| biblioscope: An Archival Guide & Bibliography | Environmental History, 10.4

biblioscope

AN ARCHIVAL GUIDE & BIBLIOGRAPHY

THESES AND DISSERTATIONS

Ashenmiller, Joshua Ross. "The National Environmental Policy Act in the Green Decade, 1969–1981." PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004. 304 pp. Examines the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 in a broad historical context, arguing that rather than being a novelty in the narrow arena of environmental policy, NEPA was a continuation of conversations about the shape of political economy that began in the 1780s. Discusses how the act blurred the lines between environmental and economic policy in the 1970s, setting the stage for the conservative movement of the 1980s.

Babalis, Timothy. "The Cross in the Wilderness: An Aesthetic History of the American Park Idea." PhD dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, 2004. 393 pp. Intellectual history of the park idea in the United States, using the 1864 legislation which created California's Yosemite Park as an historical touchstone. Traces the evolution of the aesthetic principles underlying the park concept from the English Enlightenment through nineteenth-century America, including an epilogue discussing the 1913 Senate debate over the development of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite.

Barry, Joyce. "Mountaineers Are Always Free?: An Examination of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in West Virginia." PhD dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2004. 196 pp. Examines the natural, economic, social, and political impacts of the controversial mountaintop removal method of coal mining in West Virginia, through the lens of environmental justice. Explores popular histories of the coal industry in the state and the gendered nature of regional anti-mountaintop removal activism.

Biggs, David A. "Between the Rivers and Tides: A Hydraulic History of the Mekong Delta, 1820–1975." PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2004. 423 pp. Historical study of the water environment and water projects in the Mekong Delta, 1820–1975, examining exchanges between water engineers and local people that defined regional identities tied to the surrounding water landscape.

Brock, Emily. "Replanting the Douglas-fir Forest: Forest Science and Forest Practice in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1945." PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2004. 288 pp. Charts reforestation strategies for the Douglas fir forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest from the 1890s to the 1940s, arguing that through these strategies a new understanding of the productive industrial forest developed around the goal of producing saleable lumber. Explores new connections between land use, culture, and science in the twentieth-century American forest.

Buckley, Michael George. "Green Passages: Literary Natural History in Pre-Darwinian America." PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2004. 309 pp. Ecocritical survey of American literary natural history, 1790s–1860s, including work by William Bartram, John James Audubon, Wilson Flagg, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Henry David Thoreau. Argues that the genre is unified by a dynamic and developing proto-ecological sensibility.

Chung, Tzu-I. "American Legends: Nation, Nature, Natives and Others, 1608 to 2001." PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2004. 145 pp. Examines American narratives united by the trope of colonial conquest of natural resources through the subjugation of feminine body and feminized land, and the retreat of the primitive ignoble savage in the face of civilization. Examines works from the 1600s through the 2000s, including representations of Captain John Smith, the nineteenth-century paintings of Thomas Cole, the Broadway show Miss Saigon, and the PBS television program Frontier House.

Crane, Jeff. "Finding the River: The Destruction and Restoration of the Kennebec and Elwha Rivers." PhD dissertation, Washington State University, 2004. 253 pp. Natural and human history of Maine's Kennebec and Washington's Elwha Rivers, examining how Indians, Europeans, and Americans used the rivers and the effects on their meanings for those societies. Also discusses responses by environmentalists to the rivers' declining ecological health, exploring restoration efforts and seeking to explain a fundamental shift from supporting dams for industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century to demanding dam removal by the late twentieth.

Duarte-Trattner, Earth. "Branding Nature: From Slaves to Transgenic Organisms." PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. 336 pp. Investigates the historical process of "branding nature" in the North American West, tracing the route by which branding moved between Mexico to California from the colonial period through the modern era. Slaves and cattle in colonial Mexico, oranges in industrial California, and genetically engineered corn serve as case studies in this project examining how labor and nature itself can be ordered and controlled through branding.

Espinosa, Mariola. "Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878 through the early Republic." PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003. 207 pp. Asserts that fear of the spread of yellow fever from Cuba to the southern United States greatly influenced America's relationship with Cuba in the decades prior to and immediately after Cuban independence in 1898. Discusses especially American pressures on the Cuban government to implement expensive sanitation plans.

Feldman, James W. "Rewilding the Islands: Nature, History, and Wilderness at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore." PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004. 444 pp. Explores changing ideas about nature and the relationship between human culture and natural history at Wisconsin's Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Includes a history of human habitation of and impact on the region and discussion of the National Park Service's management of the site since 1970.

Graves, Russell. "Garden City: The Development of an Agricultural Community on the Great Plains." PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004. 307 pp. Examines the late-twentieth-century development of Garden City, Kansas as a counter to the typical Great Plains narrative of regional decline. Argues that the city's economic and demographic growth has hinged on groundwater availability.

