Pulido, LauraFord, Sophia2024-08-072024-08-07https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29847The political right is most often associated with defending statues and monuments honoring colonizers, confederates, and enslavers. An example is the 2017 'Unite the Right Rally' in Charlottesville, Virginia, where activists violently protested the removal of a confederate monument to Robert E. Lee. Despite this known inclination of the right defending memorials, tensions rise as white, right-wing landowners across the United States vehemently oppose the expansion of National Heritage Areas (NHAs), framing them as a “federal land grab.” Established in 1984 under President Ronald Reagan and overseen by the National Park Service (NPS), NHAs receive federal funding to maintain historic sites, museums, monuments, and other public memorials. This dissertation examines the right’s growing resistance to NHAs, focusing on a case study spanning Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. I explore the right’s support of historic commemoration through ethnographic methods, archival analysis, and fieldwork. Central to this study are questions such as: Why do people support or oppose National Heritage Areas, and what discourses do they use? What groups oppose NHAs, how are they funded, and who are their alliances? To what extent does whiteness play a role? What kind of relationship, if any, to the past, do opponents want? Overall, I find an increasing emphasis on local management of commemorative sites, aligning with broader right-wing movements characterized by a sense of white masculinist entitlement to private property. Additionally, prominent right-wing organizations, including the John Birch Society, American Stewards for Liberty, the Heritage Foundation, and Protect the Harvest, leverage these sentiments to advance their interests, particularly within the oil and gas industries. By examining the complexities of resistance to NHAs, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersections between historical commemoration, political ideology, race, gender, and class.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Electronic Thesis or Dissertation