Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Abiding nourishment: vegetable production and the pursuit of nutritional sovereignty in Colorado
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) McCollum, Sean C., author; Little, Ann, advisor; Childers, Michael, committee member; Martinez, Doreen, committee member
This thesis explores the various methods of small-scale gardening efforts and the importance of wild and cultivated plant food to the people who have inhabited Colorado. From Arapaho and Cheyenne horticultural practices to the kitchen gardens of the American homesteader, and the vegetable truck of the first generation of Coloradan-Americans, the environment of the Rocky Mountains forced its inhabitants to adapt their methods of planting vegetables and fruit in order to survive. The pursuit of nutritious plant food is the central human-scale endeavor in Colorado's diverse history. This thesis explores the nutritional content of several important vegetables and fruits, their importance to Colorado's inhabitants, and how the environment of Colorado lends itself to the cultivation of fruits and vegetables, while challenging the planter to a nearly extreme degree.
Open Access
Accelerating waters: an Anthropocene history of Colorado's 1976 Big Thompson Flood
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Wright, Will, author; Fiege, Mark, advisor; Orsi, Jared, committee member; Howkins, Adrian, committee member; Baron, Jill, committee member
Scale matters. But in the Anthropocene, it is not clear how environmental scholars navigate between analytical levels from local and regional phenomena on the one hand, to global Earth-system processes on the other. The Anthropocene, in particular, challenges the ways in which history has traditionally been conceived and narrated, as this new geological epoch suggests that humans now rival the great forces of nature. The Big Thompson River Flood of 1976 provides an opportunity to explore these issues. Over the Anthropocene's "Great Acceleration" spike, human activities and environmental change intensified both in Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon and across much of the world. The same forces that amplified human vulnerability to the catastrophic deluge on a micro-level through highway construction, automobile vacationing, and suburban development were also at work with the planetary upsurge in roads, cars, tourism, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and flooding on the macro-level. As a theoretical tool, the Anthropocene offers a more ecological means to think and write about relationships among time and space.
Open Access
An urban field of dreams: professional baseball and the fruition of new - old Denver
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Miller, Preston, author; Alexander, Ruth, advisor; Gudmestad, Robert, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Didier, John, committee member
This thesis examines how Coors Field framed the evolution of Denver's cultural geography and common identity between 1980 and 2010. I focus on the ballpark's connection to the process of "placemaking" as it unfolded between two adjacent "Old Denver" neighborhoods: North Larimer - a multicultural enclave that became the "Ballpark Neighborhood" - and the Lower Downtown historic district, whose founders bemoaned Denver's subsequent transformation into "Sports Town USA." As a contested icon, Coors Field affected notions of place, image, and inclusion for these neighborhoods and the city at large. Given this volatile context, I argue that its fruition highlighted what the Retro Ballpark Movement could and could not do for postmodern urban America. Many observers have heralded this ballpark project as an urban panacea, but an analysis of how ordinary Denverites perceived the new kind of city it left in its wake exposed a growing rift between baseball's working class mythos and the upscale nature of contemporary ballpark projects. Despite its instant success as an economic anchor, Coors Field ultimately contributed to the homogenization (or "Disneyfication") of "Old Denver" - a trend that clashed with baseball's democratic promise and previous notions of this downtown area as a diverse and authentic enclave. Utilizing local periodicals and government documents, I look at how this facility sprang from the hopes, dreams, and qualms of myriad individuals; the finished product representing a new dawn for some and a recurring nightmare for others. The narrative follows, as a central protagonist of sorts, Karle Seydel, an influential urban designer and neighborhood activist who should be recognized as the grassroots "Father of Coors Field." Seydel championed the project as a means to save North Larimer, guided its design, and dealt with its consequences. I wanted to offer a people's history of the "Blake Street Ballpark," and thus his experiences and opinions (as well as those of his allies and opponents) will guide my analysis of how an urban field of dreams contributed to Denver's reinvention as a new - old "city of leisure."
