OU - Dissertations

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Open Access
"Aboriginally yours": The Society of American Indians and United States citizenship, 1890--1924.
(2005) Furnish, Patricia Lee.; Anderson, Gary C.,
His public life had been dedicated to improving the condition of Native people. Eastman worked with progressive reformers who, like himself, believed in the power of Christian civilization and democracy to improve the condition of Indians. These "Friends of the Indian" organizations abhorred massacres of Indians and the institutional disgrace that Indian reservations signified. During the Progressive Era 1890-1917, Eastman helped found a political organization of Native Progressive reformers, the Society of American Indians (SAI), in 1910. They came to know the political and racial power structure of the United States as it was shaped by two wars, the Spanish American War and World War I. The SAI pushed for assimilation with consent, a racial uplift created with Indian participation and with respect for Indians as human beings. With a lifespan of less than fifteen years, the SAI's anti-climactic implosion revealed the elusiveness of full citizenship and the dismal record of social reform during World War I.
Open Access
Agricultural labor, race, and Indian policy on the Round Valley Reservation, 1850--1941.
(2003) Bauer, William John, Jr.; Hurtado, Albert,
This dissertation examines the labor history of the Indians living on the Round Valley Reservation, in northern California. From the time of contact in 1854 to the beginning of World War II, Round Valley Indians represented a vital part of the migrant and agricultural workforce in northern California. White ranchers in northern California racially defined Round Valley Indians based upon their interaction with them at the workplace. Reservation agents made labor an important part of Indian policy in California. They believed labor civilized Indians and prepared them to enter white society. Round Valley Indians used labor to make and remake the reservation environment. Wages provided for the economic survival of families; workplaces themselves offered opportunities for Indians to practice ceremonies; and Indians created a vibrant recreational life when the workday ended. Round Valley Indians, then, used agricultural wage labor to adapt, resist, and initiate responses to colonization.
Open Access
"ALL THE WOMEN...WERE VIOLATED IN THIS WAY: RHETORIC, RAPE, AND MEMORY IN THE DAKOTA WAR
(2015-05) Wardrop, Emily; Anderson, Gary; Kelly, Catherine; Wrobel, David; Ehrhardt, Julia; Holland, Jennifer
Over the course of the six weeks of fighting during the Dakota War of 1862, Dakota warriors held more than 200 white women and children captive. In the aftermath of the war, the rhetoric of reporters, policymakers, military leaders, and private citizens created a powerfully racist stereotype of the Dakota. In both the public narrative of the war and the growing debates over how to best handle Minnesota’s “Indian problem,” politicians and pundits used white women as a powerful and potent symbol to advance a particular agenda—the expulsion of all Indians from the state. Drawing on literature on war, race, gender, and memory, this dissertation seeks to provide an understanding of the processes by which women’s stories are embellished and appropriated during war for political purposes. Using the narratives of female former captives, I demonstrate the importance of reinserting women into war stories, not merely as symbols, but as important historical actors. Taken collectively, the narratives of the Dakota War provide insight into the way public memory is created, challenge stereotypes of nineteenth century women, and underscore the important, yet imperfect role memory plays in the creation of history.
Open Access
America and Weimar culture, 1919-1933.
(1979) Trice, Cecil W.,
Open Access
American nervousness:
(1976) Gosling, Francis G.
Open Access
An analysis of critical and aesthetic ideas in eighteenth-century Britain :
(1978) Scott, Barbara Kerr.
Open Access
Antiquity and Loyalist Counter-Narrative in Revolutionary America, 1765-1776
(2012) Moy, Daniel Robert; Gilje, Paul A
This study explores one aspect of the American founding that scholarship has not yet fully investigated, namely, the ways in which loyalist advocates used the ancient literature of Greece and Rome to make their case against the Revolution. Neither an apologetic for the loyalist side of the revolutionary controversy nor a survey of loyalist intellectual thought, this study examines how the loyalist persuasion, much like the spirit of Whig patriotism, stemmed naturally from longstanding and earnest convictions concerning the tenets of English liberty, ideas anchored in the models and antimodels of classical antiquity. Like their patriot countrymen, loyalists shared an intense concern with conspiracies against liberty and a profound interest in the literature of the ancient past, and they looked to the classics to help them interpret the signs of the times and add rhetorical force and legitimacy to their polemic. While underestimating the important ways loyalists looked to antiquity to make their case against the Revolution, we have come to assume that classical republicanism naturally favored a radical response to the transatlantic crisis in the 1760s and 70s. However, a closer examination of the loyalists' use of the ancient literature reveals evidence to the contrary; the classical canon served both patriot and loyalist political strategies in the pre-revolutionary years. Affirming the significance of antiquity in the colonies for all British Americans, the author seeks to recapture a broader view of the ideological origins of the American founding, examining the loyalists' use of the classics to assess the influence of the ancient literature in the colonial imagination and fully appreciate the radicalism of the decade leading up to 1776.
