A declassified 1962 document shows that the Kennedy Administration considered “Operation Northwoods,” a plan to fabricate a terror attack and blame it on the Cuban government in order to legitimize an invasion of Cuba. The Northwoods plan was rejected by President Kennedy. This tactic of faking an attack for political purposes is called a “false flag” attack. Modern conspiracy theorists use Operation Northwoods as evidence that the American government fakes terror attacks in the 21st century, considering attacks such as the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 2018 Parkland shooting to be “false flag” events. I engage with the Operation Northwoods document, detailing its contents and implications. I then analyze the impact of the document in the conspiracy fringe, looking at its reference in various new media spaces, such as the online conspiracy editorial InfoWars and the alt-right social media platform Gab. I find that the power of the Northwoods document is often overestimated and exaggerated on online spaces and that the conspiracy theorists use motivated reasoning to further their belief in conspiracy.  Online spaces allow for the spread of false conspiracy narratives by enabling people with fringe beliefs to connect with each other more effectively. The wide propagation of Northwoods as evidence that major contemporary tragedies are fraudulent is a supreme example of dangerous information which can be spread unchecked online.

Hybrid landscapes are the colonial, regulated plots of land (like reservations), that Native peoples have adapted to ultimately create new senses of Indian self-hood, through their ability to survive and thrive, despite the colonial process that displaces them to those regulated lands. The vanishing Indian narrative is one example of the colonial violence enacted through those regulated spaces as Western institutions and discourses confine Native peoples to notions of the past and primitivity, to ultimately claim that they have vanished in the wake of modernity. And while Western museums have helped perpetuate the vanishing Indian narrative, tribal museums have combated this harmful narrative. Museums, as institutions that present knowledge to the general public, are sites that can present counter-narratives and tribal communities can use these spaces to present proper representations of themselves. One such tribal museum is the site of my research project. The Suquamish Museum is located on the Port Madison Indian Reservation and opened in 1983. This research is interested in how this museum has made, and continues to make, a difference for the Suquamish community and particularly analyzes the Museum’s relationship to the reservation. Over several months I have spent time in the Museum and researched the Museum’s history through its grants, reports, programs, and exhibits. I argue that, as an institution that has continued to adapt to the community’s needs, the Suquamish Museum has facilitated the construction and continued development of the reservation as a hybrid landscape through owned representation as a means of confronting the vanishing Indian narrative, thus perpetuating Native agency and sovereignty. This research is important because looking at the Suquamish tribe as its own entity, with their own representations, addresses the colonial violence that treats all Indigenous peoples as homogenous, unadaptable peoples from the “past,” ultimately highlighting their agency as place-makers.

The nineteenth century saw the British empire rapidly expand around the globe, with the British military facing conflicts in Spain, Crimea, India, Central Asia, and across the African continent. This rapid expansion culminated in the largest of Britain’s many nineteenth century colonial conflicts: the South African War (1899-1902), otherwise referred to as the Second Anglo-Boer War. While Britain had been engaging in military conflicts nearly continuously throughout much of the nineteenth century around the globe, its intelligence apparatus was, at both the strategic and the tactical levels, largely ad hoc and underfunded. Because of this, those in the British military tasked with gathering intelligence regularly relied upon nonmilitary people for intelligence. My research seeks to analyze the structure of British tactical intelligence networks during the South African War, focusing specifically on the British military’s often unacknowledged reliance on people it deemed outside of itself, such as volunteers, prisoners, journalists, and black South Africans to gather and communicate military intelligence. Drawing on primary sources such as newspapers, diaries, parliamentary testimony, and memoirs, I have crafted a view of British tactical intelligence networks during the conflict which focuses on the biases and prejudices which influenced their development and structure, as they simultaneously reified and questioned the dominant racist and sexist hierarchies of the time. I argue that the diverse composition of British tactical intelligence networks in South Africa demonstrates that these networks were intersectional spaces, where politics of race, sex, and knowledge determined the methods by which intelligence was gathered, communicated, and analyzed throughout the war. In contextualizing the tactical intelligence networks of the South African War as intersectional spaces, I seek to demonstrate that the study of intelligence networks in wars of imperial expansion affords a unique opportunity to analyze the relationship between colonial armies and the peoples they fight amongst.

