Jessica Wang

As various social and ecological upheavals of the 1970s laid bare the failed promises of modernity and progress, the living history museum began to take its form as a mode of re-enactment that re-created living processes rather than static, visual tableaus. In particular, living historical farms—reconstructions of farming operations complete with period-appropriate plants, animals, and costumed staff—became central to American historical re-enactment. Guided by the newly formed Association for Living Historical Farms (ALHFAM), the living historical farms movement drew on forms of empirical research to re-create the social and material worlds of the nation’s rural past, which included not only fashioning historically accurate implements, clothing, and buildings, but also period-appropriate plants and livestock. The “backbreeding” program, developed at Old Sturbridge Village in the 1970s, sought to return various types of cattle and sheep to their pre-industrial states in order to complete a three-dimensional historical farming experience and code it as authentic.At once, living historical farm re-enactment resembled the concurrent countercultural “back-to-the-land” communes that had emerged throughout the 1960s and 70s: both offered a return to small-scale systems of production on the land as well as operated within, as scholars have argued, a new mode of historical consciousness that championed immersive and sensory engagements with the past. However, as this these argues, the living historical farm movement and, in particular, the practice of backbreeding, embodied both the counterculturalism of the 1970s and the “empiricist” research culture and state and institutional power of the 1950s and 60s. It was not simply that the elite, state-centered motives that led to the beginning of backbreeding and living farms were completely subverted by a new generation of practitioners focused on subjectivity, embodied experience, and the collapsing of past and present. Rather, these two modes of historical thinking were entangled through the practice of backbreeding and the intensive focus on the biological, which indeed defined living historical farms. This thesis, then, urges a closer look at the intersections of science, technology, and animals with the forms of history-based cultural production that emerged around living history museums in the 1970s.

View record

This thesis studies the intersection of ecology, urban planning and systems science in the Inter-Institutional Policy Simulator (IIPS) project between 1970 and 1974. I examine the project in the milieu of the popular environmental movements and its challenges to the established political and scientific authority in North America. While previous scholarship in the history of ecology has illustrated the Cold War’s influence on the “systems ecology” research programme and its focus on computer simulation and mathematical models, this thesis examines how ecologists extended their discipline from the management of natural ecosystems to planning for “urban systems.” By investigating the networking strategy of ecologists and urban planners, the first part of my thesis studies the rise and fall of IIPS as the interaction between “IIPS the Platform” and “IIPS the Product,” or between the network of experts and the simulator they aimed to create. Although IIPS failed to create a product capable of simulating the urban dynamics of Vancouver, it nevertheless exemplified the efforts of ecologists and urban modellers to address the social challenges in the early 1970s. The second part of my thesis concentrates on the public programs led by project members, in which the experts attempted to reformulate the relationship between technoscience and the public through a variety of educational and participatory events. I argue that the value of IIPS was its contribution to the reimagination of information technology and systems science in an era of environmental anxiety and social transformation, and suggest that the experience of the project can offer critical insights into contemporary questions concerning scientists’ roles in a challenging socio-political context.

View record

This thesis utilizes extensive archival material from the University of Oregon to argue that the Philippine Constabulary, founded by the US government in 1901, conducted important anthropological research on the Islands during the early period of American colonial rule. While previous scholarship has examined the importance of anthropology and the Constabulary in the consolidation and operation of American overseas empire, no study has yet significantly considered the linkages between them and the impact that this partnership may have had on the nature of American colonial rule. This thesis argues that anthropology provided a framework through which the white, male, American officers of the Constabulary could understand their experiences leading and policing racial others, and this provided both guidance and justification for their actions as imperial agents.This thesis uses personal records and mementos left behind by Constabulary officers to uncover the ways in which these men engaged with and employed anthropological ideas daily in their work policing the Islands. As the colonial agents most frequently in contact with the inhabitants of the Islands, the anthropological work conducted by officers in many ways played a more crucial role in the day-to-day governance of the Islands than that done by colonial officials far removed from the peoples they governed. As such, this thesis brings to the forefront the integral role that early-twentieth-century science, through its alliance with colonial policing, played in not just justifying but in actually undertaking American empire. Through an examination of the beliefs and actions of the individual men who served as officers in the Philippine Constabulary, this thesis uncovers a hitherto understudied aspect of American empire in the Philippines and, in doing so, expands our understanding of exactly what American empire meant at the beginning of the twentieth century.

View record

This essay examines the invention of national security in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas previously Americans spoke of ‘national defense,’ by 1945 ‘national security’ became common parlance and Washington began building the national security state. I argue that a group of social scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study called the Princeton Military Studies Group spurred this shift. Led by Edward Mead Earle, members of the group projected geopolitical anxieties—about global economic instability, the failures of the Versailles system, and the rise of totalitarianism—inward on to the United States and helped develop the institutional role of the defense intellectual, construct the cold war university, make citizens into manpower, and popularize geopolitical thinking. Most consequentially, they created a novel way of imagining and speaking about the world. We are the heirs of their national security imagination.