Open Access
Antisuffragists and the Dilemma of the American West
(2011) Kodumthara, Sunu; Hurtado, Albert L
Under the leadership of women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the National Woman Suffrage Association was established in 1868 with the express purpose of granting American women the right to vote as the first step towards equality with men. But not all women supported this movement. Anti-suffragists were entirely satisfied with their role within the domestic sphere, which was best described in Barbara Welter's classic, "The Cult of True Womanhood." Women, they believed, were supposed to be pious, pure, submissive caretakers of their homes and families. For anti-suffragists these supposedly feminine characteristics embodied a woman's identity and explained her role in the home and the larger society. They were not second-class citizens; rather, women enjoyed an elevated moral standing. Thus, woman suffrage was a direct threat to female status.
Open Access
Becoming America's Ski City: Place and Identity on the Wasatch Front
(2018-12) Flynt, Mette; Brosnan, Kathleen; Wrobel, David; Holland, Jennifer; Griswold, Robert; Fields, Alison
“Becoming America’s Ski City” explores how skiers remolded the political, economic, cultural, and environmental landscape of Utah’s Wasatch Front, transforming the region’s valley cities and mountain forests into a more unified yet contested space over the course of the twentieth century. This process of incorporation centered on Salt Lake City. In particular, the exigencies and experiences of skiing pushed Salt Lake Citians not only to recognize the ecological ties between slope and city but also to build new connections. These links included watershed regulations, land purchases, avalanche management, investment, federal boosterism, marketing campaigns, urban planning, wilderness legislation, and the Olympic movement. Skiing also represented a larger attempt to Americanize Utah and its predominantly Mormon population. By shifting attention away from popular images of the state as an insular desert, boosters attempted to build a stronger economy rooted in tourism that placed Utah more firmly within mainstream American culture. Their partial success points to the ways in which skiing eroded boundaries between city and periphery as well as state and nation. This process sheds light on the blurred dichotomies that defined modern American life within and beyond Utah— work and leisure, city and wilderness, region and nation—and the material and social changes that they molded.
Open Access
Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists' Palestine Questions
(2015-12) Robins, Walker; Stillman, Norman; Levenson, Alan; Kimball, Charles; Keppel, Ben; Chappell, David
Today, evangelical Christians are the largest pro-Israel constituency in a United States population that is very supportive of the Jewish state generally, with evangelicalism and Christian Zionism often understood as inexorably intertwined. However, such political support for Israel was not an inevitable product of evangelicalism. It emerged, rather, out of a variety of evangelical encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of Palestine and Israel. Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists’ Palestine Questions explores the evangelical encounter with Palestine during what is known as the Mandate Era through a focus on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Between the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I and the creation of Israel in 1948, Britain governed Palestine through a League of Nations Mandate that called upon the British to prepare Palestine for eventual self-government. What this self-government would look like—whether it would favor the Zionist movement or the Palestinian Arabs—was a matter of public debate referred to as “the Palestine question.” While many Southern Baptists were interested in the Holy Land, most avoided engaging this political question, instead forming their own “Palestine questions” determined by how they encountered the region. Foreign missionaries raised different questions than editorialists, travel writers than Arabs, Jewish converts than the President of the United States. Across this diversity of encounters and questions, however, commonalities emerged. Southern Baptists overwhelmingly identified the Zionist movement with civilization, modernity, and progress against the Arabs, whom they viewed as quaint or backward. Even as Baptists generally avoided or disagreed over the politics of Zionism, influential individuals—the SBC’s lone missionary to the Jews, the mission study editor of the Woman’s Missionary Union, and the fundamentalist rebel, J. Frank Norris— preached that the movement was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. What mattered most, however, in shaping Baptist attitudes towards Palestine were the actual developments on the ground in the region—and what remained Southern Baptists’ ultimate answer to every Palestine question was Christ.
Open Access
Business in the Borderlands: Bent, St. Vrain & Co., 1830-1849
(2012) Beyreis, David; Hurtado, Albert L.
