Honors Theses (History)

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How Festivals Influenced the Musical Landscape of the 1960s
(University of Oregon, 2023-05-16) Wilkinson, Olivia
This article uses a combination of sources, including music and its lyrics, works from other scholars, an interview with a Woodstock attendee, personal accounts, artwork, and video performances to gather a comprehensive view of each festival. The video footage consists of performances, outtakes of performances, and interviews, with more footage available with each subsequent festival. Song lyrics are used liberally as primary source material to track changes between festival eras. The Beatles are referenced periodically because their career trajectory was closely tied with popular music trends. Music, performance, and personal accounts are vital to understanding how the three festivals are connected and how festivals as a concept grow over time. The first chapter discusses the Newport Folk Festival and how the electric Dylan controversy sheds light on the festival as an event that showcased a bending of genres. Chapter two discusses the Monterey International Pop Festival and how the Bay Area where the festival took place is tied to the explosion of psychedelic drug use. The last chapter discusses Woodstock and why the war was important in understanding why the festival was more controversial than many remember today. Drugs, music, and freedom of expression colored the last years of the 1960s. A willingness to experiment was a strong characteristic of many of the youth of the decade, whether they became high-profile performers or stayed among the crowds, and was closely tied with the transitional periods discussed in this article.
Open Access
Femininity and Athleticism: Title IX at the University of Oregon
(University of Oregon, 2011-06-13) Goss, Lauren
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex at any educational institution that received federal funding. Intended to focus on unfair admission practices, Title IX became known for improving the treatment of female intercollegiate athletes. However, the intricacies of implementing federal standards of gender equality presented substantial challenges, and colleges and universities confronted the ideological intersection of femininity and athleticism in different ways. The University of Oregon administration remedied cases of overt discrimination, most notably in facility access, but acute inequities persisted. Becky Sisley, the first and only Director of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics for the University of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex at any educational institution that received federal funding. Intended to focus on unfair admission practices, Title IX became known for improving the treatment of female intercollegiate athletes. However, the intricacies of implementing federal standards of gender equality presented substantial challenges, and colleges and universities confronted the ideological intersection of femininity and athleticism in different ways. The University of Oregon administration remedied cases of overt discrimination, most notably in facility access, but acute inequities persisted. Becky Sisley, the first and only Director of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics for the University ofTitle IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex at any educational institution that received federal funding. Intended to focus on unfair admission practices, Title IX became known for improving the treatment of female intercollegiate athletes. However, the intricacies of implementing federal standards of gender equality presented substantial challenges, and colleges and universities confronted the ideological intersection of femininity and athleticism in different ways. The University of Oregon administration remedied cases of overt discrimination, most notably in facility access, but acute inequities persisted. Becky Sisley, the first and only Director of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics for the University of Oregon, served as the driving force for changing athletic policies for women athletes. In extensive interviews, former female athletes corroborated this struggle for recognition. Archival evidence shows the University of Oregon administration increased funding for women’s athletics during the 1970’s. However, the Women’s Intercollegiate Association survived on a meager budget and remained autonomous until the Athletic Department combined men’s and women’s athletics in 1977. The merger, and Sisley’s resignation shortly thereafter, hindered any further attempts for reaching true equality. Title IX presented a paradox for women’s athletics: an expansion of equality for female athletes, but a decline in autonomy for coaches and administrators of women’s athletics. Discrimination against female athletes persists at the University of Oregon and there is just cause to explore gender equality in all aspects of higher education.
Open Access
Plague in paradise : a study of plague on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations
(University of Oregon, 2007-06) Bailey, Kevin R.
