Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Wealth over health: Superior, Arizona and the Magma mine 1910-1982
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Doucette, Hailey Rae, author; Childers, Michael, advisor; Orsi, Jared, committee member; Martinez, Doreen, committee member
The Magma mine in Superior, Arizona quickly became one of Arizona's most productive underground copper mines in the twentieth century. But the wealth of the company came at the cost of the lives of workers, not only through death but also illness, injury, and in its later years, unfair pay. This thesis traces the history of the Magma mine and its environmental history. As the mine rapidly expanded, it cost miners their livelihood. Chapter one looks at the growth of Superior alongside the Magma mine starting in the 1920s. Chapter two analyzes the events that led to the Magma mine's unionization in 1957 and the strikes that followed. Lastly, chapter three examines the events that led to the closure of the Magma mine in 1982.
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
"To boldly go where everyone else has gone before": the road to ADAPT
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Petrie, Gentrice, author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Carr Childers, Leisl, committee member; Hepburn, Susan, committee member
During the 1970s, residents of the newly established Atlantis independent living center used civil disobedience tactics to sway the city to provide accessible transportation services. Their strategies worked, and by 1983, Denver had one of the most accessible public transportation systems in the country. After their success, members of Atlantis decided to expand their cause by founding the activist organization American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, now American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT), which not only gave disability activists a national platform to draw attention to the issue of inaccessible transportation, but also gave them the opportunity to integrate disabled individuals into a world that denied them access to mainstream services. This story not only illuminates the success that direct action protest had on influencing public policy on a local scale but highlights how this activism empowered activists and members of the disability community by occupying public spaces, therefore challenging the idea that disabled people are unable to advocate on their own behalf and live independently.
Open Access
Invented pasts, imagined futures: world's fairs, cities, and narratives of Brazilian nationhood in the built environment, 1893-1976
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) De Souza Avelar, Lucas, author; Payne, Sarah, advisor; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Thomas, Adam, committee member; Tulanowski, Elizabeth, committee member
In 1976, a deafening historical silence emerged from an empty square in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after the former building of the senate ceased to exist. With the authoritarianism of the military dictatorship and the increasing industrial and urban development since the 1950s, the Monroe Palace, one of the early twentieth-century architectural gems of the city, suffered a gradual but violent loss of meaning. When the federal district moved from Rio de Janeiro to the utopic and modern Brasilia, in 1960, an intense debate around the future of the palace arose among intellectuals, architects, and statecraft agents. The palace, however, had a long history before its downfall, and its destruction in 1976 was just one piece of a broader, more abstract process of change over time. In the ideological dimension, specific ideas of Brasilidade – or Brazilian nationhood and cultural identity -- traveled through space and time and manifested in the physical world through world's fair pavilions in Chicago (1893), Saint Louis (1904), New York (1939), Brussels (1958), as well as in the Monroe Palace in Rio (1906-1976). These different ideas of Brasilidade referred to multiple meanings and ideologies of nationhood, modernity, modernization, tradition, past, and future that were attributed to those physical constructions. As my research demonstrates, the mutilations in the Monroe Palace and the trajectory of different Brazilian pavilions in world's fairs served as case studies to understand the maturation of Brazil's ideologies of nationhood in the twentieth century.
Open Access
Second mothers: fictive kinship and patriotic feminism in the Army Nurse Corps, 1917-1975.
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Franks, Cassie, author; Little, Ann, advisor; Yalen, Deborah, committee member; Conway, Thomas, committee member
The Army Nurse Corps, founded in 1901, has been shaped over the last century by a hierarchy of age and experience among nurses in the ANC, many of whom served in a previous war, creating intergenerational links to women who served in later war. Through the work and action of women such as Col. Florence Blanchfield, who served as a Chief Nurse in WWI, then as the superintendent of the ANC from 1943-1947, Col. Althea Williams who served as an officer in WWII and Korea, then served as the Chief Nurse for the Army during the Vietnam War, and countless others, the ANC challenged the militaries treatment of sex differences and women's ability to serve. The relationships between higher and lower ranking ANC officers and the hierarchy and age between these groups of women shaped their experience, ideas, and the ANC itself. The work of these women, and countless others, illuminates the position of experienced nurses, their leadership, and how their rank and experience allowed them to not only teach the younger generation of nurses but created a sort of proto-feminist consciousness among Vietnam Era nurses. Many Chief Nurses, higher ranking officers, and experienced nurses, earned the nickname of "Ma," "Mama", or "Mother." These women helped to cultivate an environment that allowed women to serve under pressure, look to their superiors for assistance, and challenge the gender norms that permeated the 20th century military.
