Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Rivers of resistance: resource conflict and rural organizing in the Americas(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2024) Anderson, Jacey Christine; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Molly ToddIn the last half of the twentieth-century, historians of every specialization framed their studies by national boundaries, and environmental historians of the so-called "global north" separated the domain of human culture from the domain of physical nature. For decades, scholars widely accepted and repeated these arrangements, but the lines of separation and division turned out to be far more effective as obstructions to understanding than as paths to insight. This transnational research sets a consequential example by removing those obstructions and by mapping those paths. This is an environmental history of two river basins in the Americas. The following chapters unpack parallels between these places, specifically, how people along the Rio Lempa in El Salvador and the Tongue River in Montana used their local knowledge of the land to successfully prevent mining projects in the late twentieth and early-twenty first centuries. I examine the environmental, societal, and cultural factors that led to these successes from different scales--the global to the local--and highlight common themes they shared. Both movements focused on defending their watersheds from mining projects that would have damaged water quality and altered locals' ways of life. The leaders of both movements were not traditional environmentalists and did not consider themselves to be; rather, they were ordinary people who were fighting for what they valued--a life of dignity and respect for their surroundings. By examining two distinct case studies, I show that "success" stories are not singular anomalies. They serve as models for future action.Item Mining for empire: gold, American engineers, and transnational extractive capitalism, 1889-1914(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Bartos, Jeffrey Michael; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Billy Smith; Tim LeCain (co-chair)Between 1889 and 1914, American mining engineers drew on their experience in mining in the American West into management positions with prominent mining finance firms in the British Empire. The careers of three engineers, Hennen Jennings, John Hays Hammond, and Herbert Hoover, demonstrate their influence on British gold mining investment and on the imperial system. The professional biographies of these engineers demonstrate their racialized labor practices, access to technology and capital, ideas about management, and willingness to interfere in the politics and economies of sovereign nations for the interests of the mining finance industry, notably the Transvaal Republic and late Qing China. In their actions in the colonies, they employed the latest mining technologies to extract gold from low grade ores, imposed labor conditions on the basis of race (including the legal foundations of Apartheid in South Africa), and directed investment capital toward profitable mining in support of the monetary gold standard and shareholder dividends. Along with hundreds of other mining engineers, they oversaw a world-historical expansion of the world's gold supply through the expansion of gold mining on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal Republic and in Western Australia, effectively doubling the world's supply of gold in two decades. These engineers were agents of transnational extractive capitalism and the British and American empires. As an integral component of their careers, they operated in the core of empire: major centers of investment such as London and New York, the media and publishing worlds, and even world's fairs. They communicated their professional activities and technical developments through the Engineering and Mining Journal, the premier mining publication of the era. They promoted world's fairs, ensuring that mining was prominently featured as an aspect of civilization at these expositions. They also acted as public intellectuals, speaking and publishing on topics of empire, well beyond the purview of the mine. Based on archival research, contemporary technical journals and media accounts, and autobiographical documents, this dissertation analyzes the influence of American Mining Engineers, both good and bad, in shaping the British Empire and the modern world system before the outbreak of World War 1.Item History of Sand Coulee, Montana 1880 through 1900(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2008) Erickson, George L.; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mary Murphy.Sand Coulee is now a bedroom community for Great Falls, laying twelve miles east and south of the larger city. Both town and city had their start at almost exactly the same time during the early 1880s. Sand Coulee was well known throughout the territory because of the tremendous coal field that J. J. Hill exploited to fuel his Great Northern Railway that connected the Twin Cities of Minnesota with the Pacific Northwest. The biggest repository of Sand Coulee history is a small history written by Ruby Giannini titled "A History of Sand Coulee" and a book titled "The Gulch Area History" written by a committee of area residents. "The Gulch Area History" is a genealogy of the area. These two books are the only ones specifically written about Sand Coulee and neither includes documentation. This thesis is heavily documented so that those who disagree with this history or its conclusions will be able to compare sources. Because of Sand Coulee's coal mining importance, its history resides in many newspapers, magazines, official state reports and history books. The footnotes and bibliography of this thesis give the historian a sense for the wide range of material available in bits and scraps about Sand Coulee. This thesis covers areas that are relatively unexplored in Sand Coulee's history, but there is still a lot of history to be written about Sand Coulee.