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Item To hell, heaven, and back again: language, religon, and the varied meanings of Yellowstone(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2024) Taylor, Joshua James; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeThis thesis examines the history of language and Yellowstone National Park from the early nineteenth century through the second decade of the twentieth century. I examine how the language used to describe Yellowstone's many features changed over time and how that language reflected the larger culture and the change that took place over time.Item A tangled path to extremism: desperation, resentment, and rebellion in rural Montana(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Dunn, Jennifer Anne; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael ReidyIn the closing decades of the twentieth century, the American West saw an increase in anti-government and white supremacy extremism. Montana had a number of events where residents resisted the federal government culminating in the Montana Freemen, a group who engaged in an 81-day armed standoff with the FBI in the spring and summer of 1996. Why were western residents so angry at the federal government who they believed was, at best, ignoring rural western communities, and at worst, threatening their liberty and their lives? To answer this question, I examined three rural Montana communities - Denton, Jordan and Libby - each of whom clashed with the government at the end of the century. While these conflicts developed for different reasons, residents' responses to the encounters and the regulations imposed on them illustrate a continuum ranging from resigned irritation, to urgent pleas for help, to outright rebellion. In this dissertation, I argue that the study of the 1990s in Montana reveals the development of anti-government extremism. To understand how western residents' frustrations and concerns coalesced into this directed anger, I examine three rural communities in Montana - Libby, Jordan, and Denton - whose residents were frustrated with federal regulation and believed not only that they had been forgotten by the government, unions, academics, and urbanites but that those groups were working against them. The residents of these towns lived and worked in resource communities and supplied the materials that built post-World War II America. They believed that their communities and economies had been sacrificed and forgotten. The residents in these rural town expressed their anger in different ways, but it did not dissipate after the decade ended. Their responses reveal the mounting tension, frustration, and anger that existed in the last decade of the twentieth century and highlight a throughline of connection and historical significance to anti-government extremist groups that continue to threaten democracy today.Item Gichi Bizhiki (Grandfather Buffalo): Anishinaabe sovereignty, the seasonal round, and resistance to the colonization of the web of life, 1780-1890(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Ramaker, Jill Falcon; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mary MurphyGichi Bizhiki (Grandfather Buffalo): Anishinaabe Sovereignty, the Seasonal Round, and Resistance to the Colonization of the Web of Life is an Indigenous environmental history of the years 1780 through 1890, in which many Anishinaabeg departed the wild rice- centered food system and fanned out across the Northwestern Plains from the Red River Valley to the Rocky Mountains, as they adapted to buffalo culture. The Anishinaabeg practiced the seasonal round, a highly complex pattern of movements on the land to hunt, harvest, cultivate, and trade foods as part of a holistic way of life, patterned on ancestral reciprocal obligations to place. From the 1600s forward, Euro-American colonizers, in support of industrial and capital development in Europe and eastern North America, extracted natural resources from Turtle Island including animal furs and robes, minerals, forests, and overtook land for monocropping. Euro-American colonization of the web of life to which Anishinaabe people belonged rendered the Anishinaabe seasonal round way of life unsustainable. Further, colonial policies attempted to suppress all aspects of Anishinaabe life including language, knowledge, and spiritual life. In response to colonial persecution, Anishinaabeg 'ran with the archives,' (their ceremonies) as it was unsafe for their children to be identified as Anishinaabeg. Following Anishinaabe western movement, this study tells the story of how Anishinaabe resisted colonization. Research methods included drawing on archival sources from Canada and the United States, and culturally-congruent sources including ceremony, traditional stories, ancestral knowledge of cultural leaders, language, and time spent on the land. This history is presented as one Indigenous view contributing to the field of History. This dissertation concludes that Grandfather Buffalo, the one that has stood for Anishinaabeg and their kin for millennia, is a central source of Anishinaabe sovereignty and the center of the Anishinaabe economy, the kinship network of exchange. Further, the Anishinaabe food system, the seasonal round, was sustainable for millennia because it was critically embedded in the holistic Anishinaabe way of life. Worldview is an essential factor in lifeway sustainability. Finally, by their words, deeds, and movement, Anishinaabeg resisted colonization of the web of life, or what Anishinaabeg refer to as 'all our relations'.Item Patriotic stained-glass windows and the manifestation of American civil religion(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2022) Sward, Sandra Lee; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Robert Rydell and David CherryStained-glass windows are a mechanism through which abstract ideas are communicated, often benefitting from their association with European Gothic cathedrals. When church windows include patriotic iconography, the patriotic themes conceivably benefit from this association. Between 1890 and 1950, many stained-glass windows were created for American churches that contain patriotic symbols and images associated with American nationalism. Insufficient research has been published regarding this phenomenon. This dissertation attempts to fill that gap by arguing that these patriotic images represent a manifestation of American civil religion. Over forty churches and cathedrals were surveyed using a methodology based on Erwin Panofsky's framework, which incorporates cultural influences into the analysis of the artistic design. Window themes align with various aspects of America's foundational moments, including those associated with the Pilgrims and Puritans, the War for Independence and the Founding Fathers, America's westward expansion, and the nation's wars. America's civil religion, as discussed by Robert Bellah, includes a set of beliefs, ceremonial rites, and symbols connecting a community that endow a