Thesiss

European narratives of travel to Africa multiply greatly in the eighteenth century. By the end of the century, as the slave trade is winding down and projects for colonizing sub-Saharan Africa are gearing up, most of these travel narratives are highly conventionalized: open almo…

Using a postcolonial lens as well as several other critical approaches, this study explores four areas—rhetoric, religion, wilderness, and war—in Rowlandson's influential and popular captivity text The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682). I examine these areas to show how the…

Conceived in the mid-1930s and formally proposed in 1943, the Glacier View Dam was an Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal for the North Fork of the Flathead River in northwestern Montana. This 416-foot tall dam would have provided inexpensive hydroelectric power to the region and …

Women of all backgrounds have contributed to the environmental history of the United States, but most of the environmental historical scholarship places such women alongside men and by doing so clouds their involvement as well as their achievements. This discussion introduces re…

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been prized as an area of unmatched biodiversity in the Eastern United States. However, the presentation of the Park as an unpeopled, pristine wilderness does not acknowledge that the Park is a heterogeneous space where nature and cult…

The purpose of this study is to examine the recent reports of impacts on public lands in the United States due to increased use of the social media platform, Instagram, and the app’s geotagging feature. Critical political economy acts as the theoretical and methodological basis …

There is a common misperception that historic sites cannot be maintained once they are included in a wilderness designation. This conflict ultimately does a disservice to both heritage and wilderness resources. To that end, this thesis provides a baseline inventory of all known …

The last stages of a global mass extinction event (GME) that started in the Pleistocene is likely to be continuing across the nations of the Earth. In the United States (“Nation”), it will likely climax (“Climax”) by 2100 AD when it will wipe out about 80% of endemic, vertebrate…

April 1935 marked the year that the “Dust Bowl” was termed. It was a catastrophic national event that primarily impacted the American Great Plains—specifically the Panhandle of the central United States. Stories of the Dust Bowl situate themselves within the narratives of the Gr…