Browsing by Author "Hall, Randal"

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    Environmental Control in Appalachia: Politics of the Red River Gorge Dam Controversy, 1962-1975
    (Rice University, 2022-03-30) Cook, Kamil; Hall, Randal
    In 1962, Congress approved the building of a dam on the Red River in Eastern Kentucky because of recurring floods affecting Powell County, Kentucky. This dam threatened a beautiful and ecologically unique part of the Red River, and, in response, in 1967 a group of environmental activists gathered together to challenge the building of this dam. After a contracted battle involving the Army Corps of Engineers, environmental activists, politicians, and local people, the dam was never built. Along with chronicling this controversy, my thesis explores the changing conceptions of the environment through the 1960s and 1970s and illustrates that Appalachian environmental activism not only existed, but was contemporary with national movements. I do this with the support of newspapers, letters, legal records, bureaucratic reports and more gathered from the Red River Gorge archive at the University of Kentucky and an online newspaper database.
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    Headwaters of Empire: Landscapes of Power and Refuge in the Tennessee Valley, 1794–1870
    (2023-04-17) Crum, John Mayer; Hall, Randal
    Headwaters of Empire explores how conflicting claims to sovereignty transformed Appalachian environments and shaped the exercise of state power in nineteenth-century North America. The expansion of U.S. empire into the Tennessee Valley coincided with a frenzy for state-building and new projects of republican governance. This dissertation shows that these competing claimants to sovereignty envisioned the creation of a governable and productive landscape in this region, which had a long history as a corridor for migration, trade, and warfare linking the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi Valley. Over the course of seventy years—roughly a single human lifetime—many groups, including Federal authorities; settlers and speculators; Cherokee nationalists; slaveholders and abolitionists; and Unionists and Confederates vied to control the land, what commodities it would grow, whose labor would work it, and who would profit from its transformation. Drawing on government records, military correspondence, surveys, and land office records, Headwaters of Empire maps these competing efforts to govern the nonhuman world, and explores the limits of state power in an environment hostile to its efficient operation. And through analyses of missionary records, family papers, newspapers, legal documents, and travelers’ accounts, it shows how local people responded to these claims to power in diverse ways, debating questions of sovereignty, nationhood, and their relationships with a more-than-human world. This dissertation reveals the creation of intersecting landscapes in the watersheds of the Tennessee and Coosa rivers— landscapes of state power that expanded the reach of coercive violence, and counter-landscapes of state evasion where the communities that bore the brunt of that violence maintained spaces of refuge and resistance. Exploring the ecological effects of settler colonialism across traditional boundaries of periodization in U.S. history, Headwaters of Empire also connects this local and regional story to hemispheric and global environmental histories that investigate how empire- making drove ecological change at a planetary scale in the nineteenth century and beyond.
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    Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
    (Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences
    In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.