Open Access
Baptists and slavery in frontier Missouri during the antebellum era
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Woodward, Nathan, author; Knight, Fred, advisor; Gudmestad, Robert, committee member; Lindsay, James, committee member; Kim, Joon, committee member
This thesis examines the way residents of the Missouri frontier viewed and reacted to slavery, with a particular emphasis on Missouri Baptist thought. I argue that Baptists were ambivalent toward slavery because of their religion and their unique agricultural position on the frontier far from the large cotton plantations of the Deep South. Their attitude toward slavery manifested itself in Frontier Baptist Conventions and within Baptist newspapers in Missouri. Because of this ambivalence, Baptist slaveholders and slaveholders in the largely Baptist town of Liberty, Missouri, had to find a way to reconcile their growing antislavery thoughts with their largely proslavery surroundings. Their answer came in the form of gradual emancipation of the slaves. Missouri Baptists sought to free and expatriate African Americans in colonization movements to Africa. To gauge these sentiments, this project relies heavily on three newspapers published in Missouri during the antebellum era: The Western Watchmen of St. Louis, The Liberty Tribune of Liberty, and The Border Star of Westport. The first is the only Baptist paper and the latter two are both secular. To ascertain their opinions on slavery, I used the papers to focus on ideas relating to the colonization movement, John Brown, Bleeding Kansas, states' rights, and secession. The final part of the thesis examines how southern Baptists reacted to the newly freed slave population during and after Reconstruction.
Open Access
Beet borderland: Hispanic workers, the sugar beet, and the making of a northern Colorado landscape
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2002) Standish, Sierra, author; Fiege, Mark T., advisor; Orsi, Jared, 1970-, committee member; Ore, Janet, committee member
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the arrival of the sugar beet industry wrought change in northern Colorado. The sugar beet was a totally new plant-it was unlike corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops that local farmers were familiar with. The biological characteristics of the beet required a particular style of intensive labor, indeed shaping the daily life of laborers. Hispanic migrants to Fort Collins worked and lived under the influence of the sugar beet, but they were not passive participants in the story; they effectively transplanted some of their cultural traditions and left their own imprint in the landscape. Two years after the turn of the twentieth century, the Fort Collins landscape still bears the mark of the sugar beet. Yet even as landscape tells history, history must help explain landscape. Adobe houses still stand in some old neighborhoods, suggesting that Hispanic inhabitants once played a part in the early chronicles of Fort Collins. This thesis endeavors to flesh out that story-to explain the origins of Hispanic beet workers; how the beet changed their lifestyle, bodies, and public identity; and in what ways they modified their environment.
Open Access
Clouds over Fort Collins: settlement, urban expansion, and flooding along a layered landscape
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Purdy, Tristan, author; Childers, Michael, advisor; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Grigg, Neil, committee member
Fort Collins, Colorado, home to over 150,000 people along the northern Front Range, is prone to flood. This natural disaster threat is not a recent development nor a strictly natural problem. Rather, flooding in Fort Collins is informed by the interaction of the local environment and the city's growth and development beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. This thesis explores the historical roots of Fort Collins's flood threat by considering the social, economic, and political factors that informed the physical shape of the city and how the city interacted with the watershed within which it sat. By tracing how the city's agrarian root's informed its location, and how a university, (usually) pleasant weather, and westward migration paved the way for urban and suburban expansion, this thesis displays flooding not as an exterior threat, but a natural process that has become enmeshed in Fort Collins's physical structure. Fort Collins is just one of many mid-sized American cities across the American West whose growth over the past century-and-a-half has created increasingly pressing environmental concerns. Addressing contemporary and future concerns over further growth and an increasingly unstable environment in Fort Collins and cities like it begins with understanding the historic interconnections between city growth and the environmental problem in question.
