History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Between Nation and State: Albanian Associations from Ottoman Origins to a Communist Party, 1880 - 1945(2016) Mitrojorgji, Lejnar; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses the broader antecedents of the Communist Party of Albania (CPA) as one of a number of associations whose experience was central to Albanian political history. This long experience dates back to the informal national associations formed in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century. The dissertation examines the role of these associations which, pursuing language rights and political representation through imperial state reforms, set a pattern that struggled to connect nation and state, rather than asserting the territorial demands for a nation-state familiar across the region. Starting out in the Ottoman Empire, but then maturing in the Albanian diaspora in Romania, Bulgaria, Egypt and the United States, this dissertation shows politically significant processes of longer-term adaptation that created informal associations as institutional structures able to channel collective action. It then traces the reframing of these patterns through their destruction in the Balkan Wars and the First World War to the emergence of communist associations in the interwar period and beyond. This dissertation is a sustained study that traces long-term Ottoman imperial political legacies in the Albanian successor state. The story of the associations, based on hitherto unexamined archival documents, shows that the Albanians possessed a far greater capacity for political mobilization that previously acknowledged by historians. Moreover, the dissertation successfully challenges the conventional wisdom that portrays the Albanians as irreparably divided along sectarian and regional faultlines. It finds that Albanian national activism was civic in character rather than ethnic as elsewhere in the Balkans. The Albanians fought to remain within a multinational framework because this afforded them political security, social advancement and potential economic growth. In the late Ottoman period, this political objective was manifested in the acceptance of the supranational imperial order whereas during the Second World War, in the aspiration to become members of the Comintern internationalist movement. Another important find, is the newly-discovered evidence concerning the founding of the CPA and its wartime conduct as an organization created and led by the Albanians themselves, albeit with Yugoslav ideological assistance under the transnational umbrella of the Comintern.Item Balkan Wars between the Lines: Violence and Civilians in Macedonia, 1912-1918(2012) Papaioannou, Stefan Sotiris; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation challenges the widely held view that there is something morbidly distinctive about violence in the Balkans. It subjects this notion to scrutiny by examining how inhabitants of the embattled region of Macedonia endured a particularly violent set of events: the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the First World War. Making use of a variety of sources including archives located in the three countries that today share the region of Macedonia, the study reveals that members of this majority-Orthodox Christian civilian population were not inclined to perpetrate wartime violence against one another. Though they often identified with rival national camps, inhabitants of Macedonia were typically willing neither to kill their neighbors nor to die over those differences. They preferred to pursue priorities they considered more important, including economic advancement, education, and security of their properties, all of which were likely to be undermined by internecine violence. National armies from Balkan countries then adjacent to geographic Macedonia (Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia) and their associated paramilitary forces were instead the perpetrators of violence against civilians. In these violent activities they were joined by armies from Western and Central Europe during the First World War. Contrary to existing military and diplomatic histories that emphasize continuities between the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the First World War, this primarily social history reveals that the nature of abuses committed against civilians changed rapidly during this six-year period. During the Balkan Wars and the opening campaigns of the First World War, armed forces often used tactics of terror against civilians perceived to be unfriendly, including spontaneous decisions to burn houses, murder, and rape. As the First World War settled into a long war of attrition, armed forces introduced concentration camps and other kinds of bureaucratically organized violence against civilians that came increasingly to mark broader European violence of the twentieth century. In all of these activities, the study reveals, Balkan armies and paramilitary forces were little different in their behavior from armed forces of the era throughout the Western world.Item German Radio Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A War of Words(2012) Butsavage, Christopher James; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The focus of this study is the content of Nazi radio propaganda to and concerning the Soviet Union. The radio was a new and innovative means for the Nazi regime to directly communicate with the masses of illiterate civilians in the Soviet Union on a daily basis. This study finds that as the war in the east progressed, there was an increasingly stark dichotomy between the positive messages found within German radio propaganda and the harsh reality of the Nazi occupation. It seems almost as though there was a morbid inverse correlation between the amount of violence the Germans inflicted upon civilians (including forcibly sending them to work in Germany) and the amount of radio propaganda exhorting these same civilian populations to join the Nazi cause. It is also important to note that every German radio broadcast to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was not propaganda. In fact, by 1943, a great deal of news items broadcast on German radio in occupied territory were administrative in nature. Announcements such as local curfews, blackouts, conscription and mobilization decrees, and warnings were frequently broadcast.