Scholarship & Research
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Item Resilience, resistance, and redemption: opening ethical museum space for displaced voices in our modern era(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Gwinner, Mackinley Michael; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Molly ToddMuseums traditionally silenced marginalized voices through their western colonial authority. Because of the passive nature of museum spaces, minority voices, especially the voices of displaced persons or refugees, are actively oppressed and marginalized. Resilience, Resistance, and Redemption uses case studies from the United States and Europe in order to analyze how museums throughout the western world have or have not engaged with displaced voices and their stories. Using theoretical and practical public historical practices this thesis seeks to give the reader insight into how decolonization practices have been and should be implemented in museum spaces. This thesis focuses on ethical and empathetic use of activism and solidarity by museum workers and more specifically curators to decolonize museum spaces and incorporate a more diverse range of voices into these spaces.Item A critical analysis of criticisms of public schools(Montana State University - Bozeman, 1957) Dickinson, William J.Item Dangerous vagabonds' : resistance to slave emancipation and the colony of Senegal(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2016) Hardy, Robin Aspasia; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Catherine DunlopIn 1848, when slavery was abolished across greater France, slavery remained virtually intact in the French colony of Senegal on the west coast of Africa. Slavery continued to be practiced in the colony and in its expanding borderlands until at least 1905, when this study ends. This thesis challenges traditional interpretations of illicit slavery in Senegal by demonstrating the power that French imperial culture played in the problem of continued captivity. While post-emancipation slavery in the colony was due to economic and logistic pressures in West Africa, as well as a strong indigenous tradition of forced labor, this study will show that it was also true that inherent factors within the culture of French colonialism made abolishing the institution exceedingly difficult. This thesis examines three aspects of French imperial culture after 1848 that mitigated slave freedom in Senegal: the views of race and slavery maintained by Senegal's influential métis (mixed-race) population; French cultural assessments of the aptitude and capabilities of West Africans; and a trend within French political culture to deny metropolitan rights to the colonized--a phenomenon that intensified in far-flung French territories that were not completely under French control, and where few whites resided. An examination of each of these themes will lead to a deeper understanding of the persistence of slavery in Senegal between 1848 and 1905, revealing greater nuance within the French imperial project overall.Item And they all fell silent : gender and violence in Butte, Montana, 1910-1950(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2016) Scheidler, Natalie Faye; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mary MurphyThe history of violence in the American West has captured the attention of scholars as well as the popular imagination for decades. Novels, films, scholarly articles, and most recently video games have dedicated hundreds of pages and countless hours of media production to gold camp desperados, vigilantes, bandits, and early twentieth century labor agitators, while the history of more intimate violence remains quieted. That is the violence exacted against female bodies. This project tells one story from four separate yet intricately linked vantage points: the rates and patterns of gendered violence, the cultural interpretations of violence, the legal encoding and policing of violence, and women's resistance to that violence. Additionally, this project looks at rape and wife assault simultaneously, as these are both crimes that overwhelmingly affect women. Examining these crimes in tandem throughout the twentieth century, before the advent of spousal rape or domestic violence law, and within the larger context of all violent crimes, demonstrates the ways in which violence not only worked to maintain male power, but also to define relationships between related and unrelated men and women. The redefinition of these relationships and identities, however, did not only occur through physical force, but also through institutional and epistemic violence practices. Specifically, the statistical analysis expands a robust conversation about the history of homicide in its discussion of three kinds of violent crime-rape, homicide, and assault. In doing so, it presents a more complete depiction of the history of force. The cultural analysis investigates the development of violence narratives, which have significant consequences for how the law defines crimes, how offenders will be tried and sentenced, and how preventative strategies are developed. The legal analysis examines the ways in which the law constructed bodies of potential perpetrators and/or victims and either provided for or inhibited equal access to protection. It also investigates the fluid ways in which its practitioners interpreted and executed the law. Lastly, this project explores the ways in which woman, far from passive victims, opposed the abuse of their bodies.Item Endangered waters : interdependency on Montana's Big Hole River(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2015) Davis, Benjamin Avery; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brett WalkerThe Big Hole River brings life to this arid region of southwestern Montana, but its stream flows annually reach detrimentally low levels. The causes behind the low-flow levels are a direct reflection of Euro-American impacts dating back to the early nineteenth century. This is a story of dependency and scarcity, which presently makes the river the source of political conflict.Item Flame of the red flag : cogntive ecologies of the Paris commune(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2014) Aston, Alexander Reid; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brett WalkerThis thesis addresses the longstanding intellectual framework that has divided mind from matter, agency from environment and humanity from nature. In an attempt to break down these dichotomies this paper explores the Paris Commune of 1871 as a case study in cognitive ecology. The paper hopes to answer the question of how people transform their societies without supervision or command from a central authority. It argues that cities are selection driven adaptive landscapes, co-evolutionary structures that emerge to facilitate and sustain dense human habitation through the material organization of cognition. This study seeks to answer questions about the entanglement of environment, social organization and cognition. Specifically the ways in which ecological dynamics and selection mechanisms affect social structure; how individual agency translates into collective action; and the ways in which cultural materials feedback into cognitive processes and social activity. By investigating flows of energy, matter and information during the Siege and Commune of Paris from 1870 to 1871 the analysis attempts to show how human cognition intersects with its environment to form self-organizing, complex adaptive systems. The research utilizes a number of theoretical frameworks to explore the evidence; Material Engagement Theory, Extended Mind Theory, Entanglement Theory, Developmental Systems Theory, Panarchy, and Complexity Theory. This paper demonstrates that contractions in