L'objectif de cette étude est de mettre en lumière la complexité de l'écriture de l'histoire et du processus de renouvellement historique, en prenant pour cas d'étude l'histoire de l'Ouest américain. De la théorie de la Frontière, développée par Frederick Jackson Turner à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, à la « New Western History », apparue dans les années 1980, le sujet a fait l'objet de diverses interprétations au cours du vingtième siècle. Sa complexité réside en outre dans la mythologie véhiculée par la culture populaire, ainsi que la place centrale de l’Ouest dans l’inconscient collectif américain. Très controversées, les réécritures de la Nouvelle Histoire de l’Ouest ont redonné de l’intérêt et du dynamisme au domaine de recherche, tout en suscitant des débats passionnés, dont la médiatisation fut tout à fait inédite. Enfin, l’analyse de la transmission de ces réécritures au grand public, à travers l’enseignement et l’histoire publique, permet d’évaluer l’impact du mouvement au-delà des frontières universitaires et, de fait, offre une meilleure compréhension des enjeux et défis de la discipline historique. / Taking the history of the American West as a case study, the aim of this dissertation is to analyze the complex way in which history is written and rewritten over the years. From the first historian of the Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, to the “New Western History”, born in the 1980s, the Frontier and the American West have generated different interpretations and revisions over the course of the twentieth century. The subject is all the more complex as the West has a special place in the American psyche, and its myths pervade popular culture. Not only did the emergence of the New Western History revive a field of study that had become dated, it also triggered debates that were so heated that they received ample coverage in the American press. Studying the way the New Historians’ reinterpretations were transmitted to the general public, through teaching and public history, allows an assessment of the impact of the New Western History on a lay audience and, thus, a better understanding of the complex mechanics of history-making.

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abstract: This dissertation seeks to understand two universal experiences that have pervaded human society since man first climbed out of the trees: violence and trauma. Using theories gleaned from the Holocaust and other twentieth century atrocities, this work explores narratives of violent action and traumatic reaction as they occurred among peoples of the nineteenth-century American Southwest. By examining the stories of individuals and groups of Apaches, Ethnic Mexicans, Euro-Americans, and other diverse peoples within the lens of trauma studies, a new narrative emerges within US-Mexico borderlands history. This narrative reveals inter-generational legacies of violence among cultural groups that have lived through trauma and caused trauma within others. For both victims and perpetrators alike, trauma and violence can transform into tools of cultural construction and adaptation. Part I of this work establishes the concept of ethnotrauma-- a layered experience of collective trauma among minority populations under racial persecution. By following stories of Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Warm Springs Apaches in the nineteenth-century Southwest, this dissertation reveals how Apaches grappled with ethnotrauma through generations during times of war, imprisonment, and exile. These narratives also reveal how Apaches overcame these legacies of pain through communal solidarity and cultural continuity. Part II explores the concept of perpetrator trauma. By following stories of Mexican norteños, Mexican-Americans on the US-Mexico border, and American settlers, the impact of trauma on violators also comes to light. The concept perpetrator trauma in this context denotes the long-term cultural impacts of committing violence among perpetrating communities. For perpetrating groups, violence became a method of affirming and, in some cases, reconstructing group identity through opposition to other groups. Finally, at the heart of this work stands two critical symbols-- Geronimo, victim and villain, and the land itself, hostile and healing-- that reveal how cycles of violence entangled ethnotrauma and perpetrator trauma within individuals struggling to survive and thrive in a savage land. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2020

This creative thesis is a braided narrative in which I explore the promised lands of Utah through my travels in the summer of 2008, the Cold War defense industry, and the early career of writer Edward Abbey. America's domestic and foreign policy shifts in the first decade of the Cold War contributed to the rise of modern environmentalism and to the creation of countless new religious movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To illustrate the cataclysmic upheavals of this era, each chapter of this thesis has been organized according to anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace's schema of revitalization movements. In both an historical and personal context, I investigate the tensions between freedom and preservation, between defense and vulnerability, and, ultimately, between solitude and community.

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In 1972, a flood tore through Rapid City, South Dakota, killing 238 people. Many whose lives and homes were destroyed lived in a predominately Native American neighborhood known as “Osh Kosh Camp.” This dissertation asks: why did those people lived in that neighborhood at that time? The answer lies at the intersection of the histories of race and environment in the American West. In the Black Hills region, white Americans racialized certain spaces under the conceptual framework of Indian Country as part of the process of American conquest on the northern plains beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The American project of racializing Western spaces erased Indians from histories of Rapid City, a process most obviously apparent in the construction of Mount Rushmore as a tourist attraction. Despite this attempted erasure, Indians continued to live and work in the city and throughout the Black Hills. In Rapid City, rampant discrimination forced Native Americans in Rapid City to live in neighborhoods cut off from city services, including Osh Kosh Camp After the flood, activists retook the Indian Country concept as a tool of protest. This dissertation claims that environment and race must be understood together in the American West. / History

