History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item “Freedom in Their Hands is a Deadly Poison”: Print Culture, Legal Movements, and Slaveholding Resistance on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1850-61(2018) Chaires, Jacob Wayne; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this thesis is twofold: to explain the rise of slaveholding anxiety in relation to the growing free black question, as well as to articulate how slaveholders sought to regain their power. I argue that slaveholders on the Eastern Shore politically organized around ideas and concepts produced in newspapers. Slaveholders utilized new ideas about race and the law to organize, and call upon the General Assembly to enact tougher sanctions on free black mobility. Newspapers are not only a means by which to quote mine, but they are also living, breathing, cultural organisms. They both reflect slaveholding anxieties, as well as play into them. They both record local news events, as well as conspicuously pair those local stories with similar stories from other counties, states, and nations.Item America's Commercial Cold War: Global Trade, National Security, and the Control of Markets(2019) Haddad, Ryan Issa; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous works considering the history of American trade policy during the Cold War have tended to focus on either the United States’ export control policy in the unilateral and multilateral context or the Cold War’s influence on the formation and evolution on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. While useful, these studies are limited by their narrowness. To date, no single work has emerged accounting for trade’s place in American Cold War strategy or the reciprocal impact that economic globalization and the Cold War had on each other. I argue that American Cold War trade policy was an “economic containment” exercise. The United States’ “Commercial Cold War” was conceptualized by strategists as a struggle between two rival, yet interdependent networks—one liberal and capitalist, and led by the United States; the other communist and led at the outset by the Soviet Union. The United States used trade both positively and negatively to achieve a variety of ends. Its overarching goal was to use trade to develop its network at the expense of the Soviet Union’s. This strategy assumed centralized, flexible control over trade policy in order to capitalize on diplomatic openings. Successive American presidents aspired to such trade policy control. But the diffusion of power throughout the U.S. government and across the Western alliance rendered that impossible. It proved far easier to deny East-West trade than to expand it, and more assertive American initiatives were often stymied. But despite the limits on unilateral action, the multilateral trade architectures that were established during the Cold War proved adequate to their purposes and remain in renovated form in the 21st Century.Item SPINNING SUGAR, REFINING AMERICA: CONSUMERS AND CREATORS OF DESSERT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY(2019) Flaherty, Morgan; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dessert presentations in America shifted in the eighteenth century from simple desserts with few ingredients to elaborate confections of sugar. As a luxurious end to the meal, dessert increasingly reflected class and race. After the Revolution, as dessert presentations modeled on those of European aristocracy became popular, the elite turned to confectioners to create towering displays of dessert. The scarcity of skilled confectioners pushed elites to recruit and train confectioners, including those they enslaved. The genteel movement towards refinement and the consumer revolution fueled middle-class aspirations to emulate elite dessert displays, leading them to purchase specialized material goods like serving pieces and recipe books. They also continued to use simple recipes but elevated dessert as a measure of refinement. The use of enslaved labor to produce some of these confections indicates the extent to which post-revolutionary hierarchies embedded slavery, even as enslaved confectioners had potentially more room to negotiate.Item The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century(2019) Sfondiles, Angelo; Zilfi, Madeline C.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study focuses on changes that occurred within the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople in the second half of the seventeenth century in response to the difficulties and challenges the Ottoman Empire faced. The intent of the thesis is that the Patriarchate was an integral part of the Empire and that its institutional vagaries can only be understood as a result of the close relationship between it and the Ottoman Empire. The focus is on the legal, financial, and administrative relations between the Patriarchate and the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century.Item To Drink a Cup of Fire: Morality Tales and Moral Emotions in Egyptian, Algerian, and French Anti-Colonial Activism, 1945-1960(2019) Abu Sarah, Christiane Marie; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1940s and 1950s, newspapers in Egypt, Algeria, and France debated the behavior of activists who sacrificed themselves for a cause, calling them “hysterics,” “radicals,” “fanatics,” and “terrorists.” Underlying these debates was a core question: what “rational” person would choose to sacrifice himself for a cause? To learn how activists answered their critics, and to explore transnational patterns of activist exchange, this study explores two revolutionary moments: the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the Algerian Revolution of 1954–1962. Focusing on four Egyptian clubs (the Muslim Brotherhood, Young Egypt, the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation, and the Workers’ Vanguard); three Algerian organizations (the Front de Libération Nationale, the Mouvement National Algérien, and the Parti Communiste Algérien); and three French anti-colonial networks (the Jeanson network, the Curiel network, and the Mandouze network), the study analyzes data recovered from activist journals, tracts, court cases, police confessions, and memoirs—data gathered through multi-archival research conducted