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One of the greatest technological breakthroughs of humanity was the ability to construct a device and eventually a system which would provide a more efficient, safe, clean, convenient and relatively inexpensive form of illumination than ever used previously electric light. The introduction of this new technology into Oregon communities in the early years of this century was a remarkable accomplishment. Along with memories of the light itself, important and intriguing recollections of "life lived yesterday" are often associated with these early days of electric lighting. Because these "yesterdays" are becoming more distant from the present, persons holding those memories are reaching ages where such information becomes difficult to recall, vague, distorted and often forgotten altogether. In this study, memories of how electric light affected people were recalled differently in some aspect by informants, whether it was used for the purpose of lighting streets and buildings or on personal properties within the home and on farms. Published information describing the effects of electric lighting on society is relatively scarce. Consequently, persons with important previous experiences are in many instances the only source of insight on how our predecessors lived before electric light was in use and especially how this technological breakthrough may or may not have affected their lives. Those published descriptions of pre-electric life that do exist are most commonly found in obscure publications, often originating in small or private electric company newsletters and annual reports. Very few of these reports were compiled in a systematic scheme later to be interpreted quantitatively and in light of previous research. My own interest in this subject was piqued when I realized that both oral histories and technical data on how electricity affected individuals of the Pacific Northwest region is profoundly poor in comparison to material available on other parts of the country. With this understanding, 32 individuals representing a span of 30 years, five states and 15 different communities throughout Oregon, were interviewed over the course of four months. The informants were asked questions pertaining to their lifestyle and memories before, during and after the introduction of electricity, and more specifically about the advent of electric light into their communities and homes. Because the study utilized a minuscule sample size in comparison to the state population, generalizations were not appropriate. Nevertheless, the oral histories provided a greater insight into how the introduction of electric light and electric power affected the life of an Oregonian. / Graduation date: 1994

vii, 280 p. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: SCA Archiv Theses H855 / Adviser: Earl Pomeroy

This thesis was written to document, through both primary and secondary sources, the history of hop growing as it was in Oregon between 1850 and 1950. In those years, hop growing was most often a speculative venture. Growers could be rich one year and bankrupt the next due to the uncertainties of marketing.

The thesis is a case study of two traditional family farms that were settled in Oregon in 1850 and 1915. The study embraces the theory that material culture reflects customs and values. The material culture indicators within the study are the architectural structures of the Oregon farms. The study filters the architecture through theoretical and historical data of both Oregon and the Upland South. The farms are recorded with oral history, photographs, architectural descriptions, and evolutionary settlement patterns. The filtering process results in two constructs that correlate the commonalities of both the Oregon farms and the Upland South architecture. The results point out that, with the disappearance of vernacular architecture on family farms, it follows that historic traditional cultures vanish. / Graduation date: 1993

Many French-speaking people came to the Pacific Northwest. Although most came from Quebec, some traveled from as far away as France, Belgium and Switzerland. When they arrived in Oregon Territory, a juxtaposition of three cultures merged to form a unique French-speaking community governed by a dominant Western Anglo-American character and a living Indian culture for daily subsistence. Most importantly, the French brought their own traditions from Quebec and France. Also, French individuality became altered upon their arrival and through their necessity to adapt to the strange, unknown wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. Some changes came through the need for convenience, such as learning to maneuver a canoe across a quiet lake or down a swift moving stream. Such skills enabled them to cover large distances quickly. Other adaptations developed through a need for survival, such as learning the ways of unknown Indian cultures and living amongst them, or the methods to hunt and eat different types of game for their dinner.

The abortion debate in the United States has come to split the contemporary electorate among party lines. Since the late 1970s, the Republican Party has taken a stand against abortion and has worked through various routes of legislation to pass restrictions on access to the procedure. Oregon however, provides a different interpretation of this partisan debate. Though Oregon has seen both Republican and Democratic leadership in all houses of state government and pro-life conservative groups have lobbied to restrict the procedure, no abortion restriction has been passed in the state since the United States Supreme Court invalidated many state abortion bans in 1973. This thesis analyzes the legislative history of Oregon beginning in the mid nineteenth century, when the Oregon Territory first passed an abortion ban. Oregon voters and lawmakers alike were continuously asked to debate the legality and morality of abortion. Though the state did participate in the national debate over access to abortion, made clear by dozens of attempts at restricting the procedure, Oregon's response to conservative political trends is distinctive. Oregon liberalized its abortion law before Roe was decided; and years before, prominent physicians provided abortions and advocated for reproductive health. After abortion was decriminalized, Oregon legislators protected abortion access further by rejecting all attempts to pass abortion restrictions and crafting legislation to make further restrictions more difficult to pass. Even as Republicans gained majorities in the Oregon legislature in the late 1980s and 1990s and the pro-life movement gained momentum on the statewide level nationally, Republican lawmakers remained unwilling to prioritize abortion legislation. So too, in the decades following the Roe decision, Oregon voters have rejected all pro-life attempts to restrict abortion access by ballot initiative. Instead of pointing to one explanation for Oregon's protection of abortion access, this thesis examines the societal and legislative developments that worked in tandem to create a legislative landscape that is protective of abortion.

