| Biblioscope: An Archival Guide & Bibliography | Environmental History, 8.2

Biblioscope

An Archival Guide & Bibliograpy

Theses and Dissertations

Barksdale, John Allen. "A Construction of Community Among Miners During the California Gold Rush." Ph.D. dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2002. 179 pp. Studies the lifestyles of miners living in California gold mining communities during the mid-nineteenth century.

Case, Christopher Stephen. "Goldfield, Nevada: A Case Study of Colonialism in the American West, 1900–1920." Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Arizona University, 2002. 245 pp. Economic history of this Nevada gold mining town. Asserts that unlike most other mining communities in the western United States, Goldfield was so successful that it was essentially economically independent from outside capital investment.

Chris, Cynthia. "Watching Wildlife: On the Nature Genre in Film and Television, Its History and Meanings." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2002. 288 pp. Studies changes in the depiction and representation of wildlife in motion pictures and television since the 1920s, asserting that wildlife cinematography reflects contemporary notions of race, gender, sexuality, and power.

de Boer, Tycho. "The Corporate Forest: Capitalism and Environmental Change in Southeastern North Carolina's Longleaf Pine Belt, 1790–1940." Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2002. 245 pp. Examines the influence of capitalism on settlers' use and management of the pine forests in which they lived and worked.

Farnham, Timothy John. "The Concept of Biological Diversity: The Evolution of a Conservation Paradigm." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2002. 351 pp. The development and evolution of the concept of biodiversity since a definition of the term was first published in 1980.

Faunce, Kenneth V. "Perception of Landscape in the Use and Settlement of the Tularosa Basin, New Mexico." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Idaho, 2000. 403 pp. Interdisciplinary study of the ways in which perceptions of the Tularosa Basin landscape by nineteenth-century settlers shaped land use in the region.

Fisher-Carroll, Rita Louise. "Environmental Dynamics of Drought and Its Impact on Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Populations in the Central Mississippi Valley." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2001. 304 pp. Argues that dendrochronological evidence supports the theory that a severe drought drastically limited agricultural opportunities for Native Americans living in the Mississippi River Valley during the sixteenth century, thus leading to decreasing demographic numbers.

Hilt, Eric David. "Contracts, Risk Taking and Diversification in the American Whaling Industry." Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2002. 201 pp. Economic history of the U. S. whaling industry from the colonial era through the mid-nineteenth century.

Hribal, Jason C. "Animals are Part of the Working Class: Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance in the Atlantic World." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toledo, 2002. 194 pp. An animal rights study examining: (1) the resistance of some domesticated animals to enclosure of commons areas; (2) the experiences of animals managed on private property; and (3) the emergence of animal rights activism in literature, especially from the 1640s to the 1790s, in England, Ireland, Scotland, and colonial America. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Ode, Laurel Vanessa Cricket. "Plotting America: The Classification and Cultivation of United States Literature, 1780–1860." Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2002. 257 pp. Examines differing representations of nature, natural history, and landscape in the diverse writings of such individuals as William Bartram (1739–1823), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), and Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). The author asserts that travel writing, natural history journals, nature guides, personal letters, reflective essays, and novels produced during the late-eighteenth and the early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries served to both reflect and shape perceptions of the American landscape.

Oetelaar, Delilah Joy. "Climatic Risk or Social Progress: The Historiography of Ranching in Southern Alberta." Master's thesis, University of Calgary, 2000. 155 pp. Analyzes climate and other environmental data to question predominant historical interpretations of the reasons behind the decline of ranching in southern Alberta during the early twentieth century. Argues that the decline was more likely a natural consequence of modernization.

Rozum, Molly Patrick. "Grasslands Grown: A Twentieth-Century Sense of Place on North America's Northern Prairies and Plains." Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001. 417 pp. Studies changes in land use in the Great Plains states of the United States (including Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wyoming) and in the Prairie Provinces of Canada (including Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, assessing the human ecology of the region as it relates to the development of regional identity and a sense of place.

Ryavec, Karl Ernest. "Land Use Change in Central Tibet, ca. 1830–2000." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2002. 193 pp. Asserts that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide useful data about land cover that can shed light on the history of land use in Tibet.

Skubik, Mark M. "Public Health Politics and the San Francisco Plague Epidemic of 1900–1904." Master's thesis, San Jose State University, 2002. 124 pp. Examines the history of federal and California quarantine inspection politics, asserting that the conflicting political interests of businesses, state and federal agencies, and California public health officials aggravated this healthcare crisis.

Smurr, Robert Welling. "Perceptions of Nature, Expressions of Nation: An Environmental History of Estonia." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2002. 433 pp. Interdisciplinary study of: (1) the role played by Estonian conservationists and nationalists in creating a national environmental ethic in Estonia during the pre-Soviet era; and of (2) the significance of Estonian environmental concerns in the development of a political independence movement during the late twentieth century.

Stupski, Karen Benay. "Waste, Wealth and Public Health: Recycling Human Excrement in the New England and Mid-Atlantic States, 1820–1900." Ph.D. dissertation, John Hopkins University, 2002. 426 pp. Investigates the technological, social, political, economic, and geographic aspects of recycling human waste to use as soil fertilizer and prevent pollution and diseases.

Thompson, Krista A. "The Tropicalization of the Anglophone Caribbean: The Picturesque and the Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Jamaica and the Bahamas." Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2002. 549 pp. Examines the practice of portraying idealized tropical landscapes in photographs, lantern slides, picture books, and postcards for the purpose of promoting tourism in the British colonial territories of Jamaica and the Bahamas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. States that colonial officials used the aesthetic notion of an orderly, tropical colonial society to exert authority over indigenous populations.

Ward, Evan R. "The Irrigated Oasis: Transformation of the Colorado River Delta, 1940–1975." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 2000. viii + 297 leaves. Water quality, water utilization, and water resources development in the Colorado River Basin of the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Focuses especially on the issue of salinity and its impact on the ecological health of the region in the late twentieth century.

Weisiger, Marsha Lee. "Dine Bikeyah: Environment, Cultural Identity, and Gender in Navajo Country." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2000. 248 pp. Studies the significant role played by Navajo Indian women in the economic livelihood of an Arizona Indian reservation, and delineates the negative impacts of range management policies implemented in the 1930s by the U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U. S. Soil Conservation Service on the economic and cultural structure of the Navajo Indian community.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.