Matching Items (8)
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- All Subjects: American History
- Creators: Thompson, Victoria
Description
The Confederate States of America folded as a political project in 1865, but ex-Confederates refused to surrender the ideological cornerstones of a culture of white supremacy. That Lost Cause was a Confederacy of ideas that seized the imaginations of those who claimed a stake in the failed republic. But a curious thing happened to a backwards-looking mythos that idealized local democracy over distant tyranny, white over black, and agrarian manhood over industrial mechanization. Like the ex-Confederate leaders who fled the United States after defeat, the Lost Cause migrated from the vanquished South to South America, finding fertile soil in Brazil, a nation with a deep history of analogous conflicts over race, power, and the allure of an immaculate historical myth. From there, the confederados, as they would come to be called, challenged by a Brazilian society that defied their preconceived notions of race and slavery, would amalgamate their white heritage and local Brazilian culture into an identity that was both wholly unique yet still distinctly Confederate, an identity that manages to persist to this day. Confederados in Brazil today recover an imagined heritage that was portable: like the CSA in North America, Confederados romanticize and mythologize racial identity and a struggle against a distant federal tyranny threatening individual rights. Yet at the same time, an even more curious thing has happened: they have seemingly betrayed their white heritage in certain aspects and adopted distinctly un-Confederate attitudes towards race, the very same attitudes that they had struggled to. Through analyzing both this movement and the analogous Lost Cause movement in the United States, one can begin to understand the allure that such movements have for particular groups of people, as well as how these movements have persisted so long after their initial founding.
ContributorsRozansky, Eric (Author) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Thesis director) / El Hamel, Chouki (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution make up the Bill of Rights. James Madison is often credited with writing these first ten amendments. Although technically true, it is not the whole story. These essential amendments lay the foundation for what it means to be a United States citizen as well as define the overarching American ideals of liberty and freedom. There have been many great thinkers dubbed 'founding fathers' that have contributed to the great American experiment. George Mason, the eccentric Virginia statesman and planter, undoubtedly deserves this title. Unfortunately, George Mason has too often been forgotten. This injustice on behalf of the mainstream history curriculum has left out the actual Father of the Bill of Rights. The failure at any reference of Mason can partially be attributed to Mason's later decision to refuse ratifying the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention-even after he had contributed immensely to the document. Mason's decision to not ratify the Constitution unless it contained a Bill of Rights was crucial to the anti-Federalist movement as well as resulted in social and political backlash. It was not a cowardly decision for Mason to make. It would have been much easier for Mason to just sign and go along with the majority. This thesis acts as a case study examining Mason's life in the context of the American Revolution and the later formation of our nation's modern government system. It is intended to once again inject Mason into the mainstream story of American history while dispelling many of the attacks that Mason receives in regard to his character. The paper explores Mason's contributions to the American war effort as well as highlights his role in the creation of the foundation for the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and their state counterparts. Most importantly, it examines Mason's crucial decision to not sign the Constitution and the effects of this decision.
ContributorsEdwards, Reid Parker (Author) / Critchlow, Prof. Donald (Thesis director) / Barth, Prof. Jonathan (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
This dissertation examines the history of urban nightlife in New York City and San Francisco from 1890 to 1930 and charts the manifestation of modernity within these cities. While some urbanites tepidly embraced this new modern world, others resisted. Chafing at this seemingly unmoored world, some Americans fretted about one of the most visible effects of modernity on the city—the encroachment of sex onto the street and in commercial amusements—and sought to wield the power of the state to suppress it. Even those Americans who reveled in the new modern world grappled with what this shifting culture ultimately meant for their lives, seeking familiarity where they could find it. Thus, this dissertation details how both Americans who embraced the modern world and those who perceived it as a threatening menace similarly sought a mediated modernity, seeking out and organizing spaces within modern amusements that ultimately reinforced existing cultural hierarchies.
Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same.
Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same.
