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Revising The Nation: Tribal Sovereignty And The American History Textbook, 1929-2002, Grace R. Ellis

Library Map Prize

This thesis examines Indigenous representation in twentieth-century American history textbooks. Chapter One contends that the most popular U.S. history textbook of the late twentieth century, The American Pageant, erased tribal nations from its narrative and its maps. Across twelve editions (1956-2002), The Pageant taught generations of students that “Indians” served only as barriers to building the modern American nation-state. While Indigenous erasure can be traced back to specific passages in The Pageant, erasure can better be understood as an iterative process, both textual and cartographic in nature. Beginning in 1983, The Pageant added new maps that depicted tribes …

Reconceptualizing Madness: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Autobiography And The Cultural Landscape Of Insanity, Gender, And The Illness Experience, Claire Paley

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Project Tackle 12 Years Of Cia And Taiwanese Joint Reconnaissance Overflights, Maximilian Digiovanni

Honors Theses and Capstones

Project TACKLE was a joint collaborative project between the CIA and the Taiwanese government to facilitate U-2 spy plane missions flown by Taiwanese pilots over China. These missions, conducted from 1962 to 1974, provide critical insights regarding the US and Taiwan’s fluctuating relationship during this period. TACKLE missions played a crucial role in informing policymakers on a variety of subjects, such as the progress of China’s rapidly evolving nuclear weapons program. This paper situates the TACKLE missions within the broader political context of their time to highlight the constant prioritization challenge that plagued the program.

Healing Communities With Police Divestment: Seeking Abolition Through Transformative Reform And Community-Government Collaboration, Jessica E. Gillson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Concerns about the efficacy and sustainability of the U.S. carceral system have persisted throughout the country’s history, recently fueling renewed activism and bipartisan calls for reform. However, proposed solutions remain divisive. This thesis first defines the current status of our prison systems, then explores collaborative alternatives to incarceration and policing that support communities and break cycles of incarceration.

Focusing on partnerships among local governments, community organizations, justice-involved individuals, and law enforcement, this study examines holistic approaches to crime prevention, reentry, and reintegration. Using an interdisciplinary framework incorporating restorative justice, community resilience, and systems theory, it investigates how community-based strategies can …

In Search Of A State, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a legal history of one of America’s earliest campaigns of state legislative resistance: the effort in Massachusetts to protest the national government’s perceived dismantling of an old Atlantic commercial order from 1803 to 1815. To date, scholars have either condemned this protest as a dangerous harbinger of the Civil War or vindicated it as an inevitable and salutary extension of the Founding. This article steers a different course. By focusing on the evolving language of protest and the complex hybrid of ideas and material realities from which this language emerged, this article illuminates how Federalist leaders who …

Critical Theory And The Decline Of American Patriotism, Caron L. Norton

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

Abstract

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN PATRIOTISM

Caron Norton

Southeastern University, 2025

Nationwide there has been a progressive decline in patriotism since the turn of the 21st century. Instead of growing in affection towards their country, more and more American citizens reach adulthood frustrated and angry with the United States and its heritage. Some become consumed with hatred. Rather than honoring America’s forefathers, Americans have torn down and desecrated statues and symbols from the past. Where did this antipatriotic fervor come from? How did Americans become disillusioned? This shift in mood can be directly attributed to the rise …

A Crucible For Allotment And Assimilation: The Referendum For Ratification Of The Sioux Act Of 1889 On The Standing Rock Agency, Richard Keith Smith

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Determining post-Civil War national policy regarding American Indians was a tedious process. Many entities could describe themselves as stakeholders in the process, stakeholders who were beholding motivations which they would describe as significant. Those motivations would, to varying degrees, take the interest of Native Americans into consideration. It was in the liminal environment of volatile policy adjustments that American Indians were compelled to make decisions regarding their future. The Dakota (Sioux) represented a crucible for the recently approved General Allotment Act of 1887. The rise of progressive tribal leadership was a primary reason for the sudden passage of the Sioux …

The Heart Of The University: Student Clubs And The American Colonization Of The Pacific, Eli Arnold

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Students have travelled across the Pacific Ocean to study at the University of Montana for over a century, and the contributions of these students deserve to be studied. This thesis explores the educational and community building roles that the historic International Club and Filipino Club, as well as the contemporary Pacific Islanders Club fulfilled. Students from the Philippines and Hawaiʻi provide clear examples of the potential for college campuses to be gathering places for broader community. This thesis is also a study of the global phenomenon of colonialism as seen from Filipino and Native Hawaiian students who travelled to Missoula …

Stamper, James W. - Volume 4, Carter County Genealogical Society, Olive Stamper, Howard Pollitt

Carter County Genealogy Collection

Genealogy of the James W. and Sarah (Moore) Stamper family in Carter County, Kentucky.

