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 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.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Charles W. Sanders, Jr. / The thriving areas of development around the cities of Franklin and Nashville in Tennessee bear little evidence of the large battles that took place there during November and December, 1864. Pointing to modern development to explain the failed preservation of those battlefields, however, radically oversimplifies how those battlefields became relatively obscure. Instead, the major factor contributing to the lack of preservation of the Franklin and Nashville battlefields was a fractured collective memory of the two events; there was no unified narrative of the battles. For an extended period after the war, there was little effort to remember the Tennessee Campaign. Local citizens and veterans of the battles simply wanted to forget the horrific battles that haunted their memories. Furthermore, the United States government was not interested in saving the battlefields at Franklin and Nashville. Federal authorities, including the War Department and Congress, had grown tired of funding battlefields as national parks and could not be convinced that the two battlefields were worthy of preservation. Moreover, Southerners and Northerners remembered Franklin and Nashville in different ways, and historians mainly stressed Eastern Theater battles, failing to assign much significance to Franklin and Nashville. Throughout the 20th century, infrastructure development encroached on the battlefields and they continued to fade from public memory. By the end of the century, the battlefields were all but gone. However, to support tourism in the 21st century, Franklin’s preservationists and local leaders largely succeeded in recapturing the memory of their battle by reclaiming much of the battlefield space. In contrast, at Nashville, memory of that battle remains obscure. The city continues to focus its efforts on the future, providing little opportunity to reclaim either the battlefield or memory of the Battle of Nashville.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Robert D. Linder / During the 1950s, a decade scholars call the high point of American civil religion, journalist and historian William Lee Miller complained that the “popular religious revival is closely tied to a popular patriotism, of which it is the uncritical ally: religion and Americanism, god and country, Cross and flag.” If it bothered Miller that Americans too often “slipped unnoticing from one to the other,” he suspected that at least part of the problem had to do with mass media. “It is ‘salable’ religion,” he quipped, “quite clearly and often quite candidly cut to fit the requirements of Hooper ratings, box offices, and newsstand sales.” This study examines the relationship between American civil religion and radio drama in the 1950s as well as the two decades that shaped the 1950s, the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that by adapting an earlier tradition of civil religion to the twentieth century’s popular, mass-mediated culture, radio drama reinforced the centripetalism of American public life in those decades. Radio was the right medium at the right time for a nation new to global leadership and eager to rebuild its economy. As a national medium, radio enabled civil religion to continue its role in helping to forge a national identity, and as an emotionally intense medium — or what media theorist Marshall McLuhan called a “hot” medium — radio connected individual Americans to an ethereal, imagined “community of the air.” This study sheds light on constructions of the mid-twentieth century as an era of consensus in the United States by examining how centripetalism was constructed not simply by specific actors, such as the federal government and corporate broadcasting networks, but also by the specific properties of the dominant national medium, radio, and by radio’s ability to unite Americans around deep-seated civil religious understandings of their nation. It contributes to the scholarly conversation about civil religion by locating it not only in official pronouncements and public ceremonies, but also in commercial, mass-mediated cultural products, something most Americans consumed daily.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald Mrozek / Scholars identify the early 1960s as the moment when Americans rediscovered poverty – as the time when Presidents, policymakers, and the public shifted their attention away from celebrating the affluence of the 1950s and toward directly helping poor people within the culture of poverty through major federal programs such as the Peace Corps and Job Corps. This dissertation argues that this moment should not be viewed as a rediscovery of poverty by Americans. Rather, it should be viewed as a paradigm shift that conceptually unified the understanding of both foreign and domestic privation within the concept of a culture of poverty. A culture of poverty equally hindered poor people all around the world, resulting in widespread illiteracy in India and juvenile delinquency in Indianapolis. Policymakers defined poverty less by employment rate or location (rural poverty in Ghana versus inner-city poverty in New York) and more by the cultural values of the poor people (apathy toward change, disdain for education, lack of planning for the future, and desire for immediate gratification). In a sense, the poor person who lived in the Philippines and the one who lived in Philadelphia became one. They suffered from the same cultural limitations and could be helped through the same remedy. There were not just similarities between programs to alleviate poverty in either the Third World or America; the two became one in the mid-1960s. Makers of policy in the War on Poverty understood all poverty around the world as identical and approached it with the same remedy. President John Kennedy inspired the paradigm shift. After reading about the culture of poverty in Dwight Macdonald’s review of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Kennedy began to bring together experts within a new mentality to discuss a program to end poverty. The experts had been working for separate programs that focused on seemingly disparate issues—juvenile delinquency, poverty in New England, and Third World development—but they now realized that they were all working on the same problem, namely, the culture of poverty. The understanding that cultural values created poverty led them to unify their programs and approaches as they created the War on Poverty in 1964. The discovery was not the beginning of national attention on poverty but a culmination that brought together prominent people, ideas, and programs already in existence within a new paradigm.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Charles W. Sanders, Jr. / This thesis examines the reasons Union soldiers voted overwhelmingly for Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864. This thesis bridges the gap between the emerging disagreements within the historiography of the soldier vote in 1864. The disagreements thus far deal with the role of emancipation in the Union soldier’s decision-making process versus the role of other issues, particularly whether or not the war effort should have been continued on to ultimate victory. By extension, the argument also deals with whether or not Union soldiers adhered to the Republican Party’s ideology in making their decision. Through analysis of primary sources including Union soldiers’ letters and diaries, the answer that emerges is that Union soldiers adhered to Republican ideology as outlined by Republican campaign materials as well as their party platform in making their decision for president. This thesis ultimately concludes that a focus on any one reason or another that soldiers chose Lincoln misses the larger picture.