Master of Arts / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In 1867, Abilene became the first of Kansas’ cattle towns. For the next two decades, Kansas would be the transfer point in bringing Texas cattle herds to market in northern cities, all facilitated by the expansion of railroad lines in the state. For town boosters, the cattle trade was a lucrative source of economic development. But as Abilene was soon to discover, the cattle trade also brought with it, literally, the “evils of the trade,” a whole sub-community of brothels, saloons, and dance halls. The arrival of that vice fostered immediate and often outraged citizen protests. Much of the history of cattle towns in Kansas is therefore the story of “respectable” citizens fighting the vice in their midst. This thesis examines Abilene, Kansas, in particular, and especially focuses upon one peculiar circumstance: Abilene was the only cowtown that ridded itself of vice by deliberately asking the cattle trade to leave. Abilene’s experience also reveals the mobility of the sporting community; prostitutes notorious in Abilene turned up in many other Kansas cattle town. This thesis therefore continues by examining this mobile sub-culture of prostitutes including their living conditions, their confrontations with municipal government, and the outrage they inspired wherever they went.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Timothy A. Dayton / Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early life and education led him to focus on self-development and social concerns. His subsequent individualism and concern for society were not just characteristics of his own personal behavior, but of his vision for the world. The individual and the social form a symbiotic relation critical to understanding this vision. Once Emerson had fully established this vision, he sought to make it known in an attempt to improve American society, which he felt was degenerate and in decline. Emerson suggests that the source of his rejuvenating vision can be found in the principles and ideas of the American Revolution. Emerson appeals to ideals and practice common during the Revolution and immediate post-Revolutionary period. Americans slowly drifted away from practicing these Revolutionary ideals. Emerson appropriates Revolutionary ideals and characteristics to create individual and social change in the America of his day. While this program for change seems clear and straightforward, it becomes problematic when actually applied.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Mark P. Parillo / The United States Army faced a dire challenge when conscription was phased out in favor of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973. The Army was confronted with pressing manning requirements while suffering from the American public’s disapproval over the war in Vietnam. The end of the draft in favor of an all-volunteer force did not offer a great deal of promise for filling Army manpower requirements. Army leadership realized that it needed new methods that could recruit quality volunteers while simultaneously reforming the Army’s public image. Paid television advertising, able to reach a wide and diverse viewing audience, was pursued as a way to achieve both of those objectives. This study examines Army television advertisements since the creation of the AVF and analyzes their imagery and messages. Surprisingly consistent themes and messages have persisted in the Army’s television advertising for over thirty-five years of the AVF’s existence. During that same time, American attitudes toward the military were increasingly characterized by an interesting paradox. The American public overwhelmingly supported the military but grew less inclined to volunteer for military service. The public’s good feelings toward the Army and its “support for the troops” were not borne out with strong recruitment numbers during the years of the AVF. This work will argue that the messages in Army television advertising helped change the Army from a vital national institution into just another employer making a basic job offer in the audience’s mind while doing little to reform the Army’s public image. The ads did not appeal to America’s youth to commit themselves to national service. Rather, the ads promised to help individuals realize their wishes and dreams by focusing on the economic and educational advantages that the Army could deliver. Consequently, the ads cast the Army as a sort of trade school willing to provide young people with marketable skills, educational opportunities and enlistment bonuses in return for a short stint in the service. Public service and duty to the nation were rarely mentioned. The ads portrayed the Army as willing to strike deals with recruits to advance their personal goals and enrichment while demanding little in return.