“The Good Neighbor Comes Home: The State, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and Regional Consciousness during World War II” is a study of how US foreign policy and World War II reshaped the relationship between local, state, and federal agencies and institutions and the Mexican and Mexican American population in the US Southwest. This study relies on archival research and materials from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington, DC, to argue that this change in the relationship between the federal government and the Mexican and Mexican American population led to the emergence of a regional consciousness defined by the problems communities in California, New Mexico, and Texas shared in common across the US Southwest.

The federal government first became interested in the well being of the Mexican and Mexican American population in the US Southwest because of its desire to maintain friendly relations with Latin America during the war emergency. The Good Neighbor Policy was the US foreign policy of non-intervention that promoted a sense of inter-Americanism based on a common American and democratic heritage in the western hemisphere. Both the Good Neighbor Policy and World War II provoked a collective response from local Mexican American leaders and sympathetic allies in the US Southwest: these figures turned inter-American and democratic wartime rhetoric to good account by insisting the federal government include a domestic program in its national diplomacy and security agendas to meet the population’s long-neglected needs. The federal government responded by creating the Spanish Speaking Minority Project within the domestic division of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the federal agency tasked with promoting the Good Neighbor Policy. An informal network of Mexican American leaders, federal bureaucrats, professionals, university administrators, and social scientists worked to bring federal funds into the US Southwest by defining a set of region-wide issues shared by the Mexican and Mexican American population, which contributed to the emergence of a regional consciousness, or an awareness of the problems held in common among Mexican and Mexican American communities in the US Southwest. “The Good Neighbor Comes Home” illustrates how the federal bureaucratic interest in the population emerged, how this interest both departed and continued from the federal government’s earlier interaction with the population, and how non-federal actors in California, New Mexico, and Texas relied upon and reinforced the population’s regional consciousness as they sought to improve Mexican and Mexican American conditions in the US Southwest.

This dissertation identifies Korean international students as immigrants, as conduits of knowledge transfer, and as agents of change. Part of the American Cold War policy was to establish Korea's higher educational institutions with a core group of US-educated people. Figuring prominently in this story is the US government's use of foreign assistance as a diplomatic tool to build its influence abroad. The Korean government readily accepted the aid but imprinted its designs on the American blueprint to reflect its own goal of building a modern nation-state. American universities under contract with the US government assisted the redesign of key departments at Seoul National University (SNU) and the establishment of Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS). Planned as model universities or paradigms for other Korean institutes of higher education, both national institutes became the standard bearers of "modern" knowledge. Both projects favored US-educated Koreans. To this end, the majority of the faculty members in the departments selected for restructuring at SNU was sent to the US to be trained and the overwhelming majority of KAIS' inaugural faculty members held doctoral degrees from the United States. The benefits and prestige associated with an American education in the Korean society contributed to a positive cultural representation of the US as a whole. This caused a growing number of Koreans to immigrate to the US to pursue their studies. These international students were central to Korean American immigration. They were information brokers, the first links to chain migration, and contributors to the changing racial and ethnic make-up of the American population in the twentieth century.

This dissertation analyzes the reasons why Europeans and Americans transformed their winter mountains from dismissed rural landscapes into sunny refuges for elite leisure, recreation, and health before World War II. By focusing on four resorts--Davos, Switzerland; Kitzbühel, Austria; Lake Placid, New York; and Sun Valley, Idaho--this study outlines the genealogy of winter resorts and emphasizes that they were a transnational creation that emerged from the flow of information and people across national borders. Key to this transformation were German tuberculosis treatments, British romantic thought, British sporting traditions, American youth culture, American consumerism, and the economic crises caused by World War I and the Great Depression.

This study has three larger goals. First, it aims to make a contribution to environmental history, which has already documented how a desire for natural resources and an appreciation for natural scenery dictated changes in the environment. My study adds to this literature by illustrating how concerns about health shaped the perception and economic evaluation of the natural world. The study's second objective is to illustrate the role that climate played in affecting cultural and economic developments. Most environmental historians have concentrated only on the fecund months of the calendar when telling their stories. My dissertation, though, examines how people coped with living amidst snow and extreme cold. The third aim of this study is to show that the history of tourism can best be understood in an international context. Historians have produced numerous regional and national histories of tourism, but too few have considered the impact of international travelers on economic and cultural life of local communities.

Northern Plains Borders and the People in Between is a transnational history of colonialism and mixed, mobile indigenous people in the borderlands of the northern Great Plains from 1860 to 1940. Based on archival documents from Canada and the United States, it focuses on social, spatial, political and legal developments. It demonstrates that when American and Canadian militaries invaded, they relied on and targeted mixed indigenous communities. Members of these communities were affiliated with tribes across the region, and moved often and far. As they mixed and moved, they were involved in the many different conflicts that wracked the Northern Plains after 1860, and they physically linked period violence in Canada and the United States. Subsequently, both countries incorporated Plains inhabitants through Indian treaties and state status categories that created mutually-exclusive, spatialized legal classifications—American or Canadian, Sioux or Cree, Métis, Indian, citizen, or alien. These classifications conveyed different rights, and status and rights were tightly tied to particular places, like homesteads, or nations or specific Indian reservations. One’s legal status thus had direct material implications, linking boundaries of race, place, tribe, and band to land.

On both sides of the international line, these social and spatial borders criminalized mixture and mobility. With the concurrent spread of allotment and tribal enrollment, many borderlands indigenes were left stateless—they were excluded from every legal category through which Canada and the U.S. allocated status and rights. This study shows how statelessness flowed through prior racial, tribal and spatial classifications—like enrolled member of the U.S. Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indians. It wasn’t just the international boundary that created indigenous statelessness, but the multi-faceted and layered boundary-making of settler colonialism. For indigenous people, tribal membership boundaries, or enrollment, became the most significant aspect of allotment, both in terms of land loss and in terms of enduring community consequences.

This dissertation concludes that statelessness originated not in overseas imperialism but in the earlier colonization of the continent. It also finds that the most critical implications of statelessness were material: stateless indigenes were not just landless, or homeless, but worse—their mere presence was forbidden everywhere. Legally, they had the right to occupy no place, no space. In this context, people contested their statelessness, pursuing legal status, rights and property into the 20th century. This study maps that ongoing political activity and associated mobility, revealing enduring indigenous geographies in a period when Indian people have been considered politically inactive, and reservation-bound. It shows how, into the 1940s, indigenous mixture and movement entwined Canadian and American histories, making them not just parallel but inseparable. Ultimately, it engages discussions of space, power, violence, law and the state as they relate to histories of borderlands, frontiers, and the West, Native Americans, First Nations, immigration and race.