Browsing by Subject "borderlands"
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Item Joe Arpaio and the Phenomenon of the 'Toughest Sheriff in America'(2016-11-14) Rizzi, Nicholas D.; Diaz, George T.; Baker, Nancy E.; Phelps, WesleySince first winning election as the Sheriff of Maricopa County in 1992, Joe Arpaio has cultivated an image as the ‘toughest sheriff in America.’ While Sheriff Arpaio has often been the subject of headlines and contemporary journalism, other than a handful of scholarly studies focused upon incarceration methods within Maricopa County, scant historical study has been devoted to Arpaio. The study will examine issues of race, ethnicity, conflict, and cooperation in the borderlands from the seventeenth into the twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the thesis will examine the mystique of law enforcement in the West, before finally exploring the confluence of all these factors that ultimately facilitated the rise, notoriety, and resiliency of Joe Arpaio as the Sheriff of Maricopa County. The research is taken from a combination of primary and secondary sources. The first two chapters rely heavily upon assorted secondary scholarly studies related to law enforcement in the West, race, ethnicity, and intermittent periods of conflict and cooperation in the borderlands. The final two chapters use primary sources ranging from the Arizona Republic, the Phoenix New Times, Arpaio’s two autobiographies, and other periodicals to polling data culled from the Behavior Research Center to examine the tenure of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Although Sheriff Arpaio’s incarceration methods and fixation to undocumented immigration has made him the center of contentious political debates since 1992, the thesis will mostly eschew those disputes. Rather, the thesis will seek to study Arpaio as a historical figure. In total, the thesis will argue factors unique to the borderlands, namely persistent questions of race, the rise of the Sunbelt, conservative politics, contemporary concerns over crime and undocumented immigration buttressed the influence and notoriety of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.Item Persistent borderland: freedom and citizenship in territorial Florida(2009-05-15) Smith, Philip MatthewFlorida?s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.