In 1976 two young photographers, Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, and a photo-historian named Ellen Manchester came together with an idea to rephotograph sites in the American West that had originally been documented by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan. By the spring of 1977 and with the support of various organizations they began a project that spanned the next three years and would eventually become known as the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP). In many ways, the RSP represents an important moment in the history of photography and the representation of the American West. Through analysis of their work, archival documents, contemporary sources, and interviews with the original members of the RSP and several others, this dissertation examines the activities of the project and its various members, which also included Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus. More than the RSP, this dissertation also focuses on the growing culture of photography that boomed in the 1970s. Photography was no longer seen as an outsider to the world of art but was benefiting from newfound opportunities and growth. Without such a culture, this work argues, it would not have been possible for the RSP to take place. By the end of their project, however, photography was undergoing another important transition as modernism was giving way to the more critical climate of postmodernism. When the RSP finally published their work In 1984, their project and the community of photography that fostered their ideas was undergoing profound changes. This study also closely examines the RSP's fieldwork in the American West and the various discourses that the project encountered in this meaningful space. Like photography, the West was undergoing significant changes that the RSP was able to observe and document. Through their process that matched images from the past with photographs of their present, the RSP was able to record diverse landscapes that had or had not changed over the subsequent century. Furthermore, it also provided insight into the ways in which the West had been represented and perceived over time and in a new history of the West.

The Pacific Crest Trail has become increasingly popular since Clinton Clarke first envisioned such a trail in the 1930’s. By comparing the original motives and experience of the trail to the realities of the trail today, the trail’s fluid narrative becomes apparent. While this narrative is ever changing, over the course of the trail’s history one theme has remained constant – a notably problematic relationship with wilderness rooted in an exaltation of the sublime and post-frontier ideals. This thesis focuses on how the Pacific Crest Trail’s development over the past eighty years has created an experience that, on the surface, is notably different from Clarke’s original vision for the trail, but is still influenced by a perception of wilderness born from a romanticization of nature and a pursuit to preserve the western frontier. Chapter one, The Historic Trail, investigates Clarke’s manners and motives behind promoting the trail. Chapter two, The Popular Trail, examines the visual culture surrounding the trail, from nineteenth century landscape painting to the trail’s presence in social media today. Chapter three, The Trail Community, focuses on the growth of a strong community of hikers, and what this means for the future of the trail.

State officials, between 1882 and 1888, exchanged three million acres of Texas Panhandle property for construction of the monumental Capitol that continues to house Texas government today. The project and the land went to a Chicago syndicate led by men influential in business and politics. The red granite Austin State House is a recognizable symbol of Texas around the world. So too, the massive tract given in exchange for the building, what became the "fabulous" XIT Ranch, also has come to symbolize the height of the nineteenth century cattle industry. That eastern and foreign capital dominated the cattle business during this period is lesser known, absorbed by the mythology built around the Texas cattle-trail period - all but at an end in 1885. This study examines the interaction of Illinois Republicans and Texas Democrats in their actions and efforts to create what have become two of Texas's most treasured symbols.

L'objectif de cette étude est de mettre en lumière la complexité de l'écriture de l'histoire et du processus de renouvellement historique, en prenant pour cas d'étude l'histoire de l'Ouest américain. De la théorie de la Frontière, développée par Frederick Jackson Turner à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, à la « New Western History », apparue dans les années 1980, le sujet a fait l'objet de diverses interprétations au cours du vingtième siècle. Sa complexité réside en outre dans la mythologie véhiculée par la culture populaire, ainsi que la place centrale de l’Ouest dans l’inconscient collectif américain. Très controversées, les réécritures de la Nouvelle Histoire de l’Ouest ont redonné de l’intérêt et du dynamisme au domaine de recherche, tout en suscitant des débats passionnés, dont la médiatisation fut tout à fait inédite. Enfin, l’analyse de la transmission de ces réécritures au grand public, à travers l’enseignement et l’histoire publique, permet d’évaluer l’impact du mouvement au-delà des frontières universitaires et, de fait, offre une meilleure compréhension des enjeux et défis de la discipline historique. / Taking the history of the American West as a case study, the aim of this dissertation is to analyze the complex way in which history is written and rewritten over the years. From the first historian of the Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, to the “New Western History”, born in the 1980s, the Frontier and the American West have generated different interpretations and revisions over the course of the twentieth century. The subject is all the more complex as the West has a special place in the American psyche, and its myths pervade popular culture. Not only did the emergence of the New Western History revive a field of study that had become dated, it also triggered debates that were so heated that they received ample coverage in the American press. Studying the way the New Historians’ reinterpretations were transmitted to the general public, through teaching and public history, allows an assessment of the impact of the New Western History on a lay audience and, thus, a better understanding of the complex mechanics of history-making.