Open Access
Confederate military strategy: the outside forces that caused change
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Varnold, Nathan, author; Gudmestad, Robert, advisor; Orsi, Jared, committee member; Black, Ray, committee member
When addressed with military strategy the first thought is to drift towards the big name battlefields: Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. Our obsession with tactics and outcomes clouds our minds to the social, cultural, and political factors that took place away from the front lines. Less appealing, but no less important to understanding the war as a whole, this study incorporates non-military factors to explain the shift of Confederate military strategy in the Western Theater. Southern citizens experienced a growth of military awareness, which greatly influenced the military policies of Richmond, and altered how Confederate generals waged war against Union armies. The geography of Mississippi and Tennessee, and the proximity of these states to Virginia, also forced Western generals to pursue aggressive military campaigns with less than ideal military resources. Finally, the emotions and personal aspirations of general officers in the Army of Tennessee, and the Western Theater as a whole, produced a culture of failure, which created disunion and instability in the Western command structure. Confederate generals pursued aggressive military campaigns due to a combination of social, cultural, political, and military factors.
Open Access
"Considering the sickness of my children, my heart was exceedingly sunk": fatherhood and children's health in colonial New England, 1660–1785
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) LeDoux, Libby, author; Little, Ann, advisor; Orsi, Jared, committee member; Hutchins, Zach, committee member
A reading of Puritan fathers' personal writings from 1660–1785 indicates a larger ethic of loving, hands-on fatherhood. When fathers wrote about their children in their personal writings, it was most often related to their children's spiritual and physical health. By providing for their children in times of physical distress, Puritan fathers participated in the private life of their families and formed intimate bonds with their children. This thesis challenges the narratives that present the distribution of household labor as divided between the public and private. It rejects the assumption that caring for children was women's work and sickrooms were women's spaces. The fathers examined in this thesis were mentally, emotionally, and physically present throughout their children's illnesses. Fathers' detailed descriptions of their children's physical health and the medicine given to them to ease their suffering makes it clear that the sickroom was not strictly a place for women. In addition to physical remedies, fathers also employed spiritual methods to cure their children in hopes of earning God's favor. Fathers had to reckon with the religious aspects of physical disease. They ruminated on the possible causes for disease, sought for religious meaning in their children's illnesses, and worried for the sanctification of their children's souls. At its core, this thesis tells the story of fathers who loved their children. It does not paint these fathers as men who cared for their children because of an internalized goal of living up to an abstract concept of ideal Puritan manhood or paternal power. A reading of these diaries does not unveil a series of emotionally distant patriarchal authoritarians. These men were hands-on fathers who deeply loved their families and wanted to protect their children at all costs.
Open Access
Constructing the polar world: the German encounter with the Arctic and Antarctic
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Luedtke, Brandon Patrick, author; Howkins, Adrian, advisor; Jones, Elizabeth, committee member; Cooperman, Matthew, 1964-, committee member
This thesis examines how Germans invested the polar environment with both metaphorical and scientific meaning between 1865 and 1914. It argues that German nationalists put the Northern environment to use toward the process of German nation-building in the nineteenth century and maintains that German polar protagonists promoted travel to the Far South for primarily imperial purposes in the early twentieth century. During these years Germans used narratives of travel, science, and industry in various ways to support both the Arctic and Antarctic project. Further, this research contends that doing environmental history of the German exploration of the Polar Regions can reveal wider social, economic, and political priorities pressurizing the German state. By tracing, then, the German construction and representation of polar nature across the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth-century's turn, this thesis insists that German priorities shifted over time as domestic and international circumstances changed. In investigating how the polar environment became increasingly subject to nationalist motivations and imperial ambitions, this thesis hopes to exhibit the earth's Poles as regions where several national destines run alongside one another. To this end, it forwards the Polar Regions as particularly useful sites for examining the intersection of nation-building, empire, and the environment.
