In a 1980 campaign speech to veterans, Ronald Reagan declared that the United States suffered from a "Vietnam syndrome." The war in Vietnam, Reagan said, had harmed American political life and made the public wary of the aggressive foreign policies Reagan believed were necessary to win the Cold War. I...
This study explores how the world of popular science helped forge a new civic culture during the tumultuous decades of the mid-eighteenth century. I trace the activities of a wide cast of characters in both England and America, revealing the contours of a tightly knit community of scientists, merchants, doctors,...
Forest Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya, 1940-1990s Alphonse Omondi Otieno In the period 1940-1990s, the Kenyan forestry policy evolved from an emphasis on preservation to a combination of programs which embodied both rural Africans' interests and practices and state interests in environmental issues. Using four cases from the western...
Between 1569 and 1582, the inquisitorial court of the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples undertook a series of trials against a powerful and wealthy group of Spanish immigrants in Naples for judaizing, the practice of Jewish rituals. The immense scale of this campaign and the many complications that resulted render it...
This dissertation examines the participation of tens of thousands of African-American servicemen in the occupation of Japan and the Korean war. It poses three questions: how were black servicemen incorporated into a postwar military empire; how did they help shape their nation's expanding Asian protectorate; and how did they understand...
In Muslim West Africa, food-producing villages also produced literate scholars. This study examines how such unlikely intellectuals acquired and gave meaning to Islamic knowledge through one village's experience from 1900 to the 1960s. Unlike the colonial sources underlying conventional approaches to West African Islam, libraries and oral sources from Ruumde...
This project argues that displays of humanist learning in diplomacy served to demonstrate the extraordinary good will of the Florentine regime towards a host ruler. I call this act of surpassing previous oratorical gestures a "cultural gift". Although the singular goal of humanism in diplomacy remained offering cultural gifts in...
"How did the Civil Rights Movement bring about change?" In answer to that question, this dissertation argues that the splintering of purity rhetoric within the intimate environments of home and sanctuary both inhibited and empowered white and African-American religious practitioners to seek social change. To make this argument, this project...
The last two decades in nineteenth-century West Africa witnessed a two-fold movement, namely the territorial expansion of French colonial empire and the first attempts to extend biomedicine through mass vaccination to control smallpox epidemics. This study provides both a deep history and conceptual framework to analyze the relationship between the...
This dissertation explores a seventy-year period of community growth and activism among African Americans in nineteenth-century Iowa, showing how citizenship was defined, contested, expanded and confined. Antebellum black migrants lived on the margins of a hostile society and struggled for equal citizenship using their labor, their community institutions, the legal...
This dissertation, "Myth and the Modern Problem: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain," argues that a widespread phenomenon best described as "mythic thinking" emerged in the early twentieth century as way for a variety of thinkers and key cultural groups to frame and articulate their anxieties about, and their responses to,...
This study explores the history of Bugwere, Busoga and Buganda, societies in present-day east-central Uganda, from the late first millennium and it does so through a focus on motherhood. Motherhood - as ideology and biology - impacted on almost every aspect of life in these societies, but did so in...
This dissertation examines the history of Mexicans' changing racial status in the Chicago metropolitan region, a place where race has traditionally been understood in strictly black and white terms. From World War I through the 1930's whites violently resisted Mexicans moving into their neighborhoods in Chicago, East Chicago, and Gary,...
In the Old Northwest, networks of activists across dispersed communities took controversial direct action against prejudice and slavery. By largely eschewing the growing cities that disproved the Old Northwest rule, this is a study of reform as it would have impacted most people, at the local level in the smaller...
This dissertation examines the transformation of the city-state of Florence from a republic to a principality during the first half of the sixteenth century. It explores how this fundamental change in political organization altered the culture and society of the Florentine office-holding class. The dissertation describes the course of socio-cultural...
A spokesman for the American Revolution, John Adams, famously claimed that a third of colonists supported independence, a third supported Britain, and a third remained neutral. Since then historians have struggled to understand the mixed loyalties of the Revolutionary generation.
"The Popular Politics of Loyalism During the American Revolution, 1774-1790,"...
This dissertation examines the nature and development of Protestant ideology in Tudor England. Historians have traditionally seen Tudor Protestants as classic "magisterial" reformers. Unlike "radical reformers," who formed separated sects and rejected the union of church and state, English Protestants are seen as deeply committed to royal authority and the...
The purpose of this project is to investigate the lack of significant reform regarding women’s issues during the perestroika period. Part one establishes the foundational ideology by analyzing Marxist and Leninist ideas on women and comparing them to official Soviet doctrine as established by government officials and leading scholars. Also...
Each successive wave of immigrants to America has faced prejudice founded in fear and uncertainty. Immigrants from Italy were particularly discriminated against in the early years of their arrival, from 1880 through 1920. They faced violence, racial slurs, and media attacks based on an unsubstantiated stereotype of criminality. This project...
This thesis analyzes the role segregation and white flight played in the development of New York City’s suburban Westchester County, particularly in regards to how white flight from (and within) New Rochelle during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was presaged by the racial reification of the suburb’s communal boundaries during...
During the eighteenth century, European trade with Asia was characterized by the importation of sophisticated manufactured goods in exchange for silver. The features of Euro-Asian trade testify to the vitality of the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese economies in the period before the Great Divergence. Many European observers, however, mistook them...
This dissertation investigates the evolution of national identification and assimilative trends among Germans who remained behind in the Czech lands from the end of the postwar expulsions in 1946 through the Czech Republic’s entry to the European Union in 2004. My primary lens of analysis is associational life, or formal...
“The Vicarious Middle Ages” investigates the religious and cultural history of proxy penance where medieval Christians believed that it was possible to suffer on behalf of another person. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. From the third until the sixteenth...
In March 1977 an exceptionally strong earthquake struck Romania ruled by the communist president and dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his regime. The policies and actions implemented and undertaken in the days, weeks, and year that followed were forms of aftershocks. The Ceauşescu regime modeled the 1977 earthquake recovery on previous...
This dissertation explores the extent to which Portuguese theologian, papal penitentiary, bishop, and abbot Andreas de Escobar, O.S.B. (1348-1448) benefited from contemporary trends in manuscript culture and thereby functioned as a late-medieval public intellectual. Recent research suggests that early-fifteenth-century university-trained theology masters used their expertise and authority to intervene into...
This project brings together five editions of a relatively under-studied grimoire, the
"Enchiridion Leonis Papæ", and analyses them for the first time in an academic format. The analysis examines what little has been written about the "Enchiridion Leonis Papæ" as well as its legendary associations with Pope Leo III and...