Durante as décadas de 1980 e 1990, a Western History, campo de estudos que se dedica à história do Oeste norte-americano, enfrentou uma tormenta intelectual de proporções pouco vistas antes em suas searas. O motivo para tal inquietação foi o surgimento da assim chamada “New Western History”, movimento que tinha por principal meta reescrever a história regional a partir de uma completa reestruturação de suas bases intelectuais, para tentar salvar o campo de uma suposta crise de identidade surgida ainda nos anos 1960. Neste caso, o principal alvo destes revisionistas foi a antiga historiografia constituída à imagem das teses de Frederick Jackson Turner sobre a fronteira norteamericana. Aqui, a idéia era substituir uma narrativa histórica considerada excessivamente otimista por uma que realçasse os aspectos trágicos do avanço norte-americano em direção ao Pacífico. Esta tentativa, contudo, de se escrever uma história trágica encontrou forte oposição não só entre segmentos da historiografia profissional, mas também entre elementos da opinião pública, num debate que tinha mais a ver com a própria identidade dos Estados Unidos do que com questões meramente historiográficas. / During the 1980s and 1990s, the Western History, field of studies dedicated to the the history of the American West, went through a intellectual storm of proportions seldom seen before in its midst. The motive for such unrest was the arrival of the so-called “New Western History”, a movement whose main aim was the rewriting of the history of the West from the standpoint of a total reestructuring of the field’s intellectual foundations, in an attempt to save it from a crisis of identity that emerged still in the 1960s. In this case, the revisionists’ main target was the old historiography constituted in the image of Frederick Jackson Turner’s theses about the American frontier. Here, the idea was to substitute a historical narrative considered to be excessively optimistic for one that highlighted the tragic aspects of the American advance to the Pacific. However, this attempt to write a tragic history was met with a fierce opposition not only from segments of the professional historiography, but also from the public opinion itself, in a debate that had more to do with the very identity of the US and less with “mere” historiographical questions.

Le California Camera Club, un collectif de photographes amateurs et professionnels actif à San Francisco notamment entre 1890 et 1915, est une organisation constamment marginalisée dans l’histoire de la photographie et de l’Ouest américain. En adoptant une double approche d’histoire culturelle et matérielle, cette thèse éclaire une gamme d’activités et de productions de ce club largement inconnu, qui ont contribué à forger l’identité d’une communauté éloignée de l’Ouest. Par son approche inclusive, réunissant plus de 400 membres en 1900, le club doit être considéré comme une organisation localement ancrée, qui se sert de la photographie pour produire un récit esthétiquement attirant et historiquement cohérent de la ville et de l’État. Malgré son chevauchement chronologique avec le pictorialisme et son ambition de faire reconnaître le médium parmi les beaux-arts, le corpus du club ne peut être inséré dans un canon d’histoire de l’art de la photographie. En se basant sur diverses stratégies de diffusion et d’exposition, les membres adoptent plutôt une approche collective qui transforme l’aspiration à la reconnaissance en un désir de légitimation régionale. À travers une analyse de pratiques photographiques, d’usages et d’itinéraires des objets, cette thèse retrace la construction d’une représentation idiosyncratique de la culture et de l’histoire californiennes par un club qui participe à la conquête d’une place légitime pour l’État sur la scène nationale. En mettant l’accent sur la dimension collective de la photographie, cette analyse montre comment sa pratique dans un territoire isolé mène à la construction imaginaire d’une communauté dotée d’une compréhension commune de ses valeurs esthétiques et de son histoire. L’enjeu de cette thèse est ainsi de réviser un schéma linéaire et étroit de l’histoire de la photographie en élargissant les perspectives géographiques, socioculturelles et archivistiques / The California Camera Club, a collective of amateur and professional photographers, most active in San Francisco between 1890 and 1915, represents a constantly marginalized organization in the history of photography and of the American West. By adopting a two-fold cultural-historical and material approach, this thesis sheds light on a largely unknown variety of Club activities and productions that served as meaningful elements to forge the identity of a remote Western community. Through its inclusive outlook, unifying more than 400 members in 1900, the Club must be considered a locally embedded organization that mobilized photography to produce an aesthetically pleasing and historically coherent narrative of the city and the state. Despite its chronological position in the period of Pictorialism and the striving for institutional recognition, the Club corpus cannot be inserted into an art-historical canon of photography. Rather, by drawing on diverse strategies of dissemination and exhibition, the members adopted a collective approach to the medium that turned the striving for institutional recognition into a desire for regional legitimation. Through an examination of photographic practices, uses, and object trajectories, this thesis traces the construction of an idiosyncratic representation of Californian culture and history by the Club, which actively assisted the state’s search for a legitimate national place. By focusing on the collective dimension of photography, the analysis demonstrates how the practice in an isolated territory led to the imagination of a community with shared aesthetic and historical understandings. The object of this thesis is to revise both linear and narrow tropes in the history of photography by broadening its geographic, sociocultural, archival perspectives

John Charles Fremont conducted five expeditions to the West during a period of twelve years (1842-1854). On four occasions, during three of these expeditions (1843-1844, 1845, and 1854), the explorer entered the Utah region. His explorations in northern Utah in 1843 focused primarily on the scientific analysis and survey of the Great Salt Lake. In 1844, Fremont again entered the Utah area and made scientific observations and calculations about the region, including accurately defining the geographic region known as the Great Basin, the name given it by Fremont. In 1845, Fremont proceeded through Utah while enroute to California and spent a considerable amount of time in the Utah area, once again making significant observations. Finally, during the winter of 1854, the explorer surveyed portions of central and southern Utah with intentions of locating a suitable transcontinental railroad route. In this thesis, each of these expeditions is discussed in detail and summaries given concerning the implications each had on the history of the state.

This thesis analyzes the way in which landscape photography has historically been used as a colonialist tool to perpetuate narratives of control over the American West during the mid to late 1800s. I use this framework to interrogate how these visual narratives enforced ideas about American identity and whiteness relative to power over the landscape, indigenous people and the Japanese-Americans imprisoned at Manzanar within Owens Valley, California. I argue that because photographic representation is controlled by colonist powers, images of people within the American West reinforce imperialist rhetoric that positions whiteness in control of the land; thus, white settlers used this narrative to justify their stagnating agricultural development in the Owens Valley, Native Americans were documented as a part of the landscape to be controlled, and the internees at Manzanar were portrayed such that Japanese culture was obscured in favor of assimilationist, Americanizing tropes of their status as new pioneers on the American Frontier.