College of Arts & Humanities

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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD WOMEN: BURIAL PRACTICES AND PATTERNS OF HUNGARIAN QUEENS OF THE ÁRPÁD DYNASTY (975-1301)
(2010) Mielke, Christopher Michael; Wasilewski, Janna; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Recent studies of Árpádian queens of Hungary have shown promise. Unlike previous research however, the goal of this thesis is not to examine the lives of the Hungarian queens, but rather their deaths and their burials. Utilizing what little information is known, the queens will be divided into four groups of individual case study. Considering that the vast majority of Hungarian queens were buried outside Hungary, the central issue to this thesis will be researching the causality for this. Ultimately, all twenty-four women in this study have two main factors in relation to their burial. First, their close familial link with particular branches of the Árpád dynasty could prove problematic upon the death of their husband. Second, the perceived danger of the widowed queen is a testament not only to fears of her as a foreigner and a woman, but also fears of power she exercised in her own right.
Claiming India: French scholars and the preoccupation with India during the nineteenth century
(2009) Mohan, Jyoti; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
My dissertation examines the image of India which was created by French academics during the nineteenth century. This image of India was distinct from the British image of India as a land of oppressed masses ruled by Oriental despots. The French image of India relied on spiritual and religious aspects of India, with particular emphasis on the antiquity and Aryan heritage of Indian culture. the difference in these images was largely due to the different intellectual and political traditions of Britain and France, but also reflected Anglo-French national and colonial rivalry as well as France's subordinate (subaltern) colonial position in India. I have looked at French writings on India from the religious writings of early modern missionaries to the secular writing of early twentieth century French academics. I have also examined the interest that French scholars in diverse intellectual fields like philology, anthropology, history and religion had in learning and writing about India during the nineteenth century. My conclusion is that French scholars at the end of the nineteenth century defined India primarily in terms of race, caste and Hinduism.
Anonymous Masses in the Alamire Manuscripts: Toward a New Understanding of a Repertoire, an Atelier, and a Renaissance Court
(2010) Saunders, Zoe Whitman; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara H.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study examines eight anonymous masses preserved in the Alamire complex of fifty-one luxurious manuscripts prepared by scribes working at or near the courts of Burgundy-Habsburg between about 1498 and 1535. Chapter 1 introduces the problem of early Renaissance anonymity and situates this study within research on the Alamire complex and anonymous repertories. Chapters 2 through 5 provide analyses of eight anonymous masses that survive in the Alamire manuscripts. Where relevant, the history of their models and other polyphonic settings of these complement the analyses. Two canons are resolved, symbolism is explored, and the problem of incomplete or absent settings of the Agnus Dei is considered. The analyses allow for an evaluation of quality and reveal these composers as skilled and inventive. In Chapter 6, codicological and paleographic examinations of the Alamire manuscripts demonstrate that anonymity was largely the result of scribal initiative. Investigation of the use of exemplars by the scribes, however, confirms that they often copied from multiple exemplars, some probably lacking ascriptions, which produced anonymity. Using paleographic and codicological evidence to complement my conclusions regarding the use of exemplars, I identify a change in the manner of production of the Alamire codices occurring around 1518-1520. This separates the manuscripts into two distinct groups: the first encompasses mainly luxurious presentation manuscripts commissioned from Alamire by members of the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty, while the second consists of plainer codices, probably ordered from Alamire directly by private patrons. In Chapter 7, I conclude that the contents of the Alamire manuscripts must not be considered a single repertory, and that the manuscripts, which were demonstrably prepared under varied circumstances, are not a homogenous group with a single context. Given that the lack of ascriptions in these sources was shown not to be a contemporary value judgment in Chapter 6, the quality of the eight unascribed masses is discussed here at length, as is their musicological significance. Appendices provide tables that detail codicological elements and scribal practices, and present the eight masses in modern notation, edited here for the first time.
