Though extensively studied in the modern era, the Kansas-Nebraska crisis of the mid-1800s continues to evade being comprehended in its entirety. In this paper, the theories that have been proposed for why it occurred are presented. Subsequently, each known theory is analyzed for its strengths, weaknesses, and how it contributes to the understanding of the period. With this information in mind, I employ a historical diagram to propose ways that this cataclysmic event could have been avoided. However, by doing this, it also brings about unwelcome consequences. I leave it up to the reader to decide if the actual crisis or the presented alternative series of events would have been any better in avoiding civil war.

The Phoenix Coyotes entered bankruptcy and NHL stewardship in 2009 because of poor initial planning, short-sighted private ownership, and geographical constraints associated with the team's location in Glendale. The subsequent sale process extended from 2009-2013 and included multiple potential suitors, municipal politics, and international finance as the NHL fought to keep the troubled franchise in Phoenix.

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.

In speeches, declarations, journals, and convention proceedings, mid-nineteenth-century American woman's rights activists exhorted one another to action as equal heirs of the rights and burdens associated with independence and chided men for failing to live up to the founders' ideals and examples. They likened themselves to oppressed colonists and compared legislators to King George, yet also criticized the patriot fathers for excluding women from civic equality. This dissertation analyzes these invocations of collective memories of the nation's founding, described as Revolutionary heritage rhetoric, in publicly circulated texts produced by woman's rights associations from 1848 to 1890. This organization-driven approach de-centers the rhetoric of the early movement as the intellectual products of a few remarkable women, instead exploring movement rhetoric across the first generation through myriad voices: female and male; native- and foreign-born; those who spoke extemporaneously at conventions along with well-known organizers.

Tracing the use of Revolutionary heritage rhetoric over a fifty-year span reveals that activists’ invocations of the founding were inseparably connected to their willingness to work for racial and class equality along with woman's rights. References to the Revolution and such slogans as “no taxation without representation” could be inclusive or exclusionary, depending upon how they were used and who used them. In the opening decades of the organized woman’s rights movement, claims to a shared Revolutionary heritage reflected larger commitments to racial, class, and gender equality. As organizations within the movement fractured around competing ideas about how to best improve women's lives, activists’ rhetoric changed as well. When the commitment to universal equality gave way to ideologies of race, class, and nativity privilege, references to the founding era morphed into justifications for limited, rather than equal rights. Revolutionary heritage rhetoric largely disappeared from suffrage, education, and pay equity arguments by the late 1880s, replaced by arguments grounded in white, Protestant, female moral superiority.

Hollywood's portrayal of African American men was replete with negative stereotypes before Shelton Jackson Lee, commonly known as Spike Lee, emerged as one of the most creative and provocative filmmakers of our time. Lee has used his films to perform a corrective history of images of black men, by referencing African American male icons in his narrative works. This strategy was evident in his third feature film, Do the Right Thing (1989). Baseball great Jackie Robinson, and freedom fighters, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, were the black male icons featured prominently in the film. The Brooklyn-raised filmmaker's film journals, published interviews, and companion books, have provided insight into his thoughts, motivations, and inspirations, as he detailed the impact of the black male historical figures he profiles in Do the Right Thing (1989), on his life and art. Lee deployed his corrective history strategy, during the 1980s, to reintroduce African American heroes to black youth in an effort to correct media portrayals of black men as criminal and delinquent. He challenged the dominant narrative in mainstream Hollywood films, such as Cry Freedom (1987) and Mississippi Burning (1989), in which white heroes overshadowed black male icons. Lee's work parallels recent scholarship on the history of African American males, as called for by Darlene Clarke Hine and Ernestine Jenkins. The prolific director's efforts to radically change stereotypical depictions of black men through film, has not gone without criticisms. He has been accused of propagating essentialist notions of black male identity, through his use of African American male icons in his films. Despite these alleged shortcomings, Lee's reintroduction of iconic figures such as Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, in Do the Right Thing (1989), marked the beginning of a wave of commemorative efforts, that included the retiring of Robinson's number forty-two by Major League Baseball, the popularization of the Martin Luther King National Holiday, and the rise of Malcolm X as a icon embraced by Hip Hop during the 1990's.