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abstract: This dissertation seeks to understand two universal experiences that have pervaded human society since man first climbed out of the trees: violence and trauma. Using theories gleaned from the Holocaust and other twentieth century atrocities, this work explores narratives of violent action and traumatic reaction as they occurred among peoples of the nineteenth-century American Southwest. By examining the stories of individuals and groups of Apaches, Ethnic Mexicans, Euro-Americans, and other diverse peoples within the lens of trauma studies, a new narrative emerges within US-Mexico borderlands history. This narrative reveals inter-generational legacies of violence among cultural groups that have lived through trauma and caused trauma within others. For both victims and perpetrators alike, trauma and violence can transform into tools of cultural construction and adaptation. Part I of this work establishes the concept of ethnotrauma-- a layered experience of collective trauma among minority populations under racial persecution. By following stories of Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Warm Springs Apaches in the nineteenth-century Southwest, this dissertation reveals how Apaches grappled with ethnotrauma through generations during times of war, imprisonment, and exile. These narratives also reveal how Apaches overcame these legacies of pain through communal solidarity and cultural continuity. Part II explores the concept of perpetrator trauma. By following stories of Mexican norteños, Mexican-Americans on the US-Mexico border, and American settlers, the impact of trauma on violators also comes to light. The concept perpetrator trauma in this context denotes the long-term cultural impacts of committing violence among perpetrating communities. For perpetrating groups, violence became a method of affirming and, in some cases, reconstructing group identity through opposition to other groups. Finally, at the heart of this work stands two critical symbols-- Geronimo, victim and villain, and the land itself, hostile and healing-- that reveal how cycles of violence entangled ethnotrauma and perpetrator trauma within individuals struggling to survive and thrive in a savage land. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2020

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In 1972, a flood tore through Rapid City, South Dakota, killing 238 people. Many whose lives and homes were destroyed lived in a predominately Native American neighborhood known as “Osh Kosh Camp.” This dissertation asks: why did those people lived in that neighborhood at that time? The answer lies at the intersection of the histories of race and environment in the American West. In the Black Hills region, white Americans racialized certain spaces under the conceptual framework of Indian Country as part of the process of American conquest on the northern plains beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The American project of racializing Western spaces erased Indians from histories of Rapid City, a process most obviously apparent in the construction of Mount Rushmore as a tourist attraction. Despite this attempted erasure, Indians continued to live and work in the city and throughout the Black Hills. In Rapid City, rampant discrimination forced Native Americans in Rapid City to live in neighborhoods cut off from city services, including Osh Kosh Camp After the flood, activists retook the Indian Country concept as a tool of protest. This dissertation claims that environment and race must be understood together in the American West. / History

