager more akin to Elihu Root than Robert McNamara; more a man of letters than technocrat. And yet Weinberger, the amateur historian, worked with budgets his entire public career. Essentially, Pentagon governance is the formation of a military budget that proscribes …

A Nation That Wasn't: The Whiskey Rebellion And A Fractured Early Republic, Kevin P. Whitaker

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Scholars often present nationalism as a cohesive social construction, modeled on Benedict Anderson's theory of imagined communities.1 The strength and popularity of Anderson's immensely useful paradigm of nationalism, however, perhaps leads to excited scholars over-extending his theory or seeing imagined communities that are little more than imaginary. The early Republic forms one such historical time period where, evidence suggests, historians have conjured nationalism where only a fractured nation existed. The various riots and rebellions during the early Republic strikingly expose a severely fractured nation. This paper will examine and critique some theoretical frameworks of nationalism and mobs in order to …

Archaeological Geophysics, Excavation, And Ethnographic Approaches Toward A Deeper Understanding Of An Eighteenth Century Wichita Site, Michael Don Carlock

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research exemplifies a multidirectional approach to an archaeological interpretation of an eighteenth century Wichita village and fortification located on the Red River bordering Oklahoma and Texas. A battle that is believed to have occurred at the Longest site (34JF1) in 1759 between Spanish colonials and a confederation of Native Americans led to several Spanish primary documents describing the people that lived there, the fortification and surrounding village, and of course the battle itself. Investigation of the Longest site (34JF1) in Oklahoma presents a remarkable opportunity to combine extensive historical research, archaeological prospecting using geophysics, and traditional excavation techniques in …

Can I Get A Yee-Haw And An Amen: Collecting And Interpreting Oral Histories Of Texas Cowboy Churches, Jake R. Mcadams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With more than 850 Christian cowboy ministries worldwide and approximately 160 individual cowboy churches in Texas, the cowboy church movement is an immensely important religious movement that speaks volumes about contemporary culture. Cowboy churches' "Low Barriers Model" Christianity attracts many disenchanted with traditional evangelicalism's assumed sterilized and feminized religion. Despite the cowboy church movement's exponential growth since the late-1980s, few outside the movement understand the complexity cowboy churches envelop. Using Cowboy Christians' oral histories, Jake McAdams argues that the cowboy church movement is a suburban seeker church movement centered around the mythic cowboy identity in which participants have a sincere …

Propagating Monsters: Conjoined Twins In Popular Culture, Susan Kerns

Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes representations of conjoined twins in the United States to illustrate how historical images are in conversation with biographies, medical documents, sideshows, and contemporary film and television shows about conjoined twins, both fictional and nonfictional. The recycling of established tropes and the privileging of science over humanity results in limited understandings of the fluidity of conjoined twin identity. Separation and individuality are favored, relegating conjoined twins to "disabled" people that need fixing. Studying biographical artifacts of Millie-Christine McKoy's and Daisy and Violet Hilton's careers illuminates the interrelationship between biographies, images, and rights. Although born into slavery, Millie-Christine overcame …

Elevating The Wood Engraved Landscape: The Work Of Elbridge Kingsley, Elizabeth Anne Siercks

Theses and Dissertations

This is a graduate thesis catalog exploring the work of 19th wood engraver Elbridge Kingsley. Kingsley's contemporary influences are traced using primary sources and visual analysis. Kingsley's stylistic tendencies, in both his original and interpretive engravings, are linked to other 19th century American artists. A brief discussion of the history of wood engraving and its technique are included as it relates to the evolution of Kingsley's style, as evidenced in his published work and his prints for collectors.

Loyalist Or Patriot: The Precarious Position Of Edmund Randolph, 1774-1786, Tanisha Jean Staten

Master's Theses

On May 29, 1787, Governor Edmund Randolph took the floor of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia with a radical plan for a new federal government. Randolph was a key member of the influential Virginia delegation which paved the way for United States' Constitutionalism. An examination of his early life, legal career, and politics offers a new lens with which to view the emergence of American constitutional ideology. Building off the work ofT.H. Breen, who argues that Virginia's landed gentry inhabited a distinct culture, this work illuminates the dynamics of these elites who were absolutely pivotal in shaping a new sense …

A Tangled Hope: America, China, And Human Rights At The End Of The Cold War, 1976-2000, Jared Michael Phillips