transcendent value on those items. Race, religion, and national identity are foundational elements of that civil religion and are explored here as potential influences in the design process. American civil religion is also typically embraced during times of trial. Therefore, issues of immigration quotas, Indian removal policies, economic turmoil, and military conflicts are considered as well. The windows under consideration here embraced American civil religion, while often whitewashing and sacralizing a view of American history that ignored many of its cultural complexities.Item Western American spectral studies: haunting in film, literature and landscape(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Hanson, Daniel Lee; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Susan KollinThe American Western narrative has historically not had time for ghosts. In its dominant historical form, the Western prescribed a white, male, civilizing discourse while acting as the 'nation-building' narrative for the United States. Especially in the latter context, the genre could not afford to be haunted. Yet, because the Western produced a very narrow race, gender, and ideological spectacle within a West that historically involved a wide range of peoples and experiences, it is, I would argue, an 'exceptionally' haunted American narrative. Additionally, because the West has resisted comparisons with colonialism and notions of Empire--while explicitly functioning as a settler colonial discourse--ghosts of neglect continue to plague this influential cultural expression. So, because ghosts indicate something lost, forgotten, or pathologized by a narrated cultural reality, as recent 'spectral studies' scholarship has shown, understanding how haunting exists and functions within western cultural forms provides insights into American cultural power structures. Combining postwestern theory, spectral studies discussions, and affect theory, I create a 'spectral lens' to understand the functionality of haunting within western film, literature, and landscapes. This study draws attention to both the affective power of cultural expressions and to how haunting expresses hegemonic resistance. Additionally, such a study illuminates the changing power structures of a Western narrative that continues to wrestle with cultural notions of justice and equality while increasingly realizing a destructive settler colonial historical reality of indigenous displacement and eradication. Therefore, through a better 'conversation with ghosts,' I aim to not only theoretically break down the rigid structures that fortify race, class, and gender hierarchies, but seek a more nuanced approach to heritage. This is a negotiation of what Wallace Stegner realized as the western American divide between the overly critical 'urban intellectual' and the often reactionary 'defensiveness of the native son.' In this manner, I also utilize spectrality to directly engage with the American Studies tradition of searching for a 'useable' American cultural history.Item From lethargy to leadership: America's origins and obligations as an arctic nation(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Kramer, Samuel Charles; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brett WalkerAt present, temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as the global average. This drastic increase has been the catalyst for a number of vicious cycles that exacerbate climate change, such as the melting of both permafrost and ice sheets. New waterways, opened due to melting ice, have provided access to once impossible to reach resources and brought competing ambitions of both Arctic and non-Arctic nations to the forefront. The prospect of easily accessible resources such as oil, natural gas, and minerals has amplified the issues of territory and ownership in the Arctic with many nations responding with an increase in nationalism and militarization. Outcomes of this geopolitical competition will have consequences that reach far beyond the Arctic. Equally as important are the effects that these rivalries will have on the indigenous groups that live and subsist in the Arctic --many of which have been victims of systematic disenfranchisement and racism. As a result of the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the United States belongs to an exclusive company of nations that own or oversee territory in the Arctic. These eight nations, the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark (via Greenland), despite sharing the designation of being an Arctic nation, all possess distinct ambitions and interests in the far North. Cooperation, however, is imperative to address the myriad challenges that the Arctic faces in the twenty-first century. In order for the United States to become, and remain, a responsible Arctic ally, I argue, we must first reexamine our origins as an Arctic nation and recognize the connection between the purchase of Alaska and the conquest of the American West. Acknowledging the continued existence of exploitation and colonialism in Alaska is a necessary step the United States must take on the path towards responsibility in the Arctic.Item Schools of empires: the role of higher education and colonization in the American West and Japan(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Colgrove, Clinton Allen; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael ReidyThe historical relevance of the role of the university is related to research in both local and global exchanges, the accessibility to forms of higher education, and the decentralization and use of scientific knowledge. Using institutions at Gottingen, Amherst, New York, Bozeman, and Sapporo, this dissertation interrogates how geographical space, settler colonialism, and socio-cultural contexts inform scientific, agricultural, and engineering practices, research, and education from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. Beginning with Wilhelm von Humboldt's twin pillars of academic freedom and the combination of research and teaching, this dissertation traces the migration of approaches to higher education from German schools to the American East. American conceptions of higher education evolved as educators like Frederick A. P. Barnard called for reform and academics returned from abroad. In the 1860s, the land grant school and the school of mines provided models to reshape the educational and geographical landscape of the country. As settlers colonized the American West, boosters established new schools based on civic or religious interests before state and industrial entities funded other institutions. In Montana, proximity to mining facilitated the establishment of its first school of mines and political interests led to the decentralization of the state schools. