Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Seeds of Discord: Extraordinary Commands and Constitutional Thought in the Roman Republic(2023) Cranford, Dustin Scott; Eckstein, Arthur; Lapin, Hayim; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Extraordinary commands remain a controversial subject in the history of the Roman Republic, especially regarding whether (or how) such commands contributed to the ultimate collapse of Rome’s republican government. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on the definition of extraordinary commands or the criteria for identifying them in modern scholarship, without which historians are unable to discern the true significance of these commands in Roman history. This dissertation argues that extraordinary commands are best understood as deviations from the Roman constitution, wherein the socio-political norms and laws intended to regulate Rome’s magistracies were subordinated, through either senatorial decree or popular vote, in order to accommodate the creation of an otherwise illegal military command. Starting with a historiographical survey of the modern discussion surrounding extraordinary commands, the early chapters of the dissertation also focus on analyzing the socio-political norms and rules that formed the basis of Rome’s republican constitution, as well as a detailed examination of Rome’s political institutions, especially the development of its executive magistracies. Next, a philological analysis of the terms extra ordinem, extraordinarium, and their Greek equivalents examines how Romans and Greeks themselves perceived extraordinary commands. The final chapters of this dissertation argue that the identification of extraordinary commands ultimately comes down to three analytical perspectives: the potential legal criteria of irregular magistracies, the magnitude of their occurrence, and whether they represented a deviation from Roman constitutional law. Finally, the dissertation concludes with an overview of all exceptional and extraordinary commands occurring over the course of the Roman Republic (509-31 BCE), along with a statistical analysis of the changing trends and evolution of extraordinary commands over time. In the end, a proper method of defining and identifying extraordinary commands helps modern historians truly understand the significance of such commands in Roman history. A well-known facet of Rome’s constitution was its flexibility, which allowed the Romans to find innovative solutions to crises facing the state over time, but extraordinary commands represented the breaking point of this flexibility.Item "The Sacred Cause of State Rights": Theories of Union and Sovereignty in the Antebellum North(2006-08-09) Esh, Christian R.; Belz, Herman J.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Sacred Cause of State Rights" examines the problem of federalism as the central issue in U.S. constitutional history before the Civil War. Drawing on Keith Whittington's insight into the political construction of the Constitution, the argument focuses on the role of state legislatures and courts, particularly in the North, relative to their claims of co-equal authority to the national government in the struggle to determine constitutional meaning. The project seeks to rescue the political history of federalism from the post-Civil War view that the Union had been polarized into patriotic nationalists and traitorous defenders of state rights. In fact, most Northerners occupied a middle ground between the arch-nationalism of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun's exposition of nullification. Martin Van Buren appealed to Northern moderates when he fought to defend "the sacred cause of state rights" against the heresy of nullification in 1833. Analytically, the dissertation strives to establish the core theoretical components of representative debates. It begins with the formulation of the first national Union under the Articles of Association (1774) and then moves to the constitutional compromise of 1787 and the debate over its meaning in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (1798). These chapters analyze the revolutionary political grammar of association and its importance to American constitutional deliberation. Subsequent chapters treat the issue of sovereignty through a study of the Olmsted Crisis in Philadelphia and the issue of concurrent state powers in New York by examining the Steamboat Cases. Then, the dissertation explains how Northern states' claim to interpret the Constitution for themselves was sorely discredited by the national attention given to Calhoun's radical theory of nullification in 1833. Finally, it examines the North's turn away from state rights and social contract theory and toward the organic nationalist theories of the Union espoused by Daniel Webster and Joseph Story.Item "A LIGHT WHICH REVEALS ITS TRUE MEANING": STATE SUPREME COURTS AND THE CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION(2004-04-30) Stelluto, Jr., Donald Louis; Belz, Herman J.; HistoryDuring the Civil War, Confederate wartime legislation, chiefly conscription, exemption, and impressments statutes, raised fundamental constitutional issues. These actions by the national government became a prolific source of litigation in many southern states. Yet, in the absence of a national Confederate Supreme Court, it fell to state supreme courts and state jurists to resolve these challenges to the national government's exercise of constitutional war powers and to enunciate key constitutional principles and explain the tenets of Confederate political philosophy. As a result, southern state supreme courts became the primary venues in which national constitutional issues were adjudicated. The constitutional purposes and goals of the Confederacy were national- rather than state-oriented and provided for limited but effective national government, a truly federal union in which state and national governments were to both operate effectively and energetically, and within the national government, the powers of the national government were to be separated to promote efficiency and prevent usurpation. In these cases, state supreme courts enunciated key Confederate constitutional doctrines and principles namely, limited government or constitutionalism, federalism, the separation of powers, and national purposes. State jurists established that the Confederate Constitution was a substantive and purposeful constitutive consisting of conservative principles and innovative forms and features. Operating as a de facto supreme court, these state supreme courts considered scores of wartime decisions. Consistently, across jurisdictions, these justices rejected states' rights as the political philosophy of the Confederacy, they upheld the exercise of constitutional Confederate war powers within a carefully articulated doctrine of federalism, they limited national government within its delegated authority without handicapping its capabilities to fulfill its duties, and maintained a strict separation of government powers between the three national branches. State supreme court cases have been largely ignored by Civil War scholars. However, these decisions reveal the substantive and normative nature of constitutional principles in the Confederacy. The specific holdings in these cases contradict earlier historiographical understandings of the Confederacy as a loose confederation of states with each acting independently.