The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

Through the early 1970s, Ventura County, California, witnessed an unprecedented rise in Ku Klux Klan activity. While earlier incarnations of the Klan predominantly targeted Mexican, male farmworkers, this latest iteration expanded their scope to target a growing population of people of color in the area. As their attacks and local presence increased, their actions became widely publicized with local newspapers rushing to print their stories. Reporters regularly worked with local Klan leaders in their publications, from including short statements to publishing entire interviews. Through the work of local and national newspapers, the group’s intentions and ideologies became well-documented and integrated into social discourse, leading to a distinct naturalization from the mainstream media. The Klan simultaneously received routine empowerment through the actions of local and federal institutions. Despite the Klan’s notorious reputation, the government legitimized them as an organization by granting them permits to put on public displays of hate and allowing them to hold mass gatherings. This paper examines these ways that the Klan gained power through an analysis of their treatment by the mainstream media throughout the late 20th century. It further juxtaposes their press coverage and institutional treatment to that of anti-racist groups in the area, revealing an intersection of Klan power. While there is a distinct emphasis on the Oxnard Klan Riot of 1978, a core event in California nativist history, this paper’s focus expands across numerous cities in Southern California to uncover patterns of societal integration.

My research aims to better understand the federal government’s role in addressing educational disparities by studying the impact of two of LBJ’s Great Society policy programs, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, on the desegregation of public schools in Rural Mississippi. It examines the state's resistance to integration from Brown v. Board of Education to the mid-1960s to analyze the structural factors that delayed integration and then moves into studying both the motives behind the policies and their implementation in Rural Mississippi. Ultimately, I found that the desegregation plans the federal government prescribed, many of which only called for “Freedom of Choice” or only desegregated two grades, were ineffective. Reasons for this include historical structural barriers, a lack of manpower in Washington, D.C. actually to enforce integration, and too much delegation of authority to the Mississippi State Office of Education. This resulted in the misallocation and misuse of millions of dollars that were intended to address rural poverty. While these Great Society programs began the process of desegregation in rural Mississippi schools after years of delays, which was no small feat, they were largely unsuccessful in achieving their goals, and educational disparities still dominate education in the state today.

This article examines the recollection of Qin demise memories of medieval Chinese elites, arguing that they took the “Qin demise” notion as a means to achieve their respective political agendas. The Qin dynasty was the first empire that accomplished the unification of all-under-heaven in Chinese history; however, it collapsed in fifteen years. When analysing the causes of the Qin collapse, a controversial question catches enduring attention: To what extent does the system of administration account for the Qin demise? This question has led to an unsettled debate over the respective merits of the investiture- and commandery-county systems among Chinese literati for more than two millennia. This paper historicizes the debate about administrative system from Wei to mid-Tang, during which transitions of regimes occurred frequently. To examine this debate, the discourses of five intellectuals are chosen chronologically. By studying their memories pertaining to the reasons behind the Qin demise, this paper compares their attitudes to different administrative institutions and attempts to explain the underlying ideologies and historical backgrounds. In the end, I will present a unique mnemonic pattern across time, based on the elites’ discourses.

In this paper, I will investigate four key questions relating to the rhetoric used to talk about Irish unmarried Mothers and their experiences. How did the rhetoric of the Catholic Church characterize the unmarried mother and influence her treatment? How did the state initially speak about unmarried mothers and did Catholicism influence this diction? How did this written description in law shape the experience of mothers like Mary? How do statements made in the Final Report of the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes continue this legacy of demeaning government reference to the unmarried mother? I will bring together the social and legal history through analysis of social discourse and subsequent laws. I will attempt to answer this using evidence from the Irish Government’s archive, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, and publicly available witness statements. Analysis of primary sources, with these questions in mind, highlights a planned home system justified through demeaning characterization of the unmarried mother in religious and government communications.

In the early nineteenth century, the Transatlantic Slave Trade was in a period of rapid transformation. Britain’s abolition of its own slave trade in 1807, and active British attempts to suppress the trade in the following years, caused massive shifts in the patterns of the trade. Slave traders developed new methods to maximize profits in an increasingly dangerous business, while the British navy and parliament debated how to deal with recaptured slaves. Caught in the middle of these struggles were the more than one million people sold into slavery from 1807 to 1869. This study attempts to retrace, in as much detail as possible, the lives of 437 of them: the shipmates of the Ana Maria, who were “freed” by a British vessel in 1821 and resettled in the colony of Sierra Leone. Drawing on accounts of the Ana Maria’s voyage and capture, firsthand descriptions of life in Sierra Leone, and secondary sources, this paper follows the shipmates’ attempts to develop new identities and communal strategies in the face of intense hardship. Additionally, it brings into focus the highly ambiguous legacies of Britain’s “war against the slave trade.” Despite its humanitarian mission, racism, a shortage of funds, and a strong cultural belief in the enlightening power of Christianity and hard labor created a harshly policed and desperately unsafe colonial regime in Sierra Leone that replicated many of the conditions of slavery in the Americas.

On a dreary May day in Washington D.C. in 1972, 10,000 people took to the streets despite the drizzle. They were protesting what they saw as an out-of-control Supreme Court that had undermined and betrayed America. They denounced the Court for “banning” God and His word from schools. By reversing the Court’s decision to take God out of schools, the 10,000 protestors believed America could be saved from “the disaster of dope” engulfing the country. The feeling that the Supreme Court had betrayed and undermined its duty to uphold white supremacy, the alleged religious nature of America, and the Constitution is what compelled most conservatives to anathematize the institution.

This article examines the conservative reaction to five cases: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Engel vs. Vitale (1962), Abington vs. Schempp (1963), Roe v. Wade (1973), and Bob Jones University vs. United States (1983). By examining these cases together, the role of emotion in shaping political behavior is evident. We see common rhetorical tropes about the Court’s betrayal of America repeated in all of these cases. We also see how the rhetoric of betrayal and subversion circulated among different factions of conservatism. A caveat for my thesis is that most of my sources came from non-scholars who may have relied on emotional rhetoric more than their scholarly counterparts. However, even if this is true, the words of angry conservatives in journals from the Atlantic to the Christian Beacon show an important and understudied thread of anti-Court rhetoric.

This paper, which compared and contrasted the various characteristics of the Qin empire in two computer games, tried to find the connection between the empire’s ruling ideology and its multi-aspect effects displayed in turn-based strategy games. With a closer look at Strategy games, readers may find how Qin’s ruling ideology- the legalism that emphasizes “agriculture and war” was a powerful engine for Qin’s conquering performance in both history and strategy games. Besides specific features in the games, readers may also find the interaction between players and their virtual empire echoes the sense of “oneness” within the legalist political blueprint.

The Cherokee Nation of present-day Oklahoma adopted Euroamerican practices of slaveholding in the late 18th century to demonstrate to white Europeans that they were deserving of legitimate and respected citizenship in the United States. In the early 1800s, the Cherokee faced pressures to cede their lands, but even this became widely contested by anti-removalists. Though abolitionists’ main objective was to bring about the end of slavery, they also respected the Indigenous peoples living in North America and were active participants in the struggle for the rights of Indigenous tribes. This contradiction calls to question the political dispositions of anti-removalist abolitionists. How did Northern abolitionists reconcile their support of Cherokee Civil Rights with Cherokee slaveholding practices? Did abolitionists of the mid-1800s struggle with conflicting sentiments surrounding the slaveholding practices of the Cherokee?