During the 1830s and 1840s, a unique set of economic, social, political, and environmental factors contributed to the rise and fall of Bent, St. Vrain & Co. as the preeminent American trading firm in the Southwest Borderlands. Between the company\'s founding around 1830 and the destruction of Bent\'s Fort in 1849, the Bent brothers and Ceran St. Vrain conducted a wide-ranging, multifaceted trade with the United States, Mexico, and the Native American tribes of the Southern Plains. Geographical and political isolation made it imperative for the partners to adhere to a strict set of social and economic protocols, especially the cultivation of business patronage and intermarriage with their clients. The most important factor in the company\'s strategy was the weak presence of the State - either American or Mexican - in the borderlands. The weakness of the State simultaneously presented the partners with both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, they were in a precarious position - unable to call upon the American government for protection, they went out of their way to avoid alienating the powerful tribes of the region. On the other hand, the weakness of the Mexican State allowed the Bents and St. Vrain to circumvent national trade laws, become smugglers, and acquire land grants, all of which alienated the nationalist faction in New Mexico. The arrival of the American State in the borderlands in 1846 set in motion a chain of events that ultimately brought down the company. The conquest of New Mexico unleashed a wave of violence that destroyed the conditions that had allowed the partners to prosper. By 1849, Bent\'s Fort - the symbol of company power - went up in flames, abandoned by its proprietors. Far from the centers of State power, Bent, St. Vrain & Co. flourished for nearly two decades. American expansion rendered the company\'s position within the borderlands untenable.
Restricted
The Business of Atomic War: The Military-Industrial Complex and the American West
(2020) Foxley, Curtis; Brosnan, Kathleen; Hyde, Anne; McNeill, John; Wrobel, David; Faison, Elyssa; Fields, Alison
This dissertation examines nuclear weapons manufacturing in the American West from 1942 through the early 1990s. Specifically, it examines Hanford Engineer Works in Washington, Pantex in the Texas Panhandle, Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, uranium mines and mills across the American West, and Los Angeles’s ICBM industry. Using the tools of environmental, business, and nuclear history, this manuscript asserts several related propositions. First, the military-industrial complex was not a top-down organization directed by a scientific-technological elite, but a diffuse system supported by, and comprised of, working Americans who found lucrative paychecks and a distinctive social status by taking jobs in the weapons industry. Second, private firms as much as the federal state, and at times even more so, shepherded the U.S. effort to procure nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Third, the state’s demand for nuclear weapons pushed private firms to manufacture nuclear materiel as quickly as possible and overlook the environmental and human health consequences of rapid nuclear procurement. Fourth, this dedication to procurement over human and environmental health galvanized thousands of westerners to form anti-nuclear movements and seek justice for decades of radioactive contamination. Recognizing that the success of America’s nuclear weapons program, and indeed the success of the military-industrial complex, itself, was contingent on the participation of millions of Americans and dozens of private corporations, this manuscript offers a bottom-up interpretation of the military-industrial complex. This dissertation intervenes in a historiography that privileges the role of the American state in manufacturing nuclear weapons at the expense of private industry, regards the military-industrial complex as a monolithic entity, and has failed to examine how nuclear weapons work produced both economic benefits and physical pains for working Americans. It recognizes that private firms held and exercised agency in producing nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons work provided westerners with a new source of economic wealth while poisoning western bodies and western landscapes. By showing how nuclear weapons work enriched some westerners and harmed others, this manuscript explains why some Americans continue to fight against the military-industrial complex and why others continue to support it.
Open Access
"CAPTURE THESE INDIANS FOR THE LORD": INDIAN CHURCHES AND THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH SOUTH IN OKLAHOMA, 1865-1939
(2010) Smith, Tash B.; Metcalf, Warren
"Capture These Indians for the Lord" examines the ways that Christian Indians developed within a white-dominated church society, both from their own actions as well as from the growing indifference of white officials. Focusing on the work of the Southern Methodist Church in Oklahoma from the 1860s until the reunification of American Methodism in 1939, this study explores the roots of Methodism among the Five Tribes, who the government removed to eastern Indian Territory in the early nineteenth century, in addition to the Southern Plains Indians located at the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Agency after the Civil War.
Open Access
Charles Duncan McIver: Educational statesman.
(2002) Myers, Kenneth L.; Levy, David W.,
A biography of Charles Duncan McIver, a New South educational reformer from North Carolina.
