History

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4929

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China Recharted: The Zou Family’s Cartographic Enterprise and the Making of Chinese Territoriality in the Late Qing, 1850-1911
(2026-04-20) Ou Yang, Ting-chieh; Mosca, Matthew
In the age of Google Maps, we sometimes mistakenly assume map literacy, but the ability to read meaning within maps requires long-term exposure and instruction. While scholarship has demonstrated how Qing China (1644-1911) utilized cartographic projects in its territorial expansions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far less attention has been paid to how new maps in the late 1800s impacted the national consciousness of Qing elites. Analyzing these new maps reveals that the Chinese nation as a spatial concept had appeared in the 1880s, earlier than China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, the year commonly seen as marking the beginning of Chinese nationalism by many scholars. In addition, these maps indicate two important realities about the construction of the Chinese nation during this period: 1) that conservatives utilized these maps to conceptualize the Chinese nation, and 2) the influence of capitalist markets upon map production. First, people involved in the creation of these maps were not revolutionaries or reformists but conservative businessmen. Although Chinese conservatives were blamed for the Qing’s failure to modernize, they used cartographic products to transmit their views of the Chinese nation to the reading Chinese public. Second, in order to maximize profits, these conservative businessmen produced their products based upon considerations of each map’s cost and marketability. Relevant factors included each map’s type of paper, size, and quantity, as well as the salaries of draughtsmen and the tastes of the public. Unlike the eighteenth-century atlases made in the Qing court, commercial map production in the late 1800s was influenced by the interactions between map businessmen and consumers of the Han Chinese reading public. Based on these two realities, this dissertation shows how the commercial and the social factored into map production and, in turn, the conceptualization of the Chinese nation in late Qing China.
From Stalingrad to Volgograd: De-Stalinizing Stalinist Civilization, 1943-1964
(2024-10-16) Cotton, Matthew; Young, Glennys
The Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43) left the Soviet city of its namesake in ruins. The two decades-long reconstruction of Stalingrad was a shared project between residents and the state that strove to create a modern socialist metropolis while honoring the heroic efforts of those who fought and died in the war. The restoration of the city took place first under Joseph Stalin, and later during the political and cultural upheaval of de-Stalinization unleashed by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. By examining the choices of Soviet urban planners and the “everyday” experience of residents within the city through the communist party’s local newspaper, this study seeks to explore how de-Stalinization transformed Soviet civilization through a tightly focused urban case study. This dissertation argues that Khrushchev’s reforms significantly altered Soviet life in Stalingrad through initiatives aimed at providing mass-housing, revitalizing the planned economy, expanding agricultural production, and bringing an end to state terror, all while supplanting the party’s legitimizing narrative previously contained within Stalin’s “cult of personality” with a newly expanded war myth and an updated vision of communist modernity.
