<p> In 2009, the American Museum of Science and Energy (AMSE) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee debuted an updated history exhibit about the town&rsquo;s role as one of three secret cities in the Manhattan Project. The exhibit presented a celebratory tone in honor of the innocent people who unknowingly and victoriously participated in the construction of the atomic bomb that aided the Allies in their successful end of WWII. The exhibit omitted the larger national, political nuclear discussion that took place over the following sixty-five years, cementing a long-held victory culture identity. In a 2009 world, the AMSE exhibit seemed incomplete, if not obtuse. <i>Innocent Victors</i> traces the history of AMAE/AMSE to examine the social, cultural, and political path that resulted in the 2009 and final AMSE exhibits. An analysis of public history commemoration trends, America&rsquo;s twentieth century identity politics, and a chronicle of historical interpretation in Oak Ridge reveal a divergence in understood commemoration practices. Established public history theory suggests that the official and vernacular voices form a dichotomous relationship when interpreting the historical narrative. This thesis holds significant implications for examining the intersections between community and government perspectives on the historical narrative. This study also unearths specific theoretical and methodological barriers to interpreting the atomic bomb at public spaces in the United States. Moreover, <i>Innocent Victors</i> presents a commentary on the ongoing national discussion about the past, present, and future placement of the atomic bomb in American politics, ideology, and society.</p><p>

<p> 1968 was a tumultuous year where Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago had protests, and the election of Richard Nixon shaped the next four years. The mainstream media overshadowed the local interpretation of these events. Mid-sized cities like St. Louis have largely been ignored by the mainstream media and modern scholarship. St. Louis is a complex case because it includes the city, the county, and the greater Metro East region which lies in the neighboring state of Illinois. Unlike other major cities and their suburbs, cities in the St. Louis region consider themselves separate from the city even though there is a clear influence from the city. An examination of St. Clair County, Illinois in the Metro East will show how the complexity goes even deeper. Three cities in St. Clair County, Illinois shared their opinions about the major events in 1968, and their different interpretations of these events leads to a unique window into social and racial sentiments within the county. Each city represents one aspect of St. Clair County life. East St. Louis represents a largely African American industrial suburb of St. Louis, O&rsquo;Fallon was the predominant white rural farm and mining area of the county, and Belleville represents the blend of a city suburb and the rural country life. </p><p> The few previous historians who have done research on this region focused mainly on one city in the Metro East to exemplify the whole, and East St. Louis is used as the focal point of St. Clair County. I will not solely rely on one city to give an overarching concept, but three distinct cities with different economic and population makeups. Through my research on newspaper editorials on a micro level, I demonstrate the larger trend of these sentiments in the Midwest that go largely unnoticed by the larger media in 1968.</p><p>

<p> This thesis examines the ceramics, both full-scale and toy, and dolls recovered from the Industrial School for Girls (1859-1941) in Dorchester, MA, in order to assess the ways in which the Managers who ran the School used material culture to enculturate the girls, as well as how the girls used material culture to shape their own identities. This site provides a unique opportunity to study the archaeology of a single-gender, and predominately single-class and single-age. The Industrial School for Girls, as an institution whose aim was to better the lives of poor girls and give them economic opportunities, as well as to create a better class of domestic servants, embodies the complicated moralities of Victorian domesticity, gentility, and womanhood. Analysis of the function and style of adult and doll scale ceramic vessels indicates the control that the Managers had over the School&rsquo;s material culture and how it was used to expose the girls to the proper goods that would help shape them into successful and well-behaved domestic servants. The ceramic vessels represented some of the forms required by the etiquette of the time to set a proper dining table, and many of them exhibit Gothic and floral motifs, representing purity and morality in the home. These items suggest that the Managers were making an effort to include the material culture of a proper Victorian home in order to raise their girls to be comfortable in and enculturated to that environment. The porcelain dolls recovered from the site, in both their number and condition, hint at some amount of material self-fashioning among the girls, suggesting that perhaps not all of their experiences were pleasant ones. The fact that so many dolls were discarded in the privy suggests that there was some manner of discontent among the girls that was taken out on their own dolls or the dolls of others.</p><p>

<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.

