History Electronic Theses and Dissertations (UMKC)

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The items in this collection are the theses and dissertations written by students of the Department of History. Some items may be viewed only by members of the University of Missouri System and/or University of Missouri-Kansas City. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 105

The thirteenth-century English forest : implications in law and social memory
(2025) Hayward, Paula Ann; Mitchell, Linda Elizabeth; Blanton, Virginia
This dissertation explores the legal and cultural implications of forest law in medieval English society. Forest law governed how land and game could be used in areas set aside as royal forests. After the Norman Conquest, William I (r. 1066-1087) established a distinct English forest law, declaring lands as royal forests and regulating the rights and privileges of that land. Forest does not simply mean a treed landscape; in fact, forest lands often encompassed pasture or meadow and even villages. Forests are often discussed as peripheral to the politics of the thirteenth century. While forest law administration was previously subject to the king’s arbitrary will, the 1217 Charter of the Forest issued during the minority of Henry III (r. 1217-1272), granted rights and protection to those living or operating in the forest bounds. Confirmed by Henry III in 1225, the Charter served as a tool of negotiation as forests became a conduit of power and identity for the crown and a playground for the politics of natural resources. The study of forests provides an understanding of the sophistication of the medieval people through which the relationships were built between the king and his people. As a ruler, Henry III is largely ignored or portrayed as weak by modern scholars. He, however, inherited a political landscape not of his own making, including long-standing noble families and powerful monasteries that were hundreds of years old. In the thirteenth century, the significance of medieval forests has many facets including land holdings, privileges from the crown, and tensions between forest officials and inhabitants or users of the forest. Particularly in the personal rule of Henry III from 1225 to 1258, administration and adjudication of the forest involved negotiated relationships that established control of the forest resources and revenue generated from them. These tensions are also represented in the romantic imagination of medieval literature, as authors provided social commentary on forests as untamed but controlled spaces with human and supernatural forces at play. Through the focus of forests, this study demonstrates the complexity of thirteenth-century law as well as interconnectedness of the communities of England.
Hobohemia on the plains: labor, leisure, and industrial discipline in Kansas City, 1873-1915
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2025) Winkler, Elijah Paul; Frehner, Brian
On the morning of June 9, 1925, a crowd of curious onlookers assembled near the intersection of Second Street and Grand Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri’s North End district to watch the washing away of a sleep bluff overlooking the Missouri River. For fifty years, the promontory colloquially known as “Hobo Hill” had served as a gathering point for the migratory workers who were variously derided as vagrants, tramps, and hobos. These men served as the primary labor source for industries such as logging, railroad construction, and, in the Midwest, the annual wheat harvest. However, for self-styled progressive businessmen like William Volker, whose company was the principal agent behind Hobo Hill’s removal, the throngs of hobos who passed through and wintered in Kansas City represented a social illness requiring municipal action. At the same time, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) eyed the same group of itinerant workers as a population ripe for organization. Locally, these movements culminated in the formation of the Board of Public Welfare and the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO), respectively. Recent works on American hobos have masterfully elucidated the relationship between transient laborers and the development of industrial agriculture, the rural communities of the Midwest, and federal welfare programs. The aim of this paper is to trace the evolving relationship between one down-season roost, Kansas City, Missouri, and its transient population in the decades prior to official organization under the AWO in 1915. It will incorporate the perspectives of social reformers as well as hobos themselves with the goal of elucidating larger changes in the public discourse around labor, leisure, and mobility, both social and geographic. Within Kansas City, the reform campaign effected a network of urban institutions to harness and reform the laboring life of transient men. Meanwhile, hobos themselves produced a remarkable body of songs and poetry that called for resistance to these institutions and defended the rights to leisure and mobility. Such texts were integral to the formation of the countercultural milieus known as hobohemias.
"To keep Christmas well": gender and consumerism in the Age of Industrialization
(2025) Gray Rabin, Angela; Phegley, Jennifer; Burke, Diane Mutti
Christmas evolved as an outgrowth of the mid-winter pre-Christian festivals of Saturnalia, Kalends, and Yule, to an overly commercialized, mass-market driven enterprise. Modern Christmas celebrations are inextricably connected to place, family, and food, but today’s observances have one thing in common with their early predecessors—excessive indulgence of food and drink. Although Christmas—the combined term referring to Christ mass—introduced Christ’s birth to the solstice festivities, the annual holiday has been associated with secular tendencies since Gregory, Archbishop of Constantinople, issued his warning against dancing and feasting to observers late in the fourth century. This secular side would expand dramatically—and transatlantically—centuries later after Washington Irving published Knickerbocker’s History of New York in 1809, Clement Clarke Moore published his famous poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, in 1823, and Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. Not only did St. Nicholas, who