Historians of the American West have long identified the federal government's important role in shaping the region's physical and social landscapes, especially concerning water development. The Bureau of Reclamation, which built most of the West's major dams and water projects, traces its origins back to the 1902 Reclamation Act and since then has seen its share of political upheavals and colorful personalities. But one figure towers over all: Floyd Dominy, who served as commissioner from 1959 to 1969. By following the career of this one influential bureaucrat from the Great Depression to the end of the Great Society, I show that the federal government's relationship with the West--and thus the relationship of westerners to their government--cannot be isolated from national political and social trends. My dissertation connects the literature of American state building with the insights of the New Western History and argues that the Bureau of Reclamation's true role in shaping the twentieth-century American West can only be understood in the context of a Washington bureaucracy struggling to survive through a turbulent period. "The Last Conservationist" traces the arc of American liberalism from the New Deal to the final fracturing of Western political solidarity over water issues in the late 1960s. From this perspective, federal reclamation policy is less of an imperial endeavor than a largely unsuccessful effort to hold together various western factions in the face of diminished budgets and changing social priorities. This view also highlights the control and participation of local groups, often at the expense of federal desires.

This study examines how African American intellectuals, many of them participants in the racial uplift movement, utilized the ideas of the eugenics movement as a strategy for the social, biological, and political improvement of African Americans. Focusing on the first five decades of the twentieth century, my thesis examines eugenic theories present in scientific, social, and popular discourses targeted towards African Americans. I argue that while the inflection of scientific racism in eugenics deterred some African Americans from adopting its themes, eugenics promotion of increased reproduction amongst the better segments of society meshed well with racial uplifts commitment to social advancement. This study adds to previous scholarship on the eugenics movement, which has tended to focus exclusively on African Americans as subjects of eugenic initiatives. The result is a reconsideration of eugenics that includes a more diverse set of voices than previously appreciated, and also illustrates that African American leaders borrowed from and adapted eugenic philosophies to fit their goals.

This study examines three legal contests during the high tide of black freedom agitation, 1955-1965, in which citizens of Louisiana challenged the state Bureau of Healths authority to make racial classifications. Through these cases, I argue that state bureaucrats rather than the judiciary and legislature emerged as a new arbiter of race by the mid-twentieth century; by making racial categorization part of vital information recording, Bureau administrators could gain a better understand of citizens while also helping to shape the very meaning of citizenship in a racialized sense; and that this latter development was obscured by the ubiquitous and seemingly race neutral methods of vital statistic collection. Together these cases enrich general narratives of the Jim Crow era which have tended to focus on the role of the judiciary and the legislature exclusively. Through the inclusion of state bureaucrats, this study illustrates how racial categorization has persisted in a climate that is both more fluid and more obscure than generally acknowledged.

This dissertation explores African and Portuguese roles in the rise of the Spanish Caribbean's most important port cities, with particular emphasis on Cartagena de Indias and Havana. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Portuguese and Luso-African mariners, merchants, and immigrants linked the Spanish Caribbean to a broader Portuguese maritime world. This network's most significant outcome was the forced migration of tens of thousands of African captives, funneled to the Caribbean in overlapping waves from Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and West Central Africa. Spain's heavy reliance on sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants to populate and sustain key Caribbean seaports resulted in social transformations which often mirrored or directly responded to contemporary events in precolonial Western Africa. Rather than portraying the post-conquest Caribbean as a "backwater" within a historical framework that privileges Mexico or Peru, this study argues that the early colonial Caribbean may be more accurately viewed as an extension of the early modern South Atlantic world.

This work analyzes the German-American relationship during the 1960s and 1970s in light of Richard Nixons and Willy Brandts efforts at détente with the Soviet Union. It argues against the prevailing notion that Nixons détente and Brandts Ostpolitik were complimentary by analyzing newly released sources, such as the Nixon tape recordings and Henry Kissinger telephone transcripts and governmental records from both administrations, as well as incorporating media coverage, opinion polls, speeches and memoirs. This dissertation supports a more differentiated perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the Western Alliance during the Cold War. Further, it addresses the question of ideology in the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy and discriminates between their respective visions with a particular focus on energy trade and high-tech exports. Most importantly, this work offers a revisionist interpretation of Willy Brandts Ostpolitik as an attempt to cope with the overwhelming influence of the American superpower. Nixons concept of détente was shaped by his suspicion of Communism as an expansive power and required a cautious approach that would preserve American superiority in global affairs. Brandt, however, disillusioned with the American response to the building of the Berlin Wall, saw extensive acts of goodwill towards the East as the only way to achieve German reunification. The incongruous nature of these détente policies becomes even more apparent in the area of economic diplomacy. As evidenced by the records from the West German Economics Ministry, the Nixon White House and leading German industrialists, the success of political détente was interrelated with Western approaches to trade with the Soviet Union. The result of these West German economic ties to the Soviet Union and the lack of the same in the U.S. precipitated West Germanys normalization of relations with the East. It also created a rift in the transatlantic alliance that led to divisions over an increased European energy dependency on Soviet supplies and influences current U.S. and European responses to Russias democratization efforts.

