History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Defending Giants: The Battle over Headwaters Forest and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics, 1850-1999(2010) Speece, Darren Frederick; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The redwoods have long been a source of inspiration and conflict. By the end of the twentieth century, disputes over logging Redwood Country had helped transform American environmental politics. Historians have largely neglected the redwood wars, but their impact on environmental politics was great. After 1945, the redwood wars ended official corporatist timber regulation in California, established a series of legal precedents governing private property management, and prompted the reordering of the federal environmental protection regime. This dissertation describes those transformations in detail, and helps situate the long history of conflicts over logging the redwoods in American history. The history of the redwood wars demonstrates the ways in which local activism influence the development of environmental politics, Northcoast activists complicate our understanding of radical environmentalism and wilderness ideals, and conservation methodologies persist in the priorities of modern environmentalism. The redwood wars were one of the longest and most violent environmental disputes in American history, beginning during the 1970s and lasting into the twenty-first century. Northcoast residents had grown increasingly concerned about the future of the ancient forest, timber jobs, and their rural culture as the rate of clear-cutting increased and as corporate giants swallowed up land. Some residents organized and challenged the industrial logging regime because of its threat to the health of their rural society. Eventually, the Northcoast was awash in daily direct actions, persistent litigation, and intense media scrutiny. After 1986, the citizen activists focused more and more on Pacific Lumber's plans to harvest its remaining old growth groves in Humboldt County. Pacific Lumber owned nearly all of the unprotected ancient redwood forest in the world, and the forest complex that contained those old-growth groves became known as Headwaters Forest. In 1999, after more than a decade of violent and protracted conflict, Pacific Lumber, California, and the federal government consummated an agreement to publicly acquire several old-growth groves and manage the rest of the company's land under a comprehensive land management plan. Even so, the wars continued because of the uncompromising nature of the local activists.Item Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990(2009) Chase, Robert Terry; Gerstle, Gary L.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.