United States History Commons^™

Goodnight Moonshine : The Lasting Effects Of Prohibition On The United States., John Slack

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Alcohol constitutes an integral part of societies across the world. This pattern can be seen in the United States where conflicts over alcohol’s place in the country have permeated the social landscape since the beginning of the nation. From colonial times to the modern day, society has viewed alcohol as a deplorable vice, an enjoyable indulgence, a rite of passage, an inherent freedom, and the reason for many of society’s woes. To better understand alcohol’s role in United States history, one needs to examine a key event and public policy that dealt with alcohol: Prohibition. Spanning from 1920 to 1933, …

I Want To Be In That Number: A Song Profile Of "When The Saints Go Marching In", Gregory H. Jacks

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

“When the Saints Go Marching In” has never been subject to a sustained study of its origins, disseminations, and current manifestations. A study like this, focused on a song’s perceptions via various viewpoints through time, is typically referred to as a song profile; a form of reception history specifically concentrated on a single musical composition. “When the Saints Go Marching In,” also known as “Saints” or “The Saints,” is an African-American spiritual typically listed as a traditional in most songbooks without a composer.[1] I have laid out this paper into four sections, one for each period of the song’s …

The True University: Yale's Library From 1843 To 1931, Elizabeth D. James

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

By the summer of 1930, Sterling Memorial Library was nearing completion, lacking only the university’s 1.6 million books. At 6:00 AM on July 7, with a ceremonial parade of the library’s earliest accessions, the two-month project of moving the books commenced. Leading the trail of librarians was the head librarian, Andrew Keogh, and the head of the serials cataloguing department, Grace Pierpont Fuller. Fuller was the descendant of James Pierpont, one of the principal founders of Yale, and was carrying the Latin Bible given by her ancestor during the fabled 1701 donation of books that signaled the foundation of the …

Regulating The Dead: Rights For The Corpse And The Removal Of San Francisco's Cemeteries, Lance Muckey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A specialized facet of American common law developed throughout the nineteenth century; that being mortuary law or the law of the corpse. This jurisprudence transferred limited property rights to dead bodies, which was a radical departure from the treatment of the dead under the English common law tradition that the United States had adopted after the American Revolution.

The dead fit into a unique category in law. Legally they do not exist and therefore have no voice. It thus falls to the state to speak for them in the form of statutes and judicial decisions, which represents a continuation of …

The Evolution Of Prometheanism: Józef Piłsudski’S Strategy And Its Impact On Twenty-First Century World Affairs, Phillip Tadeusz Turner

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

As the Bolsheviks attempted to assert their control over the territory of the Russian Empire during the chaotic years of the Russian Civil War many ethnic groups and nations formerly part of the empire declared their independence. Józef Piłsudski as the leader of the Second Polish Republic implemented a strategy called Prometheanism that sought to secure Poland’s newly won independence by helping neighboring nations, such as Ukraine, break away from Russian control. Promethean ideas survived the destruction of the Polish state in 1939 when Poles with ties to Piłsudski or Prometheanism who fled to the West after the start of …

Irish Women's Immigration To The United States After The Potato Famine, 1860-1900, Mackenzie S. Flanagan

Senior Theses

Thousands of single Irish women emigrated to the United States after the Great Potato Famine. These women left Ireland because social conditions in Ireland limited their opportunities for fulfilling lives. Changes in marriage and inheritance patterns lowered the status of unmarried women and made marriage increasingly unlikely. As a result, many women emigrated to the United States and, once here, worked, used their wages to help others emigrate, and most eventually married. Irish culture facilitated this mass migration by promoting the autonomy of single women yet limiting their options. Emigration did not signify a break with their Irish culture and …

A Portrait Of Chinese Americans: From The Perspective Of Assimilation, Wei Bai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With more than 40 million immigrants, the United States is the major destination for most international migrants. It has always been so because America is a nation of immigrants. The United States has been shaped by four waves of immigration, and unlike previous waves, in the past 50 years immigrants have come from Latin America and Asia more than other regions of the world. Chinese immigration is the focus of this thesis. Chinese people have been present in this society from before the Revolutionary War, and their story is a complex one--one marked by rapid growth, discrimination, exclusion, acceptance, more …

America's War In Angola, 1961-1976, Alexander Joseph Marino

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A study of the role played by the United States in Angola's War of Independence and the Angolan Civil War up to 1976.

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 …

Under The Shadow Of The Awful Gallows-Tree: The Murder Trials Of Thomas Dula And Ann Melton As A Case Study In Gender And Power In Reconstruction Era Western North Carolina, Heather L. Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a micro-history that explores everyday life on a small scale by tracing the common, if elusive lives of Thomas Dula, Ann Melton, and Laura Foster, and the communities they lived in, to explore the culture in which they lived—and died. Reactions to the murder unleashed an outpouring of discourse embedded in broader, national debates concerning gender roles. The dominant cultural theme that emerged from the murder trials as reflected in middle-class newspapers maintained that true women did not kill and real men acted as gentlemen and defenders of women’s honor. The project mines a wealth of primary source …

"If De Babies Cried": Slave Motherhood In Antebellum Missouri, Lucy Phelps Hamilton

