United States History Commons^™

Towards Sociobiogeochemistry: Critical Perspectives On Anthropogenic Alterations To Soil Nitrogen Chemistry Via U.S. Urban And Suburban Development, Christopher D. Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ecological impacts of changes to land use are relevant to concerns about climate change, eutrophication of waterbodies, and reductions in biodiversity. As a foundational component of ecosystem functioning, changes to soil biogeochemistry have significant effects on overall ecosystem health. With cities continuing to grow and develop in extent, the impacts of urbanization and suburbanization on soils are of particular concern. Despite a wide range of natural climatic and geologic conditions, several factors have driven similar patterns of land transformation and management across the United States. In particular, federal initiatives including the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, …

New York City’S Health Governance And Activism From The 1950s To The 1970s, Andres Valcarcel

Theses and Dissertations

New York City's expansive network of hospitals and preventative health services has an intense history outside of the popular narratives of biomedical and technological advancement. This thesis will discuss the period between the 1950s and 1970s and the various movements and parties that shaped the city's health and hospital system. During this period, New York City's healthcare delivery system became increasingly privatized and commercialized; processes that improved the quality of healthcare yet simultaneously barred the poorest from accessing it. Communities, healthcare workers, and civil rights organizations worked to address perceived faults and extend their agency in health and hospital policy; …

Resilience And Resistance: Culture, Conversion, And Survival Among The Stockbridge Mohicans, Mariah N. Ramdeen

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the history of conversion among the Mohican band in Stockbridge, Massachusetts from the 1730s to the 1740s. Focusing on the praying town under the ministry of Reverend John Sergeant at Stockbridge in 1736, I seek to reconstruct the resistance and survivance at the heart of the Stockbridge Mohicans’ experience. My research will explore why the Mohicans chose to establish the Stockbridge praying town and why they chose to convert to Christianity, the religion of the Puritan colonizers. I will also explore how they used their conversion to promote their own community goals. While praying towns were designed …

An Excavation Of Margaret And Jerry Morgan: How The Architecture Of Black Liminal Spaces Shaped Antebellum Conflict Between Maryland And Pennsylvania, Felicia A. Appenteng

Dissertations and Theses

In the 1830s, Jerry and Margaret Morgan and their six children were living as a free Black family in rural Pennsylvania, one of a growing number of such families in a part of the state that bordered Maryland. Suddenly, their lives were violently disrupted in 1837 when a group of men from Maryland, led by Edward Prigg, entered into Pennsylvania to seize Margaret and the children so that they could be enslaved. Although the most dramatic, this was only the latest twist in the unusual lives of the Morgan family. Jerry Morgan was born into enslavement, gained his freedom, and …

Hall Of Fame For Great Americans Collection, 1894-2008, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar

Finding Aids

Finding aid for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans collection prepared by Bronx Community College Archives.

Review Of The Book Denial Of Genocides In The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bedross Der Matossian.

Take Back The Power: The Fall And Rise And Fall Of New York City's Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975–2009, Marc Kagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009 tracks the history of this strategically significant union from the onset of New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975 to the end, in 2009, of a second attempt to free transit workers from the grip of neoliberal economic austerity.

The first effort began in 1978 and culminated with the eleven-day 1980 transit strike, initiated by union dissidents over the opposition of the union president, but abruptly ended by him before a decisive victory could be won. That president, and his successors, reconciled themselves …

Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

Hist 104: America Since 1865, Douglas Manson

Open Educational Resources

This history course utilizes materials that are open sourced

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

The Queer Life Of Lorena Hickok, Samantha D. Leyerle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life of Lorena Hickok, a remarkable woman whose story has been glossed over throughout history. Hickok was an accomplished journalist and writer, and her life offers a fascinating glimpse into being queer in the early twentieth century. While much has been written about Hickok’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, this thesis aims to go beyond their connection to examine Hickok’s entire life and experiences in greater detail. Through analyzing her work as a writer, as well as her personal correspondence and unpublished autobiography, this thesis illuminates the quiet details of defining moments in history, including the Great …