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A Tangled Hope: America, China, and Human Rights at the End of the Cold War, 1976-2000, discusses the evolution of both the international and American understanding of human rights. Beginning with a discussion of the philosophical and cultural frameworks concerning "rights" that developed in Europe and the Americas throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this work moves into the post-World War II climate that shaped Jimmy Carter and his unique understanding of human rights and America's role in the Cold War world. In particular, I argue that the existing narrative concerning Carter's foreign policy is lacking in a nuanced understanding …

Saints And Savages: American Religion And The Construction Of Victory Culture, Jacob Tyler Hayes

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Dam Mormons: Responding To The 1976 Teton Dam Disaster In The "Lord's Way", Lauriann Vaterlaus Deaver

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The June 5, 1976, Teton Dam collapse occurred in a unique region of Idaho where the population comprised as much as ninety-five percent of residents belonging to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The homogenous nature of this population influenced the nature of the recovery effort following the disaster. The Teton Dam recovery effort provided an opportunity for the LDS church, using its welfare system and priesthood (lay male leadership) organizational structure to seamlessly work with government agencies. Church leaders used the reports of positive interactions between its members and the federal and local leaders to celebrate an …

The Fugitive Slave Law, Antislavery And The Emergence Of The Republican Party In Indiana, Christopher David Walker

Open Access Dissertations

The most contentious portion of the Compromise of 1850 between the Northern free states and the Southern slave states was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. For decades slaveholders had complained of the difficulties encountered in reclaiming their fugitive slaves and demanded stronger legislation to deal with the problem. Northerners, however, did not believe that national legislation on the subject of fugitive slaves as embodied in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 provided adequate protection to free blacks and many states passed anti-kidnapping laws which often placed obstacles to rendition. Slaveholders discovered that the costs involved in reclaiming an absconding …

Victory, Reconciliation, And Reunion: The Soldiers’ And Sailors’ Monument Of Easton, Pennsylvania And A Memory Of The Civil War, Bryan Toth

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Thirty-five years after the Civil War came to an end the people of Easton, Pennsylvania erected a monument to honor the men of Easton and Northampton County that fought and died in the sectional conflict. With the nation recognizing the sesquicentennial of the Civil War the study of how the people of Easton have chosen to remember this conflict can help us better understand the war itself and its ever changing place in the collective national psychology. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument that was built in Easton’s Centre Square is reflective of a Northern monument design, and a memory of …

Approaches To Black Power: African American Grassroots Political Struggle In Cleveland, Ohio, 1960-1966, David M. Swiderski

Open Access Dissertations

Black communities located in cities across the country became sites of explosive political unrest during the mid-1960s. These uprisings coincided with a period of intensified political activity among African Americans nationally, and played a decisive role in expanding national concern with black political struggle from a singular focus on the Civil Rights movement led by black southerners to consider the "race problem" clearly present in the cities of the North and West. Moreover, unrest within urban black communities emerged at a time when alternate political analyses of the relationship between black people and the American state that challenged the goal …

Inheritance Of The Past: Patriarchy, Race And Gender In Faulkner's And Chopin's South, Therese D. Osborne

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The death of the Confederacy sealed in white southern memory a lost world of beauty that denied the cruelty of its “peculiar institution.” Southern writers have seemed haunted by this conflict between the cherished past of their ancestors and the reality of the devastated region, with its legacy in slavery. Through the commentary of women diarists who mourn their crumbling society, and selected works of William Faulkner and Kate Chopin, this paper examines the myth and reality of the southern past. It reveals the enduring impact of the all-powerful white patriarchy that gave order to the antebellum South, destroyed it, …

Aaron Kohn Attacks Corruption In New Orleans: An Intersection Of Media And Politics, 1953-1955, Kyle P. Willshire

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Aaron Kohn’s career as a driven professional crime fighter with the Special Citizens Investigative Committee, and later the Metropolitan Crime Commission, began after the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime, one of the first Senate investigative committee hearings broadcast on the evolving medium of television, gripped the American public in 1950. Sen. Estes Kefauver’s committee visited cities across America, including New Orleans. The hearings’ popularity revealed public thirst for coverage of sensational topics like organized crime, and established how Kohn would soon approach the SCIC job: with force and bombast, featuring flair and sometimes bended truth. Aaron Kohn combined Kefauver’s crusading …