Refuge in Abundance: Puʻuhonua o Kakaʻako and Native Hawaiian Politics of Family and Place in the Early Twentieth Century
(2024-10-16) Bourgette, Alika; Reid, Joshua L
“Refuge in Abundance” investigates the ways early-twentieth century Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) built and perpetuated puʻuhonua (refuge and abundance) within the shoreline neighborhood of Kakaʻako, Honolulu. Native Hawaiian lands and waters allowed early-twentieth century communities to access deep memories of interconnection important to creating the Indigenous futures. As practiced through place-based cartographic and Indigenous storytelling methods, Indigenous world-making provides alternatives to capital-driven narratives of apocalyptic decline. Through a relational mapping of Hawaiʻinuiākea (Greater Hawaiʻi) that flows as water through the skies, along the streams, and out to sea, Native Hawaiian political writers across the nineteenth century engaged in intergenerational conversations that contemplated future needs and desires during a tumultuous era of imperial upheaval and U.S. colonial occupation. Kingdom-era transformations of land tenure during the Māhele ʻĀina (Land Division) of 1848 and subsequent Kuleana Act of 1850 wrought declining fortunes for makaʻāinana (commoner) Native Hawaiians. Many makaʻāinana lost access to lands as they had for generations, despite protections and laws that incentivized their private land ownership. However, by the first decades of the twentieth century, the abundant foodscape of Indigenous Honolulu challenged the interests of settler officials in the fledgling Territory of Hawaiʻi. Relying on expanded kin and food networks from mountains to sea, Native Hawaiians braided a constellation of care and anti-eviction efforts across Honolulu. In the 1910s and 1920s, where the officials and institutions of the Territory of Hawaiʻi saw crime, filth, and racial decline, Kakaʻako community members brought together their “many hands” to create joy and usher in new life. As a form of political expression, engagement in genealogical connections to lands, waters, and skies demonstrated through midwifery, child rearing, and schoolteaching provided Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian community members alternatives to participation in colonial subjecthood as “residents” of the U.S. Territory of Hawaiʻi. As frequent targets for removal and incarceration by city police and territorial lawmakers, Native Hawaiian youths circumvented colonial organization of school and playground spaces through expanded kin and familial relationships they formed with their schoolteachers. Collective joy also reverberated through the expression of multiple Indigenous genders and sexualities by the actions of Native Hawaiian artists and entertainers who critiqued colonial capitalism in their shaping of emerging tourism. The arrival of passenger steamships in the early twentieth century presented Native Hawaiian women, men, and queer folks opportunities not only to make money, but also to carve out expansive understandings of Indigenous genders that defied limited, binary definitions and roles. As exhibited bodies, fetishized companions, and musical performers, Native Hawaiian beachboys served as living souvenirs for affluent patrons on the North American continent. Native Hawaiian boys and young men circumvented the colonial and racial organization of spaces normally reserved for haole elites in Hawai‘i and elsewhere. Through the creative joy and life-affirming worlds mutually conceived by Indigenous lands, waters, peoples, “Refuge in Abundance” celebrates the generations of Native Hawaiians who fostered the future for us, their descendants and protectors for time to come.
Twice Exiled: The Ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of China (1955-Present)
(2024-10-16) Bui, Alvin Khiem; Giebel, Christoph
This dissertation historicizes the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam or “Hoa” in the context of relations between the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and the Republic of China (ROC)/Taiwan. The Hoa formed a notable minority in the RVN and became a substantial demographic of the IndoChinese (“boat people”) refugee crisis. The first part is devoted to Hoa and ROC reactions to the RVN’s attempts to assimilate them through “Vietnamization” in four policy areas. Part two looks at two case studies of Hoa involvement in Cold War-era transnational anti-communist networks in the late 1960s. In the final part, I trace the journeys of some 15,000 Hoa and non-Hoa asylum seekers from Indochina who passed to or through Taiwan and the various ways that the term “refugee” was deployed and used by the ROC government, the United States government and the asylum seekers themselves.
Black Revolution on the Sea Islands
(2024-10-16) O'Shaughnessy, Frances; Jung, Moon-Ho; Smallwood, Stephanie
“Black Revolution on the Sea Islands” historicizes Gullah Geechee practices of collective care and kinship during the US Civil War and Reconstruction. In their engagement with and disengagement from the state, Black people’s politics of communal care challenged the order of property and propriety undergirding slavery, what I call “anti-proprietary freedoms.” Most histories of Reconstruction tend to posit a redemptive narrative for the US state, which is assumed to possess the authority to resolve the contradiction between representative democracy and global capitalism through national inclusion and civic equality. The state’s extension of political freedoms to African American men during Reconstruction has driven generations of historians to lament that the state did not likewise distribute economic freedoms like land ownership. The denial of land redistribution has come to represent the tragedy of the period. By framing Black people’s emancipation of labour around the emancipation of land, my dissertation shifts the focus away from the state’s redistribution of land and toward Black politics of collective sustenance. I argue Black people’s revolutionary visions of freedom emanated not from the state but from their creation of another world beyond property.