morphed over time into the figure known as Santa Claus, usher in a new and popular dimension of the holiday that included children, he encouraged widespread consumerism, propelled further by the Industrial Revolution. This dissertation examines how industrialization altered Christmas and guided women’s participation in the holiday in select urban centers of England between 1840, the year Queen Victoria and Prince Albert marry, and 1861, the year Albert died. My goal is to produce a literary and historical comparison of the impact of industrialization on three forms of consumerism—foodways, print materials (particularly how the press marketed the Christmas tree), and charitable spending—during the Christmas holiday. Christmas had been associated with secularism and indulgent eating long before Victoria’s coronation, but holiday meals took on new meaning during her reign. Most notably, in the middle-class home they were prepared and served by women. These meals, like gifts of food, formed and maintained familial bonds, and played a central role in “manufacturing” the correlation between Christmas observance and domesticity. But holiday fare, such as the quintessentially English plum pudding, likewise served as print culture symbols to make political statements about British global trade and colonization, another variation of consumption. Periodical artists and editors, especially those associated with Punch, or the London Charivari, frequently satirized the holiday to make social and political statements, and more than one issue of Punch featured the English plum pudding to illustrate food’s ability to transmit national identity within political discourse. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the periodical press, with the assistance of Victorian women readers, ushered in and popularized the “new” domestic Christmas. In addition, the Christmas holiday created a means by which women could challenge and circumvent patriarchal order and enter the public sphere in ways complicit with yet defiant to the cult of domesticity. Such an intriguing paradox exemplifies the rich complexities of women’s lived experience in the nineteenth century. Thus, the Industrial Revolution redefined Christmas, as women, then as now, became essential to proper observance.
The killer shepherds: hunters as pastoral figures in the Early National period
(2024) Shawver, Brian; Barton, John Cyril; Burke, Diane Mutti
This dissertation explores the role of the backwoods hunter in American literature and culture during the Early National period, especially as it was embodied by Daniel Boone and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. I use these figures to examine how popular perceptions of the sustenance hunter underwent significant transformation after the Revolutionary period, and how Boone and Bumppo came to exemplify American attitudes about nature, individualism, and western expansion. In exploring the evolution of perceptions about the hunter, I argue that this f igure came to function as the shepherd in a new conception of the pastoral mode. My argument involves an original framework of the pastoral that I construct by integrating theories presented by William Empson and Paul Alpers in their landmark works Some Versions of Pastoral and What Is Pastoral?, respectively. This framework asserts that works in the pastoral mode are characterized not by the presence of an idyllic setting, but instead by the centrality of a shepherd or shepherd-equivalent who is of a lesser social status than the pastoral author and the intended audience, but who possesses an innate dignity and moral sensibility that allows him to serve as a representative of a culture’s aspirations. My framework is further influenced by the work of Leo Marx, in arguing that the pastoral in North America invokes a literal rather than metaphorical understanding of the “middle landscape,” i.e. the physical location that allows a pastoral shepherd to fulfill his representative function. Incorporating Marx’s analyses in his seminal book Machine in the Garden, I also propose that the North American pastoral differs from the European version in identifying a more specific representative function for its protagonists; whereas the Empsonian pastoral operation involves a shepherd whom its author uses to portray model behavior in a general sense, the American hunter-shepherd of this period depicts the ideal way of interacting with the natural world in particular. As such, I also explore how Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo laid a foundation for future considerations and behaviors related to western expansion, environmental degradation, and interaction with Indigenous people.
Into "the Dead Zone" : racial violence and white supremacist genocide in Jim Crow Virginia, 1902-1951
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2024) King, Gabriel M.; Davis, Rebecca Miller
Among former Confederate states, Black Americans in Virginia experienced the fewest lynchings during Jim Crow segregation. Accordingly, after a spree of highly publicized lynchings during the late 1920s, Virginia Governor Harry F. Byrd and other state officials deemed lynchings a threat to the state’s economic development and reputation. Exemplifying this perceived distaste for racial violence, Byrd signed the nation’s first state-wide anti-lynching law in 1928. Within the historiography of the state, the law is frequently used to stress Virginia’s milder form of segregation compared to other southern states. This understanding fails to account for the state’s outsized and racialized system of state executions and the persistence of less visible acts of racial violence after the 1928 law. By adopting or continuing these practices, white Virginians preserved and made official white supremacist violence at the expense of Black social relations and citizenship. Using the archival papers of the NAACP and newspaper coverage, this thesis illustrates this maintenance of racial terror through state executions and impunity for individual perpetrators through a series of case studies. Examining these case studies using models from the field of genocide studies, this project ultimately argues for an understanding of Jim Crow-era racial violence as a part of a long-term white supremacist genocide in the United States.

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