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / This thesis explores the development of Derby, Kansas, from the arrival of its first settlers in 1869 through the early 1970s. During its first seventy-five years, Derby never grew beyond its origins as a tiny trade center for local farmers, its economic growth constantly stymied and overshadowed by the often explosive growth of Wichita, twelve miles to the north. Derby might have met the fate of so many other Kansas farming communities that did not survive developments in industrialized agricultural and transportation in post-World War II America. With the beginning of the Cold War, however, the federal government began pouring money into the Midwest and West, building up existing, and constructing new, military installations. In addition, federal spending spurred massive new defense industries, creating growth around the cites of what some historians have called “Gunbelt America.” Wichita was one such city. Derby’s proximity to Wichita finally worked to its advantage, and the small town experienced its own boom as it became a residential community inhabited by affluent commuters to the job opportunities nearby. In addition, Derby’s racial homogeneity, its relative affluence, and the deliberate attempts of its boosters to portray it as a “family friendly,” that is, as a white, middle-class, community, further spurred its growth as Wichita went through the turmoil of school desegregation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Derby, Kansas, illustrates a distinct category in the development of the new Gunbelt West, a community that flourished both because of its proximity to a larger city as well as its distance from the perceived turmoil of that urban center.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / James E. Sherow / During the period between 1848 and 1938, a combination of land-use changes and regional climatic alterations caused changes in the physical structure of the Canadian River. The Canadian River begins in the southern Rocky Mountains and flows south and then northeast across the High Plains of New Mexico and Texas. The Comanche Indians used the river as a transportation corridor, as a winter shelter for themselves and for their horse herds, as well as hunting the bison that visited the valley. The Comanches also valued the spiritual power, puha, found in the running water and on the mesas within the river’s lowlands. After the defeat of the Comanches in the Red River Wars and the destruction of the bison herds, New Mexican Hispanos moved their flocks of sheep into the valley and established settlements along the tributary streams. These settlers practiced “extensive” land use, drawing from a broad array of the valley’s resources and using them comparatively lightly in ways that drew from older Spanish laws and customs. The enclosure of parts of the valley by Anglo-Texan ranchers drove the Hispanos out of the Canadian watershed in Texas, although access to the open range in New Mexico allowed other Hispanos to retain their settlements. Corporations including the Capitol Lands Syndicate and Prairie Cattle Company introduced large numbers of cattle to the region at the same time that regional rainfall patterns shifted. This combination of heavy grazing and altered precipitation patterns led to erosion in the uplands that caused changes in the physical structure of the Canadian River. After 1903, the arrival of railroads into eastern New Mexico accelerated the development of dry-land farms in both states. Increasing calls for damming and controlling the Canadian led to the first interstate Canadian River Compact in 1928. The advent of a severe drought in the 1930s and the Great Depression led to federal resources becoming available and the first dam was built on the stream, ending the era of the free-flowing river and again starting physical changes to the Canadian.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Jack M. Holl / Donald J. Mrozek / General Walter Bedell Smith is the subject of this dissertation. It examines his career as Eisenhower's chief of staff from a functionalist perspective. Functionalism as a school of thought emphasizes the organic nature of social institutions, the importance of improvisation while framing solutions to problems, and the necessity of producing predictable results. In practice, the US Army and Smith applied functionalism in a restricted way, but conceived of the General Staff as the "brain of the army." While working for General Marshall in the War Department General Staff and later as General Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Smith met his responsibilities with respect to order, cohesion and objectives. Two general conditions complicated Smith's role at Eisenhower's headquarters: first, the burgeoning size of the staff made it difficult for Smith to manage by means of direct supervision and still preserve a measure of initiative among staff members; second, Smith's poor health and choler sometimes hindered his ability to adopt means that were consistent with the organic aspect of functionalism. In Washington, Algiers and London, Bedell Smith gained notoriety as a "hatchetman" who did his superior's dirty work. His ugly reputation was fitting in some ways, but undeserved in others. His achievements have been underestimated. Smith was the firm defender of the Eisenhower's prerogatives. Among British colleagues, he was a disciple of cooperation and diplomacy. He was intelligent, orderly and functionalist in the sense that his decisiveness and willingness to accept responsibility achieved quick and predictable results. Smith's understanding of principal issues and his grasp of details earned the trust and respect of colleagues. He acted out of duty, not "natural" meanness. The traits of a "hatchetman" - feared and detested by some - were the distinguishing features that won favor from his superiors, Marshall and Eisenhower.