UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item “THE GREAT QUESTION”: SLAVERY, SECTIONALISM, AND THE U.S. NAVAL OFFICER CORPS, 1820-1861(2021) Bailey, Roger; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes how United States naval officers’ beliefs about race and slavery shaped sectionalism between the North and South in the antebellum era. As agents of the federal government operating far from the capital, naval officers had significant influence on the implementation of American foreign policy. With reputations as respected professionals and travelers, they also shaped national discourse with their reports, speeches, and publications. These traits made officers important public figures as the future of slavery became a pervasive issue that increasingly affected American naval operations. The study examines the US Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, support for African colonization in Liberia, policing of unauthorized “filibustering” invasions in Latin America, and exploring expeditions. It argues that up until the secession crisis at the outbreak of the Civil War, the naval officer corps was remarkably resilient to the growing divide between the North and South. Most officers considered themselves to be politically moderate on the issue of slavery, and they tried to curtail the institution’s worst excesses, eliminate threats to the stability of slavery, and promote external, compromise solutions to the nation’s domestic crisis that prioritized rule of law. These solutions sought to unify white Americans around visions of empire and the expatriation of African Americans. In pursuing such goals, officers tried to enact their own version of American foreign policy. Though they had limited material success, their efforts supported political moderatism in the antebellum United States. As more and more Americans took up pro- and antislavery stances, naval officers used federal power and their personal influence to help maintain the belief that compromise could preserve the Union.Item The More Things Stay the Same: Colonization, Resistance, and the Fractured Sovereign State(2014) Clever, Molly; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Has the authority of the sovereign state system undergone a fundamental transformation in recent decades? This dissertation seeks to: 1) offer a critical examination of claims regarding the perceived fracture and erosion of sovereign state authority; 2) contribute to the task of building a theoretical framework to study the power and authority of the sovereign state system and its changes over time; 3) find evidence of patterns in how the nature of that power and authority changes over time and across different political organizations in the context of war. Theoretically, the characterization of the threat non-state combatants pose to the authority of the state system neglects relations of power between those who hold privilege within that system and those who are excluded from its benefits. Empirically, there has been an absence of systematic study of potential authoritative transformations that is both historically and geographically broad. This dissertation analyzes the language of justification for war - as expressions of political authority - used by political and military leaders from 1618-2008, employing a combination of fuzzy-sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) with interpretive case analysis to determine the constellations of conditions which drive the use of justification for war. Findings indicate that non-state actors are not challenging the authoritative logic underlying the sovereign state system; rather, the use of sovereign rights logics of justification in asymmetrical conflicts indicates a desire to access the benefits and privileges of that system. When interpreted through a post-colonial and critical race lens, these claims appear as a challenge to exclusion that is largely rooted in a legacy of racialized colonial subjugation. Relations of power, embedded in a state system that developed through imperial conquest and colonial domination, drive the use of justification frames. Thus, low power actors may in fact threaten the stability of the sovereign state system, but not in the manner characterized by the fracture narrative. The threat is not to the authoritative logic of the system, but rather to the uneven distribution of the powers and privileges of that system that stems from a legacy of colonization, which produced lasting divisions in power.