United States History Commons^™

Siouxland Ozymandias, James C. Schaap, Mark Munger

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

This is a podcast from Dr. James Schaap's Small Wonders, a series of historical vignettes about regional history for KWIT/KOIA public radio in Sioux City, Iowa. Podcasts of these and other stories from the collection, read by the author, can also be found on the station's website, www.KWIT.org, by entering Professor Schaap's name in the search field.

A Divided Generation: How Anti-Vietnam War Student Activists Overcame Internal And External Divisions To End The War In Vietnam, Jeffrey L. Lauck

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Far too often, student protest movements and organizations of the 1960s and 1970s are treated as monolithic in their ideologies, goals, and membership. This paper dives into the many divides within groups like Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Freedom during their heyday in the Vietnam War Era. Based on original primary source research on the “Radical Pamphlets Collection” in Musselman Library Special Collections, Gettysburg College, this study shows how these various student activist groups both overcame these differences and were torn apart by them. The paper concludes with a discussion about what made the Vietnam War …

The Castle Of Intelligence: Camp Ritchie Maryland And The Military Intelligence Training Center During The Second World War., Kevin M. Aughinbaugh

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Abstract: During the Second World War, Camp Ritchie, Maryland played an important role in the training of intelligence soldiers. This camp was one of the many that taught men the various ways to gather intelligence on a battlefield. From aerial photography to prisoner interrogations, soldiers learned the skills required to gather information, make sense of it, and propose plans based on what they knew about enemy troop positions and movements. These skills would be put to the test once the men graduated their six months of intensive training, and were sent abroad to assist in the war effort. Despite Camp …

Enduring Music: Migrant Appalachian Communities And The Shenandoah National Park, Madeline Marsh

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper is an archival study of the displaced children of families formerly living in the Shenandoah National Park which spans from Strasburg to Waynesboro, Virginia. The study looks at interviews, from the JMU Special Collections archives, of these children in the 1970-80s, nearly fifty years after their forced migration from the 197,438 acres that comprised the park. Change and pressure during the 1930s-40s combined with national policy began the nostalgic preservation and veneration of the culture of these people of the Blue Ridge Mountains; through the archives, a clear and diverse picture of the perspectives and lifestyles of people …

Performing Authentic Savagery: National Myth-Making And Indigenous Survival At American World's Fairs, 1893-1904, Hannah Facknitz

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The late nineteenth century in America was a period of intense change, where society took on the project of describing what exactly made America what it was. An important vehicle for this exploration of identity was the world’s fair. This paper analyzes the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Omaha Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898, and the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 and their depictions of Indigenous North Americans which were closely tied up in the current project of national myth making. A three-way conflict emerges in this study between contemporary anthropologists, entertainment professionals, and so-called …

Mary Todd Lincoln: Influence And Impact On The Civil War In The White House, Selena Marie St. Andre

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Long before President Lincoln’s death in 1865, his wife, Mary Lincoln, was regarded as an insane woman with a terrible spending problem and little regard for the Civil War. Mrs. Lincoln, in fact, was essential to Lincoln’s successful presidency and ability to keep the Union together. This thesis seeks to understand Mary in a different light than history has. As a young girl, Mary strongly believed that she was destined for greatness and would have a powerful husband beside her. By further understanding her unbound ambitions, her love of the finer things in life, and the good works that she …

The Land Beyond The Mountains: The Trans-Appalachian Frontier And The Formation Of Appalachian Identity, Joshua Goodall

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The field of Appalachian history often discusses the existence of an identity quintessential to Appalachia. In the opinion of many scholars, this identity, typically characterized as a sense of “otherness” compared to the rest of the nation, dates back to the post-Civil War period when the authors from outside the region began to write about the people of the mountains as inherently different and strange compared to other regions of the United States. However, the sense of otherness in Appalachia dates far before this period and even predates the establishment of the United States as a sovereign nation. Combining present …

Middle-Class Millions: The Creation Of Atlantic City's "Modern" Image, 1890-1910, Trevor Cooper

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

By the end of the nineteenth century, vacationing became more accessible to middle-class Americans than ever before, resulting in the growth of tourist destinations on the New Jersey shore, particularly in Atlantic City. Between 1890 and 1910, government officials, railroad companies, and hotel owners advertised Atlantic City’s technological and cultural modernity to middle-class Americans particularly in Philadelphia, creating an image of Atlantic City as a modern middle-class utopia.

This thesis further examines the relationship between consumerism and American middle-class identity. While we often consider the link between consumerism and identity to have been solidified in American culture following the Second …

The Ku Klux Klan In Early Twentieth Century Virginia, James Lamb

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Over the past one hundred years or so, interest in the Ku Klux Klan has ebbed and flowed. The Klan was founded after the Civil War as a reaction to the imposition of Reconstruction on the former Confederate states. The target of the Klan was primarily African-Americans. The second phase of the Klan took place in the early twentieth century and was a response to immigration which followed World War I. The targets of the early twentieth century Klan expanded beyond just African-Americans to include Catholics, Jews and immigrants. The third phase of the Klan arose in the 1950s and …

The Presbyterian Enlightenment: The Confluence Of Evangelical And Enlightenment Thought In British America, Brandon S. Durbin