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Charles Sanders / The power of historical memory is readily apparent in the United States of America. Ask any descendent of veterans that served in war, and a plethora of reasons behind their willingness to fight will follow. As with any conflict, the enduring legacies of the war‘s aftermath are not always clear until years after the fact. Memory of the American Civil War took several different routes before finally settling on the "spirit of reconciliation" that came to dominate American society in the post-war era. In the South, the "Lost Cause" began to take hold with former Confederates attempting to justify their defeat and change the historical record to excuse their actions. As the winner in the war, the North did not need to come up with justification as to why they fought—they had secured the Union and destroyed the divisive institution, slavery. Gradually over time, Northerners and Southerners celebrated their veterans while simultaneously promoting reconciliation between the two sections. As a result, any emancipationist legacy from the end of the Civil War was relegated to irrelevancy in American society as Jim Crow settled in within the South for the next hundred years. Memory of the American Civil War continues to have lasting impact upon modern American society, especially with the sesquicentennial celebrations of the war‘s major battles. Lesser known, and yet equally as important, is the memory of the American Revolution. As with the "Lost Cause", the American Revolution experienced its own reconstruction with equal parts forgetting and remembering. Emerging from this "reconstruction" was what became known as the American identity. Thirteen disparate colonies became a solid monolith of Americanism in the reconstructed views of the Revolution, instead of the divided thirteen colonies they truly were. This thesis argues that the "Lost Cause" and spirit of reconciliation that permeated the post-war United States after the Civil War followed a tradition of desiring unity above all else at the expense of minority groups such as African Americans and Native Americans, that began with the American Revolution.

Since Mark Leone’s landmark 1979 study Roots of Modern Mormonism, a scholarly consensus has emerged that a key element of Mormon distinctiveness stems from one’s subscription to an alternate narrative or experience of history. In the past generation, scholarship on Mormon historical thought has addressed important issues arising from these insights from anthropological and sociological perspectives. These perspectives have joined a rich and venerable controversial literature seeking to “debunk” Mormon narratives, apologetic scholarship asserting their epistemic harmony or superiority, as well as fault-finding scholarship that constructs differences in Mormon historical thinking as a problem that must be solved. The lacuna that this project begins to fill is the lack of scholarship specifically in the field of intellectual history describing the various alternate narratives of the past that have been and are being developed by Mormons, their contents, the methodologies by which they are produced and the theories of historical causation that they entail. This dissertation examines nine chronica (historical narratives and associated theories of history) generated by Mormon thinkers during the twentieth century. Following Philip Barlow’s definition of “Mormon” as any religious group that includes the Book of Mormon in its canon, this project examines five chronica generated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism’s 14-million-strong Utah-based denomination), two generated by the Community of Christ (Mormonism’s 175,000-strong Missouri-based denomination) and two generated by independent Mormon fundamentalists (polygamists), one in Utah and the other in Mexico. In so doing it examines the thought of B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, W. Cleon Skousen, Ogden Kraut, Margarito Bautista, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson and a variety of CoC writers such as Harold Velt, Roy Cheville, Little Pigeon and F. Edward Butterworth. Following the work of Leone and Jan Shipps, it engages ethnographic perspectives on unique elements of Mormon temporal phenomenology and its relationship with ritual practice. It also examines how national political and religious movements interpenetrate with Mormonism to condition different understandings of the past; the interactions of Mormon understandings of the past with Mexican revolutionary nationalism and indigenismo, Cold War anti-communism, the 1970s New Left, Christian fundamentalism and Gilded Age progressivism are concurrently examined. Similarly, Mormon interactions with various epistemes and methodologies are canvassed, including New Testament criticism, cultural anthropology, conspiracy theory, medieval typology and the Cambridge myth and ritual school. Ultimately, a set of religious communities that prioritize subscription to a narrative of Israelite immigration to the Americas and pre-Columbian Christian history of the Western Hemisphere, including the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus Christ, has had to reach a special accommodation with history. This project is a study of the diverse accommodations that have been achieved, their epistemic bases and their sustainability in light of the different forms of time consciousness that underpin them.

