Browsing by Department "History"

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A Conference on the History and Legacy of the 1919 Canales Investigation in Texas
History; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/552; National Endowment for the Humanities
CESU-Researching Indigenous Communities along El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail in Central and Southwest Texas
History; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/373; DOI-National Park Service
Project Summary The purpose of the project is to complete a well-documented narrative history of the indigenous populations that lived in the vicinity of the Camino Real de los Tejas from Coahuila to Central Texas from the era of the first entradas to the 1820s, when Spanish rule ended. Specifically, the research will identify the various groups of Native Americans, their locations and movement within Northeast New Spain and Texas corridor, and their interactions with each other and with the Europeans with whom they made contact. It will examine their impact on the Camino Real as their communities evolved over time. It will also assess how indigenous groups adapted to the changes brought about by the presence and interactions with Europeans, determining what folkways and traditions they may have incorporated as a result of those interactions. The research will also address the matter of whether these indigenous peoples persisted and in what locations after Spanish rule. Project Background In 2004 the Tejas Camino was designated a National Historic Trail. In recognition of the trail’s significance to both the U.S. and Mexico, the trail’s enabling legislation authorizes cooperation among the United States and Mexican entities “for the purpose of exchanging trail information and research; fostering trail preservation and education programs; providing technical assistance, and working to establish an international historic trail with complementary preservation and education programs in each nation.” Since Congress established this NHT in 2004, the NPS and its partners have done considerable work to document the role of Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans along this trail. Additional work is needed, however, to adequately ascertain the role that indigenous peoples played along this trail corridor. The Tejas Camino was blazed in the late 1600s and remained active for more than 150 years as the primary overland route between present-day Mexico and Louisiana. Routes used by Spanish explorers typically followed this route, which previously had been a series of Indian trails and trade routes. All along this route were once located Indian villages and other evidence denoting Native lifeways, but the various Spanish entradas eventually absorbed those populations, rendering them largely invisible by the mid-19th century. Project Goals The project seeks to fill a significant gap in our knowledge about the indigenous populations that lived along the Tejas Camino. Although researchers know a great deal about the indigenous groups in East Texas and Louisiana, there is a gap in knowledge about those that lived in the vicinity of the trail in southwest and central Texas, specifically between the Rio Grande and the Brazos River, as well as adjacent areas in what is now northeastern Mexico. In keeping with the national historic trail’s enabling legislation, the final narrative will be shared with trail partners in the US and Mexico to support current and future trail initiates.
Tolerant Expansion: When England Established American Religious Diversity 1660-1688
History; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/684; National Endowment for the Humanities
Writing to complete a book about the development of American religious pluralism and colonial British policy and practice of toleration from 1660 to 1688. My book studies the politics of religious toleration in England and its emerging empire in the key period of the second half of the seventeenth century to explain how religious pluralism became so deeply rooted in colonial American society as to make a national religious establishment impossible by the American Revolution. Using a mix of local and official imperial records, its chapters examine the creation of new colonies (especially the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), the laws regulating religion in them, the challenges to pluralism in both the new and existing colonies, and the contrast between theories developed at the imperial center and their implementation on the colonial periphery to demonstrate the ambivalent character of colonial pluralism. My ultimate argument is that America’s path to religious freedom was unsteady, depended heavily on anti-democratic English politics, and intersected with growing inequalities like slavery and dispossession.
U.S. Army Center for Military History Internship
History; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/525; DOD-Army-U.S. Army Center of Military History
Expanding the Design Scope of Organic Optoelectronic Materials through Quinoidal Ladder-Type Constitution. This research plan seeks to expand the fundamental principles of energy level engineering of π-conjugated macromolecules, testing the hypothesis that incorporation of quinoidal constitution and ladder-type backbone into organic materials can tailor their energy level and bandgap to reach superior optoelectronic performances. Accomplishment of this project will significantly broaden our scope of design on functional organic-systems, affording opportunities for the development of novel polymer materials possessing unprecedented optoelectronic performances, particularly in photovoltaic devices. Energy level engineering of the frontier orbitals represents the core effort in the research of organic electronic materials. The prevailing strategies to tailor energy levels and bandgaps, however, often manipulate only one or two individual tunable parameters, among a number of assorted factors. The lack of a general and integrated approach to control the electronic structures has been one of the main challenges for the related research fields, leading to inherent issues such as narrow scope of building blocks, unpredictable properties, limited window of material functions, and demanding chemical synthesis, etc. Consequently, the practical development of functional organic electronic materials are severely restricted and hampered. Herein we plan to develop an integrated approach that incorporates additional dimensions of structural design to address this grand challenge, achieving the ability of synergistic manipulation of assorted parameters impacting the electronic performances of organic electronic materials. The research plan is composed of three interwoven and iterative phases: In Phase I, model organic materials featuring quinoidal ladder type constitution will be designed and synthesized on the basis of our preliminary results. These materials include quinoidal full ladder polymers, step-ladder polymers, and n-type small molecules. The purpose of this phase is to demonstrate the feasibility of materials production and to provide a library of materials with rational design for the subsequent investigations. In Phase II, solution phase properties of these compounds will be characterized in order to establish a comprehensive relationship between the unique structural features of these compounds with their intrinsic electronic structures. Fundamental knowledge that guides the future expansion of molecular design scope will be obtained in this phase. In Phase III, process engineering and solid-state investigation on selected lead candidate compounds will be performed, focusing on the characters closely-related to photovoltaic device performances. These data will provide feedback for the structural design and property correlation in Phase I and II. Overall, through these iterative phases of research, we will interrogate the aforementioned fundamental hypothesis, establish the integrated design principles, and develop prototype high performance materials for optoelectronic applications.