Open Access
Crimson streets and violent bodies: identity, physicality, and the twilight of Colorado's vice districts
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Gunvaldson, Nicholas Ryan, author; Alexander, Ruth, advisor; Lindsay, James, committee member; Hutchins, Zachary, committee member
This master’s project focuses on the changing moral and legal status of Colorado’s vice districts during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The thesis argues that once informally organized vice districts were formally regulated and geographically delineated as “red-light districts” at the behest of middle- and upper-class Progressives near the end of the century they became more vulnerable to actual suppression. This result had not been anticipated. Reformers considered commercial sex an offensive but ineradicable behavior, and they hoped districting would be an effective way to control, document, and tax this vice – while keeping it separate and hidden from respectable society. To the surprise of reformers, the establishment of special vice districts rendered them not only more visible and subject to regulation, but also, more vulnerable to suppression and eradication. This may have seemed like a victory for vice reformers, yet prostitution did not disappear. Rather, the formal elimination of vice districts early in the twentieth century worsened the circumstances in which prostitution was practiced, and widened the differential societal treatment of prostitutes and their customers. Prostitution became more difficult to monitor and prostitutes became more susceptible to control by pimps, organized crime syndicates, and corrupt police. In addition to documenting the emergence and demise of vice districts in Colorado, this project examines the identity and experience of the women and men who frequented vice districts as prostitutes, sexual clients, pimps, and drug dealers.
Open Access
Cry me a river: the environmental transformation of the Tarim River Basin and its impact on Chinese-Uyghur relations, 1949-2009
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Wang, Xiaoran, author; Didier, John, advisor; Fiege, Mark, committee member; Fisher, Christopher, committee member
This thesis focuses in the study of the environmental, social, political, and economic / resource-extraction history of China's Xinjiang Province. Not only does the author trace the historically most significant environmentally depredating human events in Xinjiang over the past two thousand years, I also explains these events within the context of social, political, economic, and resource-extraction history, thus providing insight into the nature of the political, social, economic, and natural-resource backdrops that created the need of the Chinese to engage in environmentally hazardous / destructive activities in its far western / northwestern borderlands. My treatment in Section Two of the role that the Chinese government saw Xinjiang playing in the development of the Chinese economy and national security on the world stage enables not only China specialists but also non-specialists to grasp the overall impetus of the Chinese economic / security developments of the past 60 years.
Open Access
Dangerous expectations: uncovering what triggered the hunt for witches in seventeenth-century New England
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Franklin, Alaina R., author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Margolf, Diane, committee member; Jordan, Erin, committee member; Hutchins, Zach, committee member
In voyaging to the New World, European colonists found a world that was unlike anything they believed they would experience, and they struggled to implement their familiar political, social, and religious structures in their new colonies. The gap between colonists' expectations and the New World they actually found sparked the occurrence of witch hunts in colonial New England during the seventeenth century. This thesis works to reinterpret and bridge the gap between two well-developed historiographies of witchcraft. Although historians tend to study witchcraft in the Old World and in New England separately and depict them differently, they are closely related. Witchcraft in the Old World changed and evolved into what we recognize as witchcraft in New England. They provide a continuous narrative.
Open Access
Denver goes to the movies: engaging national-scale identity shifts from movie house to movie palace, 1900-1940
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Frank, Nichelle, author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Ore, Janet, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
This thesis examines the relationship between film history and movie theater architecture at local and national levels as a window into early twentieth century identity shifts. The argument is that Denver films and movie theaters from 1900 to 1940 manifested national-level identity shifts as well as influenced them. The identity shifts included attitudes of innovation, decadence, and endurance that roughly characterized the 1900s and 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. These identities represented the dominant identities that were part of the broad shift from nineteenth century frontier identity to post-WWII modern identity. This thesis draws from Denver newspapers, architectural and cinema journals, early film histories, Denver Householder and City Directories, Denver Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, other historic maps, memoirs, and photographs. Through close study of these sources and balancing the national history with Denver history, there emerges a story of how Denverites and Americans have selected ideals to maintain and adopted others as they chase their ever-changing dreams.
Open Access
"Die at home": a contextualization and mapping of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Hoehne, Patrick Tyler, author; Gudmestad, Robert, advisor; Leisz, Stephen, committee member; Payne, Sarah, committee member
This thesis attempts to contextualize and explore the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 – one of the deadliest instances of civil insurrection in American history – in order to prove that the violence of the riots was neither completely undirected nor uniform. At the heart of this argument is the simple idea that violence is never random. The first two chapters contextualize the Draft Riots within the greater experience of New York's Irish population, both in the Civil War and at home in New York City. The final two chapters, through a spatiotemporal analysis, seek to isolate patterns within riot violence in order to better understand the differing targets and tactics of rioters throughout the unrest.