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Eighteenth-Century British American Presbyterian ministers incorporated covenantal theology, ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment, and resistance theory in their sermons. The sermons of Presbyterian ministers strongly indicate the intermixing of enlightenment and evangelical ideas. Congregants heard and read these sermons, spreading these ideas to the average colonist. This combination helps explain why American Presbyterians were so apt to resist British rule during the American Revolution. Protestant covenantal theology, derived from Protestant reformers like John Calvin and John Knox, emphasized virtue and duty. This covenant affected both the people and their rulers. When rulers failed to uphold their covenant with God, the …

Between The World And Them, Jeffrey L. Lauck

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

The first time I learned the story of the Bryan family and their Gettysburg farm was when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. For Coates, there was something poetic about the fact that the climax of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most well-known battle—a moment forever enshrined in Confederate memory thanks to the likes of William Faulknerand Ted Turner—occurred on land owned by a free black man and his family. Pickett’s Charge—the greatest symbol of Confederate martial honor in the Civil War canon—had been repulsed on property that represented so much of what its participants fought …

Nevada Digital Newspaper Project, Carrie Gaxiola, Marina Georgieva, Peter Michel, Yvonne Wilk

Library Faculty Presentations

Chronicling America is a nation-wide project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to make historical newspapers available online and full text searchable. Nevada has participated in the project since 2014. Each grant cycle lasts two years and produces 100,000 digitized news pages for online access. Title selection is guided by an Advisory Board to represent each county of Nevada. These newspapers are the first draft of history, show the daily lives, perspectives, and events of the past. Much of the content offers rich research material within the topics of women’s rights and suffrage, …

"Did You Ever Hear Of A Man Having A Child?": An Examination Of The Risk And Benefits Of Being An African American Female Soldier During America's Civil War, Kirsten Chaney

Graduate Theses

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social, economic, and political benefits for African American females who cross-dressed to join both the Confederate and Union Armies during the American Civil War. The benefits gained by the African American women who disguised themselves as males improved their overall quality of life when compared to other African American women of their era. The improved quality of life for these disguised women was made available through the increased number of options granted to African American males in the social, economic, and political spheres that were denied to African American women. The …

The Second Great Awakening And The Making Of Modern America, Kerry Irish

Faculty Publications - Department of History and Politics

In the decades before the Civil War which began in 1861, the Second Great Awakening was the most powerful social movement in America. It inspired the conversion of millions of Americans to faith in Jesus Christ. And that faith motivated many of those people to attempt to transform the moral habits of the nation. Slavery was ended, consumption of alcohol reduced, women’s rights, though often opposed by people of faith, were set on a path that would result in woman’s suffrage in the early Twentieth century. A host of other reforms, too many to list, were instigated. It is not …

A Martin Luther King Jr. Amendment To The U.S. Constitution: Toward The Abolition Of Poverty, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prescribed that we add an economic bill of rights to the U.S. Constitution. A King-Inspired bill of rights should include a constitutional amendment that enumerates a natural human right to be free from economic poverty, and appropriate enforcement legislation.

For the sake of abolishing slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment says:

(Section 1) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

(Section 2) Congress shall have power to enforce this article by …

Lg Ms 045 Howard Solomon Collection, Anthony Marvullo

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

The Howard Solomon Collection documents the art, activism, and scholarship of Howard Solomon, spanning the late 1960s to 2017.

Because Howard was the scholar-in-residence from 2002 to 2008, much of the material acts as a survey of the larger LGBTQ+ Collection. See Appendix C for a full list of cross-referenced papers, archives, and collections.

Amjambo Africa! (May 2018), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

Welcome to Amjambo Africa! Welcome to Amjambo Africa! We are Maine’s free newspaper for and about New Mainers from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Amjambo Africa! is here to help New Mainers thrive and to help Maine welcome and benefit from our new neighbors.

Amjambo Africa! will serve as a conduit of information for newcomers as they navigate life in Maine.

Amjambo Africa! will include background articles about Africa so those from Maine can understand why newcomers have arrived here.

Amjambo Africa! will profile successful New Mainers from Sub-Saharan Africa in order to give hope to those newly arrived as well as make …

C.D.G. Club - Bowling Green, Kentucky (Sc 3214), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3214. Minutes of the C.D.G. (Children Desiring God) Club, Bowling Green, Kentucky, composed of women members of the First Baptist Church. Includes meeting minutes, members lists, and financial data.

U.S. Presidential Leadership And Crisis Rhetoric, Robert Mccabe

Honors Projects in History and Social Sciences

My capstone project seeks to determine what are U.S. presidents attempting to accomplish in (or with) their speeches? This matters because presidential responses to crises can reflect how a president’s leadership abilities are perceived by the people he serves. This perception plays a large role in determining how much political strength the president has to accomplish his agenda. I address this research question by analyzing four different speeches: President Kennedy’s Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy’s Address on the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Bush’s National Cathedral Speech after the September 11th …

Cowboy Art Song: A Contextual And Musical Analysis Of Libby Larsen's "Cowboy Songs", Ann Gabrielle Richardson

Dissertations

This dissertation sprang from a combination of two personal interests: cowboy culture and classical art song. The union of my cowgirl heritage with my career as a classical vocalist has long fueled an interest in a particular niche of repertoire: soprano art song with thematic connections to the North American cowboy. A conducted state of research reveals no scholarly literature exploring this specific topic. Libby Larsen’s collection, Cowboy Songs, fulfills the aforementioned niche, successfully capturing the spirit, musical idioms, and cultural themes of the North American cowboy.

Chapter I lays a contextual foundation for cowboy song, providing a catalogue …