James is the father of William 'Tater Bill' and John R. 'Pewter John' Stamper

Graduate Portfolio, Cody Miller

Graduate Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Searching For The "Tender Places": Shoddy, Knowledge, And Material Culture In The Civil War Era, Robert William Novak

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In the American Civil War era, shoddy was difficult to understand. It was simultaneously seen as evidence of advancing western civilization as well as a disgusting amalgamation of refuse and disease that threatened those who touched it. Made from shredding woolen rags and tailors’ clippings, the recycled woolen fibers could by applied in myriad woolen blends that came to dominate the ready-made clothing industry that developed through the first half of the nineteenth century. Its application could soften coarse blends and refine the appearance of cheap cloth. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, however, shoddy came to define …

Operation Dumbo Drop: Cultural Memory, And Representations Of The Vietnam War In The 1990s, Sylvie Kromer

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1995, the film Operation Dumbo Drop was released by Walt Disney Pictures. This film, based on a true story of elephants being airlifted across Vietnam in 1968 by the American military, holds a unique position as a rare family-friendly comedy about the Vietnam War. As a reflection of 1990s-era cultural memory of the Vietnam War, the film rehistoricizes and sanitizes the war, following a similar trend in other pieces of media from the same era. Operation Dumbo Drop must be seen in this context and as a product of the moment in which it was made. In taking a …

From Curiosity To Controversy: American Perception Of Japanese Immigrants, 1853-1924, Chloe Elizabeth Curbelo

Theses and Dissertations

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States reached the Pacific through westward expansion, Asia emerged as a new stage for commerce and power. Japan, long isolated under the Tokugawa shogunate, became an object of American fascination when forced into relations. While early depictions cast Japan as an exotic yet uncivilized nation in need of Western guidance, Japan’s rapid modernization and the growing number of Japanese immigrants on the West Coast transformed curiosity into anxiety. My paper traces this evolution of perception from 1850 to 1924, arguing that shifting views of Japan and its people reflected America’s ethnocentric notions of …

Dividing Paradise: A History Of Land In Hawai'i, Lacy Nicholas

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper acts as a biography of Hawaiian land, using multidisciplinary sources to construct a timeline of how land has been conceptualized and used by the people who live there. It analyzes Hawai'i as a settler colony. I begin with the first Polynesian settlers in Hawai'i, focusing on the feudal-like division and redistribution of land by the king in the pre-colonial era. Then, I discuss the attitude of the American settlers in Hawai'i and how those ideas were manifested in the privatization of land and the age of sugarcane plantations. Next, I focus on how the United States military has …

Reclaiming Revolutionary Relics: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Used George Washington’S Objects To Understand The Civil War, Abbi E. Smithmyer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

By combining cultural, memory, and material culture studies, this dissertation examines the ways objects associated with George Washington became instruments within the proxy war over whether the United States or the Confederacy best represented the American Revolutionary era’s principal values of liberty and equality. Exploring monuments, statues, historic homes, relics, and mementoes, as well as antebellum speeches and schoolbooks, letters, diaries, military orders, newspapers, and memoirs, this work demonstrates how the relics linked to Washington and the nation’s founding shaped how the Civil War generation thought about America’s past.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States has …

Bargaining For Statehood: The Intersection Of Capitalism And Politics In The Creation Of West Virginia, Kristen L. Bailey

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This project explores the original architecture of West Virginia. The plans and deliberate construction of the new state not only represented the longstanding desire of western counties for equitable representation in its legislature but also rested on the economic and political ambition of the movement’s leaders. Not all western counties supported independent statehood, and a substantial number of counties favored secession. Without a cohesive citizen consensus to embark upon statehood, traditional narratives that the western counties embarked on statehood solely to protect republican interests bears further investigation. Lacking a unified front, political and business leaders steered the movement through the …

Rifles And Riflemen: Material Culture, Violence, And Early American Identity, 1720 -- 1820, John Bradstreet Weaver

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The rifle was one of many material objects which colonists of British North America brought with them from Europe. Starting in the early eighteenth century, German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania began to manufacture rifles from locally made and imported parts. These rifles became associated with other material objects – namely a system of dress, which included wearing a whitetail deer’s tail in the hat, the hunting shirt, and forms of Native American dress – which became emblematic of some British colonists who used rifles in hunting and war. Rifles became militarily important in the Seven Years’ War, where Native American warriors, …

From Conscientious French Canadian To Enterprising American: Making Memory & Measuring Social Mobility Of French Canadians 1880-1940, Brooke S. Schwaderer

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis studies the social mobility of French-Canadian immigrants to the Keweenaw Peninsula 1880-1940 and memory among their descendants to explain how French-Canadian culture in the Keweenaw faded over time. Oral histories were conducted to gain an understanding of the current French-Canadian culture in the Keweenaw, understand how the current generation perceives changes in culture over time, and provide possible explanations for why French-Canadians thrived in the Keweenaw. Tax records from the Michigan Technological University Archives and social mobility scores, mother tongue, and homeownership information from the United States census was analyzed to measure language loss, and the social mobility …

Outlaws, Lawmen, And The Emergence Of Justice On The Western Frontier, Kaci Mae Krier

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Defining ‘Un-Americanism’ In Culture And Art: The Dies Committee’S Investigation Of The Federal Theatre Project, Matthew G. Summers