Empire of Tomorrow: Seattle and the Making of Global Capitalism in the 1970s
(2024-02-12) Hedden, Andrew; O'Mara, Margaret
This dissertation recounts the history of Seattle as an imperial city, and in doing so chronicles a larger story about the fate of American global supremacy in the late twentieth century. Whereas the city began the 1970s in economic and political turmoil, it ended the decade as a paragon of new American urbanism, “the most livable city in the United States.” And American power, once found strictly in manufacturing strength and military prowess, was being recomposed in new professional service sectors of trade, research, and technology – sectors that heavily favored Seattle. By examining how working people, community activists, unions, politicians, and business experienced these transformations, this dissertation argues that the fates of both the city of Seattle and American empire were deeply entwined. Faced with crisis, their renewed fortunes required new formations of class and race that would allow American elites to defeat the strength of organized labor and social movements while tapping into growing circuits of global capital.
Resistance Nationalisms: Vietnamese Political Identities and Refugee Narratives in the United States, 1945-1995
(2023-09-27) Nguyen, Gia-Quan Thi Anna; Jung, Moon-Ho
This project explores how Vietnamese Americans across the political spectrum manipulated and subverted narratives surrounding displaced people before, during, and after the Vietnam War. In doing so, I argue, they advanced their own anticolonial agendas to contest dominant notions of race, war, and empire in both the United States and Vietnam. The dissertation consists of three parts, each of which covers a political movement in the United States spearheaded by Vietnamese nationalists. The first part disrupts the typical timeline of Vietnamese American history by tracking the rise of a left-wing Vietnamese political tradition in the United States from 1945 to 1975. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s when Vietnamese seamen formed the Vietnam-American Friendship Association to campaign for the U.S. recognition of Vietnam’s independence from France, this political tradition drove South Vietnamese exchange students to join the U.S. antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. This largely forgotten history of prominent Vietnamese left-wing activists in the United States demonstrates that anticolonialism shaped Vietnamese American political identities across the second half of the twentieth century. The second part focuses on the Homeland Restoration Movement, an anticommunist and anticolonial struggle organized by Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s to overthrow the Hanoi regime. A direct response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979 that ousted the Khmer Rouge and established a new Vietnamese-backed government in its place, the movement, I argue, encompassed and integrated anticommunism and anticolonialism among Vietnamese Americans. The third part explores how Vietnamese advanced their political agendas by cultivating, exploiting, and appropriating narratives surrounding U.S. POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia. In the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnamese refugees routinely returned to the American POW/MIA Movement to advocate on behalf of Vietnamese POWs and to intervene in debates over the normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations.
The Archive Performs: Malay Performance Traditions as Vessels for Islamic Histories and Identities in Sumatra
(2023-09-27) Chaterji, Katia; Sears, Laurie
This dissertation explores the history of Islam in maritime Southeast Asia, focusing on the transmission of Islamic knowledge to Indonesia’s island of Sumatra through pathways mobilized by the arts – journeys made possible by singing and dancing. Looking at dakwah (Islamic proselytization) performance generally and two Sumatran dakwah traditions specifically (salawat dulang and zapin), my research shows how Islamization in the Malay archipelago demanded local individual agency in the formation of Malay Islamic cultural identity. Chapter One discusses the emergence of racialized Malayness in colonial discourses that set a persistent image against which Malay artisans and their traditions were assessed; Chapter Two considers the organization of self-identifying Indonesian Islamic artists and their responses to how the arts fit into changing religious and national identities at the cusp of violent anticommunism and a regime change in the 1960s; and Chapters Three and Four focus on the history and development of two specific dakwah traditions, salawat dulang and zapin, as embodied and oral traditions employed by practitioners to reflect local understandings of Islam in numerous ways. This dissertation contributes new ways of thinking about the performing arts as sites of Islamic cultural knowledge production, the permissibility of art within Islamic practice, and the global diversity of Islam not only through regional variation but also through the varying representations of Islam as performed tradition. In addressing such issues, this project engages a combined methodological approach drawing upon archival analysis, oral history, and dance ethnography to interrogate textual sources and performing bodies together. This approach brings together material from London, Jakarta, and the Indonesian provinces of West Sumatra and Riau in Sumatra.
