This thesis explores the relationship between the ideological justification for civil disobedience in British India in the twentieth century and the contemporary responses to the nonviolent resistance. By evaluating the elements of preparation and reaction to the Champaran, Kheda, Rowlatt Hartal, Khilafat, Bardoli, Dandi, and Quit India satyagraha campaigns, an understanding of the goals and values of civil disobedience and noncooperation was established. By studying the intellectual works of Indian independence leaders, correspondence between British government officials, widely distributed newspapers (The Times of London, The Times of India, Young India, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The New York Times, etc) and first hand participant accounts, I was able to see how the ideas of independence leaders translated into popular participation and policy reform. A wide range of opinions existed amongst British contemporaries ranging from the encouragement of the Indian agitators to a deep hatred of the resistance. In addition, this thesis possesses an accompanying historical comic book which chronicles one family's participation in the Dandi March of 1930. The creative project attempts to introduce audiences to a historical case study of non-violent resistance. Similar to how Mahatma Gandhi chose salt to represent the oppression of all Indians by the British, the Salt March of 1930 was selected as the topic of the comic book in order to introduce all audiences to the experiences of twentieth century satyagrahis. Mass civil disobedience continues to be used as a tool for political change around the world today. "Soul Force" studies the pioneering efforts in mass nonviolent resistance within colonial India.

This paper analyzes the British people’s attitudes towards the French people both before and after the French Revolution. It looks at how the French émigrés played a role in shaping these attitudes. To analyze the opinions of the British people prior to the French Revolution travel diaries are used. These travel diaries identify the stereotypes of the French people given by the British. The French Revolution prompted the immigration of French people to England. This immigration led to a change in treatment towards the French people. Kirsty Carpenter was a pioneer in researching the role émigrés played in changing British attitudes towards the French. During the Revolution a variety of sources are used to examine what the British thought of the émigrés. Memories of Frances Burney and Comtesse du Boigne are used. In addition, articles and reports found in newspapers like The Observer. Also, editorial and political writings by Henry Dundas and Edmund Burke are used. In general, after analyzing these sources it is seen that British attitudes towards the French people differed with the introduction of French émigrés during the French Revolution. Prior to the French Revolution, many British people thought of the French as foolish, vain, and lazy. The French emigrants elicited a sympathetic response from the British people. The differing attitudes towards the French people can be explained by the dire circumstances of the emigrants, the violent nature of the Revolution, and the increased contact between the French and British people.

Women. War. What is the relationship between women and war? As evidenced by movies, popular memoirs and journals, there is a definite relationship between men and war. However, this definite relationship has created a problematic and a complex relationship between women and war. The two historical events that are considered as the ‘turning points’ for women are the French Revolution and World War I are compared in this thesis. The popular perception of women’s legacy of the French Revolution is that the Revolution cultivated the ideas of Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity while World War I catapulted women to the public sphere. These two contrasting legacies are compared to see if French women’s lived experiences, memories, and writings verify these popular perceptions. Or, do the writings of the French women present a different argument? The thesis compares the writings and the lived experiences of the French women through three different themes: the argument for political rights, victimization and agency, and gendered connections (the development of sisterhood for the Revolution) or gendered divides (women’s role on the home and war front). In addition, these three themes come together to show how it is difficult to come up with a collective, public memory.

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.

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.

Historians typically view the postwar suburban metropolis from one of two vantages: from the vantage of urban capital as it flowed out of central cities into new automobile suburbs, where a new suburban culture emerged and flourished after 1945, or from the vantage of central cities, which become progressively hollowed out, leaving behind badly deteriorated inner-city services and facilities. Rarely, however, do historians view the postwar suburban metropolis from the vantage of peripheral small towns and rural countrysides. This study looks at the “metropolitan revolution” from the outside in, as the metropolis approached and then absorbed a landscape of farms and ranches centered on a small farm-service town. As a case study, it focuses on Tempe, Arizona, a town and rural countryside eight miles east of Phoenix.

During the postwar period, Tempe became part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Agricultural production in Tempe yielded to suburban development, as a producer-oriented landscape of farms and ranches became a consumer-oriented landscape of residential subdivisions and university buildings. Intangible goods such as higher education eclipsed tangible goods such as grain, dairy, and cotton. Single-family houses supplanted farmland; shopping centers with parking lots undermined main street businesses; irrigation water became domestic water; and International-style university buildings displaced vernacular neighborhoods rooted in the early history of the settlement. In Tempe, the rural agricultural landscape gave way to a suburban landscape. But in important ways, the former shaped the latter, as the suburban metropolis inherited the underlying form and spatial relationships of farms and ranches.

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.

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.

Newfoundland is an island on the east coast of Canada that is mostly forgotten to the study of history. This paper looks in depth at the fighting between France and England between 1696 and 1713, which in Europe coincided with the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1696, fighting broke out on Newfoundland between England and France because of the Nine Years’ War. Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville, a French officer, commanded the attacks on over twenty English settlements. The attacks lasted less than a year. Attacks would happen again because of the War of the Spanish Succession. France and England would attack each other trying to gain control of the prized commodity of the island, the cod fish. This study looks at how French and English fighting on Newfoundland helped to change the landscape and shaped the way the history of the French and English on the island is portrayed today. Historians tend to look more at the modern history of the island such as: soldiers in World War I and World War II, when Newfoundland became a Canadian province, and the English history of the island. This study argues that, by studying French and English fighting on the island, we can better see the historical significance of Newfoundland.

This paper contains a cultural history of the band movement in territorial Phoenix, Arizona, from about 1885-1915. I discuss how bands formed, performed, and fundraised; and how their audiences supported them. Cultural historians have conducted studies of the band movement on a national scale or within a specific context, such as music in the Indian Schools. Music historians have published studies of the structure of band music, their repertoire, and the conductors who composed that music and led professional bands of the day. My study looks at the role of bands in supporting the development of nationalism in a particular region. Phoenix, between 1885 and 1915 was the capital city of a region transitioning from a dusty, relatively isolated western territory to an economically profitable state, connected to the greater nation by railroads and canals. The activities of bands in Phoenix illustrate Arizonans’ drive to be included in the American national community.

I utilize the theories of several cultural historians and one economic historian. Jürgen Habermas, Benedict Anderson, and Maurice Halbwachs all look at how people see themselves as part of a nation, and the manners in which they communicate and socialize with each other. I assert that the development of the band movement in Phoenix parallels the stages of musical development that Jacques Attali, a French economist and historian, has established. Attali writes that music is tied to the mode of production of a society; as Arizona strengthened its economic, political, and social forms of production, bands reflected, and often heralded, those changes.

Despite their remote location and lack of professional musicians, Phoenicians were enthusiastic supporters of the band movement. They were eager to jump on the bandwagon, not because they viewed brass and wind band music as an elite, virtuosic art form, but because bands allowed them a public forum in which to collectively celebrate their American nationalism and advocate their case for statehood on a national level.