<p> English-speaking conservative Mennonites exercise a distinct set of dress practices that are not often understood by people outside the community. Advances in New Literacy Studies pave the way to understand their dress practices as a type of literacy. Multiple literacies work together to inform conservative Mennonite dress practices. One of these literacies is the reading and writing of religious texts. A second literacy is a form of heritage literacy where clothing functions as a multimodal text. Conservative Mennonites use their clothing to codify their Christian identity, gender roles and church affiliation. They intend their clothing to represent who they are to the people around them. A conservative Mennonite woman's head covering is a subversive, embodied text that corrects power imbalances they perceive between masculine and feminine. The results of viewing Mennonite dress practices through the lens of literacy show them to be a coherent sign system that passes between generations. </p><p>

<p> Between 1889 and 1914, American mining engineers drew on their experience in mining in the American West into management positions with prominent mining finance firms in the British Empire. The careers of three engineers, Hennen Jennings, John Hays Hammond, and Herbert Hoover, demonstrate their influence on British gold mining investment and on the imperial system. The professional biographies of these engineers demonstrate their racialized labor practices, access to technology and capital, ideas about management, and willingness to interfere in the politics and economies of sovereign nations for the interests of the mining finance industry, notably the Transvaal Republic and late Qing China. In their actions in the colonies, they employed the latest mining technologies to extract gold from low grade ores, imposed labor conditions on the basis of race (including the legal foundations of Apartheid in South Africa), and directed investment capital toward profitable mining in support of the monetary gold standard and shareholder dividends. Along with hundreds of other mining engineers, they oversaw a world-historical expansion of the world&rsquo;s gold supply through the expansion of gold mining on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal Republic and in Western Australia, effectively doubling the world&rsquo;s supply of gold in two decades. </p><p> These engineers were agents of transnational extractive capitalism and the British and American empires. As an integral component of their careers, they operated in the core of empire: major centers of investment such as London and New York, the media and publishing worlds, and even world&rsquo;s fairs. They communicated their professional activities and technical developments through the <i>Engineering and Mining Journal,</i> the premier mining publication of the era. They promoted world&rsquo;s fairs, ensuring that mining was prominently featured as an aspect of civilization at these expositions. They also acted as public intellectuals, speaking and publishing on topics of empire, well beyond the purview of the mine. Based on archival research, contemporary technical journals and media accounts, and autobiographical documents, this dissertation analyzes the influence of American Mining Engineers, both good and bad, in shaping the British Empire and the modern world system before the outbreak of World War 1.</p><p>

<p> Federal policies have targeted electric lighting since the 1880s with varying success. This dissertation examines the history of those policies to understand policy makers&rsquo; intent and how their decisions affected the course of events. This qualitative study poses three research questions: How have changes in lamp efficacy affected policy development? How and why have federal policies targeted electric lighting? How have private sector actors adapted public policy to further their own goals? The analysis uses an interdisciplinary approach taking advantage of overlapping methodologies drawn from policy and political sciences, economics, and the history of technology. The concepts of path dependency, context, and actor networks are especially important. </p><p> Adoption of electric lighting spurred the construction of complex and capital intensive infrastructures now considered indispensable, and lighting always consumed a significant fraction of US electric power. Engineers and scientists created many lamps over the decades, in part to meet a growing demand for energy efficient products. Invention and diffusion of those lamps occurred amid changing standards and definitions of efficiency, shifting relations between network actors, and the development of path dependencies that constrained efforts to affect change. Federal actors typically used lighting policy to conserve resources, promote national security, or to symbolically emphasize the onset of a national crisis. </p><p> The study shows that after an initial introductory phase, lighting-specific policies developed during two distinct periods. The earlier period consisted of intermittent, crisis-driven federal interventions of mixed success. The later period featured a sustained engagement between public and private sectors wherein incremental adjustments achieved policy goals. A time of transition occurred between the two main periods during which technical, economic, and political contexts changed, while several core social values remained constant. In both early and later periods, private sector actors used policy opportunities to further commercial goals, a practice that public sector actors in the later period used to promote policy acceptance. Recently enacted energy standards removing ordinary incandescent lamps in favor of high efficiency lamps mark the end of the later period. Apparent success means that policy makers should reconsider how they use lighting to achieve future goals.</p><p>

<p> This study investigates geospatial relationships among Late Intermediate Period (1000&ndash;1400 CE) settlement patterns within the Moquegua River drainage of southern Peru which were first identified in the 1990s by the Moquegua Archaeological Survey (MAS). A prevalence of walls and defensive locations and a largely vacant no-mans-land between down valley Chiribaya and up valley Estuqui&ntilde;a settlements likely evidences an increased level of inter-cultural conflict in the region during the LIP that may have continued in the Late Horizon. Using viewshed analyses in ARC-GIS, this study proposes and compares two possible chronologies to explore how Chiribaya, Estuqui&ntilde;a, and Estuqui&ntilde;a -Inca settlements interacted or competed for the surrounding river valley through their direct or indirect control of resources, and their ability to defend against each other. Through the identification of these prime factors, this study aims to understand how the placement of settlements corresponds to the larger web of social interactions.</p><p>

<p>Lincoln County, Arkansas, is a small county in the southeastern sector of Arkansas that lacks a museum dedicated to its history. With Lincoln County lacking the funds to purchase/build a physical space that is on-par with current museum standards, a museum building is an impossibility at this point. Yet, the older generations that are full of knowledge about the history of the county are fading away. To preserve past and future history, a new spin on a museum had to be accomplished. The spin was creating a digital museum. This study goes in-depth on the creation of a digital database and museum for Lincoln County using Omeka.net and WordPress.com according to Dublin Core and museum standards. The websites showcase a broad and general history of Lincoln County that will hopefully become a foundation for the creation of a physical museum.

