No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Much has been written about America’s entry into World War II. However, little attention has been given to the war’s effects on the social and economic lives of the people of East Tennessee who both benefited and suffered from the presence of many wartime facilities and industries. World War II also affected those civilians living and working on the home front. While its men had to fight in foreign lands, the region had to deal with food, housing, and labor shortages, the changing roles of women and African-Americans, and even the presence of enemy prisoners of war. This paper intends to show how the people of East Tennessee both benefitted and suffered as a result of America’s entry into World War II. It will detail the role of local industries that in most cases changed from producing consumer goods to war material. Attention will be paid to key wartime facilities such as Oak Ridge Laboratory and Eastman Chemical. In addition, it will examine the effect that the war had on those East Tennesseans who served overseas and returned home to their families and communities changed forever. This paper will also show the extent to which East Tennessee women and African-Americans contributed to and were affected by the war effort as well as how their roles in society would be changed because of it. The use of enemy prisoners of war as labor on the home front will be elaborated upon as well. By examining these themes and topics, our citizenry today will have a better understanding of the sacrifices made to win World War II.

The European exploration of America has traditionally conjured up images of Europeans intrepidly scanning horizons, meticulously detailing maps, and graciously offering curious natives access to God and goods. More than two decades of anthropological, historical, and ethnohistorical scholarship have tempered this heroic image and shown in great detail the complex and often contradictory role Indians played in this grand drama. Consequently, one can no longer picture colonial-era European explorers or travelers without also envisioning their Indian companions, both men and women, guiding the way, carrying the baggage, gathering the food, and providing needed information. This dissertation examines the character of the personal relationships that Indians and Europeans formed together while on North American expeditions of conquest, trade, and Christianizing between 1520 and 1800.;Travel entailed confrontations with the elements that could literally wipe out a party that made a wrong turn, ignored or misread the weather, or misjudged the current of a given rapid. Furthermore, poor provision planning or diplomatic bungling could also bring the grandest plans to grand disaster. But while battling the elements, Indian and European travel partners often battled each other. They played a subtle game of tug-of-war for control over the course, pace, and timing of travel. They fumed and connived over whose leadership, strategies, and values should hold sway. They wrestled over whose deities should be honored, and they derided each other's individual and collective abilities when one failed to live up to the other's visions of the ideal traveler. Tensions ranged from the subtlest forms of petty one-upmanship to physical coercion, and even occasional fisticuffs. It was the trail's defining conditions, its dangers, unfamiliarity, and isolation from comfortable and reassuring trappings of social prestige that exacerbated these tensions. The resulting contests reveal how different cultural meanings could swirl around trips and travel events often seen by historians as relatively straightforward moments in Europe's colonial expansion. They also demonstrate how individuals of different backgrounds constructed themselves and their fellow travelers while on the trail.

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of military strikebreaking. By focusing on the contest between striking southern and eastern European and Mexican immigrant coal miners and their employers during the 1913--14 coal strike in southern Colorado, the dissertation demonstrates how the intersection of politics with issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity shaped the miners' rebellion and the state and corporate responses to it. The Colorado National Guard was an integral part of how the state and capital reacted to the strike, and makes an ideal focus for this study because it was a prolific strikebreaker during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The guard's motivations for strikebreaking, however, went beyond restoring order and protecting business interests. Two decades of fighting the Plains Indians after the Civil War and three years of service in the Philippines (1899--1902) helped Colorado National Guardsmen equate the immigrant miners whom they faced in 1913--14 with the "savage tribes" of the western plains and the Filipino "insurrectionists" who resisted American imperialism. Striking immigrant coal miners emerged as racially inferior non-citizens who did not share the white, native-born and middle-class conceptions of masculinity that prevailed in the guard. Guardsmen, therefore, believed they had to defeat these immigrant strikers because they threatened the Anglo-American "civilization" guardsmen had helped spread across the continent and across the Pacific.;The project bridges the often disparate fields of labor, cultural, and political history, broadening our knowledge of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by demonstrating what military strikebreaking tells us about the era's complex conflicts over American identity. The social and cultural dynamics that made military intervention possible were inextricably tied to ideas about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. These ideas worked in concert to create a bond between industrialists, state officials, and National Guardsmen that allowed capital to consistently wield the state's military wing against labor. The dissertation, therefore, also expands our knowledge of how social and cultural forces shape state formation and action.

No description available.

No description available.