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Slavery in Missouri was typically small-scale in nature and featured smallholdings possessing few slaves. Situated on the periphery of the South and the western border of the antebellum United States, Missouri, even after achieving statehood, remained a frontier. This small-scale frontier environment provides an opportunity for the close examination of slave motherhood. Focusing on slave motherhood through the lens of small-scale slavery in Missouri, I am able to closely examine the day-to-day lives of these women and focus on their common experiences as mothers living in bondage. This in turn paints a broader picture of typical slave mother experiences in …

Disillusionment Versus Loyalty In The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1937-1938, Charles Rehberger Iii

Honors College Theses

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is the unit of American volunteers fighting within the International Brigades and on the side of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. Analysis of the Brigade and their role in Spain has led to greatly diverging views on why their service ended in defeat and who was to blame for it. While revisionist historians such as Ronald Radosh and Cecil Eby conclude that the Soviet Union was at fault for imposing political pressure on the Republic, sending incompetent officers to command the International Brigades, and using the volunteers to stall as they bled Spain’s gold …

Encounters With The American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, And The Search For The Authentic Plains In The Nineteenth Century, Jacob L. Vines

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the …

Between Two Fires: The Origins Of Settler Colonialism In The United States And French Algeria, Ashley Sanders

Library Staff Publications and Research

This dissertation is a comparative study of the establishment of settler colonies in the American Midwest (1778-1795) and French colonial Algeria (1830-1848). It examines how interactions between the Indigenous populations, colonists, colonial administrators, the military, and the métropole shaped their development and advances the theory of settler colonialism. This study centers on the first fifteen to twenty years of conquest/occupation in the American Midwest, focusing specifically on southern Illinois and Indiana, and the province of Constantine, Algeria. Despite differences in geography, relative size of the military presence and Indigenous demographics, the process of establishing settler colonies in both locations followed …

The Realities Of Foreign Humanitarianism And The U.S. Military: Nineteenth Century Roots, David Mock

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

For nearly two centuries, United States (U.S.) political policy and non-government organizations (NGOs) had delivered foreign humanitarian assistance (FHA) when and where needed. The logistical capability of the professional U.S. military has allowed it to become an enduring delivery method for FHA. Since the 2000s, Congress has actively shaped the Department of Defense’s (DoD) role in humanitarian operations through a wide variety of authorities contained in the Armed Services (Title 10 U.S. Code) and Foreign Relations and Intercourse (Title 22 U.S. Code) statutes, and through annual legislation. Each branch of the military has also developed more defined doctrines in response …

Claiming The Best Of Both Worlds: Mixed Heritage Children Of The Pacific Northwest Fur Trade And The Formation Of Identity, Alanna Cameron Beason

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, a region encompassing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, the western half of Montana, and British Columbia, supplied the needed ingredients for the formation of a distinctive identity to form among the mixed heritage children born to indigenous women and men of the fur trade. This thesis examined how this identity formed in some the leading families of the time. The MacDonald’s, McKay’s, and the Tolmie’s all embraced both sides of their parental cultures and used them to create and defend their own sense of identity and community. Language was an important aspect of this new …

Documenting Ferguson: Capturing History As It Happens, Sonya Rooney, Jennifer Kirmer

WashU Libraries Presentations

This poster chronicles a novel archive project—the Documenting Ferguson Project at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). Our poster highlighted our steps in the documentation and preservation of materials created in the course of and surrounding events in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. WUSTL created a committee, consisting of University Archives and other library staff, faculty, and additional university staff, to coordinate the efforts to capture the history as it happened. The Documenting Ferguson Project Team was called together in August 2014, soon after the death of Michael Brown and the first …

Treasonous Patriot: A Comparative Content Analysis Of The Media's Portrayals Of Daniel Ellsberg And Edward Snowden, Kaylin Mcloud

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On June 9, 2013, the world was introduced to Edward Joseph Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA contractor and the man responsible for the biggest leak of classified government documents in American history. Almost immediately, comparisons were drawn between Snowden and another famous whistleblower--Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. The overwhelming rhetoric surrounding the comparison was that Ellsberg was a true American patriot and that Snowden was nothing like him, that he was a traitor. Despite Ellsberg's own claims that he and Snowden are exactly alike, the media still finds Snowden lacking when comparing him with …

The Lover's Cup, Kimberlee Relyea Guin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This documentary film, The Lover's Cup is the story of a former Naval Officer from World War II, Dr. Phillip Trapp, who took Marines into the battle of Iwo Jima and lived to see the flag being raised on Mt. Suribachi. This 55-minute film explores his life experiences before, during and following World War II. His first-hand experiences are used to illustrate the Social and psychological impact of the Great Depression and World War II and his journey to overcome his adversity and create positive changes in the world through his subsequent education and service at the University of Arkansas …

Let Him Be An Honor To The Country: Veteran Violence And Public Opinion After The Civil War, Laura Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the causes, perception, and treatment of violence and crime committed by veterans after America's Civil War. After an examination of the research problems plaguing the study of violence and crime among veterans, this study uses newspaper articles, tracts and sermons, the published journals and letters of Union and Confederate soldiers, and other contemporary sources to evaluate the presence and perception of violence and the hardships associated with the homecoming of veterans. Alcohol and drug addiction that began during the war followed veterans home. Discipline in the army was inconsistent, and violence abounded in camp as well as …