View record

Studies of the relationship between American law and Chinese migrants in the nineteenth century have focused upon the legal, administrative, and social effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), elite merchant use of contract law, and the failure of law enforcement to address or prevent mass anti-Chinese violence by whites in the mid-1880s. The literature has neglected, however, detailed inquiry into the practices of everyday law, or the legal resolutions of mundane, small stakes conflicts in specific local contexts. For Port Townsend, Washington Territory, study of the practice of law during the territorial period reveals that in this locality, Chinese litigants of transient or labourer status could access the court to recoup unpaid debts and, rarely, to redress instances of everyday violence. The professionals of the courts - judges, clerks, and lawyers - as well as juries of whites from the community, all regularly granted Chinese defendants and litigants their rights to testimony and due process throughout the territorial period. This is significant because the court system granted the rights even during moments of anti-Chinese political power, which shielded some defendants from the effects of racially targeted municipal ordinances. The evidence also shows that coercive and punitive aspects of migrant-official legal relations, including the refusal to grant a defendant's rights, did not enter into other areas of law beyond the charges under the Exclusion Act. It is also significant because indigenous peoples in Washington Territory (and, in Port Townsend itself, the Klallam and Chimakum) consistently endured far fewer rights and rights which changed more drastically within the American legal system at the same time, thus signalling that white Americans judged Chinese to be more like themselves than indigenous peoples. The unenthusiastic efforts of law enforcement to punish everyday violence against Chinese victims, however, shows that whites did not consider Chinese victims worth protecting except in cases where community actions clearly sanctioned official action.

View record

In 1980, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made its first serious pitch to Congress in support of a permanently manned outpost in low earth orbit. Their initial case for the program’s necessity heavily relied on Cold War logics and military thinking, with international participation functioning as a mere afterthought. Although NASA and its foreign partners now flaunt the evidence of their successful cooperation, the internationalism inherent in the station’s current name and form was the result of station development, not the initial goal of NASA officials. Two major shifts defined NASA’s treatment of the space station over the course of its development. The first was a turn away from collaboration with the military. For previous projects, such as the space shuttle program, NASA had depended on military backing to justify the expense of human spaceflight to Congress. This military backing ensured that NASA’s interactions with international agencies remained shallow. The shift away from the military which occurred with the space station revealed the tension between NASA’s civilian nature and its military ties, and proved the turning point in NASA’s evolution into a truly civilian agency. Of all the international partners, Japan’s involvement was crucial to the changes which took place at NASA through the space station program as, in the moment of truth, Japan’s strident objections to the possibility of Pentagon contributions made military and international involvements incompatible. The second change was a transition towards more substantial international collaborations with foreign space agencies, which NASA increasingly saw as crucial to the success of the project and as a replacement for military backing before Congress. This paper argues that this increasing focus on the international aspects of the space station was driven by the cooling of the relationship between NASA and the military, which left NASA scrambling for funding and supporters for the space station. It was the domestic political situation, not a sense of internationalism, which compelled the internationalization of both the station and the agency.

View record

After the Paris Peace Agreement formally ended America’s involvement in the Vietnam war in January 1973, there still remained the unsettled issue of Cambodia, embroiled in a civil war between a coalition of insurgents (including the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communist party destined for infamy) and an American-backed regime in Phnom Penh. In the months between the Paris Agreement and the US Congress’ forced cessation of American military activities in August 1973, the Nixon administration sought a diplomatic solution to its Cambodian problem, but the details of this period remain contested. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s top diplomat, has consistently maintainedthat he was engaged in delicate negotiations with his counterparts in Hanoi and Beijing inan attempt to broker a settlement between the warring Cambodian factions, but that Congress’ actions deprived him of the necessary leverage to bring it to fruition; that Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge, therefore, was Congress’ responsibility, and not the administration’s. Using primary documents that have become available in recent years, it is now possible to test Kissinger’s claims by partially reconstructing the diplomatic activity that took place in the corridors of power in Hanoi, Beijing, Paris andWashington. Examination of the available record indicates that Kissinger’s claims aredisingenuous at best; although he did have extended discussions with Le Duc Tho, ZhouEnlai and others about the Cambodian issue, these talks were tedious, repetitive and notconducive to any kind of breakthrough. Moreover, upon scrutiny, Kissinger’s interlocutors appeared to be sending subtle messages to the Americans that the solution to the Cambodian problem was to be found through direct contact with the insurgency, rather than through Beijing or Hanoi. These signals were, however, ignored by adiplomatic crew that, despite Kissinger’s reputation for strategic brilliance, provedunimaginative and obstinate, with tragic results for the Cambodian people.

View record