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) expansive definition of ‘Un-Americanism’ through the body’s 1938 investigation of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). The committee, then known as the Dies Committee after its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX), publicly presented the hearings as an attempt to root out communism in a deeply compromised government program. And indeed the FTP, an ambitious New Deal Program to provide work for unemployed professionals in the theatre, had an undoubtedly leftist bent. However, the hearings were consistently focused on the project's progressive stances on issues of race and gender, and effectively exposed the underlying …

From Lithuania To Mobile: An Immigrant’S Memoir Comes To Light, Deborah Gurt

University Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Taking God's Country: The University Of Montana, Morton J. Elrod, And Allotment On The Flathead Reservation, Dylan Tate Yonce

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the University of Montana (UM) developed from a small frontier college into an influential research institution. During its maturation process, the University relied on the acquisition of land to expand. In addition to its main campus in Missoula, the university sought land for research and recreation. When Congress passed the Flathead Allotment Act (1904), UM became one of many non-Native beneficiaries of federal land dispossession policy in the United States. Existing scholarship has largely homed in on “land grant” universities established through the Morrill Act (1862), which effectively dispossessed ten million acres …

Workable Seams, Jackson Mills Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In Jackson Mills Smith’s Workable Seams, readers encounter the stories, landscapes, and lives of rural Knox County, Indiana, from the oscillating vantage of a Hoosier boy raised with a Cajun sensibility. After relocating from Louisiana to the river bottoms of the crossroad state at a young age, the speaker gradually uncovers a local history only previously understood in fragmentary shards and fading glimpses.

Alternating between semi-lyrical embodied experiences and memories, documentary pieces in conversation with the state’s historical archive, and the retelling of exaggerated local yarns, poetry is a means of inquiry in Workable Seams. Topics range from …

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

America's Highest Stage: Utopians, Capitalists, And Trail Runners On Pikes Peak, Mitchell Morris

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Since ancient times, Pikes Peak’s prominence on the land has endowed it with prominence in the minds of all who have lived around it. This ancient dynamic was reinforced in the nineteenth century by the famed expedition of Lieutenant Zebulon Pike in 1806 and the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858. Since then, the mountain has become a stage. Standing tall, visible from hundreds of miles around, and known from coast to coast, Pikes Peak is a platform that has attracted diverse historical actors to come and perform, elevate their endeavors to new heights, and demonstrate what they, and people …

Weaving Threads Of Identity: A Qualitative Study On Reconnecting Indigenous Folx, Rachael L. Fuller

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This research is a qualitative phenomenological inquiry into reconnecting Indigenous participants’ experiences in how they navigate and integrate their cultural heritage, identity, and intergenerational experiences to shape their present and future lives. Previous literature examines characterizing Indigeneity, navigating multiple spaces, and culture as wellness. Rooted in Tribal Critical Race Theory, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine participants who self-identified as Indigenous. A thematic analysis highlighted six themes of reconnection: a) oppression, b) ancestors, c) belonging, d) barriers to reconnection, e) learning, and f) connection with community. This research makes a contribution to the growing Indigenous identity literature by providing an …

Black Bodies On American Stages, Gabrielle Burton

Honors College Theses

The following study explores the character types that have been historically available to Black actors in American theatre and how that representation enforced, resisted, or ignored stereotypes. To examine the impact of those roles on the performers who played them, I examine the documented approaches Black actors have taken to embody their characters, as well as my own evolving process used to portray the eight characters I have inhabited in my personal college performance career at Georgia Southern University. This research and retrospective analysis reveal that while a lazy or performative indifference leads to harm, color-conscious inclusion, challenging conversations, and …

Using Gis To Visualize Daily Routines At The Neighborhood And Household Scales: A Feminist Approach Using A Nineteenth-Century Diary, Sterling D. Quinn

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Feminist scholars in the discipline of geography have noted the ways that routine activities at the household and neighborhood scales contribute to power relations and identity formation. Geographic information systems (GIS), with their ability to create multiple visual representations of people’s experiences in space at any scale, hold great potential for revealing these local processes and patterns that are often lost or invisible in broader historical narratives, especially when they pertain to women and children. This article contributes an example by using GIS to encode and map everyday events in a diary kept by Elisabeth Koren, a nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrant …

Day In The Life At The North Dakota School For The Blind; 1929-1932, Katelynn Berg

History Hawks: A North Dakota History Zine

This zine describes a day in the life at the North Dakota School for the Blind during the early years of the Great Depression. The goal is to analyze if and how the school and its students were affected by the Great Depression.

Re-Indigenizing And Collaboratively Tending Urban Greenspaces, Divinity Nnenne Adewale

University Honors Theses

This work details the active process of land tending with the intention of re-Indigenization in the Pacific Northwest at several Portland sites; The Native American Student Community Center, PSU Oak Savanna, and the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Land tending is an intuitive process, one rooted in love and respect for life of all forms as well as becoming the perpetual student; land tending is not a skill to be mastered, only practiced. Unlike environmental management, tending cannot be done separate from the earth, in a classroom or otherwise. Connections are what tending is built on top of: the foundation; effort …