Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / David Stone / This manuscript reveals the primary causes of Habsburg defeat both in 1866 and in 1914-1918. The choice of offensive strategy and tactics against an enemy possessing superior weaponry in the Austro-Prussian War and opponents with superior numbers and weapons in the First World War resulted in catastrophe. The inferiority of the Habsburg forces in both wars stemmed from imprudent spending decisions during peacetime rather than conservatism or parliamentary stinginess. The desire to restore the sunken prestige of Austria-Hungary and prove Habsburg great power status drove the military to waste money on an expensive fleet and choose offensive tactics to win great victories. This study shows the civil-military interaction in regard to funding and procurement decisions as well as the deep intellectual debates within the army, which refute the idea that the Habsburg military remained opposed to technology or progress.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Michael A. Ramsay / Immediately after World War I, the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps implemented an officer education program. Called the Marine Corps Schools (MCS), the Commandant, Major General John A. Lejeune, gave the schools the mission of educating officers throughout their career. MCS struggled during its first decade of existence due to operational tempo and a poor curriculum. The direction of MCS changed greatly with the assignment of James Carson Breckinridge as the commanding officer in 1928. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role Breckinridge, an unconventional and intellectual officer, played in reviving the MCS and turning it into the authority on Small Wars and Amphibious Operations. It will show that Breckinridge, drawing on observations made of college education systems, focused the Marine Corps Schools on the task of teaching officers to analyze problems and find solutions and not rely on memorized book answers.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / This study argues that after World War I, corporate executives continued a strategy of perception management (PM) to control Americans’ choices in the commercial sphere and to shape the economic and cultural landscape of the 1920s. The state used PM on an unprecedented scale in 1917 and 1918 to promote a model of loyal American behavior (as part its effort to manage the mobilized U.S. society), but the use of PM did not end after the Armistice. While many historians have seen wartime propaganda measures as the result of special fears and circumstances tied to a sense of pervasive national emergency, they fail to explain the continuation of comparable methods into the period of peace supposedly characterized by a return to "normalcy." Whereas most historical studies sharply delineate between political propaganda and commercial advertising, this study stresses leaders' continuous use of PM to promote their notions of what constituted typical, normal, even loyal American behavior in times of both war and peace. While not a contemporary term in the early twentieth century, PM offers an appropriate conceptual framework to analyze a deliberate strategy at that time. This study defines it as actions used to convey or deny selected information to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, resulting in behaviors and actions favorable to the originators’ objectives. During WWI, policymakers and bureaucrats concealed the state's effort to control people's behavior with claims of defending liberty and democracy. After the war, corporate executives used PM to manufacture consumer demand and encourage Americans to think of themselves foremost as consumers. A cross section of political, economic, and cultural history, Perception Management in the United States from the Great War to the Great Crash offers an original perspective that emphasizes the consistency between the wartime and postwar eras by highlighting leaders' ongoing use of perception management to control Americans' behavior.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / James E. Sherow / This dissertation contributes to the environmental, agricultural, and technological history of the modern United States by examining pesticide use and the debates surrounding them in the Great Plains from the 1940s to the 1980s. Specifically, it addresses the relationships among aerial sprayers, farmers, agriculturalists, and grassroots concepts of toxicity that emerged from mid-century technological and environmental changes. It argues that pesticides as well as a variety of weeds and insects actively transformed the tools, attitudes, and regulatory policies of their users. Historians of agricultural chemical use in America have focused on the political debates over DDT, the social activism against pesticides that Rachel Carson inspired with her best-selling book Silent Spring (1962), the growth in federal regulatory policy in the 1970s, and the contentious reactions by the chemical and agricultural industries. This study offers a new, ground-level history of pesticides by showing how aerial sprayers, farmers, and agriculturalists developed custom chemical applications and conceptualized toxicity as each related to the technological and environmental changes in the region. Drawing on multiple sources, including agricultural experiment station reports, scientific studies, government documents, farm journals, landowner and aerial spray pilot correspondence, and oral histories, this study explores how local producers changed with their chemicals, spray planes, and pests to develop an environmental ethos that understood toxicity as a synthetic and natural danger. Although opposition to pesticides became central to modern environmentalism, debates around pesticides‘ effectiveness and dangers did not come only from activists or government regulators. Beginning just after World War II, landowners and spray pilots in the fields and rural airstrips of the Great Plains took the hazards of agricultural chemicals seriously, critiquing how and why pesticides were used for decades after. By viewing chemicals, spray planes, and pests, as well as landowners, pilots, and agriculturalists as equal forces in the regional transformation of farming landscapes, this dissertation highlights a new history of pesticides, agriculture, and the environment. Farmers and custom applicators did not simply follow the economic goals of agribusiness. Nor did they dismiss the dangers of pesticides. Rather, they constructed their own standards of injury and environmental risk that stressed accuracy, regulation, and a reasonable certainty of safety—a result of the equally transformational influences of chemicals, pests, and the region. This study finally offers new insights into the creation of national chemical policy and the regulatory debates over pesticides during the 1960s and 1970s.