Historyhttps://hdl.handle.net/1808/7762024-03-28T16:52:14Z2024-03-28T16:52:14ZAmerican Land Rush: “A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead BoomGregg, Sara M.https://hdl.handle.net/1808/315602021-04-02T14:25:32Z2020-01-01T00:00:00ZAmerican Land Rush: “A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom
Gregg, Sara M.
This Virtual Exhibition features one of the millions of small stories of homesteading in the US West. Lily Bell Murray Stearns Schuld Lampp overcame early tragedy in Illinois that left her an orphan, moving through Saskatchewan and Iowa before she arrived in Montana to claim 320 acres (129.5 hectares) of “free land” under the terms of the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act. Stearns’s saga captures both the risks and the opportunities of the Great Plains during the early twentieth century. Stearns was one of 14,891 homesteaders who successfully proved up in Montana in 1917, the year of greatest homestead success during the long homestead era (1863–1986), but her experiences evoke how the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected the abundant economic, political, and personal whims of the era.
This exhibit is derived from research conducted for a book project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, that uses microhistorical methods to excavate the multiple histories of areas that achieved high rates of homesteading success, reclaiming the histories of the land and peoples on which these land claims were sited. Lily Stearns’s story, placed within the largest successful homestead rush in history, foregrounds the personal saga of one woman who struggled to find security and a sense of pace within the sweeping demographic and geopolitical changes of her day.
2020-01-01T00:00:00ZBeyond Stories: Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental HistoryGregg, Sara M.https://hdl.handle.net/1808/315582021-03-23T08:00:50Z2019-01-01T00:00:00ZBeyond Stories: Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental History
Gregg, Sara M.
Scholars using quantitative and spatial methods have revisited some of the foundational texts in environmental history over the past decade, demonstrating that new technologies permit scholars to revisit some of the pivotal interpretative questions that helped to establish the field. This essay investigates the new opportunities as well as the perils that historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) present for environmental historians, and examines the ways in which scholars have crafted and redirected historical questions using new techniques in the spatial humanities. This essay explores the impact of scientific knowledge, and more specifically, HGIS, on reshaping our ideas about historical contingency and the use of evidence in environmental history, focusing on the ways data sets and digital technologies now permit a dramatically different approach to historical investigations. Environmental historians have been using HGIS in order to assess the long-term effects of agricultural policy and land use change on a range of landscapes, as well as to survey urban and marine regions with an eye to addressing new questions about development and sustainability. This essay evaluates the role of spatial studies in environmental history, examining the new types of data that recent technological developments have made usable for scholars in the humanities.
2019-01-01T00:00:00ZUnited States economic and military assistance policy toward China during World War II and its immediate aftermathRahman, A.F.M. Shamsurhttps://hdl.handle.net/1808/313882021-02-09T09:01:01Z1988-05-31T00:00:00ZUnited States economic and military assistance policy toward China during World War II and its immediate aftermath
Rahman, A.F.M. Shamsur
This study traces the background and development of the U.S. assistance policy toward China in the late 1930's and throughout the 1940's. This aid took place in numerous forms but mostly via U.S. government programs. Operation of Lend-Lease assistance occupies a major part of this study, which was definitely the first major commitment of the U.S. resources for the large scale reconstruction of another country's economy. Although the aid given during wartime was basically intended to strengthen the capacity of China to resist the Japanese aggression, all U.S. aid programs had far reaching effects on China's post-war industrialization and economic development. Besides Lend-Lease, the other major U.S. programs to aid China were participation in the operation of UNRRA and the dispatch of an American War Production Mission to China. The short term objective of tying down three million Japanese soldiers in China superseded America's long-term objective of a unified, democratic and friendly China.
Although U.S. aid programs to China failed to achieve a major success owing to the corruption of Kuomintang officials, an outbreak of intensive civil war, and also lack of proper coordination and information about China's actual situation, it profoundly affected the United States' later relations and assistance policy toward other countries. The U.S. emerged as a major economic giant to influence the reconstruction and development of the global economy. On the other hand, China's process of westernization was largely begun because of this U.S. aid effort.
Ph.D. University of Kansas, History 1988
1988-05-31T00:00:00ZInventamus Si Progressimus: “We Made It Up as We Went Along” The Evolution of the American Advisory Effort in South VietnamShelton, Mark Stephenhttps://hdl.handle.net/1808/313442021-03-05T16:53:56Z2019-08-31T00:00:00ZInventamus Si Progressimus: “We Made It Up as We Went Along” The Evolution of the American Advisory Effort in South Vietnam
Shelton, Mark Stephen
Abstract This dissertation examines the efforts of the South Vietnamese government along with their American military and civilian advisors to devise and implement programs to combat the Viet Cong Infrastructure in South Vietnam prior to the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. This dissertation will focus on both the Agroville and Strategic Hamlet Programs examining their organization, construction, and goals and the Viet Cong response to counter their implementation. It examines how the South Vietnamese with assistance from the United States military and Central Intelligence Agency under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy conducted armed nation-building from 1955‒63 on an unprecedented scale. This dissertation argues that the Viet Cong Infrastructure was so pervasive, and their control of the peasants using terror so systematic, that the price in time, treasure, and especially blood was more than either the South Vietnamese or their American allies were willing to pay to overcome.
2019-08-31T00:00:00Z