The third pandemic of bubonic plague menaced the whole globe for more than a century and claimed the lives of more than thirteen million people. In the twentieth century, plague reached America for the first time, arriving on the Hawaiian archipelago in 1899. By 1910, a rural form of plague known as sylvatic plague, characterized by persistent enzootic infections and intermittent human contraction, became firmly established in the Hamalma District of Hawaii's Big Island. This area's economy and society was dominated by sugarcane plantations, which worked closely with public health authorities in combating the plague pestilence. Plantation doctors participated in administering evolving plague treatments, while other leaders tried various methods of vector and reservoir control. These efforts largely amounted to a massive anti-rodent campaign, waged in the fields of the sugarcane plantations. Rat control experts tried trapping, poisoning, and other methods, but most attempts proved to be ineffective in halting plague entirely. The last case of human plague in Hamakua occurred in 1949, and enzootic plague disappeared somewhat mysteriously in 1959. In total 112 Hamakua residents caught the disease, 109 of whom perished.
Open Access
The new brew : the reaction of America's big breweries to the microbrew revolution of the 1980s and 90s
(University of Oregon, 2007-06) Melia, John Patrick
In the 1980s and 90s, the United States beer industry entered a period known as the Microbrew Revolution. During this period, a myriad of small breweries emerged to meet the new demand for specialty beers among American beer drinkers. Current literature generally judges America's biggest breweries (Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors) to have been failures in this market niche and downplays their activity in the specialty beer market. In fact, big breweries were quite active in the domestic specialty market. This paper analyzes the various international partnerships, domestic partnerships and new brands that the Big Three undertook during the Microbrew Revolution in an attempt to profit from the American specialty beer market. While many of the big brewery's efforts in this emerging niche indeed flopped, the Big Three's strategies often proved to be quite profitable as well. This presence of so many successful specialty brands affiliated with big breweries challenges the popular conclusion that the Big Three were failures in the domestic specialty market during the Microbrew Revolution.
Open Access
MEXICO '68: AN ANALYSIS OF THE TLATELOLCO MASSACRE AND ITS LEGACY
(University of Oregon, 2005-06) Borden, Kara
On October 2, 1968 the Mexican government massacred hundreds of peaceful protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco plaza. Up to this point, Mexico had not experienced large-scale violence since the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. The government’s authoritarian suppression of the movement surprised people throughout the country. The PRI, the ruling party for decades had stayed in power since the triumph of the Revolution, and viewed demands for reform as a threat to their power. With the opening ceremonies for the 1968 summer Olympic Games slated to begin October 12, the government did not want dissent visible to the international powers, and acted quickly to decapitate the movement. Since protest movements had become commonplace globally throughout 1968, both the demonstrators in Mexico and the government learned from the examples set by other movements like those in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Ultimately, the government chose the Soviet path and attacked its own citizenry. For years after the massacre at Tlatelolco, the event provided a reminder that the PRI government did not truly represent the interests of the populace. As the generation of protestors from 1968 has grown up, they continue to influence the course of politics in Mexico to this day.
Open Access
The natural business of a scientist : the atomic scientists' movement in America
(University of Oregon, 2004-07) Drueding, Katie
This thesis examines the activities and beliefs of a group of scientists, mostly former Manhattan Project workers, who were politically active in the years immediately following WWII. Their organized activities formed what we call the Atomic Scientists' Movement. Through groups including the Federation of American Scientists, the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, and the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, and publications including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, these men and women promoted policies of civilian control of atomic research and some form of international agreement governing the manufacture and use of atomic devices. In spite of frequent requests by their critics to constrain their official opinion to matters of established scientific fact, these movement scientists were either unable or unwilling to make such a distinction: in the years following the war, these scientists claimed expert authority over all things nuclear, whether that be the nuclear laboratory or atomic energy politics. This paper argues that this perspective on science and society is very similar to that explored from the 1960s forward by individuals doing work in the history & sociology of science, or "science studies" and works particularly with the work of Bruno Latour in order to name and explain the issues at work in the scientists' movement's redefinition of a scientist's proper place. The work of the movement scientists provided an entirely new way of thinking and popularized that way of thinking, fifteen to twenty years before those same ideas gained currency in the formal academic world. For those who recognized it, the atomic bomb provided the catalyst for the dissolution of conventional boundaries between science and society: from that point forward, for at least some part of the American public, politics clearly and obviously affected the pursuit of science, and scientists clearly and obviously had relevant perspectives on social issues.