xi, 149 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Between the early 1900s and the 1952 U.S. Supreme Court case of United States v. Oregon State Medical Society, conflicts over the legality and permissibility of contract medicine raged in Oregon. Organized labor opposed the practice because it restricted their choice of physician, and because they resented mandatory wage deductions to pay for the contracts. Organized medicine resented contract medicine for its imposition of commercial power on physicians. The groups initially attempted to resolve the issue publicly through legislation, but procedural factors and a lack of group cohesiveness prevented a public solution. Beginning in the 1930s, the State Medical Society imposed its own private code of ethics on the medical services market to eliminate contract practice, and used the legislative process to preserve its independence to pursue a private sector solution. Ultimately, the Supreme Court allowed this approach, based partly on its view that medicine was distinct from business. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Daniel Pope, Chair; Dr. Glenn May; Dr. James Mohr

This thesis addresses the relationship between art and society by examining the production of culture on the Oregon Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The author examines the social conditions and decision-making processes which shaped the art that was produced and determined who produced and who consumed the art of the FAP. Also examined are the changing social relations of art prior tCI), during, and after the WPA's Federal Art Project. The research for the thesis utilized inductive methods of research aimed at theory construction rather than theory testing, although theoretical questions guided the gathering and analysis of data. Most of the data were obtained from primary sources, including interviews with fifteen people who had varying degrees of familiarity with the Oregon FAP; letters of correspondence, memos, and other primary documents on the Oregon FAP were used extensively. Secondary sources supplemented these primary sources by providing an overview of the national FAP and providing comparative data on the New York City FAP. An important factor in the establishment of the national FAP was the political activism of artists, particularly in New York. In Oregon, where only a handful of artists were politically active, the upper class administrators of the FAP seemed to have had more autonomy in shaping the direction of the program. It is argued that in many cases the goals of the FAP, to provide employment for artists on relief and to use the skills of these people to create socially useful projects, were undermined due to the orientations and inclinations of administrators and business sponsors of the projects who emphasized the professional art aspect of the FAP rather than the relief, socially useful aspect of the project. Nevertheless, the Oregon FAP brought about a change in the social relations among the artist and the art audience; not only was art made more available to the Oregon public through the public display of art works, and through the free instruction of art at community art centers, but artists, themselves, were for the first time employed to exchange their labor, as artists, for a wage. In this sense, the FAP was seen as a kind of "cultural revolution," although an examination of the social relations of art following the 1930s reveals that the cultural revolution took the form of an entrepreneurial, petit bourgeois revolution, rather than the socialistic revolution many artists had hoped for. It is suggested that the nature of this revolution stems, in part, from the characteristics of the FAP, where artists were government employees, yet were administered by a bureaucracy staffed by an elite which traditionally had been the patrons of art. The conclusions of this thesis are stated in the form of tentative propositions that await further testing in subsequent comparative studies of the FAP.

viii, 234 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: KNIGHT PN4897.O74 E78 1995 / Studies have shown that women's ideas, especially those that challenge the status quo, have historically received little attention from the press. This thesis discusses how women were described in three of Oregon's frontier newspapers from 1846 to 1859, and also explores their contributions to the newspapers as writers, poets, editors, and businesswomen. Information from established American media clipped for the frontier papers described popular, mainstream ideas of womanhood, as well as provided news on the emerging women's rights struggle. Information generated locally on women encompassed a variety of themes, including marriage, education, and temperance. This study shows that even though content about women and women's roles as contributors were constrained by contemporary ideas of propriety and women's place in society, women were valued as readers and contributors to the three Oregon newspapers. / Committee in charge: Dr. Lauren Kessler, Chair; Dr. Timothy Gleason, Dr. Leslie Steeves