The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

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 project considers how canal construction was a means for the Canadas and the United States to compete with each other, whether economically or militaristically. I examine canals built from 1815- 1835, the heart of the historiographical “Canal Age,” in the State of New York and the Saint Lawrence Lowlands, specifically the Rideau Canal, the Erie Canal, the Lachine Canal, and the Welland Canal. I argue that geopolitical anxieties and economic competition between the Canadas and the United States engendered canal construction in both nations. Part I discusses the Rideau Canal’s purpose to alleviate British military dependency on the Saint Lawrence. Part II pivots to New York, where I frame the Erie Canal as a tactic by New York business and government interests to deprive Montreal of its geographic monopoly as the sole connection between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. Part III analyzes the Lachine Canal as Montreal’s economic response to the existential threat the Erie Canal posed to its businesses. Part IV complicates the previous emphasis on militaristic and economic competition to explore moments of international cooperation during the construction of the Welland Canal.

Throughout the American Civil War, the administration of President Abraham Lincoln used military commissions in an unprecedented fashion to prosecute civilians from Northern and Border states, and those from Union-occupied Southern states on charges of disloyal speech. Analyzing records of the military commissions from the National Archives, this paper reassesses the role of the commissions and the trials concerning disloyal speech in particular to evaluate the political character of the Civil War tribunals. By comparing cases of disloyal speech in which the defendant resided in loyal states with those in which the defendant came from seceded Southern states, this paper argues that civilians within the Union prosecuted by Northern and Border state commissions were essentially treated the same as Confederates prosecuted by Southern commissions convened in occupied territories. By using the same legal system to try civilians in ostensibly loyal states as was used in disloyal states, the Lincoln administration blurred the lines of assumed loyalty and disloyalty. In doing so, the government stigmatized civilian defendants from the Union by equating them with secessionists. That stigma was made more obvious when those found guilty were expelled from within the Union. These trials and judgements were political acts that redefined conceptions of loyalty and speech during a time of disunity and war, illuminating the ways in which the military commissions during the Civil War were themselves political.

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 thesis of the paper is to highlight the evolution of California water law from native occupancy to modern times. The argument is displayed through the evolution of the San Joaquin Valley and shows how businesses from the start began formulating California water laws to benefit them disregarding what happened to co-operations and family farms. Second, the paper highlights native perspectives by showcasing how native land was seized and uncover ignored histories in the valley. The transformation of the utopian description of the valley compared to the parceled-out flat land we see today is physical evidence of the impact that agribusiness has had on the valley. Split into three parts, the first discusses native history in the area showcasing how colonization affected the valley by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans. The second examines the gold rush and the adoption of private ownership compared to other methods of acquiring both gold and water. The third section highlights how the implication from the last section creates an arena that benefits larger businesses.

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?