Understanding the Class Enemy: Foreign Policy Expertise in East Germany
(2009) Scala, Stephen J.; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study makes use of reports, resolutions, analyses, and other internal documents as well as oral history interviews in order to detail the construction, functioning, and output of foreign policy expertise in the GDR. Subordination to the practical needs and political-ideological requirements of the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) represented the defining feature of East German foreign policy expertise. Yet its full politicization, which was essentially complete by the late 1960s as the SED succeeded in establishing a comprehensive system of foreign policy expertise tailored to meet its particular vision, entailed the maintenance of a degree of professional and intellectual autonomy--the GDR's Aussenpolitiker, or foreign policy professionals, were expected not only to comply with the political and ideological postulates espoused by the party leadership but also to deliver sound, specialist analysis of international relations. The persistent tension between these contrasting objectives was directly reflected in the output of East German experts, who in the conditions of diplomatic isolation prevailing until the early 1970s formulated a GDR-specific conception of international relations that fused clear identification of East Germany's realpolitical interests with the Marxist-Leninist notion of foreign policy as a form of class struggle. Following foreign policy normalization in the first half of the 1970s, however, increasing specialization and professionalization matched with a dramatic increase in East German experts' exposure to the capitalist West, including integration into a transnational network of foreign policy specialists, allowed the specialist element of expertise to gain preponderance over the dogmatic-ideological element. The great challenge to the international position of the Soviet Bloc and the GDR represented by the "second Cold War" in the first half of the 1980s then prompted East German experts to abandon simplistic adherence to Marxist-Leninist foreign policy dogma in favor of prioritization of the concrete realpolitical interests of the GDR. In the process, the GDR's experts formulated a body of non-dogmatic foreign policy thought that mirrored the Soviet New Thinking without taking on its comprehensiveness or overt rejection of inherited postulates.
"Dear Little Living Arguments": Orphans and Other Poor Children, Their Families and Orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool, 1840-1910
(2009) Wilson, Marcy Kay; Gullickson, Gay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Orphanages in the United States and England cared for thousands of children between the early decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These institutions were central to local provisions for the poor during a time period in which state and government poor relief remained limited. Though a small group of studies have focused on American orphan asylums and even fewer works have evaluated English orphanages, no effort has of yet been made to engage in a comparative analysis of the institutions that cared for so many children in both countries. Through analysis of Protestant orphan asylum registers, correspondence, committee minutes, and annual reports, this dissertation investigates the local provisions made for poor children in Baltimore, Maryland and Liverpool, England, between 1840 and 1910, examines the socio-economic realities of the families these children came from, the ways in which poor children in both cities were affected by the needs of their families and the aid available to them, and the similarities and differences that existed between these orphanages and their residents. This dissertation argues that there were significant differences between orphanage inhabitants in both cities when it came to parental survival and to who children ended up with after their residence in these institutions, but that the orphanages were remarkably alike, providing the poor children in their care with similar educational, religious and vocational training that the middle-class reformers who ran these institutions understood as gender and class appropriate. This study reveals a prolonged commitment on the part of orphanage administrators in both cities to the use of indenture as a dismissal method, and suggests as well the existence of a shared trans-Atlantic understanding of poor children and their labor when it came to these asylum officials.
The Intersection Between Nationalism and Religion: The Burghers of Calais of Auguste Rodin
(2009) Lee, Jung-Sil; Hargrove, June Ellen; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
As a republican, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) conveyed political ideology in his public sculpture, but due to his interest in religion and spirituality, his interpretations differed from contemporary artists. He grafted national myths and symbols onto Catholicism and its rituals to facilitate the sacralization of the Republic. Yet, the tension between Catholicism and republicanism in his work persisted because of his religiosity and his adherence to secularism. Rodin's conflict and compromise between the two fields were not only his personal dilemma, but also that of the Third Republic. This dissertation focuses on how Rodin internalized republican ideology in his public sculpture, and how he appropriated Catholic ritual to promote political messages. In spite of the republican government's constant struggle to separate from Catholic domination, Catholicism was so deeply imbedded in French culture, Rodin recognized this complex paradigm which he co-opted to construct an ideological matrix for his public work. Aware of the powerful social role of religion, the First Republic tried to create a new religion based on deistic tradition, The Cult of Supreme Being, to unite all French people who were severely divided by factions, languages, and regionalism. This precedent tradition further proved the importance of religion's social reach in constructing national sentiment. Based on research in Rodin museums in Paris and Meudon in 2004 and 2006, this study examines how Rodin merged Catholic practices and contemporary social ideologies into the fiber of nationalist identity that served to reconcile political oppositions in France and to heal wounded civic pride after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Similar to the public sphere proposed by Jürgen Habermas, Rodin's public sculpture suggests ideal democratic communicative field. The Burghers of Calais is a prime example of the republican ideal of heroic martyrdom. At the same time, its overall form, figural arrangement, and poignant expressions invoke the Catholic practice of pilgrimage, drawing the audience into the scene's emotional landscape. This interpretation of The Burghers of Calais as a religious and psychological catharsis paves the way for public sculpture to function as a healing tool to rebuild personal and national subjectivity.
