Political History Commons^™

Gettysburg College Journal Of The Civil War Era 2017

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

No abstract provided.

An Anomalous Case Of Southern Sympathy: New Jersey's Civil War Stance, Emily A. Hawk

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

A popular narrative of the Civil War assumes that all Northern states stood united behind President Abraham Lincoln in their loyalty to the Union. However, the case of New Jersey suggests that this narrative of devotion is simply a myth. The agrarian economy of New Jersey kept the state firmly opposed to universal emancipation, and New Jersey behaved more like a border state than its geographic neighbors of Pennsylvania and New York. By examining New Jersey's response to the release of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Election of 1864, the myth of Northern unity is broken by understanding persistent state-level …

“Altoona Was His, And Fairly Won”: President Lincoln And The Altoona Governors’ Conference, September 1862, Kees D. Thompson

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

This article explores the long-forgotten Altoona Conference of 1862, when nearly a dozen Union governors met at the Civil War's darkest hour to discuss war strategy and, ultimately, reaffirm their support for the Union cause. This article examines and questions the conventional view of the conference as a challenge to President Lincoln's efficacy as the nation's leader. Rather, the article suggests that Lincoln may have actually welcomed the conference and had his own designs for how it might bolster his political objectives.

A Divided Front: Military Dissent During The Vietnam War, Kaylyn L. Sawyer

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Emerging from a triumphant victory in World War Two, American patriotism surged in the 1950s. Positive images in theater and literature of America’s potential to bring peace and prosperity to a grateful Asia fueled the notion that the United States could be the “good Samaritan of the entire world.”[1] This idea prevailed through the mid-1960s as three-quarters of Americans indicated they trusted their government. That positive feeling would not last, and America’s belief in its own exceptionalism would begin to shatter with “the major military escalation in Vietnam and the shocking revelations it brought.”[2] The turmoil in social …

Partisanship In Mexico: Influence Of Violence And State Spending, Christopher White

CMC Senior Theses

This paper serves to further investigate factors influencing partisanship in Mexican politics with a focus on state spending and drug violence. With state spending, this paper builds on prior literature about political effects of federal social spending (Handelman 1997, Domínguez and Chappell 2004, Díaz-Cayeros 2009) to propose a similar theory regarding state social spending. The proposed panel data model for national elections between 2000 and 2012 finds that for diputados elections, a thousand-peso increase in state spending had a statistically significant influence on party voting – boosting PRI candidates (typically incumbents) by 0.66% and hurting both PAN and PRD candidates …

Democratic States Of Unexception: Towards A New Genealogy Of The American Political, William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer, James T. Sparrow

Book Chapters

This chapter takes issue with the history and theory of exception along these three lines. The first section offers a critique of the idea of law at the heart of the theory of exception. By taking a closer look at the history and theory of law in early nineteenth-century America, it offers an alternative reading of the role of exception in Emerson’s America – a place and time in which the exception in law was anything but exceptional. The second section offers a critique of the idea of state and sovereignty at the heart of the theory of exception in …

The Man Question: How Bolshevik Masculinity Shaped International Communism, Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

History Faculty Publications

It was a communist romance. In 1923, Croatian American communist Steve Nelson (born Stjepan Mesarsoš) met Margaret Yeager, the daughter of ‘radical’ German immigrants, at the Communist Party office in Pittsburgh. As Nelson recalled in his 1981 memoir, ‘everything happened’ very quickly, and the two married the same year. Both understood that Yeager, the ‘better educated’ and ‘more sophisticated’ of the two, would not accept a ‘passive role’ in the relationship. Indeed her mother gave the nineteen-year-old bridegroom a copy of August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism as a wedding gift. Nonetheless, they soon took on stereotypical roles. He became an …

The Wwi Middle East: Western Intervention And Modern-Day Political Conflict, Pauline Park

Global Tides

This paper analyzes three conflicting agreements made by the Allied powers between 1915 and 1917: the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot arrangements, and the Balfour Declaration. It reveals the agreements as demonstrative of deeper patterns of political power and strategy in the Middle East that persist today. This paper moreover compares the Middle East with the European colonization of Rwanda in the 1880s, and how the nation's internal division was caused by external global powers seeking political and economic gain. This analysis seeks to connect global events as part of a wider political agenda propagated by Western powers.

The Hopes And The Realities Of Aviation In French Indochina, 1919-1940, Gregory Charles Seltzer

Theses and Dissertations--History

My dissertation examines how and why the French employed aviation in the five constituent parts of French Indochina (Annam, Cambodia, Cochinchina, Laos, and Tonkin) during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the French, believing that the modern technology of powered flight possessed seemingly endless potential, saw aviation as a vehicle for extending, consolidating, developing, and protecting their interests both within the colony and around Southeast and East Asia. Aircraft, whether civil or military, were viewed and used as a multi-purpose tool of empire. Indeed, planes were employed for a variety of tasks in Indochina: transportation …

How The Willowbrook Consent Decree Has Influenced Contemporary Advocacy Of Individuals With Disabilities, Kristen S. Addessi

Student Theses

The existence of the Willowbrook State School was a culmination, of over a one-hundred-year history of Western society’s attempts to provide adequate care, and treatment for individuals with disabilities. The residents housed there, suffered violations of their human and civil rights in various forms of severe abuse, neglect, and violence. Following a three-year legal battle in 1975, as a result of the travesties that occurred, the legal doctrine known as the Willowbrook Consent Decree was written. The Consent Decree was implemented to ensure that the residents’ human and civil rights are met and protected. The Willowbrook State School and the …