at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsterdam), Dar al-Kutub (Cairo), The National Archives (London), and the Service Historique de la Défense (Paris). The result is a cognitive and behavioral history of transnational activist movements. Setting aside the motive-based question of why activists made certain decisions, the study surveys how activists made decisions and narrativized behaviors. Three types of stories are examined: stories of affiliation, stories of aggression, and stories about morality. Each set of stories is linked to a research question. How did individuals decide to affiliate with certain clubs over others? How did activists decide to commit violent attacks? And what role did morality tales, moral rationalizations, and “moral emotions” (like disgust, shame, and anger) play in these processes? As the study contends, activists drew on a common toolkit of cognitive and behavioral strategies to make decisions, negotiate behavior, and mobilize support for decolonization—crossing ideological, religious, and national boundaries in the process. Activist storytelling thus highlights the hybridity of Arab and French moral imaginaries, revealing how activists practiced emotions and produced movements. Their stories also foster awareness of how individuals negotiate concepts of right and wrong, both in public and in private.Item BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH, EAST AND WEST: THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, 1780-1865(2019) Holness, Lucien; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the making of free soil and black freedom, as well as the abolitionist movement in southwestern Pennsylvania. I frame the region as a borderland between the free North and the slave South, where the status of African Americans was somewhere between slavery and freedom, as well as a crossroads between the abolitionist movement in the East and the Old Northwest. By doing so, I hope to understand how geography (physical and political) influenced ideas about race and the types of strategies abolitionists favored in their fight against slavery and for black rights. I argue that the roots of free labor ideology—a belief that emerged in the 1850s that slavery (and, for some whites, free blacks) should be prohibited from western territories in order to allow free white men to earn a living wage—can be traced to the 1780s when southwestern Pennsylvania was one of the first territories opened to westward expansion and where the place of black people in American society remained uncertain. Alongside this nascent idea of free labor emerged an oppositional culture created by African Americans and their white antislavery allies that was shaped by their geographic location, worksites, institutions, and living conditions. This led to the formation of counter ideas about free soil, the west, black freedom, race, and citizenship. Many white southwestern Pennsylvanians adamantly opposed these ideas fearing that interracial social relations, labor competition, and the possible migration of blacks into the region would degrade the economic independence of these households, turning whites into a dependent and degraded class.Item “Intimate Entanglement: The Gendered Politics of Race and Family in the Gulf South"(2019) Bearden, Joshua L; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Intimate Entanglement: The Gendered Politics of Race and Family in the Gulf South,” uses manuscript court records, newspapers, records of colonial administrators, and accounts of merchants and travelers to investigate the ways in which cross-cultural peoples practiced an adaptive gender culture in the Gulf South in the era between 1740-1840. “Intimate Entanglement” argues that a protean understanding of the gendered dynamics within the family allowed Anglo-Native peoples to eschew the racial categorization imposed upon them by Anglo-Americans while also self-fashioning identities that allowed for maximum autonomy and for the protection of their wealth and status within Native communities. Familiar with both the matrilineal/matrifocal familial arrangements of the Five Tribes of the Gulf South as well as the gendered norms associated with the Anglo-American patriarchal family, cross-cultural peoples decided which identities they presented for public consumption depending upon the needs of a particular situation. This practice became prevalent during the colonial era, when increased contact between Anglo and Native peoples created unstable gendered and racial identities. By the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans had embraced a rigid definition of white patriarchal identity that centered Anglo men’s ability to control subordinates, own slaves, and exploit property, enslaved persons, and other forms of wealth. At the same time, Anglo-Americans embraced a new racial hierarchy which sought to consign people of Native and African ancestry to the same inferior position. Cross-cultural people fought this new racialization by continuing to practice the flexible understandings of gender that had its roots in the colonial past.Item The "Europa-Gedanke" and the Transformation of German Conservatism, 1930-1955(2019) Klein, Joshua Derren; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following dissertation is a political-intellectual history of German conservatism and national identity from the 1930s to the 1950s. It explores the published and private documents of prominent conservative intellectuals, propagandists, journalists, and military elites who before, during, and after the Second World War developed a new concept of European nationalism which they called the “Europa-Gedanke,” or “Europe-concept.” This dissertation traces the evolution of this political ideology by assessing what Europe meant for these thinkers, how this meaning changed over the course of a volatile historical time period, how it differed from other concepts of Europe, and how it informed the transformation of German conservatism. The figures analyzed in this dissertation had in common a professional and intellectual trajectory that began in the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar period. Part 1 of this dissertation dissects their path to intellectual complicity in National Socialism and the propaganda apparatus behind Hitler’s “New Order