United States History Commons^™

“A Freedom Rider Before Freedom Rides:” Jackie Robinson Beyond Baseball, Amy Elizabeth Cantrell

Gettysburg College Headquarters

This paper seeks to evaluate the historical discourse surrounding the narrative of Jackie Robinson. Famed for being the first African American player to break the long withstanding color barrier in professional sports, a vast majority of discussion surrounding his story has centered solely on his athletic prowess and triumphs. However, as this paper will explore, Jackie Robinson’s contributions to the wider framework of racial equality and civil rights within America extend far beyond the baseball diamond. Evaluating both his laurels as an activist and socio-political figure as well as how these merits have been depicted, or neglected, in media representations …

“For The Right To Live”: Radical Activity In Portland’S Parks During The Great Depression, Eliana Bane

Anthós

During the Great Depression, Portland's working class joined in the national surge of radicalism to fight for economic relief and social justice. One of organized labor’s most effective strategies was to stage mass demonstrations in highly visible public spaces, such as Plaza Park adjacent City Hall in downtown. Rallying in city parks represented workers’ determination to exercise their free speech in spite of Red Scare suppression of leftist radicals. This essay explores the role of public parks in the history of the labor movement in Portland during the Depression, primarily focusing on Plaza Park since it was a hub for …

Reclaiming Public Space: How Black Portlanders Transformed Irving Park, 1960s-1980s, Ana Bane

University Honors Theses

Although we often take their existence for granted, public parks are imperative for the vitality of a functioning democratic society. Parks are more than just sites for recreation–an important arena for community building in its own right; occupying public space is an inherently political act that takes on new dimensions in resistance movements. This project explores the role that public space played in the history of Black community organizing and resistance in Portland. Irving Park is a sixteen acre park in the heart of the Albina district, Portland’s historic African American neighborhood. Though the area is now heavily gentrified, from …

[2023 Honorable Mention] What Does The Absence Of My History Do To My Identity & Pride?: Utilizing Autohistoría-Teoría Methodology To Trace Educational Experience, Jissel Antonio

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

Utilizing Gloria Anzaldúa’s Autohistoria-teoría methodology, this humanistic study explores embodied experiences in the education system, guided by the question, What does the absence of my history do to my identity and pride? Theorizing across historical and personal contexts, I weave together personal archival materials, including school test scores, magical thinking, storytelling, and historical legacies of colonialism and American education. Inspired by Anzaldúa’s method of inquiry, I explore the relationship between identity and education by theorizing the reverberations between history and personal/collective experience.

Hist 104: America Since 1865, Douglas Manson

Open Educational Resources

This history course utilizes materials that are open sourced

Wagon Tracks Volume 37, Issue 3 (May 2023)

Wagon Tracks

Contents

2 On the Cover: Leaving Independence by Charles Goslin

4 Insights from your President

5 Joanne’s Jottings

6, 32 Art and the Trail: Edward Holslag at 21c Kansas City, by Joanne VanCoevern

7 In Memoriam: George Bayless Donohow, John Conoboy, Mary Cottom, Dorothy Kroh, Star Jones, Dr. Joyce Thierer

8 2023 Symposium

11 Board of Directors Nominees

14-20 Rebecca Mayer's 1852 Honeymoon with 50 Men and 500 Mules, Part 2 by Joy Poole

21-24 Searching for Page Blackwood Otero by Dr. Michael Olsen

24-25 What’s in the News along the Santa Fe Trail? Using Newspapers for Historical Research by …

Citing Seeds, Citing People: Bibliography And Indigenous Memory, Relations, And Living Knowledge-Keepers, Megan Peiser Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma

Criticism

By turning the page or reading further, you are accepting a responsibility to this story, its storyteller, its ancestors, and its future ancestors. You are accepting a relationship of reciprocity where you treat this knowledge as sacred for how it nourished you, share it only as it has been instructed to share, and to ensure it remains unviolated for future generations.

This story is told by myself, Megan Peiser, Chahta Ohoyo. I share knowledge entrusted to me by Anishinaabe women I call friends and sisters, by seed-keepers of many peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, and knowledge come to me from …

Critique! Critique! Critique! Black Labor In The Early American Book Trade, John J. Garcia

Criticism

This article pursues two lines of inquiry: first, recovering the presence of Black labor in the history of the book in colonial North America, the British Caribbean, and the early United States, with a second and complementary discussion of why critique must be foregrounded in the field formation of critical bibliography. Free and enslaved Black men and women helped make early American books possible. Their presences are to be found at the edges and vicinities of print cultural production, in roles such as papermaking, wagon driving, and forms of domestic labor that extended to the libraries and reading practices of …

Surfacing: A (Loose) Manual On Unlayering / Stuff-Making And Hypervisibility, Zoë Pulley

Masters Theses

This is a (loose) manual on a method I like to refer to as surfacing.