Mosul's Hinterland: Village and Monastery in Early Islamic Iraq
(2023-01-21) Haines, Jeffrey; Walker, Joel
This dissertation offers a social history of monasteries and villages in the hinterland of Mosul during the early Islamic period. Modern historians of the medieval Islamic world often mention the large Christian populations that flourished in the rural areas of the caliphate, but rarely include close analysis of these communities. Syriac monastic sources, however, take readers deep into rural landscapes of the ʿAbbāsid Empire, which remained little known to Muslim geographers. Using John Bar Kaldoun’s Life of Rabban Joseph Busnaya, a tenth-century narrative about the rise and fall of the East Syrian monastery of Beit Ṣayyare in the highlands of northern Iraq, this work traces the interactions between urban center and hinterlands and the tangled connections between monasteries, local villages, and Kurdish tribes. Its anecdotes about the war between the Ḥamdanid and Buyid dynasties also give a glimpse of Islamic history from below and the consequences that followed the seismic political shifts that wracked the middle ʿAbbāsid era.
"Don't We All Have a Responsibility?”: Authority, Agency, and the Reframing of Jewish Life in East Berlin before and after the Fall of the Wall
(2023-01-21) Schatte, Katja; Young, Glennys; Naar, Devin
This dissertation examines the ways in which individuals, particularly women, identifying as Jewish in East Berlin between 1945 and 2016 articulated their Jewish identity and sense of community in the aftermath of the Holocaust, under state socialism, and in response to the social and political changes of the reunification period. It argues that we can understand this trajectory only if we develop an understanding of Jewish history that lifts up marginalized and less-heard voices. In practice, this means taking seriously the idea of a multiplicity of perspectives and re-examining the question of what constitutes the center, and the margins, of Jewish life. This dissertation thus combines the examination of state and congregation documents with analyses of memoirs, essays, literary works, and oral history interviews to address issues such as the experiences of Jews of different national origins, the impact of reunification on the personal and professional lives of East Berlin Jews, and the ways community members documented their lives.
Conquest of Amity: Affective Politics and Cultures of Friendship in the Spanish Colonization of the Philippines, 1521-1762
(2022-09-23) Jiamrattanyoo, Arthit; Rafael, Vicente L.
This dissertation presents a political history of friendship in cross-cultural relations between Philippine natives and Spaniards from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. It examines the ways in which various types of friendship were forged in the contexts of colonial contact, domination, endurance, and resistance—and how they were imbricated with interimperial, colonial, and local politics in the Philippines. It conceptualizes these ties as “affective arrangements” and “agonistic intimacies” in order to mark their affective and contractual character as well as their inherent tension. Drawing upon archival and published sources in European and Philippine languages, I argue that the Spanish colonial matrix of power in the Philippines was crucially constituted and challenged through friendship as a site and means of struggle for both sides of the colonial axis as well as third parties. Their politics of friendship transpired on three interconnected levels: interpersonal friendship between individuals or groups of people in direct contact, interpolity friendship between political communities, and divine friendship between God and native converts. All three modes unfolded through the dynamic workings of various affects and entailed analogous practices of friend-making—particularly friendly hailing, gift giving, and covenant making. The Spanish colonization of the Philippines was partly driven by a transimperial paradigm of friendship understood as a set of contractual and affective practices. Rooted in European philosophical and juridical-political traditions, the paradigm informed imperial competition in Southeast Asia and beyond. Spain’s imperial ideology of friendly pacification, however, was compromised by the ethno-racialization of native (in)amicability and practical circumstances on the ground. Its implementation was significantly characterized by violence, for friendship was at times acquired by force just as violence was justified on account of friendship or a lack thereof. Spaniards also appropriated an indigenous Philippine form of ritualized friendship as a native token of friendly agreement, and yet supplanted it with their own legal and ceremonial practices. Nevertheless, Spanish intervention and domination were strategically evaded, negotiated, or resisted by some Philippine natives through their individual maneuvering or their collective mobilization of friendship as a counter-hegemonic mode of social belonging and solidarity. Others, meanwhile, actively befriended vying imperial powers, sometimes oscillating between them, to maintain their relative autonomy and attract foreign aid in their local conflicts. This early colonial politics of amity heralded the leitmotif of friendship that has recurred in Philippine domestic and foreign affairs up to this day.
