United States History Commons^™

Making Marital Rape Visible: A History Of American Legal And Social Movements Criminalizing Rape In Marriage, Joann M. Ross

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the history of marital rape and related topics in the United States within the broader context of women’s legal and political rights. The project demonstrates the interplay between women’s activists, legislators, the criminal justice system, and an involved public necessary to change both societal and legal views on spousal rape, and eventually its criminalization in all fifty states.

Concentrating on approaches to criminalizing marital rape in three of the fifty states, this dissertation provides a reasonable representation of the existence of the marital rape exemption in America, arguments used to maintain the exemption, and various methods used …

Land And Law In The Age Of Enterprise: A Legal History Of Railroad Land Grants In The Pacific Northwest, 1864-1916, Sean M. Kammer

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Federal land subsidies to railroad corporations comprised an important part of the federal government’s policies towards its western land domain in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In all, Congress granted over a hundred million acres to railroad corporations to subsidize construction of a transcontinental railway network. Long after the last such grant in 1871, these land grants continued to incite political contests in Congress and state legislatures and legal disputes in communities across the West. By the end of the century, railroad corporations had become manifestations not just of the threatening growth of corporate power in the United …

Spider In The River: A Comparative Environmental History Of The Impact Of The Cache La Poudre Watershed On Cheyennes And Euro-Americans, 1830-1880, John J. Buchkoski

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a case study of the Cache la Poudre watershed in Colorado in the mid-nineteenth century and how it contributed to cultural transformations of both Cheyennes and Euro-Americans. This research follows the relationship that developed between Cheyennes and rivers since they inhabited Mille de Lacs in Minnesota in the seventeenth century. It examines the creation of settler-colonialism through the formation of boundaries and colonies in Colorado through the use of rivers. This further illustrates the connectedness of both Euro-Americans and Cheyennes to the rivers and argues that there were battles over these rivers and not only over the …

Philanthropy And The New England Emigrant Aid Company, 1854-1900, Courtney Elizabeth Buchkoski

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This project examines the New England Emigrant Aid Company colonization of Kansas in 1854 as a solution to the growing debate over popular sovereignty and slave labor. It uses the Company as a lens to reinterpret the intellectual history of philanthropy, tracing its roots from Puritan ideas of charity to the capitalistic giving of the nineteenth century.

It argues that the Company’s vision was simultaneously capitalistic and moralistic, for it served both as an imposition of “proper” society upon the West and South, but also had the potential to benefit the donors financially and politically. Using a settler colonial framework, …

John Collier And Mexico In The Shaping Of U.S. Indian Policy: 1934-1945, Wilbert Terry Ahlstedt

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Relations between Mexico and the United States have often been tense and yet they have always been interrelated. In the nineteenth century Mexicans were viewed by their northern neighbors as degenerate racial hybrids. In terms of Native Americans and their relationship to land, Mexico was seen as an example of how not to conduct Indian policy. But during the 1930s, significant numbers of officials within the Roosevelt administration expressed interest in and admiration for Mexican domestic policy, especially in relation to Indian policy. One of the most enthusiastic proponents of Mexico’s federal Indian policy was U.S. Indian Commissioner John Collier. …