United States History Commons^™

Richardson, Sarah Nell (Pickett), 1915-2000 (Sc 2903), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2903. Wedding book, gift cards, and greeting card from the wedding of Sarah Nell Pickett to Harry Blair Richardson, Sr. on 30 April 1939, held in Joplin, Missouri. Book includes list of attendees.

Museum Spaces As Psychological Affordances: Representations Of Immigration History And National Identity, Sahana Mukherjee, Phia S. Salter, Ludwin E. Molina

Psychology Faculty Publications

The present research draws upon a cultural psychological perspective to consider how psychological phenomena are grounded in socio-cultural contexts. Specifically, we examine the association between representations of history at Ellis Island Immigration Museum and identity-relevant concerns. Pilot study participants (N = 13) took a total of 114 photographs of exhibits that they considered as most important in the museum. Results indicate that a majority of the photographs reflected neutral themes (n = 81), followed by nation-glorifying images (n = 24), and then critical themes that highlight injustices and barriers faced by immigrants (n = 9). Study 1 examines whether there …

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 …

Landscape Visibility And Prehistoric Artifact Distribution At Pea Ridge National Military Park, Jake Lee Mitchael

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pea Ridge National Military Park, in the north east corner of Benton County, Arkansas, is the 4,300 acre site of a crucial Civil War Battle. Human occupation of the Ozark Highland landscape, however, extends far into pre-history. A 2005 report to the National Park Service details the findings of a four year cultural resource survey of the park. The sampling strategy employed in the research design (random sample site selection and 2.5% park coverage) provides an excellent dataset to assess prehistoric land use. This dataset is not dependent on artificially defined sites, representing singular activity in a limited geographical space. …

Poo-Tee-Weet? Unintelligent Things To Say About A Massacre: Vonnegut’S Slaughterhouse Five And Us Interventions In The Post-Wwii Era, Kelly A. Mcardle

Honors Scholar Theses

While fighting in Europe during WWII, Kurt Vonnegut was taken prisoner and sent to work at a German prison camp where he witnessed one of the most destructive events of WWII, the firebombing of Dresden, Germany by the Allied forces. Although Vonnegut was liberated in 1945, the novel about the events he witnessed was not published until 1969. What happened in the intervening years to shape the novel that would eventually become Slaughterhouse Five? As Vonnegut grappled with his experiences for two decades, American leaders increased American involvement around the world. The explanations used to justify these interventions have …

The Guarantee Of Freedom And Dignity? Colombian Land Reform, The Alliance For Progress, And The United States, Thomas A. Costello

Honors Scholar Theses

Although the United States had involved itself in programs of land reform in Korea, Japan, and Western Europe in the mid-20^th century, prior to the establishment of the Alliance for Progress, there was little discussion of encouraging such programs in Latin America. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the attitudes towards land reform in Colombia prior to the signing of Colombian Law 135. By examining documents from the Kennedy administration, this thesis proves the United States exerted its influence on Latin American nations in the early 1960’s to promote the enacting of national agrarian reform projects. Furthermore, …

The Artist, The Workhorse: Labor In The Sculpture Of Anna Hyatt Huntington, Brooke Baerman

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) was an American sculptor of animals who founded the nation’s first sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens, in 1932. Hyatt Huntington, whose personal papers are housed at Syracuse University, is an important yet understudied artist. Focusing on Hyatt Huntington’s sculptures in Brookgreen Gardens and on the gardens themselves, which also included a zoo, this paper will examine themes of labor in the artist’s oeuvre.

Hyatt Huntington placed an emphasis on hard work as she fought to distinguish herself as a sculptor in a male-dominated field. The products of her labor often venerate the work of animals, from bulls …

A Qualitative Historiographical Case Study Of The Educative Properties Of Eugene V. Debs And John Dewey: 21st Century Implications For Education, Bradley Countermine

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to shed light on the current state of educational reform rhetoric through an analysis of previous attempts to shape public education for the benefit of all. Analyzing Eugene V. Debs’s and John Dewey’s views on democracy and education during the Progressive Era promotes a version and vision of education that inspires people to think critically, to navigate contemporary society, and to acknowledge current issues within public education and United States society at large. Because education both reflects society and has the power to transform it, the struggle for fair, equitable, and enlightening education is paramount to the …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

The X Patents: Patents Issued Under The Patent Acts Of 1790 & 1793, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

The earliest United States patents— sometimes called “name and date patents” because they were not numbered—are distinctive in many respects. Patent specifications were not required to include claims until the Patent Act of 1870. Moreover, while the 1790 Act required a substantive examination by a Patent Board, that requirement ended with the 1793 Act, when it was deemed too burdensome. Thereafter the evaluation of the sufficiency of patent specifications was left to the courts.

The Electoral Victory Of John Bell And The Constitutional Union In Kentucky, 1860., Samuel Thomas Whittaker

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

James Wilson And Anglo-American Customary Constitutionalism., Sean Allen Southard

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

Marriage And Gender: A History Through Letters, Victoria Kern

Senior Honors Projects

Research on the evolution of marriage can be found quite easily, but the opportunity to see into the lives of married couples from the past is rare. Through the analysis of letters between my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, I provide a glimpse of what being married has meant throughout the 20^th Century for heterosexual couples. Societal ideas about what makes a marriage ideal have changed over time, but they have always been closely linked with gender expectations (Berk, 2013), so a feminist approach to the analysis of the evolution of marriage is used with my family’s letters as a …

Thriving, Not Just Surviving, On Food Stamps, Sam L. Mccaughey

Senior Honors Projects

Food insecurity has been a persistent element in the history of the United States. Efforts to address the problem - and the larger issue of poverty - have been wide-ranging, but the debate about how best to respond to hunger has often centered on the relative roles of government and charity. Often that debate has led to hybrid solutions that combine government sponsored welfare such as food stamps and community-based food relief programs such as food banks. Yet, even such complementary approaches leave many people’s needs unmet, and there remains a significant population, both across the country and in Rhode …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Raymond E. Jackson And Segregation In The American Federation Of Musicians, 1900-1944, Lance Boos

History Theses

In 1944, the American Federation of Musicians abolished the practice of subsidiary local chapters, granting autonomous charters to the twelve chapters of African American musicians who were bound to a white parent chapter in their respective cities. While most black musicians in the AFM were organized in “separate but equal” chapters, those under subsidiary status were obligated to pay dues to the white local but generally had no access to union offices, voting rights in union elections, control over booking of and payment for jobs, or representation at the national convention. This change was prompted by years of advocacy by …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Shackling The Great Emancipator: How The Nineteenth Century Press In South Carolina Helped To Shape The American National Memory Of Abraham Lincoln’S Racial Beliefs And Policies, Elizabeth D. Oswald-Sease

Graduate Theses

Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most popular president in American history to date. American collective memory centers on his legacy as the Great Emancipator, a man who was beyond his time in terms of social equality and paved the way for later advancements in civil rights for African Americans in the United States. This caricature of Lincoln is fundamentally inaccurate, however. Lincoln himself repeatedly stated his devotion to the restoration of the Union, which at its fundamental core was a political entity that only encapsulated white Americans. In fact, Lincoln’s eventual issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation was intended to be …