Dissertation Information for Scott Stabler NAME: - Scott Stabler
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- Arizona State University (USA) (2005)
ADVISORS: - Brooks D. Simpson
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Peter Iverson - Alex Bontemps
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Race, reaction, policy and perception: A tri-cultural study of postbellum America through the life of General O. O. Howard
Abstract: More than thirty years ago Pulitzer Prize winning historian William McFeely called for a "tri-cultural study" of Euro, African, and Native Americans after the Civil War. Realizing the import of a tri-cultural study, this work will contrast these three races and the policy that impacted them in postbellum America (1865-1880) by examining the career of General O. O. Howard. Though the dissertation will concentrate on Howard's postwar career, which reflects much of the government's policy involving race after the Civil War, the point is not just to write a biography of a historically important American. The work is a contextual biography that reveals postbellum similarities in Euro America's attitudes towards newly freed slaves and conquered American Indians involving racism, religion, education, labor, diplomacy, the role of the military, and government policy.
Though the government attempted comparable assimilation initiatives for both African and Native Americans soon after the Civil War, the results were disparate and remain apparent even today. The similarities are numerous. For example, the federal government sponsored missionaries to educate, assimilate, uplift, and evangelize both African Americans and American Indians. Washington sent the U.S. Army to carry out policies both in the South and on the Plains. The federal government took its first steps in initiating a welfare state through the Office of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. These examples and many others form a historical process that has encountered little in the way of tri-cultural historical study.
The study concludes that placing the events of the Reconstruction Era on a continuum with what happened west of the Mississippi River offers a revisionist perspective. Often, in current historical thought, the occurrences in postbellum America divide into two completely divergent eras in history, Reconstruction and westward expansion--which they are not. Research in archives throughout the United States reveals a story about how Euro-American ideals of assimilation were perpetuated on minority races after the Civil War.
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calculated 2008-05-06 19:20:50
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