Reproduction: The Ultimate Enemy Of Racial Passing In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Veronica Kordmany

Student Theses

"In this essay, I examine three texts that consider the repercussions of passing for Black Americans. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) serves as a namesake for this general idea, as two light-skinned African American women represent the divisionary approach to racial passing. In George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) we see a passing Black man’s virility being tested as he enters an ‘alternate universe’, in which a scientific invention grants him full access to the wondrous white world he’d always dreamed of entering. Finally, in the middle of this textual spectrum is Angelina W. Grimké’s 1919 short story, “The Closing …

The Language Of Legal Violence: The State’S Role In Silencing Capitalist Dissent, 1877-1915, Jaclene Paolucci

Theses and Dissertations

From the 1870s to the eve of World War I, the United States government enacted a violent and repressive campaign against labor activists and political radicals to protect capitalist interests. The growing alliance between employers and the government threatened American democratic traditions and turned those who challenged the capitalist system into potential enemies of the state.

Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The US Civil War was fought over slavery. But what do we really mean when we say that? This paper examines that question, first by exploring the idea of “higher law,” which gained tremendous traction in American society starting around 1850. Proponents of the idea claimed that laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act are immoral; that the immorality of such laws is self-evident, and that such immoral laws should be resisted—sometimes even with violence. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea of higher law were not necessarily in favor of slavery, but they opposed the use of extra-Constitutional means to bring …

Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.

Art, Propaganda, And Truth, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

This essay explores how British and American writers and theorists in the first half of the twentieth century thought about art, propaganda, and truth. Focusing largely on literature written during the First and the Second World Wars, this essay shows that very few authors defined their art as propaganda or truth and instead used words like “political,” “resistance,” “information,” and “anti-fascist” to describe their wartime writing. However, while authors might have eschewed the term propaganda, that does not mean that they avoided producing it. As this essay illustrates, what many authors wrote would now be considered “propaganda.” Moreover, even if …

The Final Straw: The Battle For Puerto Rico, Samantha N. Marrero

Theses and Dissertations

The Common Wealth of Puerto Rico has undergone tremendous amounts of oppression. The capstone will evaluate the policies imposed on the commonwealth by the United States, and the actions revolutionaries or independentistas took to have a liberated Puerto Rico

In A Country Obsessed With Mexican Food And Culture, Why Do Mexican People Not Receive The Same Reverence?, Elba T. Rodriguez

Capstones

For centuries, the U.S. has had a complicated relationship with immigration policies and people of color. And the U.S./Mexican border has long been a source of contention. From Operation Wetback to Trump’s “Build the Wall” campaign, Mexicans have faced outright prejudice and hate. This work will delve into the contradictory policies of the U.S. using Mexicans for physical labor while simultaneously deporting them back to Mexico. It will investigate the experiences of Mexicans in this country and the incongruity of many Americans that maintain anti-Mexican sentiments while also celebrating Mexican holidays, such as Dia de los Muertos or Cinco de …

Close-Quarters Antagonism: The New Left Within And Against The War On Poverty, Andrew S. Anastasi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation suggests a new way of thinking about relations between social movements and capitalist states through a comparative historical sociological study of how three New Left social movement organizations – Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, and the National VISTA Alliance – related to the United States government’s War on Poverty in the 1960s and 1970s. It contributes to historical knowledge of the period by investigating the archives of these social movement organizations, and it systematizes the viewpoint of movement participants in dialogue with social and political theory. The dissertation finds that the trajectories of these …

"Prophecies Of Loss": Debating Slave Flight During Virginia's Secession Crisis, Evan Turiano