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Derek S. Hoff / In the years immediately after World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that he did not want to run for office. However, the general, persuaded by the efforts of Citizens for Eisenhower groups, reversed his decision before the 1952 election. The new politician did not take an easy path to the White House, however, as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the leading conservative Republican, fought to represent the GOP. Eisenhower aligned with the moderate faction, the party’s traditional source of power, and joined the Republicans during the early stages of a civil war in the party. From the time Eisenhower received the presidential nomination in 1952 until his death in 1969, he committed himself to leading the GOP and establishing moderate, not conservative, Republicanism as the party’s ideology. However, this aspect of Eisenhower’s political career has largely been ignored by historians. The analyses of Eisenhower that focus on his presidency, rather than his military career, concentrate on policy decisions, omitting the president’s role as party leader during a transformative era. This oversight not only skews Eisenhower’s legacy but also renders analyses of the conservative revolution in American politics incomplete. Before conservative Senator Barry Goldwater secured the Republican nomination in 1964, a very important moment that augured —but did not guarantee — the future triumph of the conservative wing, Eisenhower worked to stop his campaign. Had Eisenhower succeeded, the GOP and American politics could have followed a much different trajectory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Utilizing documents from throughout Eisenhower’s political career, this study argues that although Eisenhower failed to halt conservatism, he influenced the course of the GOP. During the 1950s and 1960s, Eisenhower helped revitalize the party, improved the party’s organization, and contributed to conservatism’s delayed ascendancy. Furthermore, Eisenhower merits recognition as a party leader who worked tirelessly on behalf of moderate Republicanism, not just as a man with impressive coattails for Republicans to cling to during elections.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / David A. Graff / Cotton was the most important commodity in the economy of the industrialized Western world in the mid-nineteenth century, as vital then as petroleum is today. It was widely believed that a prolonged interruption of the cotton supply would lead not merely to a severe economic depression, but possibly to the collapse of Western Civilization. Three quarters of the world’s cotton supply came from the Southern states of the United States. When the American Civil War erupted and cotton supplies were cut off, the British Cotton Supply Association was faced with the difficult task of establishing cotton cultivation in other locations. In order for the effort to succeed, the British had to obtain and distribute millions of pounds of American cotton seeds. The United States government, the Illinois Central Railroad, and a number of organizations and individuals cooperated to obtain the necessary seeds that the British had to have. American farm equipment manufacturers assisted by designing, making, and distributing portable cotton gins and other implements needed by cotton growers overseas. U.S. consuls overseas sometimes assisted the Cotton Supply Association with seed and equipment distribution. This dissertation is about the implementation of the grand economic strategies of the United States and Great Britain. It is also about the people who implemented those strategies on the ground, people as diverse as Union agents who went into Confederate territory to procure cotton seeds, farmers in Illinois, British consuls who distributed seeds grown in Illinois to farmers in the Ottoman Empire, and English colonists who flocked to Fiji with high hopes of becoming cotton planters. It attempts to measure the impact of the cotton boom and subsequent bust that resulted from the American Civil War on societies around the world.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / This study analyzes the effect of the Army Air Forces’ wartime experience on the selection and training of aviation cadets and the steps taken by the Army Air Forces to reduce the number of accidents and fatalities. Over the course of the war, the US Army Air Forces suffered over 54,000 accidents in the continental United States. These accidents accounted for over 15,000 fatalities, the equivalent of a World War Two infantry division. As a result of this wartime experience the Army Air Forces began instituting and enforcing stricter safety measures and emphasizing safety in all phases of training. By the end of the war, the Army Air Forces had transitioned from an organization with loose standards for selection, training, and safety to one with formal procedures for all three. In the process, the Army Air Forces established a new culture of professionalism for the US Air Force.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / After the Second World War, the leaders of the Department of the Army (DA) worked to inform those in the service that they had a duty to help the American people understand what the Army was doing to provide security for the nation. Their goal was for the public to have, at a minimum, the same amount of understanding of the Army as it had during World War II. To achieve this goal they believed that the officer corps had to be convinced that explaining to the public what the service was doing was in the best interest of the Army. The effort of the leaders to convince the officer corps was conducted by two primary means. First, the leaders made many public statements announcing that the Army would continue to inform the American people. Second, they added a requirement for those setting the curricula at the senior two schools of the service to provide instruction about the program that the Army had, which had three sub-programs, to update the American public. Between AY 1947 and 1989, the leaders continued to talk about the importance of informing the public. However, those approving the curricula at the two Colleges of the Army placed decreasing emphasis on educating students about what public affairs was and how to conduct it. This assertion is based on three primary findings. First, there is a clear decrease in the number of hours allocated to teaching about public affairs. Second, over the course of this period students were provided with fewer chances to apply what they were learning. Third, the coverage of the instruction went from covering at least two of the components of the Army’s program to at best only one. In the end a gap is clearly visible between what the leaders of the Army were saying regarding the importance of educating officers about public affairs and what was included in the curricula of these two schools: deeds did not match words.