The San Francisco Peaks rise to a height of over 12,000 feet on the Colorado Plateau of Northern Arizona. The remnants of an extinct volcano, the Peaks are sacred to thirteen Southwestern Indigenous nations; they are home to the Kachina spirits of the Hopi, and they mark the eastern boundary of Dinétah, the Navajo homeland. For residents of the city of Flagstaff, which lies just south of the Peaks, the mountains are a source of water, a symbol of the community, and a crucial part of the regional economy. In the summer, tourists from the hot deserts of central and southern Arizona are drawn to the Peaks for a respite from temperatures that routinely reach the triple digits. In the winter, the Arizona Snow Bowl ski area, located on the western slope of the Peaks, provides winter recreation that is crucial to the winter economy of Flagstaff. The intersection of Indigenous religion with Flagstaff’s tourist economy, as well as environmental concerns, has made the Peaks a flashpoint for community conflict numerous times over the last half century. This dissertation explores the Hart Prairie Controversy, a conflict over use of the Peaks that began in 1969 when landowner and developer, Bruce Leadbetter, proposed a ski village to be located at Hart Prairie, just 1,000 feet of elevation below the base of the Arizona Snow Bowl. Leadbetter’s plans for a commercial and residential development to support thousands of tourists and newcomers alarmed neighboring landowners, local environmentalists, and Northern Arizona’s tribal nations, especially members of the Hopi and Navajo tribes. For almost a decade, Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors formed a loose coalition, sometimes working together, sometimes with differing aims, to oppose the Snow Bowl Village proposal through appearances at public hearings, statements in the local media, and when necessary, legal action. This dissertation shows the Hart Prairie Controversy as an example of a time when a confluence of social movements and increased legal and political access, especially among American Indians, coalesced to preserve unique spiritual and ecological ground from development and desecration.

This dissertation explores the role transportation infrastructure played in regional and community development in northwestern Arizona from 1882 to 1989. Transportation infrastructure undergirds the economic viability and development of most American regions and communities. In northwestern Arizona, following a process familiar throughout the American West, the initial construction of railroad transportation infrastructure fundamentally transformed the area from sparsely populated space to an industrialized region centered on railroad created townsites. Although critical to regional development and growth, U.S. Route 66 was added well after the initial railroad period. In total, regional transformation occurred in four phases: Railroad, Route 66, I-40, and post-bypass. For regional residents, Route 66 was the most important phase transforming railroad created spaces into functional communities. Yet, despite maturing as communities, each of these towns also struggled with the same racial and class divides as the larger nation. From the early railroad period, through WW2, tourism was present in the region, but an ancillary part of the economy focused on visiting environmental attractions like the Grand Canyon. After WW2, it became more important as regional industrialism faded and traffic levels rose on Route 66. However, as long as Route 66 remained a primary highway, tourism retained its focus on the environment. As much as the construction of transportation infrastructure provided initial access to the region and founded towns, the later regional highway and railroad bypasses cut-off many of these communities from the source of their economic livelihood. Regional towns lucky enough to be integrated into the new interstate highway system like Kingman profited and grew; towns bypassed by the interstate and railroad withered and were forced to reinvent themselves to survive. This post-bypass reinvention took the form of a non-environmental focused mythic tourism connected to an emerging national Route 66 nostalgia movement that envisioned the lost Route 66 as representative of a better, more authentic America. The association with the national Route 66 nostalgia myth successfully attracted tourists but came at the cost of regional communities losing a more realistic understanding of their past and becoming disassociated from their previous community identity.

This dissertation focuses on the development of two communities of women religious beginning in the early nineteenth century: the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, founded in 1812, and the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, who arrived in Ohio in 1829 and became a diocesan community in 1852. Although administratively separate, these two apostolic communities shared a charism of service to the poor in the tradition of St. Vincent de Paul. The history of these two communities demonstrates the overlapping worlds women religious inhabited: their personal faith, their community life, their place in the Catholic Church, and their place in the regions where they lived. These women were often met with admiration as they formed necessary social institutions such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages that provided services to all religious denominations.

Sisters’ active engagement with their local communities defied anti-Catholic stereotypes at the time and created significant public roles for women. The skills needed to create and maintain successful social institutions demonstrate that these women were well-educated, largely self-sufficient, competent fundraisers, and well-liked by the Catholics and Protestants alike that they served. This dissertation argues for the importance of acknowledging and analyzing this tension: as celibate, educated women who used their skills for lifelong public service, the Sisters of Charity were clearly exceptional figures among nineteenth century women, though they did not challenge the gendered hierarchies of their church or American society.

To further understand this tension, this dissertation utilizes several cases studies of conflicts between sisters and their superiors in each community to examine the extent of their influence in deciding their community’s current priorities and planning for the future. These case studies demonstrate that obedience did not have a fixed definition but is better understood instead as dynamic and situational between multiple locations and circumstances. These findings concerning gender, labor, institution and community building, and the growth of American Catholicism highlight the integral role that women and religion played in the antebellum era.

This dissertation analyzes the transformation of noncitizen detention policy in the United States over the twentieth century. For much of that time, official policy remained disconnected from the reality of experiences for those subjected to the detention regime. However, once detention policy changed into its current form, disparities between policy and reality virtually disappeared. This work argues that since its inception in the late nineteenth century to its present manifestations, noncitizen detention policy transformed from a form of exclusion to a method of state-sponsored violence. A new periodization based on detention policy refocuses immigration enforcement into three eras: exclusion, humane, and violent. When official policy became state violence, the regime synchronized with noncitizen experiences in detention marked by pain, suffering, isolation, hopelessness, and death. This violent policy followed the era of humane detentions. From 1954 to 1981, during a time of supposedly benevolent national policies premised on a narrative against de facto detentions, Arizona, and the broader Southwest, continued to detain noncitizens while collecting revenue for housing such federal prisoners. Over time increasing detentions contributed to overcrowding. Those incarcerated naturally reacted against such conditions, where federal, state, and local prisoners coalesced to demand their humanity. Yet, when taxpayers ignored these pleas, an eclectic group of sheriffs, state and local politicians, and prison officials negotiated with federal prisoners, commodifying them for federal revenue. Officials then used federal money to revamp existing facilities and build new ones. Receiving money for federal prisoners was so deeply embedded within the Southwest carceral landscape that it allowed for private prison companies to casually take over these relationships previously held by state actors. When official policy changed in 1981, general detentions were used as deterrence to break the will of asylum seekers. With this change, policy and reality melded. No longer needing the pretext of exclusionary rationales nor the fiction of humane policies, the unencumbered state consolidated its official detention policy with a rationale of deterrence. In other words, violence. Analyzing the devolution of noncitizen detention policy provides key insights to understanding its historical antecedents, how this violent detention regime came to be within the modern carceral state, and its implications for the mass incarceration crisis.