Gateway Cities: Seattle and Vancouver on the Pacific, 1896-1939
(2022-09-23) Heslop, Madison L.; Reid, Joshua L.
“Gateway Cities” explores the cultural and material production of settler colonialism in the urban waterfronts of Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, between the 1890s and 1930s. It charts the making of modern, imperial settler cities from Indigenous settlements and mill towns on the shores of the Salish Sea and the establishment of a permanent, settled society with respectable, white, property-owning settlers at the top of its social order. Since at least the 1890s, white settler colonists in the coastal Pacific Northwest have attempted to fix ambiguous—or amphibious, in the case of the urban waterfront—spaces and identities and naturalize the status of settler colonial cities through forms of regulation, including criminalization, exclusion, and engineering. “Gateway Cities” reorients orthodox land-centered approaches to settler colonial studies, urban history, and the regional study of the North American West to the shoreline in order to better understand the place of the Pacific Northwest in the Pacific and how colonization has operated at the threshold between them. It argues that settlers pursued interrelated strategies of cultural and material production, municipal engineering, and legislative action in order to stabilize their assets, define the boundaries of belonging, and assert social, political and economic dominance within the Seattle and Vancouver waterfronts. These waterfronts functioned both literally and rhetorically as gateways for the continuously rising number of settlers in the urban coastal Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century and served as a nexus of competition over the right to determine the public images and futures of these cities and the Pacific, one that transformed the waterfront from a chaotic, subversive zone into a space that remains tightly regulated today.
Diagnosing Minorities: Anti-Syphilis Campaigns and Nation-state Building on the Inner Asian Frontiers of China, 1949-1964
(2022-09-23) Zeng, Xiaoshun; Dong, Madeleine Yue
This dissertation examines how and why the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched a massive-scale STD control program, officially termed “Ethnic Health” (Minzu weisheng), among the ethnic minority peoples in Inner Mongolia, eastern Tibet (Kham and Amdo), and Xinjiang from the 1950s through mid-1960s. Drawing on archival documents, government publications, medical writings, newspapers, memoirs, and oral history interviews, this research shows how the medical teams dispatched from Beijing and provincial capitals carried out anti-syphilis campaigns among the diverse minority communities on the Inner Asian frontiers of China. My research suggests that the Ethnic Health program embodied the PRC’s medicalized and sexualized approach to “seeing” and governing Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minority peoples in the peripheral regions. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the early PRC state launched a biopolitical campaign to bolster regime legitimacy and, more importantly, incorporate Inner Asian minority groups into the emerging Han-centered socialist nation-state. Even though the Ethnic Health program was devised to promote health and elevate the status of the Inner Asian minority population, the program failed to achieve its desired effects and, on the contrary, further marginalized ethnic minorities in the cultural and political realm of Mao-era China.
