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- All Subjects: Civil war
- All Subjects: trauma
- Creators: Lockard, Joe
Description
This dissertation analyzes two regional systems of involuntary servitude (Indian captive slavery and Mexican debt peonage) over a period spanning roughly two centuries. Following a chronological framework, it examines the development of captive slavery in the Southwest beginning in the early 1700s and lasting through the mid-1800s, by which time debt peonage emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude that augmented Indian slavery in order to meet increasing demand for labor. While both peonage and captive slavery had an indelible impact on cultural and social systems in the Southwest, this dissertation places those two labor systems within the context of North American slavery and sectional agitation during the antebellum period. The existence of debt bondage and Indian captivity in New Mexico had a significant impact on America's judicial and political institutions during the Reconstruction era.
Debt peonage and Indian slavery had a lasting influence on American politics during the period 1846 to 1867, forcing lawmakers to acknowledge the fact that slavery existed in many forms. Following the Civil War, legislators realized that the Thirteenth Amendment did not cast a wide enough net, because peonage and captive slavery were represented as voluntary in nature and remained commonplace throughout New Mexico. When Congress passed a measure in 1867 explicitly outlawing peonage and captive slavery in New Mexico, they implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Thirteenth Amendment. The preexistence of peonage and Indian slavery in the Southwest inculcated a broader understanding of involuntary labor in post-Civil War America and helped to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor. These two systems played a crucial role in America's transition from free to unfree labor in the mid-1800s and contributed to the judicial and political frameworks that undermined slavery.
Debt peonage and Indian slavery had a lasting influence on American politics during the period 1846 to 1867, forcing lawmakers to acknowledge the fact that slavery existed in many forms. Following the Civil War, legislators realized that the Thirteenth Amendment did not cast a wide enough net, because peonage and captive slavery were represented as voluntary in nature and remained commonplace throughout New Mexico. When Congress passed a measure in 1867 explicitly outlawing peonage and captive slavery in New Mexico, they implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Thirteenth Amendment. The preexistence of peonage and Indian slavery in the Southwest inculcated a broader understanding of involuntary labor in post-Civil War America and helped to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor. These two systems played a crucial role in America's transition from free to unfree labor in the mid-1800s and contributed to the judicial and political frameworks that undermined slavery.
ContributorsKiser, William S., 1986- (Author) / Fixico, Donald L. (Thesis advisor) / Simpson, Brooks (Committee member) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This thesis analyzes the unsettling presence of the Holocaust in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1980), Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2013). Characters in these texts struggle to maintain a stable sense of what it means to be Jewish in America outside of a relationship to the Holocaust. This leaves the characters only able to form negative associations about what it means to live with the memory of the Holocaust or to over-identify so heavily with the memory that they can’t lead a normal life. These authors construct a re-formed memory of the Holocaust in ways that prompt a new focus on how permanently intertwined the Holocaust and Jewish identity are. In this context, re-formed means the way Jewish American writers have reconstructed the connection between Jewish identity and its relation to the Holocaust in ways that highlight issues of over-identification and negative identity associations.
By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors construct a re-formed memory that allows for the formation of Jewish American identity as permanently bound with constant Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust itself. The authors’ treatment of issues surrounding Jewish identity contribute to the genre of post-Holocaust literature, which focuses on re-forming the discussion about present day Jewish American connection to the Holocaust. Giving voice to the Holocaust in new ways provides an opportunity for current and future generations of Jewish Americans to again consider the continued importance of the Holocaust as a historical event within the Jewish community.
In a world that is once again becoming increasingly anti-semitic as a result of the current political climate, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, the discussion that these texts open up is increasingly important and should remain at the forefront of American consciousness. The research in this thesis reveals that through the process of Holocaust memory constantly being re-formed through the work of these Jewish American authors, its continued influence on Jewish American culture is not forgotten.
By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors construct a re-formed memory that allows for the formation of Jewish American identity as permanently bound with constant Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust itself. The authors’ treatment of issues surrounding Jewish identity contribute to the genre of post-Holocaust literature, which focuses on re-forming the discussion about present day Jewish American connection to the Holocaust. Giving voice to the Holocaust in new ways provides an opportunity for current and future generations of Jewish Americans to again consider the continued importance of the Holocaust as a historical event within the Jewish community.
In a world that is once again becoming increasingly anti-semitic as a result of the current political climate, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, the discussion that these texts open up is increasingly important and should remain at the forefront of American consciousness. The research in this thesis reveals that through the process of Holocaust memory constantly being re-formed through the work of these Jewish American authors, its continued influence on Jewish American culture is not forgotten.
ContributorsMiller, Samantha Tracy (Author) / Goodman, Brian (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This thesis examines the evolution of the interpretation of the battle of Gettysburg, as well as how the analysis and presentation of the battle by multiple stakeholders have affected the public's understanding of the violence of the engagement and subsequently its understanding of the war's repercussions. While multiple components of the visitor experience are examined throughout this thesis, the majority of analysis focuses on the interpretive wayside signs that dot the landscape throughout the Gettysburg National Military Park. These wayside signs are the creation of the Park Service, and while they are not strictly interpretive in nature, they remain an extremely visible component of the visitor's park experience. As such, they are an important reflection of the interpretive priorities of the Park Service, an agency which is likely the dominant public history entity shaping understanding of the American Civil War. Memory at Gettysburg in the first decades after the battle largely sought to focus on celebratory accounts of the clash that praised the valor of all white combatants as a means of bringing about resolution between the two sides. By focusing on triumphant memories of martial valor in a conflict fought over ambiguous reasons, veterans and the public at large neglected unsettling and difficult conversations. These avoided discussions primarily concerned what the war had really accomplished aside from preserving the Union, as white Americans appeared unwilling to confront the war's abolitionist legacy. Additionally, they avoided discussion of the horrific levels of violence that the war had truly required of its combatants. Reconciliationist memories of the conflict that did not discuss the violence and trauma of combat were thus incorporated into early interpretations of Civil War battlefields, and continued to hinder understanding of the true savagery of combat into the present. This thesis focuses on the presence (or lack thereof) of violence and trauma in the wayside interpretive signage at Gettysburg, and argues that a more active interpretation of the war's remarkably violent and traumatic legacies can assist in dislodging a faulty legacy of reconciliationist remembrance that continues to permeate public memory of the Civil War.
ContributorsPittenger, Jack (Author) / Simpson, Brooks D. (Thesis advisor) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Dallett, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013