Durante as décadas de 1980 e 1990, a Western History, campo de estudos que se dedica à história do Oeste norte-americano, enfrentou uma tormenta intelectual de proporções pouco vistas antes em suas searas. O motivo para tal inquietação foi o surgimento da assim chamada “New Western History”, movimento que tinha por principal meta reescrever a história regional a partir de uma completa reestruturação de suas bases intelectuais, para tentar salvar o campo de uma suposta crise de identidade surgida ainda nos anos 1960. Neste caso, o principal alvo destes revisionistas foi a antiga historiografia constituída à imagem das teses de Frederick Jackson Turner sobre a fronteira norteamericana. Aqui, a idéia era substituir uma narrativa histórica considerada excessivamente otimista por uma que realçasse os aspectos trágicos do avanço norte-americano em direção ao Pacífico. Esta tentativa, contudo, de se escrever uma história trágica encontrou forte oposição não só entre segmentos da historiografia profissional, mas também entre elementos da opinião pública, num debate que tinha mais a ver com a própria identidade dos Estados Unidos do que com questões meramente historiográficas. / During the 1980s and 1990s, the Western History, field of studies dedicated to the the history of the American West, went through a intellectual storm of proportions seldom seen before in its midst. The motive for such unrest was the arrival of the so-called “New Western History”, a movement whose main aim was the rewriting of the history of the West from the standpoint of a total reestructuring of the field’s intellectual foundations, in an attempt to save it from a crisis of identity that emerged still in the 1960s. In this case, the revisionists’ main target was the old historiography constituted in the image of Frederick Jackson Turner’s theses about the American frontier. Here, the idea was to substitute a historical narrative considered to be excessively optimistic for one that highlighted the tragic aspects of the American advance to the Pacific. However, this attempt to write a tragic history was met with a fierce opposition not only from segments of the professional historiography, but also from the public opinion itself, in a debate that had more to do with the very identity of the US and less with “mere” historiographical questions.

Le California Camera Club, un collectif de photographes amateurs et professionnels actif à San Francisco notamment entre 1890 et 1915, est une organisation constamment marginalisée dans l’histoire de la photographie et de l’Ouest américain. En adoptant une double approche d’histoire culturelle et matérielle, cette thèse éclaire une gamme d’activités et de productions de ce club largement inconnu, qui ont contribué à forger l’identité d’une communauté éloignée de l’Ouest. Par son approche inclusive, réunissant plus de 400 membres en 1900, le club doit être considéré comme une organisation localement ancrée, qui se sert de la photographie pour produire un récit esthétiquement attirant et historiquement cohérent de la ville et de l’État. Malgré son chevauchement chronologique avec le pictorialisme et son ambition de faire reconnaître le médium parmi les beaux-arts, le corpus du club ne peut être inséré dans un canon d’histoire de l’art de la photographie. En se basant sur diverses stratégies de diffusion et d’exposition, les membres adoptent plutôt une approche collective qui transforme l’aspiration à la reconnaissance en un désir de légitimation régionale. À travers une analyse de pratiques photographiques, d’usages et d’itinéraires des objets, cette thèse retrace la construction d’une représentation idiosyncratique de la culture et de l’histoire californiennes par un club qui participe à la conquête d’une place légitime pour l’État sur la scène nationale. En mettant l’accent sur la dimension collective de la photographie, cette analyse montre comment sa pratique dans un territoire isolé mène à la construction imaginaire d’une communauté dotée d’une compréhension commune de ses valeurs esthétiques et de son histoire. L’enjeu de cette thèse est ainsi de réviser un schéma linéaire et étroit de l’histoire de la photographie en élargissant les perspectives géographiques, socioculturelles et archivistiques / The California Camera Club, a collective of amateur and professional photographers, most active in San Francisco between 1890 and 1915, represents a constantly marginalized organization in the history of photography and of the American West. By adopting a two-fold cultural-historical and material approach, this thesis sheds light on a largely unknown variety of Club activities and productions that served as meaningful elements to forge the identity of a remote Western community. Through its inclusive outlook, unifying more than 400 members in 1900, the Club must be considered a locally embedded organization that mobilized photography to produce an aesthetically pleasing and historically coherent narrative of the city and the state. Despite its chronological position in the period of Pictorialism and the striving for institutional recognition, the Club corpus cannot be inserted into an art-historical canon of photography. Rather, by drawing on diverse strategies of dissemination and exhibition, the members adopted a collective approach to the medium that turned the striving for institutional recognition into a desire for regional legitimation. Through an examination of photographic practices, uses, and object trajectories, this thesis traces the construction of an idiosyncratic representation of Californian culture and history by the Club, which actively assisted the state’s search for a legitimate national place. By focusing on the collective dimension of photography, the analysis demonstrates how the practice in an isolated territory led to the imagination of a community with shared aesthetic and historical understandings. The object of this thesis is to revise both linear and narrow tropes in the history of photography by broadening its geographic, sociocultural, archival perspectives