ContributorsHoodenpyle, Morgan (Author) / Gullett, Gayle (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Tempe experienced rapid growth in population and area from 1949 to 1975, stretching its resources thin and changing the character of the city. City boosters encouraged growth through the 1950s to safeguard Tempe’s borders against its larger neighbor, Phoenix. New residents moved to Tempe as it grew, expecting suburban amenities that the former agricultural supply town struggled to pay for and provide. After initially balking at taking responsibility for development of a park system, Tempe established a Parks and Recreation Department in 1958 and used parks as a main component in an evolving strategy for responding to rapid suburban growth. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Tempe pursued an ambitious goal of siting one park in each square mile of the city, planning for neighborhood parks to be paired with elementary schools and placed at the center of each Tempe neighborhood. The highly-publicized plan created a framework, based on the familiarity of public park spaces, that helped both long-time residents and recent transplants understand the new city form and participate in a changing community identity. As growth accelerated and subdivisions surged southward into the productive agricultural area that had driven Tempe’s economy for decades, the School-Park Policy faltered as a planning and community-building tool. Residents and city leaders struggled to reconcile the loss of agricultural land with the carefully maintained cultural narrative that connected Tempe to its frontier past, ultimately broadening the role of parks to address the needs of a changing city.
ContributorsSweeney, Jennifer (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / MacFadyen, Joshua (Committee member) / Smith, Jared (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This dissertation examines the conception, planning, creation, and management of Fort Union National Monument (FOUN) in northeastern New Mexico. Over approximately the last eighty-five years, writers, bureaucrats, boosters, and the National Park Service (NPS) have all been engaged in several different kinds of place-making at FOUN: the development of a written historical narrative about what kind of place Fort Union was (and is); the construction of a physical site; and the accompanying interpretive guidance for experiencing it.
All of these place-making efforts make claims about why Fort Union is a place worthy of commemoration, its historical significance, and its relationship to local, regional, national and international contexts. The creation and evolution of Fort Union National Monument as a memorial landscape and a place for communion with an imagined past—in short, a site of memory and public history—is only the latest chapter in a long history of migration, conflict, shifting ownership, and land use at that site. I examine the evolution of a sense of place at Fort Union in two broad time periods: the twenty-five years leading up to the monument’s establishment, and the seven decades of NPS management after it was created.
Taken as a case study, the story of FOUN raises a number of questions about the basic mission and meaning of NPS as a cultural institution and educational organization; how the agency conceptualizes and “talks about” Native Americans and the Indian Wars; the history and practice of public history; and how best to address sites like Fort Union that seek to historicize America’s imperial past.
All of these place-making efforts make claims about why Fort Union is a place worthy of commemoration, its historical significance, and its relationship to local, regional, national and international contexts. The creation and evolution of Fort Union National Monument as a memorial landscape and a place for communion with an imagined past—in short, a site of memory and public history—is only the latest chapter in a long history of migration, conflict, shifting ownership, and land use at that site. I examine the evolution of a sense of place at Fort Union in two broad time periods: the twenty-five years leading up to the monument’s establishment, and the seven decades of NPS management after it was created.
Taken as a case study, the story of FOUN raises a number of questions about the basic mission and meaning of NPS as a cultural institution and educational organization; how the agency conceptualizes and “talks about” Native Americans and the Indian Wars; the history and practice of public history; and how best to address sites like Fort Union that seek to historicize America’s imperial past.