"Fare Well To All Radicals": Redeeming Tennessee, 1869-1870, William Edward Hardy

Doctoral Dissertations

On February 10, 1869, Tennessee Governor William G. “Parson” Brownlow tendered his resignation as he prepared to take his seat in the United States Senate, to which his Radical allies in the General Assembly had elected him in the aftermath of the 1867 state election. On resigning, Brownlow expressed full confidence in DeWitt C. Senter, the man who would succeed him. Stunningly, six months later Brownlow’s Radical party verged on collapse after its Conservative rivals captured control of the General Assembly in the August 1869 state election. The new legislature speedily repealed many of the enactments of the five years …

To The Indian Removal Act, 1814-1830, Kyle Massey Stephens

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a history of Indian removal as a political issue from the War of 1812 to the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Its central argument is that federal removal policy emerged and evolved due to a precise and largely unforeseen sequence of events. Drawing on Indian treaties, journals of negotiations, minutes of cabinet meetings, Congressional debates, personal memoirs, and a variety of other sources, the dissertation charts and elucidates the evolution of United States Indian policy from a diplomatic to a domestic concern. One of the central themes of the dissertation is how most white …

The Non-National Subject: Ambivalent "Americans" In Contemporary Narratives By Women Writers In The Us, Dalia Gomaa

Theses and Dissertations

This study argues that the notion of Americanness is constructed nationally within the U.S. geographic space, as well as transnationally outside that space. The transnational perception of the U.S. nation-space and Americanness makes possible ambivalent positionings which I call non-national and through its lens I examine migrant narratives by Arab-American, Chicana, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, and Cuban-American women writers. I explain in my study that the non-national subject does not merely occupy a liminal space between home-country and host-country but rather reconfigures the implications of the "foreign" and the "domestic"; "home" and "abroad" within that interstitial space. I also argue that the …

Barbary Pirates: Thomas Jefferson, William Eaton, And The Evolution Of U.S. Diplomacy In The Mediterranean, Patrick N. Teye

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes U.S. relations with the Barbary States from 1784 to 1805. After the American Revolution, the young nation found its commerce menaced in the Mediterranean by North African pirates sponsored by the rulers of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. As the U.S. sought to find a solution to end piracy and the practice of paying tributes or ransom to free Americans held captive, Thomas Jefferson proposed several solutions as a diplomat, vice president, and as president when he authorized the Tripolitan War (1801-1805). Thus, this look at U.S. relations with the Barbary States focuses on Jefferson’s evolving foreign …

“The Price Of A Woolworth’S Burger:” The Importance And Overshadowing Of The Nashville Sit-Ins, Aaron M. Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the sit-in demonstrations that used direct action and civil disobedience to target segregation at store lunch counters. The Nashville demonstrations were the last sit-in protests to occur that are discussed in this thesis, which also examines the protests in Wichita and Greensboro. Historians argue that the Wichita and Greensboro sit-ins were the most important demonstrations of their kind. The movement in Wichita was the first protest to end segregation policies at targeted stores, and the Greensboro protests led to a direct action movement in over fifty other cities targeting lunch counters. However, the Nashville based sit-ins surpassed …

Vice In The Veil Of Justice: Embedding Race And Gender In Frontier Tourism, Daniel Richard Maher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how "frontier" discourses in Fort Smith, Arkansas simultaneously constitute mythological narratives that elide the deleterious effects of imperialism, racism, and sexism, while they operate as marketing schemes in the wager that they will attract cultural heritage tourists. It examines material exhibits and interpretive history programs at locations including the Fort Smith National Historic Site, Fort Smith Museum of History, Miss Laura's Visitor's Center, and the Clayton House; in texts such as the 1898 book by Samuel Harman whose title forever branded Fort Smith as Hell on the Border; in the subsequent branding and marketing derived from the …

Quaker Of Virtue: Herbert Hoover And His Humane Foreign Policy, Ryan Thomas Peters

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the major foreign policy events of Herbert Hoover's presidency. The thesis uses newspapers, presidential memorandums as well as memoirs from key cabinet members in Hoover's administration to bring into account Hoover's background and upbringing as a motive for how he dealt with foreign policy issues throughout his four years in office and brings to light his efforts to create a better and more peaceful world. Beginning with his childhood, Hoover began to develop moral and character attributes that taught him the importance of helping neighbors and always acting humane when it came to issues of war, pain …