Working at the nexus of environmental, cultural, and Borderlands history, my research, "Smoke and Mirrors: Smelter Pollution and the Cultural Construction of Environmental Narratives in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," follows the evolving late 20th-century debates over transnational smelter pollution in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. The region has pivoted around copper mining since the late 19th century and by the mid-1900s, the transnational copper industry, concentrated in Douglas, Arizona, and Cananea and Nacozari, Sonora, coupled with the prevalence of maquiladoras in Agua Prieta, produced a severe air pollution problem. In reaction to environmental damage and public health problems, concerned citizens on both sides of the border organized to legally enforce existing environmental regulations and improve local conditions. The ensuing struggle over local air quality in the small towns of Douglas, Cananea, and Nacozari--coined the "Gray Triangle"--quickly escalated to national environmental and economic conversations, and resulted in international cooperation and legislation.

On the eve of 1920, the U.S. recording industry had been through a number of near-fatal economic downturns since its precarious emergence in the 1890s, and yet stood on the verge of its most influential decade to date. Already in its short history, the recording industry had nearly ceased to exist in the 1890s, saved itself by transforming the phonograph from office machine to nickel-in-the-slot novelty, survived the first of many format wars to come, and reinvented itself by introducing the phonograph into American homes. During the 1920s and 1930s, the recording industry participated in creating genre categories and identifying audiences for music that had previously gone unrecorded. By concentrating on both industry giants (Victor, Columbia) and smaller labels that were key to industry trends (Gennett, Paramount, Okeh), this dissertation's working hypothesis is that a new mode of production in the recording industry between the world wars -- based both on previous business strategies and new market conditions -- allowed a few large corporations to develop into a highly organized industry. This relationship between genre (understood as a configuration of social, cultural, ideological, and aesthetic beliefs) and mode of production (in its most concrete sense, how a given company operates) has continued to be an important one to the record industry, because with each new genre and sub-genre the industry has the potential to connect with underserved or unrecognized audiences. By combining industrial history with cultural analysis, this dissertation analyzes institutional cultures at various record companies and the contributions of musicians and various cultural intermediaries who helped shape U. S. popular music beginning in the early twentieth century. The central questions to which I continually return are: How did the consolidation of the recording industry into distinct company cultures shape the records that were made? What role did these cultures play in the shaping of genres, in terms of both creative control and technological formats? And finally, how do these various aspects interrelate in the context of the recording industry -- both as an industry involved in manufacturing culture and reflecting its own participation as a cultural institution? / text

Aerial Empire combines environmental and political history to argue that air shaped the United States’ colonization of the intermountain west. By focusing on environmental management and federal-Indian policy, it shows how claiming and regulating air as a natural resource both supported and subverted the nation’s control over the region in the twentieth century. A combination of white encroachment, warfare, diplomacy, and violence had transferred the region from Native to non-Native populations by the late nineteenth century. This process involved claiming western air, but appropriating the lower atmosphere required technology and policies devised during the twentieth century. Efforts to access and regulate air shaped twentieth-century U.S. expansion in New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and Arizona, and turned a boundless atmosphere into a finite resource. Climate cures began the process of defining air as a natural resource, accelerated by aviation which compelled courts to legally distinguish navigable airspace from air rights in the 1920s. Nuclear science expanded atmospheric knowledge and smog undermined an approach to pollution based on dilution by 1950. As air pollution control shifted from a local to national issue, commercial and military jets increasingly crowded the skies. Environmental policy extended federal authority over air as a natural resource with the 1970 Clean Air Act, which tribes used to press federal recognition of their environmental sovereignty. Fluid and elusive, atmospheric motion subverted efforts to fix the sky in place and undermined territorial jurisdiction. Although modern legislation made air a material resource, the atmosphere remained interconnected with land in ways that complicated its regulation. Claiming air required seeing it as a material rather than an immaterial resource, and as a finite rather than infinite one. Tribes influenced and deployed environmental law to bolster Indigenous power and challenge the settler state’s authority over air, land, and Native peoples. Yet Indigenous and rural communities suffered disproportionate impacts of atmospheric transformations, such as nuclear testing, extractive industry, and military airspace. Efforts to claim, measure, map, and manage the atmosphere contributed to crucial changes in modern American society, including the transfer of Indigenous land, resources, and labor to settlers; the degradation and pollution of air with dangerous compounds and waste; the expansion of military control over new spaces; and the extension of federal authority through modern environmental policy. / 2028-10-31T00:00:00Z

This dissertation examines the political and business career of H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Scholars studying Richard M. Nixon’s presidency and administration have given very little attention to Haldeman’s career before and after his time as chief of staff. This dissertation argues that in order to understand Haldeman’s actions as chief of staff one needs to have a firm understanding of his career before he entered Nixon’s White House. In contrast to what many have argued, an overt interest in politics and overriding ambition to serve Nixon did not solely drive Haldeman. Instead, the development of Haldeman’s career is best understood through his consistent search for opportunities and activities in which he could alter, reform, or improve existing processes and organizations. Only a study of his entire career brings this motivation to the forefront. Using Haldeman’s recollections, his White House diaries, archival records relating to his business and political career, assessments of the Nixon presidency, and the recently published memoir of his wife, this dissertation provides an in-depth study of his career as a manager in business and politics. This study answers important questions regarding Haldeman’s background, intellectual makeup, and the trajectory of his career by reexamining Haldeman’s work for Nixon and his career in the advertising industry and analyzing how each of these experiences informed his life, skillset, and his managerial behavior. Providing the scholarship with a more complete picture of Haldeman’s life and career augments the understanding of Richard Nixon’s political career and presidency, by filling a critical void with a more comprehensive overview of a close aide and a major figure at the center of the Watergate scandal. An examination of Haldeman’s entire career, moreover, illuminates how significant developments in twentieth century United States political and business history impacted one individual.