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
"The Japanese" in Colorado's racial discourse: fear, anxiety, and spectacle in the reporting of the Denver Post during the interwar years (1919-1941)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Tenn, Christopher, author; Henry, Todd, advisor; Jones, Elizabeth, committee member; Archie, Andre, committee member
This thesis is comprised of two principle sections. The first two chapters examine the experiences of Japanese immigrants residing in Colorado during the sixty years prior to the onset of World War II. These chapters describe the characteristics of Colorado's Japanese communities, the circumstances which drew them to Colorado, and the demographic changes the community underwent in the decades preceding the Second World War. The way in which the racial background of these individuals shaped their experiences in Colorado is of central importance to this work. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the ways in which race intersected with transnational politics, local economic contingencies, and cultural attitudes to influence the responses of Colorado's Euro-Americans to their Japanese neighbors, profoundly shaping the experiences of Japanese immigrants in Colorado. The latter half of this work analyzes racial discourses circulating in the Denver Post during the interwar years. During the two decades leading up to the Second World War, the Denver Post was the predominant regional newspaper and regularly featured articles on Japanese Americans, Japanese nationals, Japan, and Japanese culture and society. I argue that the sentiments expressed within the paper were representative of a popular racial discourse that was ultimately essentializing and dehumanizing. The language employed within this discourse lumped together a complex and diverse group of people into the racial category of "Japanese," attributing to that category a series of essential and universal characteristics. In my critique of this language, I reveal that this discourse was often multi-faceted and expressed sentiments that varied from fear and anxiety, to awe and fascination. The result was the production of numerous and varied stereotypes which served as representations of the "Japanese" to readers of Colorado newspapers. Regardless of what characteristics it projected upon the "Japanese," however, this discourse continued to homogenize all individuals of Japanese ethnicity into a singular racial entity, problematically reinforcing the legitimacy of race as a valid means of social categorization in the process. I am critical of such a category and, in this work, seek to demonstrate how the process of constructing a "Japanese" racial identity during the interwar years was in fact a process of othering that contributed to the ease with which negative, vilifying stereotypes were later projected upon Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
Open Access
Making meaning in a modern world: place and identity in Leadville, Colorado
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Hawk, Jennifer, author; Fiege, Mark, advisor; Ore, Janet, advisor; Calderazzo, John, committee member
Leadville, Colorado is one of many former mining towns significant to not only the state of Colorado, but also to the history of the West as a whole. Part of the larger history of the extractive industries on which the Western United States was founded, mining towns like Leadville provide a postindustrial landscape through which to study the ways in which individuals and communities rely on their history and memory to maintain a stable identity in a modem world that no longer accommodates the kind of economic structure that they most strongly identify with. This thesis consists of three parts, two of which offer a more traditional historical study of the ways in which Leadville residents use their past to mitigate the realities of life in the modem world. The third portion, a non-fiction essay, reflects on my own experiences with both Leadville and with the nature of modem life.
Open Access
"The scum of both nations": a Gaelic perception of gender and communities during the conquest of Ulster
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Garl, Olivia N., author; Gudmestad, Robert, advisor; Kreider, Jodie, advisor; Little, Ann, committee member; Kwiatkowski, Lynn, committee member
This thesis covers the conquest of Gaelic Ulster from 1555-1653 through a gender lens. Early modern Ulster's history is rift with dynamic, systemic change that has been occluded by previous scholarship. By bringing women out of the footnotes and fragments, this work establishes the importance of surveying colonization and conquest on two levels. It demonstrates how gendered perceptions of the Gaelic Irish isolated their nested identities to serve English constructions of the Other. In addition, it complicates the narrative of English sovereignty in Ulster by describing the complexity of Gaelic rule and its dependence on kinship networks prior to 1600. Gaelic kinship networks, reinforced by marriage alliances and fosterage, utilized regional ties to enforce their autonomy despite increased English presence in Ulster. This work utilizes specific cases to demonstrate continuity and change over time in Ulster's Gaelic and settler communities during this period. Chapter 1 examines the use of marriage alliances and fosterage to reinforce Gaelic power from 1555-1600. It uses the examples of Agnes Campbell and Finola MacDonnell to show the permeable and alterable boundaries of Ulster's warrior society during this time of turmoil. Chapter 2 examines the role of settlers in Ulster's English and Scottish communities from 1600-1641. It explains the process of altering the Irish figure in print culture to serve English ambitions of conquest and how those realities differed in everyday life. Chapter 3 uses the 1641 Depositions to reflect on the drastic change in Ulster as it was superimposed on the 1641 Irish Rebellion. It examines 450 depositions taken in Antrim and Down to analyze what gendered, coded language was used to construct or reconfigure images of settlers and natives, Protestants and Catholics, and victims and rebels.