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Bonnie Lynn-Sherow / This thesis recreates the relationship between humans and their physical environment in Fort Scott, Kansas between 1850 and 1920 and uses the poetry of J.S. Penny, a contemporary amateur poet living and writing in Fort Scott, as an essential primary resource. Settlers came to this area in southeastern Kansas in the 19th century for its timber-lined streams, high precipitation, and rich soil. The Missouri River, Fort Scott, and Gulf Railroad was extended through Fort Scott in December of 1869. The arrival of the railroad transformed the town. The natural resources which had been a mark of identity for the people of Fort Scott became commodities to be sold in national markets. Manufacturing and industry boomed, but population would eventually plateau in the early 20th century, creating a small industrial city that had maintained a strongly rural sense of community. Penny’s poetry provides a personal, emotional response to the rapid changes to the landscape around him. Some of his poems on the local landscape directly note specific changes in the local ecology, while some demonstrate Penny’s religious connection the natural world—a common perspective during his time. Other pieces show us Penny’s observations of how his neighbors reacted to the weather and environment in Fort Scott. Penny, like many Americans in the early 20th century, saw the history of his home as one of agrarian development and westward expansion over an empty landscape; the Jeffersonian and Turnerian roots of his perspective are evident in his poetry. With Penny’s poetry, we can create a more complete environmental history of Fort Scott by understanding how Fort Scott residents related to the land around them.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Michael Krysko / David Stone / Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was a nationalist leader and founder and first president of the republic of Turkey, still remains an important figure in the Turkish political and social landscape. Kemalist historiography, which is based on Mustafa Kemal’s six-day speech (Nutuk) in October 1927, emphasizes the foundation of the Republic as central to Turkish history. While this historiography emphasizes that Mustafa Kemal had an explicit plan during his modernization efforts, this dissertation will cover how Mustafa Kemal was incoherent in his actions and changed his discourses over and over again during the change of the political structure of Turkey. Beyond that, this study will suggest that Mustafa Kemal was an opportunist and pragmatist who utilized every single event to establish a Jacobin style autocracy. This research will discuss how Mustafa Kemal succeeded in using every opportunity, such as the Law of Supreme Commander Act in August 1921, the abolition of Sultanate in 1922, the establishment of Republic in 1923, the abolition of Caliphate in 1924, and the elimination of opposition in 1925, to establish his personal autocracy. In particular, the records of Assembly debates, not sufficiently used by Turkish historians, will be helpful to understand the creation of this personal autocracy. While Kemalist historiography credits Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the original and unique conception of the social, legal, and educational reforms of the early Republican period, this dissertation argues that this approach is not balanced. Although the Kemalist historiography asserts that Mustafa Kemal and his legacy represent carrying out Enlightenment ideals in an obsolete society almost totally ignorant of these principles, the Kemalist modernization got a great inheritance from its predecessors, the Young Turks. Therefore, the Kemalist overstatement of an idealist figure of Mustafa Kemal is wrong in some degree. This dissertation aims to scrutinize the contribution of the Ottoman reformers and contradictions, mistakes, and overstatements of the Kemalist modernization project in social, legal, and educational areas by the help of wide primary sources which include official reports of the Grand National Assembly, the Republican Era archives and a mass of periodicals which were published in 1920s in Turkey.

Master of Science / Department of Horticulture, Forestry, and Recreation Resources / Ted Cable / National parks reach out to millions of people each year by offering a number of recreational and educational experiences. People are exposed to new ideas and experiences in a national park that they may not get anywhere else. At Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, the National Park Service (NPS) compels visitors to step into the shoes of African American students in a segregated elementary school through the use of interpretive exhibits. This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the interpretive exhibits at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. Most visitors sampled (91%) were visiting for the first time, indicating that the site does not have many repeat visitors. Race and the American Creed, the 30 minute film that plays in the auditorium, was found the most impactful exhibit by 34.3% of visitors surveyed. Expressions and Reflections, the temporary exhibit in the Kindergarten room, was the second most impactful exhibit, at 21.6% of visitors surveyed. The least impactful exhibit was the film Pass It On, at 0.9% of visitors surveyed. As a whole, visitors were most impacted by dynamic exhibits with a clear theme, while static exhibits and those that did not have a clear theme were not as impactful. This research will help guide Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site staff as they contemplate future changes in the interpretive exhibits.