Michael's responses to the three theses

Michael Gioia

Response to “Race, Memory, And Law in the Tacoma Chinese Expulsion of 1885”

Unterreiner’s thesis aimed to present the history of the Tacoma Chinese Expulsion in the broader context of American racial attitudes following the Civil War. Specifically, the thesis explored how many citizens at the time were simultaneously anti-slave or progressive and also sinophobic. Unterreiner ultimately hoped to connect these sentiments to contemporary legal history and the development of civil rights legislation.

This thesis was largely narrative in structure, which made for an interesting choice in my opinion. Instead of working with an argumentative thread, Unterreiner follows the actions of several protagonists who played roles in the Tacoma Expulsion. I found that Unterreiner succeeded from a stylistic standpoint - the narrative was often gripping and had a nice flow to it, organized well into chapters. At the same time, providing biographical sketches of the principle players made the thesis more compelling. However, I think that focusing on the narrative may have hobbled Unterreiner’s ability to make broader arguments on the legal landscape of the reconstruction era, which was a stated goal of the thesis. Indeed, most of the discussion and analysis of legal history did not occur until the conclusion.

There were also some details that Unterreiner curiously included. For example, the conclusion began with a history of women’s rights to serve on juries, which felt a bit disjointed from other parts of the thesis. However, these details could also add to the piece - I thought that the introduction did a good job of capturing my attention in a creative way, showing the presence of anti-Chinese sentiment in the same era but a difference context.

Response to “Toward a More Perfect World”

I very much enjoyed this paper. I think that partially had to do with my own interest in the way cultural products can reflect the broader attitudes and dilemmas of their historical moment, a theme at the crux of Knowles’s thesis. However, I also thought that the thesis was skillfully written and organized.

Knowles works to track the evolution of the portrayal of violence in the Westerns starring Clint Eastwood and related films. Knowles holds that the portrayal of violence in these movies is not a mere aesthetic choice by the director, but a reflection of larger cultural attitudes that change with time. At first, I was taken aback by the choice of subject - we often wouldn’t think of Clint Eastwood as an object of history, but more a pillar of recent mass culture. Yet Knowles succeeded early on in convincing me of the project’s validity, skillfully connecting cinematic choices with both historical events (ie. the Vietnam War) or cultural/historiographical beliefs (Turner’s Frontier Thesis). My one complaint was that I thought the citations could have been more robust, but I understand the challenges in simultaneously discussing film and citing history scholarship.

The thesis was also a pleasure to read - like Unterreiner’s thesis, it had a logical organization scheme that was broken down well into chapters and easy for me to follow. Knowles also wrote well, capturing my attention with his wording and descriptions of the films he analyzed - sentences like “Against the backdrop of Morricone’s dazzling, operatic score and the piercing whistle of gunfire, violence becomes a stylized spectacle…” made these films and their depiction of violence easy to imagine.

Response to “The Fate of the ‘Negro Republic’’

Dang presents the history of the Santo Domingo affair within the context of changing political attitudes during reconstruction. Dang is especially interested in the voices of African-Americans on the potential annexation of Santo Domingo, and uses the voices of Frederick Douglass and Henry McNeal Turner to explain how differing social contexts led these two individuals to view the Santo Domingo affair differently.

I found the argumentation of the thesis interesting. In effect, Dang uses the Santo Domingo affair to make wider points on the nature of reconstruction and racial attitudes during this period. According to Dang, it would not have been possible for the United States to seriously consider annexing the island republic had it remained committed to Reconstruction and the promises of Union Victory at the close of the Civil War. The Santo Domingo Affair thus represented a shift in government interest from civil rights to expansionists projects.
On the whole, I was convinced by this argument, and I thought Dang worked well in a situation where she had limited sources. While a wider polyphony of African American voices on the affair would have been helpful, I imagine those sources simply don’t exist or are not easily accessible. Dang’s sourcework was otherwise impressive, and I appreciated how she incorporated archival research to shed new light on the attitudes of luminaries on the matter.