From Borderland to Southern Land: The Changing Landscape of the Sabine River Valley, 1800–1877
| dc.contributor.advisor | McDaniel, W. Caleb | en_US |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Hall, Randal L. | en_US |
| dc.creator | Kisner, Bryson | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-08-30T18:29:16Z | en_US |
| dc.date.created | 2024-08 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-08-06 | en_US |
| dc.date.submitted | August 2024 | en_US |
| dc.date.updated | 2024-08-30T18:29:16Z | en_US |
| dc.description | EMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2030-08-01 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Between 1800 and 1877, human-environment relationships underpinned the geopolitical and economic changes to the Sabine River Valley. Respectively, these changes were the bordering of multi-polity borderlands and the transition from a pericapitalist (capital-connected) economy to a more capitalist one. Anglo-American settlers and their nation-states, hoping to make the watershed part of the plantation-based landscape of the U.S. South, altered the river valley to effect these changes. The basin, however, was not entirely transformed. Significant portions of the river valley were resistant to plantation landscapes’ imposition. Instead, these environments preserved both the cultural diversity and the older, non-capitalist human-environment relationships of the former borderland. Eventually, capital found ways to extract wealth from such places. But these portions of the basin remained ecologically, economically, and culturally distinct from plantation-based landscapes. This history of the Sabine River Valley therefore demonstrates how the nineteenth-century expansion of the U.S. South, as a political project that included a fundamentally environmental aspect, both succeeded and failed subsuming new landscapes—and how those landscapes contributed to the creation of a more complicated, more diverse South by preserving spaces for marginalized communities and their cultures to survive. "From Borderland to Southern Land" thereby explores the changes in the landscape of the Sabine River Valley during the first three-fourths of the nineteenth century. It takes an environmental approach to this bioregion’s history and uses that methodology as the basis for a history of a North American borderland. In combining these fields, it explores the histories of various ethnic communities, including regionally distinct Hispanic and Indigenous peoples; of U.S. imperialism and expansion; of capitalism as an environmental as well as an economic and social phenomenon; and of the nature of the U.S. South as a region comprised of manifold landscapes. In doing so, it argues for narratives positioned at the intersection of environmental and borderlands histories. | en_US |
| dc.embargo.lift | 2030-08-01 | en_US |
| dc.embargo.terms | 2030-08-01 | en_US |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | en_US |
| dc.identifier.citation | Kisner, Bryson. From Borderland to Southern Land: The Changing Landscape of the Sabine River Valley, 1800-1877. (2024). PhD diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/117823 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1911/117823 | en_US |
| dc.language.iso | eng | en_US |
| dc.rights | Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder. | en_US |
| dc.subject | borderlands | en_US |
| dc.subject | environment | en_US |
| dc.subject | U.S. South | en_US |
| dc.subject | Texas | en_US |
| dc.subject | Louisiana | en_US |
| dc.subject | Sabine River | en_US |
| dc.title | From Borderland to Southern Land: The Changing Landscape of the Sabine River Valley, 1800–1877 | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
| dc.type.material | Text | en_US |
| thesis.degree.department | History | en_US |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Humanities | en_US |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Rice University | en_US |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | en_US |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy | en_US |