Browsing by Subject "Indiana history"
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item “An Act of Tardy Justice”: The Story of Women’s Suffrage in Indiana(2019) Morgan, Anita; History, School of Liberal ArtsItem The Eugenic Origins of Indiana's Muscatatuck Colony: 1920-2005(2020-09) Bragg, Abigail Nicole; Nelson, Elizabeth; Morgan, Anita; Cramer, KevinThis thesis examines the widely unknown history and origins of Muscatatuck Colony, located in Butlerville, Indiana. The national eugenics movement impacted the United States politically, medically, legally, and socially. While the United States established mental institutions prior to the eugenics movement, many institutions, including ones in Indiana, were founded as eugenic tools to advance the agenda of achieving a “purer” society. Muscatatuck was one such state institution founded during this national movement. I explore various elements that made the national eugenics movement effective, how Indiana helped advance the movement, and how all these elements impacted Muscatatuck’s founding. I investigate the language used to describe people that were considered “mentally inferior,” specifically who the “feeble-minded” were and how Americans were grouped into this category. I research commonly held beliefs by eugenicists of this time-period, eugenic methods implemented, and how these discussions and actions led to the establishment of Muscatatuck in 1920. Muscatatuck Colony, though a byproduct of the national eugenics movement, outlived this scientific effort. Toward the mid and late twentieth century, Muscatatuck leadership executed institutional change to best reflect American society’s evolving thoughts on mental health and how best to treat people with mental disabilities. Muscatatuck Colony reveals a complicated narrative of how best to treat or care for people within these institutions, a complex narrative that many mental institutions share.Item Multi-Generational Memory in Indiana: Oral History and the Use of Descendant Testimony in Holocaust Education(2025-01) Lawson, Ellie Audrey; Haberski, Raymond, Jr.; Kelly, Jason M.; Silverman, Lois H.The year 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. In the genocide’s aftermath, the state of Indiana became home to Holocaust survivors and – with time – their descendants. Indiana offered survivors a place to rebuild their lives. Unfortunately, our collective understanding of Indiana’s survivor population, their Holocaust experience, and lives in Indiana, has yet to be studied. The most significant challenge preventing that understanding is the lack of collection and accessibility to primary sources from survivors in Indiana public history institutions, namely oral histories. We must now – as a fast-approaching post-witness era arrives – investigate new opportunities to document the history of the Holocaust and its impact on Hoosiers. In this paper, I argue descendants of survivors can bridge the memory of the Holocaust to how Indiana can memorialize the Holocaust. The project, and this paper, centers around five second and third generation descendants and their recorded testimonies. By utilizing oral histories as a mechanism for documentation and storytelling, their testimonies offer an opportunity to strengthen Indiana’s historical record and Holocaust education. This paper identifies the process of conducting an oral history project including the scholarship which informs it and logistical preparation to record and preserve five oral histories. In the analysis of the project’s testimonies, themes of multi-generational trauma, memorialization of survivor ancestors, and identities of descendants illuminate the significant contributions of this project not only to Indiana’s memory, but rightfully adding to the growing studies on descendants in Holocaust studies and education across the United States. This paper provides a concise survey of the state of Holocaust education in Indiana and public history institutions who contribute to it. By identifying the contributions, the limitations of Holocaust education in Indiana – notably inaccessible collections of survivor testimony – prevent Hoosiers to participate in meaningful education and memorialization of Indiana’s survivor population. The project offers a foundation by filling a gap in Indiana’s historical record about the Holocaust and providing accessible, ready-to-use oral histories Indiana’s historians, educators, and the public can integrate in local efforts to teach, learn, and memorialize the Holocaust and Indiana’s survivors.Item Systemic Anti-Black Violence in Indiana: A Digital Public History Wikipedia Project(2022-07) Hellmich, Madeline Mae; Shrum, Rebecca K.; Tandy, Kisha; Robertson, Nancy MarieThe most recent racial justice movement that emerged in the United States beginning in the summer of 2020 in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd laid bare the overdue need to revisit white America’s legacy of racist violence against its Black citizens. Historians can help bridge the gap between past and present and urge more Americans to identify and confront racial violence. As a born-and-raised Hoosier, I wanted to contribute to social change and racial justice at home. The historical silence on the history of racist violence in Indiana supports the myth that Indiana was a free state where Black citizens found refuge from the racist violence they experienced in the South; thousands of primary source newspapers containing details of white perpetrators lynching and violently attacking Black Hoosiers refute this myth. This paper identifies white perpetrators’ acts of anti-Black violence and Black Hoosiers resistance to anti-Black violence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis of racial violence in Indiana shows that white perpetrators employed violence in defense of white supremacy and that Black Hoosiers resisted anti-Black violence and white supremacy. The record indicates that racial terrorism has been embedded in the fabric of Indiana since its founding. Grassroots efforts, such as the Facing Injustice Project’s work to acknowledge the 1901 lynching of George Ward in Terre Haute, Indiana, are starting to recognize the harm white Hoosiers did to Black Hoosiers and bring repair to victims’ descendants and communities. More public history projects are needed to engage all Hoosiers in reckoning with the history of anti-Black violence. Activists and organizations have shown that Wikipedia is one digital institution where anyone can do the work of rooting out inequalities and injustices. This digital public history Wikipedia project challenges the historical silence on Indiana’s racially violent past by telling the truth about the history on one of the most-visited websites in the world. Using Wikipedia to do public history invites Hoosiers of all backgrounds to take up the work of acknowledging Indiana’s history of anti-Black violence, updating the historic record, and reevaluating the narrative constantly.Item Taking It to the Streets: Hoosier Women’s Suffrage Automobile Tour(2019-07) Morgan, Anita; History, School of Liberal ArtsItem Tending the Soil: Assessing Research Trends for Indiana's Civil War Era(Ohio Valley History, 2011-09) Towne, Stephen E., 1961-