Open Access
Feminism comes to campus: women at CSU 1960-1971
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1994) Russo, Andrea E., author
During the sixties students protested everything from restrictive social regulations to the Vietnam War. In this changing environment women, relying on skills learned in mainstream and protest activities, demanded changes for themselves. By the end of the decade these factors converged to foster the emergence of a feminist consciousness among some CSU women. In addition this thesis examines the important role of male student leaders, who had both a provocative and paternalistic relationship with women, in the development of feminism on campus. Relying upon the student newspaper, the CSU Collegian, oral interviews, and other university materials from that era I demonstrate the importance of the campus to the emergence of feminism in the sixties and early seventies. Chapter One examines the early protests of women and men against restrictive housing regulations and demonstrates that the fights against parietal rules was important for the formation of strategies and tactics that would be used later when feminists explicitly challenged gender-specific forms of university discrimination. Chapter Two explores how local and national events of the mid-sixties influenced women activists at CSU and nurtured a budding feminist consciousness on campus. Chapter Three, through an examination of women's organizations, shows that a feminist consciousness was clearly present on campus by 1968.
Open Access
From bordered land, to borderland, and back again: how the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant became part of the United States, 1844-1878
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Swisher, Jacob, author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Little, Ann, committee member; Duffy, Andrea, committee member; Payne, Sarah, committee member
From 1844 to 1878, the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, a one-million-acre parcel in Colorado and New Mexico's San Luis Valley, experienced a transition from a Ute landscape, to a Ute, Nuevomexicano, and American borderland, and, finally, to an American region. This rapid, thirty-year transformation centered on conflicts between Utes, Nuevomexicanos, and American and European migrants and land speculators over the grant's borders, including legal, racial, political, economic, and scientific ones. By 1878, the outcome of these border contests was a relatively stable, bordered landscape on the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. Examining this transition as a shift from a Ute bordered land, to a Ute, Nuevomexicano, and American borderland, and, finally, into a bordered, American region not only demonstrates that border contests were central to the expansion of the United States and its settler populations across the American West but also shows how contests over borders have offered important avenues of resistance for local communities in the San Luis Valley in both the past and present.
Open Access
From Nobilissima dux to Beata: expressions of female authority and influence in medieval Florence
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Smith, Barbara S., author; Lindsay, James E., advisor; Didier, John, committee member; Coronel, Patricia, committee member
This thesis argues that by examining four influential women of Florence and northern Italy over some five centuries' time (circa 1060-1471A.D.) historians can view change over time related to female authority and how it reflects larger social norms that became increasingly entrenched over time. These women inform our understanding of the role and status of women in medieval Florence through their exceptionality. By considering such a large expanse of time these women's lives can be compared to one another, as well as to their contemporaries. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and discusses general themes that are occurring contemporaneously across Europe that serve to inform and provide context for the laws and social norms that are occurring in Florence. Chapter 2 focuses more directly on each woman and her familial and social circumstances in which she uses and exercises her authority. Chapter 3 builds on the base of Chapter 2 and makes arguments regarding the extent to which each woman wielded her authority and the ways in which that authority was exercised. Chapter 4 provides a brief conclusion in relation to each woman and how the four, together, help to inform historians' knowledge about the ways in which patriarchal power structures, including patrilineage, worked to increasingly exclude women from positions of authority.
Open Access
Frontier beer: a spatial analysis of Denver breweries, 1859-1876
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Neihart, Braden, author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Archambeau, Nicole, committee member; Leisz, Stephen, committee member
American breweries in the nineteenth century offer a business-based lens to understand immigration and industrialization. For this reason, historians in recent years have turned increasing attention to the history of beer, particularly in individual cities such as Chicago or St. Louis. This study examines brewers in Denver from the 1859 Gold Rush to statehood in 1876 and attends to spatial challenges they faced as a result of ethnic and industrial conditions within and far from the city. Over this period, the brewing industry transitioned from several small breweries into a handful of high-producing businesses. Distance to necessary materials, equipment, and customers posed tremendous hurdles to brewers and elicited creative solutions. Breweries thus fulfilled cultural and industrial desires by overcoming geographic obstacles. They condensed space within Denver and the nation through railroads, replaced craftwork with industrial labor, and attempted to structure transitory labor in the American West.