'Civil Wars: A History In Ideas' By David Armitage (Review), Zachary C. Shirkey

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Full Circle: The New Deal And The Great Recession, Donald Lewis Roberts

Honors College Theses

In this paper I will show how the mindset of liberalism has evolved since the Great Depression. It merged with progressive movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to become a politically left ideology that intertwined with power hungry politicians who perverted liberalism and used sudden economic and social phenomena to engineer a new type of American government. One that has constantly expanded, reaching and entrenching itself further and further into the lives of Americans, starting with President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s work would be expanded in the name of progress and equality by several of his …

A Study Of The Determinants Influencing The Legislative Success Of A Government-Proposed Bill In Korea, Byung Jun Ahn

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

As there is a widespread perception of legislative gridlock and subsequent failure in addressing national problems in Korea, this study examines what factors influence the legislative success and legislative time of a government-proposed bill in Korea. This study uses government-proposed bills from 1988 to 2016 to estimate the effect of explanatory variables such as divided government, the year of presidential term (one to five year), the presidential approval rate, the unemployment rate, filibusters, jurisdictional area of a bill, and the ratio of members’ bills to government-proposed bills.

The results of regression analyses show that there is no evidence divided government …

“No Other Agency”: Public Education (K-12) In Washington State During World War I And The Red Scare, 1917-1920, Jennifer Nicole Arleen Crooks

All Master's Theses

This paper examines the impact of World War I and the Red Scare upon public education in Washington State. Schools, expected to be the instruments of governmental policy, played an important role in the everyday lives of people on the American homefront. Although many helped in the war effort willingly, this wartime drive included both instilling nationalism and loyalty to American political and economic institutions as well as the assimilation of immigrants. While these forces existed well before World War I and the Red Scare, they strengthened and became more publicly acceptable in 1917-1920 as more people grew convinced that …

A Multi-Causal Approach To The Thirty Years’ War, Ethan Haan

Grand Valley Journal of History

The Thirty Years’ War was arguably the most consequential war of the Wars of Religion and of the wider European conflicts in the 17th century. The historiography on the causes of the war has been present ever since literature on the conflict became available shortly after its cessation. Since 1900, the debate over the underlying motivations has intensified and has become muddied in some areas. This study aims to summarize and clarify the previous positions that historians have taken on what caused the war, from religious urges to socio-economic and political factors. This study also attempts to clearly define where …

Cry Havoc: The Rise And Collapse Of America's Contractors In Iraq, Samuel Brown

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

This work aims at examining the development of Private Security Contracting, specifically Blackwater, and their role in destabilizing the United States’ mission in Iraq. In that examination, it looks at existing literature on the subject and the efforts that people involved in the Bush Administration made regarding the War on Terror that allowed these companies and Blackwater to develop. Choices made by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CPA leader Paul Bremer all added to the chaos and the shortage of manpower that would see these companies fill in the gaps in American planning. This work …

Politics And Pragmatism: The United States And Israel Between Two Presidents, Christopher J. Parker

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the United States’ relationship with Israel and the wider Middle East between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The United States’ relationship with Israel has reverberated across the Middle East and studying its impact is critical for understanding past and present issues in the region. It begins with an examination of the factors that impelled President Truman to act against the advice of his Department of State and recognize Israel only minutes after it declared statehood in May 1948; arguing that, above all else, domestic political considerations lay at the heart of his decision. It then assesses the …

"A Babe In The Woods?": Billy Graham, Anticommunism, And Vietnam, Daniel Alexander Hays

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on famous evangelist Billy Graham's role in the Vietnam War, both as a public supporter and private advisor. It argues that, contrary to his self-depiction, he was no "babe in the woods," no mere neophyte or bystander. Rather, America's most famous preacher was an active participant in promoting and even planning the war. Graham's evangelical theology, with his premillennialist beliefs, led to his intensely anticommunist worldview, where communism was the Antichrist. His public support buttressed the presidents prior to and during the Vietnam War and, sometimes, Graham even delved into policy recommendations for the war.

Graham's role …

When "Comoners Were Made Slaves By The Magistrates": The 1627 Election And Political Culture In Norwich, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article tells the story of a contested provincial election for sheriff which took place in Norwich during 1627. In light of recent scholarly critiques of studies that frame the early-modern period in terms of binary opposites, this article demonstrates that 1620s political culture is hard to define in such stark terms. Through a close reading of the events, characters, and outcomes of the election, this article also shows the importance of embedding local peculiarities into wider historiographical narratives of change, or continuity, and reveals the essential role of the urban middling sorts in shaping the political narratives of the …

The Power Of The Periphery: Aid, Mutuality And Cold War U.S-Ghana Relations, 1957-1966, Moses Allor Awinsong

Masters Theses

This project interrogates how economic self interest motivated periphery states such as Ghana to use foreign policy as a vehicle to attract improved development assistance from superpowers, in this case the United States. While the United States viewed its aid program in Ghana in stringently Cold War terms, Kwame Nkrumah and his advisors were less inclined to get deeply concerned about Cold War ideology. This project shows that Ghanaian agency was manifested in the Cold War through the new state's construction of a foreign policy image that made it a prominent African voice globally. It then examines how that image …