A method that synthesizes narrative through the use of surfaces such as textiles, paper, web & video to reveal the spectacularly ordinary parts of Black life within a growing design practice.

A method I (currently) practice in three (evolving) steps:

Unlayering and piecing together stuff (rememory)

Acknowledgment of ancestry through stuff-making (kin)

Consciousness of oneself and the place / time / space in which the work is being disseminated (hypervisibility)

This is a manual that profiles a (current) design practice of a Black female maker …

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

Sources On The History Of Jesuit Higher Education: A Bibliographic Essay, Michael Rizzi

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

This essay provides an annotated bibliography, highlighting books and articles about the history of Jesuit higher education in the United States. It lists sources that should be helpful to anyone researching the topic, and can be used as a starting point for scholars seeking more information about how Jesuit colleges and universities evolved over time.

The Jesuit Colleges That Weren't: Conewago Latin School And Guadalupe College, Michael Rizzi

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

This article offers a brief history of two obscure and often overlooked Jesuit schools from the nineteenth century: the Conewago Latin School in Pennsylvania and Guadalupe College in Texas. Although neither school ever fully developed into a true institution of higher education, they began life similarly to other Jesuit schools of the 1800s, and under different circumstances they might have evolved, like those other schools, into true American colleges. The purpose of this historical sketch is to preserve the memory of these nearly forgotten Jesuit institutions.

Lg Ms 079 Steven G. Bull Papers, Jill Piekut Roy, Jeremy Rundstrom

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Papers include correspondence, photographs, publications, and ephemera documenting the beginning of the gay liberation movement in Maine and Steve Bull's participation in the movement both in Maine and nationally, especially through his involvement with the founding of the Wilde-Stein Club at University of Maine Orono in 1973 and his chairmanship of the first Maine Gay Symposium in 1974. Letters received by Bull and his friends, both personally and as Wilde-Stein Club officials, are evidence of the attitudes of both supporters of gay liberation and its opponents in the 1970s. Bull's research papers document the University of Maine's reaction to …

Challenges To Swiss Democracy: Neutrality, Napoleon, & Nationalism, Thomas Quinn Marabello

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The year 1291 is considered the birth of Switzerland as we know it. Yet this is not entirely correct, since it was when the Swiss Confederacy was formed. This defensive alliance between some cantons that would expand over time did not mean Switzerland was a unified nation-state. Most of Europe in 1291 was stuck in the Middle Ages with few unified nations existing at the time. 1648 was an important year for Switzerland and the rest of Europe. The Treaty of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War that involved most of the continent over religion and politics. …

Book Review: Maurice-Ernest Gillioz (1877-1962): Great Builder In America, Yves Bordet

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Maurice-Ernest Gillioz is a good example of the American dream. The son of a Swiss emigrant from the Canton of Valais who arrived in New York in the middle of the American Civil War, Gillioz started from nothing and built one of the largest public works companies in the Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century. Philippe Pierroz’ book is 164 pages, written in French, of richly illustrated and strongly documented material. The numerous illustrations and appendices can be easily understood by English-speaking readers.

End Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Aa Ms 29 African American Oral History Collection, Jill Piekut Roy, Lex Lecrone

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description

The Center for the Study of Lives was established in 1988 by Robert Atkinson, professor emeritus of human development, multicultural studies, and religious studies at University of Southern Maine. Collection includes recordings and documents related to oral histories conducted by Jill Cournoyer and other students of Joseph Conforti. Interviewees are Eugene Cummings, Rev. Margaret Lawson, Ronald S. Lynch, Leola Marshall, Dana Richardson, and Gerald E. Talbot. Also includes a speech by Eugene Jackson. Interviewees speak about their lives and histories as African Americans in the United States, particularly in Portland, Maine.

Date Range:

1985-1996

Size of Collection:

0.25 Linear …

A New Voice For Old Helvetia: Introducing The Descendants Of Swiss Settlers, Joseph H. Smith

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The Descendants of Swiss Settlers is a new lineage society that honors and celebrates the unique legacy and achievements of Swiss men and women who settled in North America prior to March 5, 1798, which marks the end of the Old Swiss Confederacy. We are excited to announce our formation and we are seeking members!