At War Again: Soldiers, Civilians, and Multi-War Experiences in the British Empire, 1885-1918
(2022-07-14) Soja, Taylor M; Bailkin, Jordanna
In the decades on either side of the turn of the twentieth century, Britain was at war in its empire. At War Again: Soldiers, Civilians, and Multi-War Experiences in the British Empire, 1885-1918 is the first academic history of a diverse group of Britons who took part in multiple British imperial conflicts, from so-called expeditions, campaigns, rebellions, and wars that took place throughout Africa and in other British colonies, to the First World War. Multi-war veterans belonged to a particular cohort that came of age in the waning years of the nineteenth century and who were often in their late thirties, forties, or fifties when they experienced World War I. They were working-class soldiers, career military officers, nurses, caregivers, and family members of those who served. Together, the diversity of their experiences shows that the particular character of the British empire at the turn of the century meant that it was not only possible, but common, to live a life repeatedly punctuated by experiences of war. This project recasts the relationship between colonial violence and military history by studying the lives and experiences of those Britons for whom the First World War did not come first. Their lives not only allow for a re-consideration of the relationship between the First World War and earlier British imperial wars, but also demonstrate the centrality of war and violence to the maintenance and expansion of European empires, particularly in Africa. Using critical approaches to biographical writing and analysis, including group biography and approaches to the biographies of material culture objects, this project argues for the importance of continuities that extend beyond traditional chronological and geographic lines. Starting first from the experiences of individuals whose lives unite nineteenth-century colonial wars to the First World War, it then analogizes out to consider bigger picture connections across systems of empire, nation, and war. It also shows that as British multi-war veterans made meaning of their repeated military service and their participation in programs of colonial violence, they also came to understand themselves as Britons. This project, then, makes an argument for the importance of subjective experience and identity formation as essential for understanding the connections between colonial conflict and the First World War.
England’s Worldly King: The Foreign, the Global, and the Rise of Cultural Cosmopolitanism at the Court of Henry VIII
(2021-10-29) Hinchliffe, Emma R; Schmidt, Benjamin
It is the premise of this study that in the Tudor period there developed a new sense ofbeing/feeling ‘cosmopolitan’ – i.e. a citizen of the world - that was distinct from the original, political, meaning of this term and was instead defined by cross cultural engagement, international trade, and interest in the peoples and places of the early modern world. This sense of cosmopolitanism would be explicitly articulated in Elizabeth I’s reign but has its origins earlier, in the court and culture of her father Henry VIII. This cultural cosmopolitanism was not just a-political but actually came to prominence within the decidedly anti-cosmopolitan political arrangement of the sovereign nation state. This dissertation charts the development of this identity through an exploration into the material culture of Henry VIII’s court and argues that it grew out from his rapacious desire to be seen as a worldly king in a newly globalized world. This subsequently led to a new appetite for, and place of, the foreign and the global at his court; manifested principally in his consumption of foreign things, goods, and global knowledge, andin his positive relationships with ‘strangers.’ These cultural interests happened to come to maturity in a period when, politically, England was turning away from internationalism and developing a growing sense of national identity and sovereignty that would culminate in Henry’s reformation in 1533. This dissertation argues that this coincidence of a multicultural court with a renewed sense of national politics enabled a culturally specific, and patriotic, form of cosmopolitanism to take root in England.
Contesting dismemberment: rumor, revolt, and empire in Peru and the Philippines (1920-1930)
(2021-10-29) Bayona, Jorge Enrique; Rafael, Vicente L.; Warren, Adam
In an effort to disrupt traditional borders of Area Studies, this dissertation studies two regions rarely put into conversation with each other—Southeast Asia and Latin America—in comparative perspective to study the anxieties that emerged among local Ã©lites in Lima and Manila when dealing with threats to the geobodies of their nations. The territories under threat of dismemberment from the nation—the Amazon basin and the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu—though claimed for centuries by their predecessor state, the Spanish Empire, had only relatively recently been effectively incorporated into the territory administered from the capital cities of Lima and Manila, and despite the apparent “solidity” of the nation, continued to be understood as fragile additions that could be amputated with far greater ease than their “core” territories. The study of the rumors and revolts that took shape in and surrounding these territories unearths the anxieties and fears that revolved around them and gives us insight into the differentiated manners in which those spaces and the indigenous peoples living there were understood and what their relationship with the nation as a whole was. These threats emerged in a context of American empire, which was understood to seek territorial reorganization for its own benefit. Paradoxically, it was the country subjected to direct colonial control, the Philippines, that more successfully weathered the challenge, while Peru, subjected to indirect empire or necolonialism, proved less capable of doing so, thus also blurring the boundaries between both kinds of imperialism.