Since Mark Leone’s landmark 1979 study Roots of Modern Mormonism, a scholarly consensus has emerged that a key element of Mormon distinctiveness stems from one’s subscription to an alternate narrative or experience of history. In the past generation, scholarship on Mormon historical thought has addressed important issues arising from these insights from anthropological and sociological perspectives. These perspectives have joined a rich and venerable controversial literature seeking to “debunk” Mormon narratives, apologetic scholarship asserting their epistemic harmony or superiority, as well as fault-finding scholarship that constructs differences in Mormon historical thinking as a problem that must be solved. The lacuna that this project begins to fill is the lack of scholarship specifically in the field of intellectual history describing the various alternate narratives of the past that have been and are being developed by Mormons, their contents, the methodologies by which they are produced and the theories of historical causation that they entail. This dissertation examines nine chronica (historical narratives and associated theories of history) generated by Mormon thinkers during the twentieth century. Following Philip Barlow’s definition of “Mormon” as any religious group that includes the Book of Mormon in its canon, this project examines five chronica generated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism’s 14-million-strong Utah-based denomination), two generated by the Community of Christ (Mormonism’s 175,000-strong Missouri-based denomination) and two generated by independent Mormon fundamentalists (polygamists), one in Utah and the other in Mexico. In so doing it examines the thought of B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, W. Cleon Skousen, Ogden Kraut, Margarito Bautista, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson and a variety of CoC writers such as Harold Velt, Roy Cheville, Little Pigeon and F. Edward Butterworth. Following the work of Leone and Jan Shipps, it engages ethnographic perspectives on unique elements of Mormon temporal phenomenology and its relationship with ritual practice. It also examines how national political and religious movements interpenetrate with Mormonism to condition different understandings of the past; the interactions of Mormon understandings of the past with Mexican revolutionary nationalism and indigenismo, Cold War anti-communism, the 1970s New Left, Christian fundamentalism and Gilded Age progressivism are concurrently examined. Similarly, Mormon interactions with various epistemes and methodologies are canvassed, including New Testament criticism, cultural anthropology, conspiracy theory, medieval typology and the Cambridge myth and ritual school. Ultimately, a set of religious communities that prioritize subscription to a narrative of Israelite immigration to the Americas and pre-Columbian Christian history of the Western Hemisphere, including the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus Christ, has had to reach a special accommodation with history. This project is a study of the diverse accommodations that have been achieved, their epistemic bases and their sustainability in light of the different forms of time consciousness that underpin them.

In the midst of the progressive era, American nursing and medical education witnessed tremendous reform. The increase in the number of hospitals during the early twentieth century brought a growing demand for nurses and led to varying standards in admissions and education within hospital training schools. In addition, the rise of the field of public health led to a campaign by a number of American nurse leaders to reform nursing education. This campaign included: the formation of several national professional organizations; gaining the support of prominent medical officials, including those close to the Rockefeller Foundation, an influential philanthropic organization; and successfully arguing against the sending of public health nurses overseas during the First World War. Although these steps were taken prior to the end of the war, the period immediately following the war, and the 1918 pandemic spread of influenza, provided fertile ground for reopening discussions regarding nursing education both nationally and internationally. Following the war, the involvement of numerous American-backed organizations, including the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS), and the American Red Cross (ARC), in the training of nurses in Europe highlighted the numerous and conflicting ideals of American nurses in regards to nursing education during this period. In particular, those who had campaigned for the training of public health nurses in the USA — led primarily by the formidable nurse Annie Goodrich — voiced differing ideals for the training of nurses than those American nurses who led the work of the RF, the LRCS and the ARC in Europe following the war. It will be argued here that, contrary to earlier theses that have suggested the spread of a singular “American gospel” of public health nursing education, in fact there were several hotly contested ideas being conveyed in Europe by several different American individuals and organizations at this time. In particular, the RF’s support of two opposing ideals — that of their own nursing representative, Elisabeth Crowell in Europe, and that of Goodrich in the USA — heightened this conflict. The eventual success of one set of these ideas depended on the alignment of congruent ideals in the training of health care professionals with influential individuals and organizations. Furthermore, this dissertation suggests that the outcome of this debate influenced the future direction of nursing education in both Europe and North America.