<p> Historic tenant farmsteads are often thought to be redundant archaeological resources because of their limited temporal range and function which acts to limit the diversity of their archaeological assemblages. However, work has not been done that confirms this equivalence, and archaeologists often write off tenant farmsteads as being too modern or too disturbed to warrant investigation. This is a problematic approach as tenant farmsteads are quickly eroding from the American landscape and a representative sample of sites need to be investigated and preserved before they&rsquo;re gone. This thesis tests different sampling strategies and field methods that may allow for the efficient investigation of tenant farmsteads without jeopardizing historical knowledge. The results show that the sites studied in this thesis are in fact redundant and a number of different methods can be used to investigate them in a much more efficient manner.</p><p>

<p> Examines early attempts to formalize congressional oversight of intelligence, and details what level of congressional oversight existed for the Bay of Pigs operation.</p>

<p> The Volga Germans assert a particular ethnic identity to articulate their complex history as a multinational community even in the absence of traditional practices in language, religious piety, and communal lifestyle. Across multiple migrations and settlements from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Volga Germans&rsquo; self-constructed group identity served historically as a tool with which to navigate uncertain politics of belonging. As subjects of imperial Russia&rsquo;s eighteenth-century colonization project the Volga Germans held a privileged legal status in accordance with their settlement in the Volga River region, but their subsequent loss of privileges under the reorganization and Russification of the modern Russian state in the nineteenth century compelled members of the group to immigrate to the Midwest in the United States where their distinct identity took its full form. The Volga Germans&rsquo; arrival on the Great Plains coincided with an era of mass global migration from 1846 to 1940, yet the conventional categories of immigrant identity that subsumed Volga Germans in archival records did not impede their drive for community preservation under a new unifying German-Russian identity. A contingent of Midwest Volga Germans migrated in 1881 to Albina, a railroad town across the Willamette River from Portland, Oregon where the pressures of assimilation ultimately disintegrated traditional ways of life&mdash;yet the community impulse to articulate its identity remained. Thus, while Germans are the single largest ethnic group in the U.S. today numbering forty-two million individuals, Portland&rsquo;s Volga German community nevertheless continues to distinguish itself ethnically through its nostalgia for a unique past.</p><p>

<p> The labor movement&rsquo;s groundswell in the 1990s accompanied a period of intense competition and conglomeration within the retail book sector. Unexpectedly, the intersection of these two trends produced two dozen union drives across the country between 1996 and 2004 at large retail bookstores, including Borders and Barnes &amp; Noble. Historians have yet to fully examine these retail organizing contests or recount their contributions to the labor movement and its history, including booksellers&rsquo; pioneering use of the internet as an organizing tool. This thesis focuses on the aspirations, tactics, and contributions of booksellers in their struggles to unionize their workplaces, while also exploring the economic context surrounding bookselling and the labor movement at the end of the twentieth century. While the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) auspiciously announced a national campaign in 1997 to organize thousands of bookstore clerks, the only successfully unionized bookstore from this era that remains today is the Powell&rsquo;s Books chain in Portland, Oregon with over 400 workers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 5. </p><p> Local 5&rsquo;s successful union campaign at Powell&rsquo;s Books occurring between 1998 and 2000 is at the center of this study and stands out as a point of light against a dark backdrop of failed union attempts in the retail sector during the latter decades of the twentieth century. This inquiry utilizes Local 5&rsquo;s internal document archive and the collection of oral histories gathered by labor historians Edward Beechert and Harvey Schwartz in 2001 and 2002. My analysis of these previously unexamined records demonstrates how Powell&rsquo;s efforts to thwart the ILWU campaign proved a decisive failure and contributed to the polarization of a super majority of the workforce behind Local 5. Equally, my analysis illustrates how the self-organization, initiative, and unrelenting creativity of booksellers transformed a narrow union election victory to overwhelming support for the union&rsquo;s bargaining committee. Paramount to Local 5&rsquo;s contract success was the union&rsquo;s partnership with Portland&rsquo;s social justice community, which induced a social movement around Powell&rsquo;s Books at a time of increased political activity and unity among the nation&rsquo;s labor, environment, and anti-globalization activists. The bonds of solidarity and mutual aid between Local 5 and its community allies were forged during the World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and Portland&rsquo;s revival of May Day in 2000. Following eleven work stoppages and fifty-three bargaining sessions, the union acquired a first contract that far exceeded any gains made by the UFCW at its unionized bookstores. The Powell&rsquo;s agreement included improvements to existing health and retirement benefits plus an 18 percent wage increase for employees over three years. </p><p> This analysis brings to light the formation of a distinct working-class culture and consciousness among Powell&rsquo;s booksellers, communicated through workers&rsquo; essays, artwork, strikes, and solidarity actions with the social justice community. It provides a detailed account of Local 5&rsquo;s creative street theater tactics and work stoppages that captured the imagination of activists and the attention of the broader community. The conflict forced the news media and community leaders to publicly choose sides in a labor dispute reminiscent of struggles not seen in Portland since the 1950s. Observers of all political walks worried that the Portland cultural and commercial intuition would collapse under the weight of the two-year labor contest. My research illustrates the tension among the city&rsquo;s liberal and progressive populace created by the upstart union&rsquo;s presence at prominent liberal civic leader Michael Powell&rsquo;s iconic store and how the union organized prominent liberal leaders on the side of their cause. It concludes by recognizing that Local 5&rsquo;s complete history remains a work in progress, but that its formation represents an indispensable Portland contribution to the revitalized national labor movement of the late 1990s.</p><p>