<p> This thesis argues that Richard Hofstadter's innovations in historical method arose as a critical response to the Progressive historians, particularly to Charles Beard. It argues that Hofstadter's first two books were demonstrations of the inadequacy of Progressive methodology, while his third book (the Age of Reform) was a demonstration of the potential of his new way of doing history. </p><p>

<p> Clarence King was a pioneer of nineteenth century American mountaineering. With an unrestrained imagination and irrepressible will, he boldly pushed into high alpine regions and wrote colorful narratives of his explorations. However, his is no simple story of pure self-reliance. Friendships are a vital part of King&rsquo;s mountaineering. King&rsquo;s bold mountain leadership was made possible through powerful relationships and with the support of intrepid friends. The friendships of a small collection of rugged mountaineers in the American West, and the web of ties linking them with the broader society, offer unique perspectives into nineteenth century American culture. </p><p>

<p>This thesis contributes to the study of American eugenics by chronicling its history in California, the state where most modern American sterilizations took place. Eugenics had a powerful role in California?s twentieth-century social policy, and this project exposes how theories about racial purity and social engineering became intertwined with the Progressive movement, the gender politics of the Cold War, anti-immigration advocacy groups of the 1970s, and contemporary environmental movements. Through an examination of archival material from the collections of prominent eugenicists, newspaper articles, and historical essays on eugenic theory, population control, and environmentalism, this study addresses the ways in which eugenic theories of biological hereditarianism affected public policy and medical practice in twentieth-century California, raising important questions about the complex intersection of public health with race, gender, and class.

Between 1939 and 1945 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, monitored the political activities of President Franklin Roosevelt's anti- interventionist foreign policy critics. Hoover, whose position as FBI director was tenuous within the left-of-center Roosevelt administration, catered to the president's political and policy interests to preserve his position and to expand FBI authority. In his pragmatic effort to service administration political goals, Hoover employed illegal wiretaps, informers, collected derogatory information, conducted investigations that had the potential to discredit the anti -interventionists, forwarded political intelligence to administration officials, and coordinated some activity with British intelligence. This all occurred within a crisis atmosphere created with the onset of the Second World War, and it was this political dynamic that permitted Hoover to successfully cultivate his relationship with President Roosevelt. In the process, the administration's otherwise legitimate foreign policy opposition was regarded as subversive and some anti -interventionists' civil liberties were violated through intensive FBI scrutiny of their political dissention. Moreover, the FBI's surveillance marks the origins of the FBI's role in the later national security state. Among those targets examined in this dissertation include Charles Lindbergh, the America First Committee, notable anti- interventionist senators and congressmen, the anti -interventionist press, and other prominent individuals who advocated American isolation from foreign war.

<p> Elbert Peets (1886-1968) designed some significant town plans in the early to mid-twentieth century. His design work was successful and well regarded at the time, and his plans for Greendale, Wisconsin and Park Forest, Illinois were influential for post-World War II suburban developments. These town plans, and others such as Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and Washington Highlands, Wisconsin have continued to be vibrant and successful neighborhoods. Peets also wrote widely, and most notably was the co-author of <i>The American Vitruvius; An Architect&rsquo;s Handbook of Urban Design.</i> However, though these contributions were notable, Peets has been largely neglected in the historiography of twentieth century urban and landscape studies. Histories of the period have tended to focus on a few heroic figures and major movements like the advent of International Style modernism. This study adds to the history of the period by showing that the appearance of a monolithic narrative of the time is incomplete and that including alternative points of view like Peets&rsquo;s provides both a more accurate and more interesting history. </p><p> There are three primary arguments for this study. The first is that the quality of the work itself merits recognition. Beyond noting that there was interesting work being done, the qualities that made Peets&rsquo;s work notable, emphasis on user-centered humanistic designs, inclusion of site-specific ecological features, and concentration on the primacy of social streets as the centerpiece of neighborhood plans, were distinctly at odds with the dominant narrative of the modernist agenda. The second argument, and the one that has not received attention, is that the plans incorporate sensitivity to ecological concerns that grew from the growth of scientific forestry, the rise of ecological science, and the growing conservation movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Peets was exposed to these trends from his education at Harvard&rsquo;s Landscape Program, and to a greater degree than his contemporaries, he incorporated those concepts into his town plans in the form of riparian protection zones and greenways. Finally, this study will interrogate the reasons that Peets has been overlooked. His association with the Garden City movement and with a precedent-based design approach at the time that European modernism as advocated by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Hilberseimer resulted in his being associated with a traditionalism and historicism that was falling out of fashion. This study will recognize Peets&rsquo;s contributions, and more broadly will investigate how the vagaries of fashion in design trends result in a significant figure being overlooked. </p><p> This study will challenge the dominant narrative of the rise of modernism by recognizing an alternative and competing path for urban design. Peets&rsquo;s work, along with other critiques of the modernist agenda that noted the anti-urbanist implications of modernist urban renewal and its devaluing of social streets, illustrates an overlooked and valuable episode in the trajectory of mid-century urban planning practice and urban theory.</p>