of Europe.” Part II traces their postwar professional rebirth as widely publicized journalists and influential military reformers in the first decade of West Germany. Surprisingly, after 1945 these figures were able to bridge their European ideology with the postwar Christian Democratic politics of European integration and anti-Communism. This alliance opened the door for liberals in West Germany and the American intelligence community to accommodate a previously hostile milieu into their postwar liberal politics. The primary thesis of this dissertation is three-fold: a) the conservative Europe-concept is a hitherto neglected and dismissed ideology which was highly influential across all three examined time periods of German history; b) this influence was a result of the Europe-concept’s explicit reformulation of the enduring German völkisch tradition in such a way that expanded the definition of the historical ethnic community (from Germany to Europe) and thereby addressed the perceived political inadequacy of nationalism during and after the Second World War; and c) the Europe-concept contributed to the de-radicalization of German conservatism by assisting a transition from the anti-democratic Conservative Revolutionary impulse to the postwar West German politics of liberal democracy – a convergence that moderated the instinctive illiberalism of German conservatism.Item Self, Space, Society, and Saint in the Well-Protected Domains: A History of Ottoman Saints and Sainthood, 1500-1780(2019) Allen, Jonathan Parkes; Karamustafa, Ahmet T; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through an exploration of the historical trajectory of Islamic saints and sainthood across the early modern Ottoman world by means of a wide selection of case studies this dissertation argues for the importance of sainthood in all its facets as both a subject of Ottoman history and as a lens for illuminating many other aspects of social and cultural history. Beginning with the newly expanded empire under Selīm I (r. 1512-1520) and stretching all the way to the second half of the eighteenth century, this study explores the intersection with saints and sainthood of large-scale political and social transformations that shaped the empire as a whole at various points during this time-span, from the integration of new provinces into the empire to the rise of Islamic puritanism to the elaboration of new sociabilities and expressions of the self. The case studies that structure this study range from examinations of particular important figures and their textual corpora such as ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī (d. 1565) and ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731) to investigations centered on particular regions or communities, paying particular attention to rural contexts in Syria, the Kurdish lands, and Anatolia. Subjects and sources, in a wide range of genres, from both the Arabophone and Turcophone divisions of the empire are treated, the dissertation examining the empire as an interconnected whole despite linguistic differences. Eschewing a focus on Islamic mysticism or sufi organizations narrowly conceived, I demonstrate the socially distributed nature of sainthood and its interplay with many aspects of wider discourse and practice. Drawing upon theoretical models of script and repertoire, language and dialect, I work to make sense of different yet interrelated practices of Ottoman sainthood across the empire, paying especial attention to the uses and constructions of social space, the performance and making of the self, and the generally socially embedded nature of saints and associated phenomena. Finally, this study unfolds within the context of the wider early modern world, Islamicate and beyond, with the larger goal of situating my arguments and findings within the global patterns and dynamics that marked the early modern world.Item SUSTAINING THE PACIFIC CARRIER AIR WAR: THE DEVELOPMENT OF U.S. NAVAL AVIATION MAINTENANCE AND THE ENLISTED AIRCRAFT TECHNICIAN IN WORLD WAR II(2019) Fisher, Stanford Edward; Sumida, Jon T; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The ability of the United States Navy to fight a protracted war throughout the Pacific Ocean in World War II was not solely the result of technology, tactics, or admiralship. Naval aviation maintenance played a major role in the U.S. victory over Japan. Naval aviation leadership throughout the period between World War I and World War II focused on the improvement of technology and tactics rather than training a new, and in the event of war, necessarily large cohort of enlisted personnel. Aircraft maintenance was an afterthought for much of the era because of the small number of carriers and aircraft. When the United States realized a two-ocean naval war was imminent and a drastic increase in the size of its aviation fleet was ordered, the navy was forced to reconsider its earlier practices and forge new polices and processes. The U.S. naval air war against Japan did not achieve sustained success until enough aircraft technicians were in place to support the doctrine of the Fast Carrier Task Force. The United States Navy was not ready to fight a protracted war at sea until its carrier aircraft technicians were trained and in place. The historiography of U.S. naval warfare in the modern era lacks any comprehensive study on the subject of naval aviation maintenance. This dissertation demonstrates the importance of considering all elements of the military institution, not just those that correspond to operational-battle history when studying the full dimensions of modern naval war in the age of the aircraft carrier. Recognizing the drastic institutional changes that accompanied an increase in maintenance personnel from less than 10,000 to nearly 250,000 over four years, a complete restructuring of the aviation navy’s technical educational system, and the development of highly specialized skilled labor force on board the aircraft carrier are essential to creating a more complete historiography World War II naval warfare. Analyzing the effect that aircraft maintenance and the aircraft technician had on carrier warfare is an added layer to the complex study of war that should not be overlooked. Even in the era of modern-technologically advanced warfare, people still matter.