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 Pirates, Anarchists, and Terrorists: Violence and the Boundaries of Sovereign Authority(2014) Shirk, Mark Alexander; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how states combat episodes of violence that pose an ontological threat to the state. Sovereignty is a bundle of practices that draw, maintain, and redraw boundaries around political authority, the state is the polity constructed by these boundaries. The boundaries can be physical such as a border between state or conceptual such as that between public and private. These boundaries create the `conceptual maps that state leaders use to make sense of the world. The threat posed by violent action is constructed by narratives. Revisionist narratives of violence, the focus of this study, are illegible to states using current conceptual maps and therefore cannot be defeated while they remain. States are forced to redraw the boundaries of sovereign authority in the course of combating these threats, resulting in a transformed state. In my three cases - golden age piracy in the 18th century, anarchist `propagandists of the deed' at the turn of the 20th, and al Qaeda - I demonstrate that the state develops creative solutions to concrete crises. For instance, golden age pirates exploited a surfeit of ungoverned land and open markets in the early 18th century Atlantic to attack trade forcing colonial states to bring their Atlantic colonies into the domestic sphere and shift the sea into an open space. Similarly, the rise of the labor movement and the development fingerprint databases and the universal passport system were, in part, responses to the threat of anarchists propounding "propaganda of the deed" at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, counterterror innovations devised to combat al Qaeda, such as targeted killing and bulk data collection, have transformed borders from sites of exclusion designed to keep out undesirables to sites of collection where they are tracked and controlled. Each case demonstrates how states re-inscribe themselves by redrawing conceptual boundaries, such as between in order to make sense of an episode of revisionist and respond effectively.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.