Modern Antiquities: Arthur Evans, the Balkans, and the Discovery of a Lost European Civilization
(2021-08-26) Elezovic, Arna Sophia; Walker, Joel
This dissertation employs the career of British archaeologist Arthur Evans as the fulcrum to examine the concept of “modern antiquities,” which Evans defined as the study of ancient customs and societies best represented in the Balkans, and which he understood as essential to understanding the ancient past. The dissertation seeks to connect Evans’ more widely known expertise in the Bronze Age Aegean (circa 3000 – 1200 BCE) with his experience in the Slavic Balkans in the late 19th century, to show he participated in the construction of European and Balkan identities, including an imagined past of Europe. Previous studies of Evans have focused, for understandable reasons, on his discovery on Crete of the physical remains of Minoan civilization, which he himself termed “that earliest of European civilizations.” Evans’ first career began in the Balkans in the 1870s and included a five-year residence in Dubrovnik (now in Croatia), while he was journalist writing for The Manchester Guardian. His substantial political involvement in southern Slavic causes continued after his formal expulsion (for spying) by the Austrians in 1882, in particular during the period of World War I and the peace process of 1919. Using Evans’ own published books, unpublished travel journals, unpublished letters and draft memoranda, and lesser known published articles, the dissertation examines how Evans contributed to the construction of a southern Slavic identity in a multi-tiered way. For example, he perpetuated stereotypes about the ‘barbaric Balkans’ while simultaneously idealizing the Balkan peoples for having ancient customs; and yet, he supported their modernization efforts when he designed maps of the region based on Roman roads to illustrate the potential train or road routes to improve communication. This dissertation will contribute to regional studies of southeastern Europe and identity studies (gender and ethnicity) by bringing a lesser known aspect of Evans’ career forward. The goal of the project is to understand Evans’ legacy and how he perpetuated a tradition where current popular academic journalism continues to treat the Balkans as on the edge or even beyond the borders of Europe.
Politics, Protest and Revolution: The Origins and Evolution of the Urban Networks of the NLF and the Communist Party in Central Vietnam, 1930-1975
(2021-08-26) Lillie, Aaron; Gebiel, Christoph
This project combines political history, social history and memory to convey a perspective of the war through the eyes of the people of Central Vietnam who participated in the urban movement of the Vietnamese Revolution. It is intended to address conspicuous gaps within the historical record through an examination of how and why urban networks of the Communist Party, the Việt Minh and the NLF evolved and attracted new members in Huế and Central Vietnam in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.Beginning with the inception of the Communist Party in Huế in 1930, this project tracks the various affiliated underground network’s development and evolution through World War II, the French War of decolonization, the Diệm government, the Struggle Movement and the Tết Offensive, concluding in the early 1970s. It offers a view of the Vietnamese revolution and the Vietnam Wars (1945-1975) from the perspective of the people in Huế and Central Vietnam who joined the, the Communist Party, the NLF and the student and Struggle Movements. Chapters 1 and 2 follow the development of the Communist Party and affiliated networks in central Vietnam through the 1940s and 1950s. Based primarily on recent interviews with participants and eyewitnesses, Chapters 3,4 and 5 are a narrative which incorporates a collection of perspectives of NLF underground agents, dissidents and political activists, who, riding a wave of anti-American nationalism and Buddhist and student anger at the undemocratic policies of the military government in early 1960s central Vietnam, made a choice to become committed revolutionaries. Chapter 5 also addresses the Tết Offensive in Huế and surrounding controversies in some detail.
