ORCID ID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8039-0648
Date Awarded
2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
History
Advisor
Joshua JP Piker
Committee Member
Carol CS Sheriff
Committee Member
Christopher CG Grasso
Abstract
"To Surrender Their Aspirations and Hopes: Union Visions of a Confederated West." Throughout the early years of the Civil War, Union war advocates wrote extensively on the catastrophic effects that Southern independence would herald for the American West. Predicting violent Confederate expansion, European invasion, and rippling western secessions, Union war advocates believed that if the Confederacy were to achieve its independence, the West would quickly be lost with the South. As they faced widespread disaffection and war-weariness in the North, Republican war advocates sought to use these dire visions of the nation’s Western future to demonstrate the stakes of the Civil War and construct a common cause that could guide Northerners away from comprising and peace with the South. Through extensive research in Union newspaper archives, this paper reveals how pro-war Union writers and politicians used predictions of western catastrophe to counter arguments for peace and defend and expand the war’s prosecution. This paper asserts that the hypothetical West was crucial to American understandings of the war and that debates between war advocates and their pro-peace adversaries often revolved around the question of the West and its future. “Holoholona Hele Hewa: Animals Gone Astray. Sovereignty, Law, and Environment in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.” From their earliest encounters with Europeans, Native Hawaiians puzzled over how to manage stray livestock. Acting as agents of environmental disruption and symbols of European property, wandering livestock presented Native Hawaiians with serious challenges to their sovereignty and governance. In order to confront these challenges, beginning in the 1840s, the Kingdom of Hawaii selectively adopted a number of Anglo-American stray animal regulations, including fence laws, fines on wandering animals, and the establishment of stray animal pounds. Relying largely on the Kingdom’s poundkeeper records, this paper traces how Native Hawaiians navigated the ecological and political consequences of stray animals from 1840 to 1900. While new laws enabled the Kingdom of Hawaii to confront the challenges of stray animals, they also empowered foreign capitalists and provided a surprising institutional foothold for Hawaii’s white planter class to influence Hawaiian land tenure. Both assertions of Hawaiian sovereignty and sites of foreign influence, Hawaii’s estray laws offer a powerful lens from which to view the often paradoxical nature of colonialism in Hawaii in the nineteenth century.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21220/y7rg-y826
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Werner, Kai R., "To Surrender Their Aspirations And Hopes / Animals Gone Astray" (2021). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1638386692.
https://doi.org/10.21220/y7rg-y826