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan sought new forms of knowledge to strengthen its imperial rule, and in the colonization of Hokkaido, Kiyotaka Kuroda identified the land grant model displayed under William Smith Clark's leadership in Massachusetts as the ideal example to adopt. Both case studies demonstrate higher education's adaptability and its tenuous relationship with government expectations and funding. As Japan's empire crumbled, evolving geopolitical matters influenced the American government to increase federal funding opportunities leading to the alignment of schools and programs with the Academic-Military-Industrial Complex. Laboratories such as the Electronics Research Laboratory at Montana State University demonstrate how this relationship affected new forms of technology and research. Based on archival research and personal interviews, this dissertation analyzes the historical, multifaceted role of the university, its accessibility, and how Humboldtian ideals, reflected in practice, shape our understanding of the present and future role of higher education.Item Cultural super volcano: a cultural history of Yellowstone's hot spot via eco-paranoia(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Atwood, Erin; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brett WalkerPeople who experienced previous natural disasters later develop a characteristic of miscalculating risk in current and future natural disasters due to the emotional intensity of fear clouding their capability to estimate their true danger in such scenarios. Eco-Paranoia is termed in this thesis as a foundational reasoning for the miscalculation. The oversight of risk due to overrunning fear currently elevates anxiety towards Yellowstone National Park's anticipated super eruption. What fuels these fears and causes humans to exhibit irrational decisions during natural disasters? Outside influences such as the mass media, first-hand disaster experience, historic response to cultural shifts in ideologies, and human response to fear and insecurities generate the miscalculated risk that results in a shift in human thinking and behavior. An analysis into the experiences of Mt. St. Helens survivors is included to help interpret modern human response to volcanic eruptions into a speculation of reaction with a Yellowstone eruption. The need to understand the function of fear as it activates human thought and behavior is elaborated on to analyze its influencing impact. Culturally, the public attuned their attention to other characteristics of the park besides the massive hot spot below when the park was first established. Fear of a destructive explosion lingered far off in their minds. All of these historical factors lead to further understanding how and why the current public is attuned, anxious, and paranoid about destructive volcanic activity in Yellowstone National Park. Eco-Paranoia, as exhibited through this thesis discusses the influence of people's constructed beliefs and ideologies that ultimately cause them to be fearful and paranoid for something that does not necessarily deserve such worry; the clouding of calculating risk due to fear during natural disasters. By nature, humans succumb to their emotions of fear and ultimately are the cause of their distress in natural disaster situations.Item A turbulent upriver flow: steamboat narratives of nature, technology, and humans in Montana Territory(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2019) Kelly, Evan Graham; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeFor a 25 year period in the second half of the 19th century, steamboat travel was a critically important transportation technology which influenced the material, social, and cultural existence of people and landscapes in the Montana region. Building on methodological approaches developed in New Western History and Environmental History, this study argues that steamboats in Montana played a significant role in shaping cultural, demographic, and environmental changes in the area. Steamboats and their crews shaped the dynamic exchange of cultures, materials, and energy between people, landscapes, and technologies. This project stresses that the changes in human-environment relationships in the region influenced people in different ways depending on their race, class, gender, and ethnicity. This thesis argues that steamboats and their crews tapped-into and altered existing systems of material and energy exchange, reshaping energy regimes and augmenting environmental realities in the region. At the same time, steamboats influenced human actions and perceptions of the world around them. The layout of this project begins with an introduction chapter articulating methodological approaches and frameworks used in this analysis. The second chapter provides background on the changing natural and human geographies of the region, while the third chapter provides a history of steamboat technology as well as an overview of the labor, materials, and auxiliary technologies required to operate steamboats. Chapters four through seven present four chronologically organized case-studies and these narratives are used as lenses through which the broader implications of steamboat transportation in the region are examined. The final chapter briefly examines the steamboat Montana and the decline of steamboat travel in the early 1880s before offering a summary and conclusion of findings.Item Regarding policy in chronic traumatic encephalopathy as a transhistoric disorder(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2019) Negri, Adam Christopher; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael ReidyAn individual historian can be categorized as belonging to one of two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: transhistoricists, those that believe in an object's existence independent of external forces and its ability to remain fundamentally unaffected across time, or culturalists, believing an object's quality or features are dependent on the time and place of its reference. Disease entities have been examined through both perspectives quite fruitfully, expanding the whole of academia's appreciation of the relationship between disease and history. However, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, has recently been embroiled in a nationwide National Football League scandal wherein the livelihood of many affected retired players depends on the court's decision in the accompanying tort case to deal out appropriate justice. The nosological understanding of CTE is crucial in the debate - to include all affected players, despite dramatic revisions in our understanding of CTE as a disease across the 20th-century, all parties must recognize CTE, originating in a 1928 case study as 'punch drunk syndrome,' as a timeless entity that has undergone progressive iterations in categorization. In this instance, the culturalist perspective would render the disease's history sufficiently fragmented and prevent a cohesive narrative that includes all manner of diagnostic varieties. Even if antithetical to the present state of the humanities, the transhistoric approach is the only satisfactory perspective to uphold justice in the case of suffering football players.