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
Spent a little time on the mountain: backcountry ski touring in Utah and Colorado
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Miller, Alexander, author; Childers, Michael, advisor; Carr Childers, Leisl, committee member; Cheng, Tony, committee member
Backcountry skiing has continually grown as a recreational activity since alpine skiers began leaving developed ski area boundaries in the late 1930s. Placing individuals in a less managed, sometimes hostile, winter landscape creates a significant management issue for the U.S. Forest Service. This thesis examines this issue by looking back to the sport's emergence as a popular winter recreation activity. It asks how ski tourers from the 1960s through the 1980s understood the way they used land. To answer this question, it examines the development of avalanche research and growing avalanche awareness in the Mountain West, the experience backcountry skiers sought and the mentality that created, and how that mentality established an advocacy framework aimed at protecting access to the backcountry—the area outside ski resorts and away from signs of the "works of man." Through this investigation, it highlights how the U.S. Forest Service facilitated this new form of land use, what exactly it is backcountry skiers are using, and how this use informed environmental politics. Finally, it argues that through understanding how the growing backcountry skiing community used mountain landscapes in the past, skiers, land management agencies, and the broader outdoor recreation community, can begin to come to terms with the impacts of this use and how to mitigate them.
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
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
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
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
"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
Power, politics, and the origin of the Chinese Exclusion Era
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Campbell, Jessica, author; Gudmestad, Robert, advisor; Payne, Sarah, committee member; Souza, Caridad, committee member
This study places the origins of the Chinese Exclusion Era (1823-1882) in a larger regional, national, and international context to reveal that the Chinese Exclusion Era was not a direct cause and effect relationship between labor and policy, but rather a negotiation between various groups including immigrants, laborers, politicians, and businessmen, where each group worked in its own self-interest to achieve or eliminate the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the United States. This study focuses on issues of race, class, and gender, with particular emphasis on the ways in which existing structures and institutions within the United States such as the black-white binary, democracy, and capitalism shaped the reception and ultimate exclusion of immigrants.
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
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
Rapid ascent: Rocky Mountain National Park in the Great Acceleration, 1945-present
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Boxell, Mark, author; Fiege, Mark, advisor; Bobowski, Ben, committee member; Howkins, Adrian, committee member; Lindenbaum, John, committee member; Orsi, Jared, committee member
After the Second World War's conclusion, Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) experienced a massive rise in visitation. Mobilized by an affluent economy and a growing, auto-centric infrastructure, Americans rushed to RMNP in droves, setting off new concerns over the need for infrastructure improvements in the park. National parks across the country experienced similar explosions in visitation, inspiring utilities- and road-building campaigns throughout the park units administered by the National Park Service. The quasi-urbanization of parks like RMNP implicated the United States' public lands in a process of global change, whereby wartime technologies, cheap fossil fuels, and a culture of techno-optimism—epitomized by the Mission 66 development program—helped foster a "Great Acceleration" of human alterations of Earth’s natural systems. This transformation culminated in worldwide turns toward mass-urbanization, industrial agriculture, and globalized markets. The Great Acceleration, part of the Anthropocene—a new geologic epoch we have likely entered, which proposes that humans have become a force of geologic change—is used as a conceptual tool for understanding the connections between local and global changes which shaped the park after World War II. The Great Acceleration and its array of novel technologies and hydrocarbon-powered infrastructures produced specific cultures of tourism and management techniques within RMNP. After World War II, the park increasingly became the product and distillation of a fossil fuel-dependent society.