energy, matter and information flows created by the Prussian siege triggered selection mechanisms favoring specific social institutions while disempowering others. Further, it shows that cognitive niche construction facilitated social revolution in the city. Finally, it argues that cultural materials helped to distribute cognitive processes in ways that enabled collective revolutionary action. This includes one clear example of a positive feedback loop mediated through physical objects. In conclusion, this paper shows that the most important feature of urban environments is the ability to facilitate individual adaptations to ecologies dominated by the physical and cognitive presence of their own species. The products of human cognition, circulating as materials in socio-cognitive ecologies, function to entangle ideas and relationships into the physical environment and organize behavior. Thus, human societies do not fundamentally break from the natural world but express the developmental properties of human evolution.Item The 1952 Montana elections : politics as usual(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1976) Everett, David DeanItem Piety, politics, and profit : American Indian missions in the colonial colleges(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 1985) Wright, BobbyThe royal charters which sanctioned the settlement of the American colonies invariably expressed as their primary purpose the propagation of Christianity among the American Indians. Throughout the colonial period, the English viewed education as a primary means to accomplish this pious mission. The purpose of this study was to examine critically the educational Indian missions in the colonial colleges. In doing so, this investigation employed ethnohistorical perspectives and methodology in examining the institutional experiments at Henrico, Virginia, Harvard College, the College of William and Mary, and Dartmouth College, spanning a period from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries. The study found that, while the colonial educators professed their own piety as if this were their singular motivation, they capitalized on the charitable impulses of the pious English and on the opportunities which the charity presented in furthering other political and economic interests. This investigation also established that mixed motives led to diversions from the purposes for which money had been collected and further that this was a primary cause of the ultimate failure of these/ educational experiments. In revealing that missions in the colonial colleges were not expressions of unblemished piety, this study has confronted the declarations espoused in the early records and much of the later historical literature, thus enhancing the growing body of ethnohistorical scholarship on Indian-white relations during the colonial period, while simultaneously offering a fresh insight into the origins of higher education in America.Item A man of Germany : acceptable uncertainties in a time of war(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2004) Gallagher, John Bernard; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael Sean Reidy.During the week of September 15, 1941, Niels Bohr and Wemer Heisenberg met secretly in Copenhagen, Denmark. These Nobel physicists worked together in the 1920s to construct a new quantum physics. The Copenhagen Interpretation consisted of statistical quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle, and Complimentarity, which revolutionized perceptions of atomic phenomena and challenged the scientific community with their conceptions of classical Newtonian causality. At the time of the meeting, Germany occupied Denmark and Heisenberg led the German effort to develop practical applications of nuclear fission. Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s meeting ended with anger and frustration leading to the separation, personally and professionally, of these two men. Owing to a lack of documentation and the varying opinions over the events of 1941, I propose to use the scientific principle of uncertainty, developed by Heisenberg in 1927, as a metaphor to broaden our understanding of the meeting between these men. Instead of using the two pairs of conjugate variables, as defined by the Uncertainty Principle, I will use four-square variables that allows for an alternate interpretation of the 1941 Bohr-Heisenberg meeting. The four-square variables involve aspects of Werner Heisenberg’s life. These are the development of his scientific work, the formation of the scientific community through collaboration, the social, cultural, and political context of Germany, and the personal and professional relationship between other physicists and between Bohr and Heisenberg themselves. My thesis seeks to determine what was said between these men that led to the disruption to their relationship. My conclusions limit the indeterminacy of the event and brings a level of acceptable uncertainties that illustrate above all that Heisenberg was a man of Germany.Item Anti-democracy's college : an outline of the corporatist culture of organized social machinery and the leadership of the land-grant agricultural colleges in the 'Progressive' era(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 1990) Scoville, Gordon Gary; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Billy G. Smith and Donald L. Robson.The Morrill Act of 1862 established a national system of land-grant colleges and universities. Generations of scholars have viewed these institutions as democratic because the schools supposedly diffused opportunity to realize the traditional liberal principle of individual freedom for self-determination. Through an analysis of the leaders - presidents, deans, and directors - of the land-grant agricultural subdivisions in the "progressive" era, the purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether the leadership's completion in that period of a tripartite organization of resident instruction, research, and extension accorded with democracy. Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony guided the examination. This idea refers to a cultural process of practicing principles in such a way as to form class alliances that secure popular consent to a dominant politics. Use of the historical method of "internal criticism" established the credibility of primary material that entered a dialogic encounter with the Gramscian conception, which provided a provisional explanation of the original documents. The results of the dialogue show the tripartite structure as a class alliance embodying the Newtonian world machine as a business corporation based on corporatist principles of centralized authority, priority of office over individual, and fragmented functions. Agricultural college leaders helped convey specific forms of organized corporatism to farming people. Corporatism consisted of organization that supplanted popular reconstruction of society with central coordination of mass objectives as the fragmented pursuit of single-issue interests. In the countryside, this conveyance sought to reproduce elements of the organizational design exemplified by the tripartite arrangement, and thus aimed to secure consent to a dominant politics of corporate liberalism that shifted liberal agency from individuals to centrally coordinated groups. The study concludes that collegiate participation in and support of this rising mode of political dominance took form in assistance in constructing a "corporatist culture of organized social machinery" -- the extension of corporatist principles and practices in a society that the college leadership imagined to be a machine. This diffusion constituted an anti-democratic denial of the individual and popular capacity to determine their societal destiny.