Greene, Ann Norton. "Harnessing Power: Industrializing the Horse in Nineteenth-Century America." PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2004. 348 pp. Examines changes in the use of horses as power technology during nineteenth-century industrialization in the United States.

Keeling, Arn M. "The Effluent Society: Water Pollution and Environmental Politics in British Columbia, 1889–1980." PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2004. 389 pp. History of water pollution in British Columbia, 1889–1980, examining how political debates over pollution reflected national and continental trends in environmental management and values, and were shaped by geographical, environmental, social, and economic aspects of the province.

Maxham, Mintcy D. "Native Constructions of Landscapes in the Black Warrior Valley, Alabama, AD 1020–1520." PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004. 325 pp. Explores the spaces in which commoners lived at the Moundville site in the Black Warrior Valley, below Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from 1020–1520 AD, shifting focus from the elite individuals usually studied in archaeological research. Uses regional and site-specific approaches to examine how Moundville's general population created their landscapes to reflect the ways they identified themselves and ordered their worlds.

McCormick, Maureen A. "Of Birds, Guano, and Man: William Vogt's Road to Survival." PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2005. 242 pp. Examines the work of ecologist William Vogt (1902–1968) on land use and population control, in particular his influential 1948 neo-Malthusian text Road to Survival. Argues that instead of being an early example of land-use sensibility associated with the early environmental movement, Vogt's work reflects an intermediate stage between Progressive Era conservation and late-twentieth-century concerns for quality of life.

Miller, W. Jason. "Environmental Justice, Lynching, and American Riverscapes: Langston Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop." PhD dissertation, Washington State University, 2004. 171 pp. Drawing from a variety of fields including environmental justice, ecocriticism, and cultural studies, examines how the poets Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) wrote about racism and lynching. Explores how both Hughes, in the United States, and Bishop, in Brazil, relied on their feelings of topophilia (place affection) and topophobia (place fear) for riverscapes to write about lynching.

Moore, Ted D. "Capital Cities: Planning, Politics, and Environmental Protest in Lansing, Michigan and Salt Lake City, Utah, 1920–1945." D.M.A. dissertation, Michigan State University, 2004. 317 pp. Explores the efforts of reform groups, civic leaders, and city planners to define and create urban spaces in Lansing, Michigan and Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1920 to 1945, with the goals of incorporating the environment and women more fully into urban history, and examining the politics of environmentalism and suburbanization in this period.

Murton, James Ernest. "Creating a Countryside in British Columbia: An Alternative Modernity, 1919–1935." PhD dissertation, Queen's University at Kingston, 2002. 363 pp. Explores the interwar period in British Columbia, during which the problem of employing and rehabilitating returning soldiers gave rise to a new era for land settlement. The soldier project formed part of a larger effort to create a new countryside through planned communities, scientific settlement, land clearing, dams, dikes, and irrigation. Combines cultural, political, and environmental history approaches.

Netherton, Dane Morris. "Paul Tsongas and the Battles Over Energy and the Environment, 1974–1980." PhD dissertation, Washington State University, 2004. 259 pp. Examines the political career, 1974–1980, of Paul Tsongas of Lowell, Massachusetts, with particular attention to energy issues and Tsongas' efforts to reconcile environmental, regional, and economic interests during his terms in the U.S. House and Senate.

Perales, Monica. "Smeltertown: A Biography of a Mexican-American Community, 1880–1973." PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2004. 352 pp. Studies the shared social, cultural, religious, and educational experiences of immigrant laborers living in the Mexican ethnic community of Smeltertown, the company town owned and operated by the American Smelting and Refining Company for employees working its copper smelter in El Paso, Texas.

Thoms, J. Michael. "Ojibwa Fishing Grounds: A History of Ontario Fisheries Law, Science, and the Sportsmen's Challenge to Aboriginal Treaty Rights, 1650–1900." PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2004. 320 pp. Examines the history of Ojibwa treaty rights negotiations and fisheries law in Southern Ontario, mid-seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, using community-based case studies with four Mississauga and three Chippewa First Nations. Discusses the role of nineteenth-century sportsmen in opposing and criminalizing Aboriginal fishing systems, locating the roots of this particular conflict in a colonial power struggle.

Utter, Kathryn L. "In the End the Land: Settlement of the Columbia Basin Project." PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2004. 474 pp. Examines Washington State's Columbia Basin Project (1910s–1960s), the largest reclamation project undertaken by the United States government, arguing that the history of its settlement can inform the debate over why or to what extent reclamation did or did not meet its social potential.

Yochim, Michael J. "Compromising Yellowstone: The Interest Group-National Park Service Relationship in Modern Policy-Making." PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005. 397 pp. Examines the late-twentieth-century relationship between interest groups—including conservationists, recreational groups, businesses, and scientists—and the National Park Service in park policy-making through four case studies from Yellowstone National Park. Discusses how these case studies reflect American values and sometimes conflicting relationships between Americans and nature.

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