Open Access
"God makes use of feeble means sometimes, to bring about His most exalted purposes": faith and social action in the lives of evangelical women in antebellum America
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Austin, Beth Darlene Ridenoure, author; Alexander, Ruth M., advisor; Margolf, Diane C., committee member; Doe, Sue R., committee member
Historians of women's history and of African American religious history interpret Evangelical Christian theology in widely differing ways. Women's historians often have emphasized its complicity with the socially conservative, repressive forces with which women's rights proponents had to contend as they sought the betterment of American society. Historians of African American women and religion tend to highlight Christianity's liberating role and potential in the African American experience. These different historiographical emphases prompt reconsideration of religious conservatism and its effect on social activism, particularly as refracted through the lens of race and gender. Considering the ubiquity of Christian religiosity in the rhetoric, the epistemology and the moral culture that informed social discourse in nineteenth-century America, individual religious belief and its effect on women's social activism as they sought to define and expand their role in American society is an important element of historical analysis and deserves much greater attention by the scholarly community. This thesis is an attempt to draw together themes from various bodies of historiography in order to clarify the interconnectedness of religious belief, gender roles, and race relations in the history of the United States. It examines the lives and beliefs of ten American women, white and black, who adhered to the commonplace, conventional theology of Protestant Evangelicalism and who engaged in the reformist tendencies of the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, Protestant Evangelical Christianity became a socially useful and politically relevant means of integrating faith and daily life in the context of an evolving ideology of human rights, and served as a path through which Americans, both white and black, were able to appropriate and make effective use of the individual authority that had been idealized in the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Although the actions of nineteenth-century Evangelical women were not always intended to bring about political change, their collective embodiment of an outwardly-focused, socially-active Evangelical faith contributed momentum to the creation of a pattern of discourse within which marginalized Americans of later generations operated as they pressed for legal and political equality as American citizens. This thesis, by examining the ways in which the faith of conservative, Evangelical women empowered them to effect positive change in their own and others' lives, revisits the issue of religious conservatism and its effect on social activism, probing the question from the angle of empowerment rather than from limitation.
Open Access
"I am going to find a new fatherland": nationalism and German colonization societies in the frontier state of Missouri
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Greenway, Stephan Troy Joseph, author; Gudmestad, Robert H., 1964-, advisor; Knight, Frederick C., committee member; Hughes, Jolyon T., committee member
Despite a recent rise in interest among American historians in regard to examining German immigration to the United States, in most cases their methodology remains rooted in the past. American scholars have long shown a tendency to examine the immigrant experience from the moment the immigrants set foot in the New World. Historians in other fields have begun to realize the importance of drawing historical connections that go beyond the borders of the United States. However, scholars studying German immigration to the United States have in large part failed to embrace this transnational methodology. Recent works of transnational history have demonstrated that by making connections to events that occurred outside of the United States, historians can gain a fuller understanding of the forces that shaped the nation's development. A series of German settlement societies worked to create a new Germany in the frontier state of Missouri during the early decades of the nineteenth century. By examining these societies connections will be made between political events occurring in the German-speaking states of Europe and expansion into the American West. It will be demonstrated that events across the Atlantic Ocean, events which fed a sense of nationalism that had been simmering since the middle decades of the eighteenth century, had an effect on the state of Missouri that is visible to this day. This transnational examination of the efforts of German nationalists to create a new Germany in the United States will not only reveal a facet of Missouri's history long neglected by historians, it will challenge American scholars to move beyond the formidable intellectual barrier the nation's borders have placed on their work, allowing them to create more nuanced, more complete narratives of the nation's past.