In Colombia in the 1930s and 40s, both Liberal and Conservative politicians increasingly made claims about the opposition that contributed to the creation of a discursive framework for the perpetrators of eliminationist political violence during La Violencia (1946-1964), a period when militants in both parties committed brutal assassinations and massacres against defenseless civilians, leaving nearly 200,000 dead. As in other cases of eliminationist political violence in the twentieth century, the rhetoric on the eve of La Violencia relied on conspiracy theories that attached perceived domestic enemies to international cabals bent on destroying la patria. Liberals were depicted as being part of an worldwide Judeo-Masonic plot against Christianity, while Conservatives were presented as soldiers in a Nazi-Falangist conspiracy against democracy and progress. Many party members believed these conspiracy theories because they were grafted onto a pre-existing nationalistic tropes concerning the two parties, dating from the nineteenth century, and because the politicians had professionalized, presenting themselves as experts deserving respect because of their specialized knowledge based on advanced study, travel abroad, and the proper use of Spanish.

The familiarity of the evangelist Billy Graham has led historians to overlook his contribution to the creation of the post-civil rights era South. This project considers Grahams influence on the American South by focusing on his behavior and rhetoric regarding race and politics (along with religion, the most salient subjects for analyzing change in the South) between 1950 and 1980, a period when the North Carolinian maintained a visible and controversial presence in the region. Alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, southern apologist in the press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration, Graham functioned as a type of regional leadera product of his times and a player in them, a symbol and an actor. Graham represents an illuminating window through which to consider the relationship between evangelical Christianity and socio-political change in the South. He reveals how American revivalism and evangelical public theology, while embracing traditional forms of belief, can also sanction new expressions of those same values. In his simultaneously influential and circumscribed roles as evangelist, peer of politicians, and regional spokesperson, Graham was both a nexus for, and driver of, many developments central to the post-civil rights era South. He supplied an acceptable path upon which white southern moderates could back away from Jim Crow, and his post-segregation rhetoric portended the rise of color blindness within popular conservatism. While not a culture warrior, he influenced the 1970s turn from racial toward gender-based social issues. Through his work in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and his deep social ties in the South, Graham created space for the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham contributed to the end of the Solid South in both its racial and political senses. His social ethic of evangelical universalism and its secular corollary, the politics of decency, mediated the emergence of a South that was nominally desegregated and more amenable to Republican politics. Graham suggests the peculiarly evangelical nature of the Souths rapprochement with modernity.

Focused on Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, this dissertation demonstrates that Christian liturgy was a vital location for creating and contesting power in the slave societies of early modern British America. Though historians have often portrayed the early South and British Caribbean as irreligious and materialistic, this project shows that those depictions are based largely on comparison with New Englands evangelical traditions rather than on exploration of the best sources for understanding the liturgical Christianity of the plantation colonies. Those sources reveal a world in which English ritual and liturgical life was studiously translated to the Americas as colonists, who were confronted with powerful majorities of Africans and their descendents, sought ever greater continuity with their culture of origin. They thus recreated English customs of ritual time and space, the domestic sacraments of marriage and baptism, cultural elaborations on the Eucharist, and mortuary practice. In the context of slave societies, those ritual moments were freighted with new social meaning. The dissertation shows that the social meaning of those ritual moments is essential to understanding the making of race in the slave societies of early America.

HISTORY PERMANENT WAR ON PERUS PERIPHERY: FRONTIER IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF CONFLICT IN 17TH-CENTURY CHILE EUGENE CLARK BERGER Dissertation under the direction of Professor Jane Landers This dissertation argues that rather than making a concerted effort to stabilize the Spanish-indigenous frontier in the south of the colony, colonists and indigenous residents of 17th century Chile purposefully perpetuated the conflict to benefit personally from the spoils of war and use to their advantage the resources sent by viceregal authorities to fight it. Using original documents I gathered in research trips to Chile and Spain, I am able to reconstruct the debates that went on both sides of the Atlantic over funds, protection from pirates, and indigenous slavery that so defined Chiles formative 17th century. While my conclusions are unique, frontier residents from Paraguay to northern New Spain were also dealing with volatile indigenous alliances, threats from European enemies, and questions about how their tiny settlements could get and keep the attention of the crown. I also hope to shed new light on what the residents of the frontiers themselves were saying about their world, rather than relying on the important but somewhat muddled impressions of historians and statesman who have national legacies in mind.

Despite their prominence in early modern English culture, fasts have remained virtually unstudied. This omission is unfortunate. Study of fast days provides a valuable window onto one of the most important stories of early modern England: the struggle to define English Protestantism and to unite the nation around one vision of it. Thereby, it also helps to answer critical questions. Why did peace last in the Church of England for over 80 years before the Civil War? Were puritans revolutionaries or pillars of the establishment? Was early modern England defined by conflict or consensus? Study of fasts offers answers because English Protestants used them to advance their visions of a properly reformed religion, church, society, and individual. They deemed such reform essential to establishing and maintaining order. Fasts, however, had the potential both to unite and to divide English Protestants over questions of reform and order. More specifically, fasts were a critical space in which English Protestants created their religious self-understandings by interpreting themselves and the world around them. Fasts brought together an array of language, categories, and narratives central to these Protestant self-understandings. How contemporaries wove together the threads of self-understanding in large part depended on royal policies. These policies had a critical influence directly by themselves, and indirectly by shaping the relationship between puritans and conformists. The evidence from fasts shows that the policies of Elizabeth and James created factions but then managed tensions so as to contain conflict. In this context, centrifugal forces were weaker than centripetal ones. The policies of Charles, however, aggravated tensions and led to diverging self-understandings and increasing conflict. In this context, centrifugal forces became stronger than centripetal ones. This conclusion supports post-revisionist interpretations of the English Civil War as a puritan counter-revolution against Caroline-Laudian policies. It disputes the interpretations of many revisionists according to whom the Civil War arose as Puritans attacked the via-media which Anglicans had established in the Church of England.