The Countercultural Back-to-the-Land Movement
(2021-08-26) Bowdler, Jonathan A; Findlay, John
The countercultural back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s was the third wave of an antimodern tradition that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. This study places the hippie back-to-the-land movement within this larger context and follows the intergenerational exchange between the counterculture and second generation back-to-the-landers such as Ralph Borsodi, Mildred Loomis, and the School of Living organization in the mid-1960s. The resulting narrative offers a complex picture of exchange as an older generation introduced hippies in Berkeley to decentralism, eugenics, and a form of anti-statist environmentalism. The counterculture, however, was the product of the Cold War prosperity and the shifting politics of the New Left. The overwhelmingly white, middle-class counterculture did not adopt eugenics. Instead, it formulated a novel back-to-the-land ideology that combined decentralism and pastoralism with an emerging white identity politics that appropriated from non-white traditions, especially those of Native American groups, that were viewed as premodern models for a post-modern future. This study follows three case studies – Twin Oaks in Virginia, Alpha Farm in Oregon, and Heathcote in Maryland – to track the movement as the 1960s counterculture transformed into the New Age movement of the 1970s and 1980s. By drawing on newsletters and other archival materials, this study explores how back-to-the-landers sought to fashion alternative political cultures that avoided the practice of voting, novel economic systems that empowered women, and intercommunal organizations that offered labor-sharing services and New Age social gatherings. Like other antimodern movements such as the Arts and Crafts movement, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s primarily served the racial and class interests of participants and ended up reinforcing dominant cultural trends such as the rise of post-World War Two consumerism, the shift towards a politics of the personal, the rightward turn of American politics in the 1970s, and the settler-colonial appropriation of Native culture. Though the countercultural back-to-the-land movement offered individual personal transformation and influenced the Organic movement, the environmental movement, and the personal computing movement, it failed to attract a more diverse coalition and could not offer a radical alternative to Cold War society and culture.
The Myth of Elizabeth: History, Memory, and Race in Alaska, 1867–2020
(2021-08-26) Coen, Ross; Findlay, John
This dissertation examines a pivotal moment in the history of Alaska Native civil rights, the enactment of an anti-discrimination law in 1945 that guaranteed equal access to public facilities without regard to color or race, to show how such stories become mythologized in public memory. Sponsored by the Alaska Native Brotherhood, an Indigenous rights organization comprised of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples of Southeast Alaska, the law passed following a contentious debate in the territorial legislature in which Elizabeth Peratrovich (Tlingit) delivered impassioned testimony that refuted the bigotry of anti-equal rights legislators. Rightfully canonized as a civil rights hero, Peratrovich is today the most famous woman in Alaska history with a state holiday in her honor. As with other figures from historically marginalized groups, such as Sacagawea, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks, however, the story of Peratrovich’s heroism has been exaggerated, embellished, and even falsified for the purpose of turning it into a myth, a term that in this context refers to a people’s collective memory about their past, which helps to sustain certain beliefs about the world and their place in it. Accordingly, the story of Alaska’s anti-discrimination law has been coopted by numerous groups and individuals for the purpose of validating social and political imperatives of the present moment in which the story was being told. In particular, White Alaskans have cited Peratrovich as evidence of White-Native reconciliation and the supposed achievement of full equality for all, both of which function to erase Indigeneity from the historical record, justify the settler colonial appropriation of Native lands, and perpetuate the marginalization of Natives from state institutions. Drawing on both Native testimonies and records of Alaska’s White-dominated political institutions, this dissertation shows how Indigenous histories are regularly framed according to settler colonial prerogatives and shaped by the interaction of myth, memory, and history.

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