ContributorsMedley, Evan (Author) / Fixico, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Pitcaithley, Dwight T. (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Dallett, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This study is a cultural history of danger, disaster, and steam-powered transportation in nineteenth-century America. The application of steam power to transportation, a globally transformative innovation, had particular influence in the early United States. A vast American continent with difficult terrain and poor infrastructure posed significant challenges, both to individual mobility and to a nation eager to build an integrated economy, a unified culture, and a functional republican government. Steamboats and locomotives offered an apparent solution, their speed and power seemingly shrinking distances between places and expanding mobility and access across space, a process contemporaries and scholars have described as a sort of space-time compression. However, these machines that overcame space also blew up, caught fire, wrecked, collided, derailed, and broke down, killing tens, and often hundreds, of Americans at a time. This dissertation analyzes the ways Americans encountered, interpreted, and adapted to these new dangers, all the while making the technology that created them an ever more essential aspect of their lives. I argue that Americans’ responses to disasters, filtered through the transportation and communication networks created by steam power, constituted a deep, shared reflection about the nature of expanded mobility in a fast-evolving modern America. Though few suffered disaster directly, Americans collectively framed the danger of steam as both a profound national problem and an evocative symbol of modernity. Through public conversations mediated by print, Americans identified susceptibility to danger as inherent to high-speed travel, and, alongside practical safety measures, developed distinctly modern cultural adaptations to understand and manage that danger. By century's end, Americans had cultivated a modern mentality on mobility, technology, and danger: though most Americans never experienced disaster they were intimately aware of it, and though familiar with catastrophe they understood it as unlikely and accepted it as a feature of their modern technological lives.
ContributorsKuenker, Paul (Author) / Gray, Susan (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation examines the history of Cabrini-Green through the lens of placemaking. Cabrini-Green was one of the nation's most notorious public housing developments, known for sensational murders of police officers and children, and broadcast to the nation as a place to be avoided. Understanding Cabrini-Green as a place also requires appreciation for how residents created and defended their community. These two visions—Cabrini-Green as a primary example of a failed public housing program and architecture and Cabrini-Green as a place people called home—clashed throughout the site's history, but came into focus with its planned demolition in the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation. Demolition and reconstruction of Cabrini-Green was supposed to create a model for public housing renewal in Chicago. But residents feared that this was simply an effort to remove them from valuable land on Chicago's Near North Side and deprive them of new neighborhood improvements. The imminent destruction of the CHA’s high-rises uncovered desires to commemorate the public housing developments like Cabrini-Green and the people who lived there through a variety of public history and public art projects. This dissertation explores place from multiple perspectives including architecture, city planning, neighborhood development, and public and oral history. Understanding how Cabrini-Green became shorthand for failed program design while residents organized and fought to stay in the area provides a glimpse into possible futures of an emerging Chicago neighborhood.
ContributorsField, Andrea (Author) / Vandermeer, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Pfeiffer, Deirdre (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This dissertation uses the narrative practice of chorography as a genre for assessing the history of placemaking in the Salt and Gila River region of central Arizona from the late seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Chorography concerns the descriptive representation of places in the world, usually of regions associated with a particular nation. Traditionally, chorography has served as a written method for describing geographical places as they existed historically. By integrating descriptions of natural features with descriptions of built features, such as ancient ruins, chorography infuses the physical landscape with cultural and historical meaning. This dissertation relies on a body of Spanish- and English-language chorographies produced across three centuries to interpret how Euro-American descriptions of Hohokam ruins in the Salt and Gila River valleys shaped local placemaking. Importantly, the disparate chorographic texts produced during the late-seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries reflect ‘discursive continuity’—a continuity of thought spanning a long and frequently disregarded period in the history of central Arizona, in which ruminations about the ruins of ancient cities and irrigation canals formed the basis for what people knew, or thought they knew, about the little-known region. When settlers arrived in the newly-formed Arizona Territory in the 1860s to establish permanent settlement in the Salt and Gila River valleys, they brought with them a familiarity with these writings, maps, and other chorographical materials. On one hand, Arizonans viewed the ancient ruins as literal evidence for the region’s agricultural possibilities. On the other hand, Aztec and Cíbola myths associated with the ruins, told and retold by Europeans and Americans during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, offered an imaginative context for the establishment and promotion of American settlement in central Arizona.
ContributorsCaproni, Linnéa Katherine Elizabeth (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Timothy, Dallen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017