Open Access
Their endless war : the legacy of agent orange and interpretations of the Vietnam veteran's compensation movement, 1978-1984
(University of Oregon, 1999-05) Stern, Justin D.
In the late 1970s, some Vietnam veterans accused the US government of dismissing its obligation to provide them financial and medical compensation for injuries they believed were sustained during the Vietnam War. Veterans and their families argued that exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant sprayed abundantly during the conflict, was responsible for several mysterious illnesses and birth defects. Activist veterans seeking benefits from the government participated in the Agent Orange Compensation movement from 1978-1984. The Movement serves as a historical medium to explore meanings of the Vietnam experience for veterans, their families and America in the decade immediately following the War's ambiguous conclusion. The Agent Orange controversy engaged the nation in a discourse about the legacy of the Vietnam War. The course of this legacy is still not completely charted and will be greatly influenced by the treatment America accords its veterans.
Open Access
Searching for paradise in the rain : Oregon's communes and intentional communities of the 1960s and 1970s
(University Of Oregon, 1997-08) Vanneman, Brian Robert
In the late 1960s, the United States' expanding counterculture gave rise to thousands of communes, or intentional communities, which sprouted up across the nation. Many of these communities chose Oregon to be their new home because of the state's progressive politics and social climate, fertile farmland, and proximity to California, at the time a hotbed of political activism. Magic Farm and Alpha Farm, two Oregon communities described in detail in the thesis, exemplify some of the many approaches to the institutional, economic, and social challenges posed by communal living. Ultimately, the tale of these two settlements explains in part the reasons that some intentional communities continue to prosper even today, while others collapsed in the middle 1970s. Regardless of their final fate, Magic Farm and Alpha Farm, as well as their many companion communities, are part of Oregon's very rich recent history filled with those who have searched for paradise in the rain.
Open Access
The early political philosophy of furst Otto von Bismarck from 1848-1852
(University Of Oregon, 1996-04) Ladd, Anthony Leon
The political philosophy of Bismarck is often imposed from his later career onto his earlier political activities without asking the question of whether or not the political pragmatism he dearly practiced later in his life was an evolution or whether it was always present even in his earliest political activities when he possessed the reputation of being an arch-conservative in Prussian domestic politics. This thesis seeks to understand his early political philosophy through his interaction with the Revolution of 1848, his role in the Reaction and his attitude and political actions towards Austria during his service in the Federal Diet until late 1852.
Open Access
The civil rights movement in Portland, Oregon, 1955-68
(University Of Oregon, 1983-06) Buhler, Julie Lorana
Open Access
The early development of the Serbian and Romanian national movements, 1800-1866 : a comparison
(University of Oregon, 1977-08) Meyer, Martha
Open Access
A history of anti-war activity at the University of Oregon 1964-1970
(University of Oregon, 1977-06) Barnum, Gary
The purpose of this paper is to provide the reader with a chronology and brief description of the rise of anti-war activity on the University of Oregon campus. I feel that a qualitative change can be noted in the demonstrations from 1964 to 1970 and that the activities at the University can serve as a microcosm of the development of anti-war efforts around the nation. This paper should not be the end of study of the development of antiwar activity on this campus. A good causal investigation is yet to be done. I hope that this work can serve as a springboard for studies in the future.
Open Access
The French Communist Party : was its policy from 1939-1941 justified?
(University of Oregon, 1949-05) Wysong, Kathleen Forsythe
Open Access
The National War Referendum
(University of Oregon, 1940-05) Lowry, Philip B.
This analysis is patterned to first picture the historical background of popular participation in government in America; second, to outline the history of the war referendum in America; third, to discuss the referendum as an instrument of popular government; fourth, to scrutinize the negative arguments of the national war referendum; fifth, to seek the positive arguments of a national war amendment; sixth, to show the modifications imposed upon any conclusion because of the workings of allied concepts, namely the realisms of politics and the vicissitudes of public opinion; and lastly, to summarize a conclusion upon the basis of the foregoing facts and analyses. A chapter has been devoted to each of these phases of the issue which is the subject of an interesting and much debated controversy.

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