History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland(2024) Hess, Sophie; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland,” investigates histories of natural resource commodification, environment, and culture in the Patapsco River Valley, or “The Hollow” as it was called by its first European settlers. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English colonists seized the powerful currents of the Patapsco and the forests surrounding it, the ancestral floodplains of Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples, to build large-scale agricultural projects and industrial factories. These operations altered the environment, and as the valley grew into a center of extractive production, its communities experienced more frequent and severe floods which have continued into the present. This dissertation examines these entwined consequences of environmental capitalism and settler colonialism through a site-specific, multi-century lens, studying how humans, plants, and animals within various spaces of production—iron furnaces, wheat fields, grist and cotton mills, schools, prisons, local governments, and family units —experienced industrialization. It traces trace labor ecologies within communities of enslaved, convict, and low-wage workers, and the ways that soil exhaustion, flooding, and other environmental forces both threatened these enclaves and created opportunities for freedom. This work uses a microhistorical methodology to intervene in histories of energy transition, labor, and the Anthropocene. “Hollow Ground” argues that early American industrialism can help us to better understand how local desires for capital growth have accumulated into global processes of toxic emissions, and how the frontline issues faced by post-industrial communities today relate not only to global production but to local histories of extraction and the culture that perpetuates it. These same communities also hold critical histories of commoning, stewardship, labor resistance, and environmentalism that can help create a blueprint for survival in the face of the climate crisis.Item DECENT, SAFE, AND SANITARY? PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE ENVIRONMENT OF EASTERN WASHINGTON, D.C., 1940-1965(2020) Shapiro, Justin; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the relationships between the physical environment and the history of public housing in Washington, D.C. from the 1940s to the 1960s. The environmental features of public housing complexes, as well as those of the landscape around them, significantly shaped the outcomes of the National Capital Housing Authority’s (NCHA) projects. The scale of public housing construction during that period entailed sweeping and dramatic transformations in the landscape. At the same time, the NCHA found itself constrained by material and financial pressures coming from a variety of bureaucratic and institutional sources. Those pressures limited the NCHA’s ability to respond to environmental stresses at various public housing sites. In the absence of adequate responses from the NCHA, the environment played a significant role in determining the outcomes of the District of Columbia’s public housing program. The physical nature of the NCHA’s choice of sites, as well as the materials that it used, turned public housing complexes into sites of environmental injustice rather than the decent, safe, and sanitary housing that the Authority envisioned.Item A BOND RATHER THAN A BARRIER? CONSTRUCTING THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY(2014) Brideau, Jeffrey Mitchell; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A mid-20th century water infrastructure megaproject, the St. Lawrence Seaway is a shipping channel that accommodates ships with a 26-foot draft and allows them to traverse a distance of 2,300 miles, from the headwaters of Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. It also facilitates the production of hydroelectric power, harnessing the river's kinetic energy to produce electrical current. Its official opening, in 1959, unified several formerly discrete elements into a coherent bi-national envirotechnical system. An environmental and technological system embedded in specific social and ecological contexts, the Seaway caused significant disruption - inundated and relocated communities and altered hydrologic dynamics are the most conspicuous repercussions of its construction and continued operation. Despite this contested history, the Seaway has been "naturalized" and masks many attendant ecological and socio-historical transformations. The Seaway's symbolic power is as potent as its social and ecological legacies. The project and associated institutions have become symbols of bi-national cooperation, and are held up as exemplars of transboundary resource management. This symbolic legacy obscures the protracted and acrimonious debate that preceded Seaway construction, as well as alternative possibilities and perspectives marginalized in the process. Accordingly, I contend that the Seaway has both engendered new bonds and simultaneously erected new barriers, transforming the landscape and peoples in myriad and often unanticipated ways. By teasing out the stories concealed by the dominant Seaway narrative, I show that the remaking of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence, between the 1820s and 1960s, materially and discursively reconfigured adjacent societies and landscapes. Using envirotechnical analysis deployed in a bi-national narrative, I explore the Seaway as both a symbol and a reality. The boundaries between these forms are permeable not fixed, and both are crucial to its construction and operation. This story is, at its core, an interrogation of boundaries - a narrative focused on two nations and the river that divides and unites them. It is also about the boundaries drawn between culture and nature, the environment and technology, the abstract and physical, expertise and advocacy, as well as myth and materiality.