Publications and Research

This article examines debates over fugitives from slavery during Virginia’s secession movement. By considering these debates in the context of Virginia’s history of freedom seekers, the constitutional politics of fugitive slave rendition, and white fears of politically informed slave resistance, this article clarifies how proslavery Virginians understood the threat posed by interstate slave flight in 1861. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's election, proslavery Virginians on both sides of the secession conflict agreed that runaways posed a grave danger to the future of slavery in the state. Early in the convention, southeastern planters and northwestern unionists forged an alliance based …

Katharine Bement Davis: Defying Expectations As A Woman And In The Study Of Women, Ella Hester

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Katharine Bement Davis’ (1860-1935) life and career as a highly educated scientist and Progressive activist placed her at the forefront of various moral panic debates at the turn of the twentieth century. Davis was born into a staunch abolitionist and suffragist family in upstate New York in 1860. Her family’s politics were grounded in progressive Protestant principles which allowed her to gain access to higher education as a white woman from a middle-class family. Her education left her poised to use the latest scientific research to shape Progressive dogma in the 1910s and 1920s. Davis’ education and the groundbreaking research …

Debt-Driven Settlerism: Small Farmers And Bankers In The Trans-Appalachian South, 1800–1820, Phil Agee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how indebted small farmers contributed to the territorial expansion of the United States into Native lands of the trans-Appalachian South during the formative decades of the US republic. Taking on debt to purchase land and pay for the operating costs of farming, small farmers, the vast majority of whom were white, faced insolvency, land forfeiture, imprisonment, precarity, and poverty. In their struggles to manage debt, they operated under a creditor-friendly regime rooted in monetary and credit innovations of the colonial period. Indebtedness repeatedly compelled many small farmers to reenter the cycle of migration and settlement, serving as …

"Secession's Moving Foundation": Fugitive Slave Rendition And The Politics Of American Slavery, Evan Turiano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the political conflict over fugitive slave rendition from the era of the American Revolution through the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. It pays particular attention to the struggle over the legal rights due to African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves. Slaveholders claimed an absolute property right over accused fugitive slaves and argued that any recognition of legal remedies for accused runaways threatened that right. Free African Americans and their allies in the abolitionist movement asserted that Black people accused of having escaped slavery were due a legal process. This was a vital protection against …

Decolonizing Genderqueer: An Inquiry Into The Gender Binary, Resistance, And Imperialistic Social Categories, Lauren E. Abruzzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines core metaphysical properties of nonbinary and genderqueer categories in dominant U.S. contexts. I address a prevailing argument that these categories, by definition, resist the gender binary and are therefore radical modes of existing. In response, I put forth a view of ‘nonbinary’ and ‘genderqueer’ that I call the Diachronic Approach, which describes these categories as yet another set of tools within an imperialistic gender system, much like ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ In other words, they are what I refer to as imperialistic social categories. While nonbinary and genderqueer people do not fall perfectly within the U.S. gender …

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

Asian Americans Challenge The Official Racial Nationalism Of The United States, Frank Wu

Publications and Research

The very definition of “Asian American,” which historically has been based upon the formal exclusion of this grouping, demonstrates the racial nationalism of the United States Racial nationalism is not new. It has been the norm in America (and arguably remains the norm elsewhere, including throughout Asia) to identify belonging to a shared race as essential to membership within a nation-state. This essay uses the Wong Kim Ark case, recognizing birthright citizenship for an individual of Chinese descent, and the Korematsu case, allowing the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, as a means of showing how government officials conceived …

The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …

North Of The Grid: The Black Experience Of 17th -19th Century Rural New York City, Stephanie E. Barnes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, transatlantic slavery was a racial project and template for race-making which created a country that relied on institutions that were organized and performed through social stratification. Today, the nation still operates on systemically racist institutions that have benefited whites while disadvantaging ‘others.’ The narratives presented in American history are rooted in whiteness and benefit the white community while marginalizing nonwhites. Over two hundred years of slavery history in this country has been purposely manipulated and left out. My research focuses on using an historical archaeological framework to research and share the lives of free and enslaved …