Open Access
Charro: The Transnational History of a Cultural Icon
(2014-05-09) Moreno, Gary; Evans, Sterling; Cane-Carrasco, James
This is a transnational cultural history of the charro horseman in Mexico and the United States. It begins with an analysis of the archetype in nineteenth century art and literature, exploring various works of visual and literary culture. The dissertation continues with the popularization of the image through the spectacle of mass entertainment and the emergence of celebrity through bullfighting. This study crosses the border with performers of the secondary acts of Mexican bullfighting in the Wild West shows of the United States. As some of the first migrant laborers who crossed into the United States on railroads, these trick riders and ropers left a significant impact on popular culture north of the border. With the expansion of industrial cinema in the 1920s, Wild West show performers transitioned to film where they spread the image of rope-wielding charros much wider than before. The career of Leo Carrillo parallels many of the political and social developments that allowed the charro archetype to function like a tool of cultural diplomacy between Mexico and the United States. Finally, the appropriation of the image by elite charrería rodeo associations and the post-revolutionary state made the figure a national symbol that unified diverse regions and ethnicities of Mexico. The symbol lost potency as post-revolutionary governments aged and accusations of corruption, fraud, and repression increased, allowing youth in the counterculture to re-appropriate the image as a critique against the state. Today, the image remains an important marker of cultural identity for communities on both sides of the border.
Open Access
Clyde Warrior's "Red Power": A Fresh Air of New Indian Idealism
(2012) McKenzie-Jones, Paul Richard; Metcalf, R. Warren
Clyde Warrior's "Red Power": A Fresh Air of New Indian Idealism is an ethnobiography of one of the most outspoken young activist of the early Red Power movement. Based on primary source research and the oral history of some of his closest friends and family, the chapters detail the complexity of community, tradition, cultural immersion, and identity, and how these issues combined to inform and influence Warrior. Largely remembered as someone who predicted Red Power and paved the way for a future generation of militancy, Warrior actually shaped Red Power and laid the foundations for the more militant generation that followed.
Open Access
Colorado's 'island community': Irrigation and industrial agriculture in Colorado's Grand Valley, 1882--1920.
(2001) Raley, Bradley Frank.; Pisani, Donald J.,
This dissertation examines the relationship between this local community and the broader economy. Many historians have portrayed small towns as passive recipients of outside corporate influence, but this community recruited investors and government bureaucracies; always with an eye on protecting local autonomy. While the community did seek to control its destiny, topography and isolation kept the community aloof from economic development. The Grand Valley also attempted to recreate the industrial agricultural system of California's Central Valley, and so embraced available technology, especially in the fruit industry. Their devotion to pesticide eventually ruined orchards and perpetuated their existence as an Island Community.
Open Access
Community, poverty, power: The politics of tribal self-determination, 1960--1968.
(2003) Cobb, Daniel M.; Metcalf, R. Warren,
"Community, Poverty, Power" underscores the need for scholars to transcend conventional definitions of Indian history, combine micro and macro scales of analysis, and blend social and political perspectives. In addition to expanding the interpretive ground upon which the War on Poverty is assessed and suggesting a different way of thinking about the emergence of tribal self-determination, it provides a context for understanding the heightened militancy of the Red Power movement. It also re-envisions the meaning of activism so that it includes people who worked within the system in order to affect change. To the extent that the idea of tribal self-determination entered national discourse between 1960 and 1968, it did so because of these continuing encounters between natives and newcomers.
Open Access
Culture, conflict and coexistence : American-Soviet cultural relations, 1917-1958.
(1980) Parks, J. D.,
Beneath the strained official relationship between Washington and Moscow, American and Soviet cultural representatives have maintained a long standing cultural intercourse. Only at the depths of the cold war did contacts almost entirely disappear, and then only for a short time. Particularly free and easy during the pre-recognition period, the contacts began to dwindle during the thirties as Stalin purged the Party and consolidated his control, flourished during World War II, and fell off sharply thereafter as Stalin waged an anti-foreign campaign in the USSR. Moscow's actions prompted the United States, in turn, to create its own barriers to American-Soviet contacts and to stage its own version of cultural isolationism. After Stalin's death the Soviets largely took the initiative in restoring contacts, and were largely responsible for the formal exchange agreement signed in 1958 and renewed every two years thereafter.
Open Access
Damming the Bighorn: Indian reserved water rights on the Crow Reservation, 1900--2000.
(2003) Benson, Megan Kathleen.; Pisani, Donald J.,
According to one experienced lawyer, the Winters doctrine "hangs by a thread." Quantification of the Indian reserved water right serves the interests of local and state entities; does it also serve the interests of Indians? The dissertation examines Crow negotiations to quantify their reserved right with the State of Montana's Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission and concludes that circumstances will always dictate whether or not quantification is advisable. The Crow had compelling reasons to quantify and many obstacles including in fee owners within the tribe, non-Indian ranchers, and the United States.