The 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade was a significant event in the story of fetal personhood—the story of whether embryos and fetuses are legal persons. Roe legalized abortion care in the United States (US). However, the story of fetal personhood began long before the 1970s. People have been talking about embryos, fetuses, and their status in science, the law, and society for centuries. I studied the history of fetal personhood in the United States, tracing its origins from Ancient Rome and Medieval England to its first appearance in a US courtroom in 1884 and then to the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973.

But this isn’t a history of events—of names and dates and typical details. This is a history of words. In the twenty-first century, words used to discuss embryos and fetuses are split. Some people use humanizing language like “unborn children” and “human life.” Others use technical words like “embryos” and “fetuses.” I studied what words people used historically. I charted how words moved from science to the public to the law, and how they impacted court rulings on fetal personhood.

The use of certain words nudged courts to grant additional rights to embryos and fetuses. In the 1960s, writers began describing the science of development, using words like “unborn child” and humanizing descriptions to make embryos and fetuses seem like people already born. That helped build an idea of embryos and fetuses as having “life” before birth. When people began asking courts to legalize abortion care in the 1970s, attorneys on the opposite side argued that embryos and fetuses were “human life,” and that that “life” began at conception.

In those cases, “life” was biologically defined as when sperm fertilized egg, but it was on that biological definition “life” that judges improperly rested their legal rulings that embryos and fetuses were “potential human life” states had a duty to protect. It wasn’t legal personhood, but it was a legal status that let states pass laws restricting abortion care and punishing pregnant people for their behavior, trends that threaten people’s lives and autonomy in the twenty-first century.

This thesis was written in order to understand the history of US fire policy and how aircraft's involvement in the fire scene has evolved since its first usage as a surveillance tool. I formed an interest in aerial firefighting as soon as I started to learn how to fly when I was 16 because my instructors owned and operated Billings Flying Service, which provides helicopter-based aerial firefighting services. Last year I was able to be a part of an aerial crew and acted as a third crew member aboard a CH-47D, or Chinook. During this experience, I came to realize that firefighting was not as black and white as it seems it should be and observed a lot of inefficiency with aircraft usage. It was from the experience and resulting observations that I found the idea behind my thesis. However, I learned that in order to understand the contemporary fire policies and aircraft's role in them, the history of the fire policy had to be examined and understood. Therefore, I began this thesis with the first paid firefighters in US History and then worked toward the modern era. This historical examination of fire policies and aerial firefighting illustrates the transformations that these subjects had undergone and helped to reveal how the fire scene of today has come to be, especially regarding the fire industrial complex that has formed. In the end, I realized that fires were no longer being fought because they should be fought, but because people and politicians expected them to be fought and expected to see aircraft in the fight, no matter the cost or effectiveness. I conclude this thesis with my own thoughts on how fire policy should be changed in order to protect the environment and return the exorbitant cost of firefighting, especially regarding aerial firefighting resources, back to a reasonable size.

This collection of literary nonfiction essays is lead by the metaphor of cocladogenesis — a unique evolutionary relationship between two lineages that combines coevolution and cospeciation — to suggest that a similar relationship should exist between the subjective and the objective experience, art and science, and the chronicle and the narrative. It is not the singular extreme of either side that results in the advantageously beautiful products of cocladogenesis — it is the constant dialogue between the two factions.

This paper explores the relationship between wildfire management and the consideration of ecological and environmental concerns in Arizona. To get a proper perspective on the current state of wildfire management in Arizona, information on two wildfire management programs, the Four Forests Restoration Initiative and FireScape, was researched and analyzed, as well as contemporary fire policy, a history of wildfire in Arizona, and two recent fires in Sedona, AZ. The two fires in Sedona, the Brins Fire of 2006 and the Slide Fire of 2014, act as a focal point for this ecological management transition, as even within an 8-year period, we can see the different ways the two fires were managed and the transition to a greater ecological importance in management strategies. These all came together to give a full spectrum for the factors that have led to more ecologically-prominent wildfire management strategies in Arizona.

Guided by the Obama administration, NASA has begun developing commercial launch capabilities. For both cargo and crew delivery to the International Space Station, NASA has selected companies to build and operate the vehicles at a fixed price. Alexander McDonald suggests that this continues a trend in space exploration established by large observatory projects, and that the Apollo-era style of funding and operation was a historical anomaly. This paper attempts to discover if historical analog can support or weaken this thesis. The analogs chosen are two episodes in the history of terrestrial exploration: the experience of the Spanish and British empires in North America. These are compared to the history of space exploration up until today, focusing on how the role of private enterprise has changed in each instance. While the analogies between historical episodes are weak in a few areas, they do possess a common narrative concerning the shifting balance between private and government interests. This narrative supports McDonald's thesis, and shows that NASA's current policy anticipates an expected transition towards a private-public hybrid model of exploration and expansion.