This research project explores the relationship between various business activities of Ezra Meeker, an early white settler of the Pacific Northwest, to illuminate how his identity was shaped by nineteenth-century American business culture. Since Meeker faced both financial and personal failures in his hop and his Klondike business enterprises, both of which were connected through the issues of prohibition, he felt pressured, at least in part due to his business context, to produce a legacy of success. Making extensive use of archival and printed sources, this paper shows how Meeker looked to his pioneer past as the time when he was the most successful, and then used his public memorialization of the Oregon Trail to restore and burnish his own legacy. This project argues that it is only by gaining a deeper understanding of Meeker's business pursuits that we can truly understand his nationally-recognized work of preserving the past. By examinging various responses to Meeker's efforts to reshape his image, this project analyzes Meeker's success in changing his identity and the broader implications thereof. In this way, the paper also sheds light on crucial aspects of American identity, including westward expansion and myths of the West, which people like Meeker and his compatriot Buffalo Bill preserved and perpetuated. This identity is vital to understand since many Americans' perceptions of themselves and their country, as well as their patriotic belief in it, have been built on this understanding of our nation's past.

By the late 1520s, Henry VIII’s lack of a legitimate male heir had led to a succession crisis in England. Eventually this culminated into a procession of legal and scholarly battles broadly referred to as "The Great Matter", which was the quest for the annulment of Henry VIII's first marriage. Criticisms over these proceedings by historians often decontextualize the events of the Great Matter. Moreover, the Great Matter is often portrayed as a vanity project; one that was wholly unnecessary because Henry VIII had a legitimate daughter from his first marriage. There are many flaws with this presentation of history. For one, it ignores most of the historic precedent up to the point of Henry VIII's reign for how female leadership was received, and what that reception could lead to– namely rebellion, usurpation, forced abdication, civil war, and instability. I argue that, rather than a vanity project, the Great Matter was absolutely understandable within the context of the time and place it occurred. I also argue that, rather than the near and distant future proving Henry’s anxiety over the reception of female leadership as unwarranted; such anxiety demonstrated a remarkable sense of awareness and an extraordinary prescience. My research includes the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and a collection of other various primary source quotes relevant to the matter of female succession in the sixteenth century, and the Great Matter in particular. These were analyzed through a social and cultural lens, and also analyzed through contextualization and comparison to later relevant events.

The Internet fundamentally altered what copyright means and how it functions in society. Now anyone who downloads music or uploads videos to YouTube is deeply implicated in the complex set of laws known as copyright. Despite this daily interaction, the public at large is unaware of or even apathetic towards the current copyright system. The question then is why is there a gap between public opinion and understanding of copyright and the copyright legislation itself? To answer this question this research investigates the copyright discourse across time as the internet and thus digital copyright expanded. To do this a discourse analysis was conducted surrounding three different pieces of proposed copyright legislation: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Stop Piracy Online Act (SOPA) and the EU Copyright Directive. The analysis included the bills themselves, congressional/parliamentary hearings, newspaper reporting, statements by supporters/opposition, and online discussion forums. These data were then coded to gauge what the public was informed of and how they were interpreting digital copyright legislation and the impact it would have. Preliminary findings indicate that public awareness of copyright and copyright violations has grown over time, as has concern and involvement by the public in copyright debates. These findings show that as the Internet became more ingrained in people’s day to day lives copyright or at least concern over copyright legislation and the impact it would have on the Internet also became more prevalent. Understanding this discourse and how various parties are interpreting copyright is important because in the digital age copyright is a fight over who gets to control, alter, create, and access content and information. In a world that relies on access to information, the importance of this decision should not be underestimated.

Nearly a century ago, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color (1920) articulated his growing concern that the scourge of racial diversity exacerbated by immigration was particularly acute within the United States. This scourge not only threatened to transform America’s national character in terms of religion, laws, and customs, but also served as a profoundly destructive force to white labor and standards of living. Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policies and the rationale behind them parallel not only Stoddard’s concerns about the threat immigrants pose to the United States, but also Stoddard’s solution of shoring up the “inner dikes” against undesirable immigrants. This study compares the immigration policies of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump to explore issues of border control, detention methods, arrest rates, and use of media in shaping public perception of immigrants. It also utilizes statistical data to assess the economic impact of legal and illegal immigration within the United States under the three presidential administrations listed. Findings suggest that the claims made by the Trump administration about the threat immigration poses not only contradict statistical data, but also perpetuate negative racialized stereotypes about immigrants. By drawing on the basic premise of critical whiteness theory--that race as a social construction is an important feature in American society and includes racialized practices of essentializing, colorblindness, and microaggression—this study provides an example of how Trump’s zero tolerance policies on immigration utilize early twentieth-century narratives of race and racialized differences to institutionally normalize discrimination and prejudice as natural features of American society as opposed to social challenges within it.