In "Between Mountain and Lake: an Urban Mormon Country," I identify a uniquely Mormon urban tradition that transcends simple village agrarianism. This tradition encompasses the distinctive ways in which Mormons have thought about cities, appropriating popular American urban forms to articulate their faith's central beliefs, tenants, and practices, from street layout to home decorating. But if an urban Mormon experience has as much validity as an agrarian one, how have the two traditions articulated themselves over time? What did the city mean for nineteenth-century Mormons? Did these meanings change in the twentieth-century, particularly following World War II when the nation as a whole underwent rapid suburbanization? How did Mormon understandings of the environment effect the placement of their villages and cities? What consequences did these choices have for their children, particularly when these places rapidly suburbanized? Traditionally, Zion has been linked to a particular place. This localized dimension to an otherwise spiritual and utopian ideal introduces environmental negotiation and resource utilization. Mormon urban space is, as French thinker Henri Lefebvre would suggest, culturally constructed, appropriated and consumed. On a fundamental level, Mormon spaces tack between the extremes of theocracy and secularism, communalism and capitalism and have much to reveal about how Mormonism has defined gender roles and established racial hierarchies. Mormon cultural landscapes both manifest a sense of identity and place, as well as establish relationships with the past.

There are places that rest tangibly on the Earth's surface, and places that flourish only in the imagination, and places that site their existence within a moral geography, and a few places, not many, Bor Island among them, that manage to fuse all these settings together. In truth, Bor belongs with that long tradition of island Arcadias that have attracted Western thinkers since well before Thomas More in 1516 gave them the name they now have: Utopia. What makes Bor Island unique is that its informing theme is fire.

This dissertation explores how the written word and natural and cultural landscapes entwine to create a place, the process by which Arizona's landscapes affected narratives written about the place and how those narratives created representations of Arizona over time. From before Arizona became a state in 1912 to the day its citizens celebrated one hundred years as a state in 2012, words have played a role in making it the place it is. The literature about Arizona and narratives drawn from its landscapes reveal writers' perceptions, what they believe is important and useful, what motivates or attracts them to the place. Those perceptions translated into words organized in various ways create an image of Arizona for readers. I explore written works taken at twenty-five year intervals--1912 and subsequent twenty-five year anniversaries--synthesizing narratives about Arizona and examining how those representations of the place changed (or did not change). To capture one hundred years of published material, I chose sources from several genres including official state publications, newspapers, novels, poetry, autobiography, journals, federal publications, and the Arizona Highways magazine. I chose sources that would have been available to the reading public, publications that demonstrated a wide readership. In examining the words about Arizona that have been readily available to the English-reading public, the importance of the power of the printed word becomes clear. Arizona became the place it is in the twenty-first century, in part, because people with power--in the federal and state governments, boosters, and business leaders--wrote about it in such a way as to influence growth and tourism sometimes at the expense of minority groups and the environment. Minority groups' narratives in their own words were absent from Arizona's written narrative landscape until the second half of the twentieth century when they began publishing their own stories. The narratives about Arizona changed over time, from literature dominated by boosting and promotion to a body of literature with many layers, many voices. Women, Native American, and Hispanic narratives, and environmentalists' and boosters' words created a more complex representation of Arizona in the twenty-first century, and more accurately reflected its cultural landscape, than the Arizona represented in earlier narratives.

This dissertation is a cultural history of the frontier stories surrounding an Arizona politician and Indian trader, John Lorenzo Hubbell. From 1878 to 1930, Hubbell operated a trading post in Ganado, Arizona--what is today Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. During that time, he played host to hundreds of visitors who trekked into Navajo country in search of scientific knowledge and artistic inspiration as the nation struggled to come to terms with industrialization, immigration, and other modern upheavals. Hubbell became an important mediator between the Native Americans and the Anglos who came to study them, a facilitator of the creation of the Southwestern myth. He lavished hospitality upon some of the Southwest's principle myth-makers, regaling them with stories of his younger days in the Southwest, which his guests remembered and shared face-to-face and in print, from novels to booster literature. By applying place theory to Hubbell's stories, and by placing them in the context of the history of tourism in the Southwest, I explore the relationship between those stories, the visitors who heard and retold them, and the process of place- and myth-making in the Southwest. I argue that the stories operated on two levels. First, they became a kind of folklore for Hubbell's visitors, a cycle of stories that expressed their ties to and understanding of the Navajo landscape and bound them together as a group, despite the fact that they must inevitably leave Navajo country. Second, the stories fit into the broader myth- and image-making processes that transformed the Southwest into a distinctive region in the imaginations of Americans. Based on a close reading of the stories and supporting archival research, I analyze four facets of the Hubbell legend: the courteous Spanish host; the savior of Native American arts and crafts; the fearless conqueror and selfless benefactor of the Navajos; and the thoroughly Western lawman. Each incarnation of the Hubbell legend spoke to travelers' relationships with Navajo country and the Southwest in different ways. I argue, however, that after Hubbell's death, the connection between his stories and travelers' sense of place weakened dramatically.