Feigned Histories: Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Spanish Chivalric Romance
(2009) Crowley, Timothy D.; Hamilton, Donna B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study re-evaluates Sidney's method and purpose for inventing Arcadia, through analyzing his fiction in tandem with the Spanish genre of chivalric "feigned history." It introduces the new perspective that Arcadia exploits structural and thematic focus on clandestine marriage in Feliciano de Silva's feigned Chronicle of Florisel de Niquea, Part Three (1535), as rendered in translation by Jacques Gohory as "Book" Eleven in the French Amadis cycle (1554). Old Arcadia follows that chivalric paradigm in Books One through Three; then it employs motifs from ancient prose fiction by Apuleius and Heliodorus in Books Four and Five to amplify plot conflict tied to the protagonist lovers' secret marriages. Imitation of Spanish pastoral romances by Montemayor and Gil Polo in Old Arcadia's Eclogues supplements the work's primary narrative plane and also facilitates Protestant aesthetic impressions of marriage and affective individual piety. Shifts in literary source material occur as means to extend and enrich thematic focus and narrative poetics of those first three Books. Sidney's narrative establishes admiratio for its protagonist lovers and reader complicity with them, while imposing comic and tragic distance from other main characters. These observations revise dominant critical assumptions about Old Arcadia. Building upon its chivalric source material, Sidney's fiction increases verisimilitude and invents its own rhetorical focus on dynastic union through clandestine marriage. This study observes for the first time that political tension and legal debate in Old Arcadia's conclusion revolve around that issue. Sidney's fiction figures forth a succession crisis contingent upon legal complications with the issue of clandestine marriage in Arcadia, in a manner congruous with Genevan, French, and Tridentine legal reform on that matter, as well as with England's unique legal situation regarding secret marriage. The story's intellectual focus on justice and equity complements its author's concern with the case of his uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. While Sidney composed Arcadia, his own political and economic prospects remained largely contingent upon Leicester's secret marriage. This study opens new avenues for research on continuity in Sidney's oeuvre and on New Arcadia's influence in English prose fiction and drama of the 1590s and the seventeenth century.
Civilizing The Empire: The League Of Nations and The Remaking Of British Imperialism, 1918-1926
(2009) Sutcliffe, Rachel I.; Price, Richard N.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
After the First World War, Britain's economy and security depended on imperial cooperation for reconstruction. Yet, the war and the culture based on the League of Nations and its principles of self-determination and internationalism challenged efforts to strengthen imperial unity. Imperialists had to re-envision a more inclusive idea of empire in the midst of nationalist uprisings abroad and labor unrest at home. By analyzing circulated propaganda and speeches about the League, this thesis traces the efforts of British political thinkers who used the League's principles to manage the domestic discontent that threatened unity. It demonstrates how they tried to relate the League's principles to the ordinary Britisher's historical commitment to internationalism and imperial humanitarianism. Invoking social psychology, imperialists tapped into a universal interest in the League to re-legitimize the British Empire and establish a more enduring psychological imperial unity between the metropole and the empire after the war.
After Empire: Ethnic Germans and Minority Nationalism in Interwar Yugoslavia
(2008-11-30) Lyon, Philip; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study traces the (ethnically German) Danube Swabians' embrace of national identity in interwar Yugoslavia with attention to the German national movement's antecedents in Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina under the Habsburgs. We examine the important role of German national activists in Yugoslavia and survey the institutions they built to stimulate, shape and mobilize Yugoslavia's German population as a specifically national minority based on the Swabians' history and collective memory as colonists in the region. Thereafter, we discuss the rift that emerged inside the German minority during the 1930s, when the German leadership and its conservative variety of German nationalism were confronted by brash, young challengers who sought to "renew" the German minority in a Nazi image. These young enthusiasts for National Socialism directed their extreme nationalism not at the repressive Yugoslav authorities, but rather at their older rivals in the Germans' main cultural and political organization, the Kulturbund. German culture and national authenticity became key criteria for German leadership in this struggle to control the Kulturbund. Meanwhile, German Catholic priests also resisted the Nazi-oriented Erneuerungsbewegung insurgency. Ultimately, we see in this clash of generations both support for and resistance to local manifestations of Nazism in Southeastern Europe. One of this study's major finds is the stubborn endurance of national indifference and local identity in Southeastern Europe throughout interwar period, when national identity was supposed to be dominant. Many Germans embraced national identity, but certainly not all of them. The persistence of this indifference confounded the logic of twentieth century nationalists, for whom national indeterminacy seemed unnatural, archaic, and inexplicable. Even after years of effort by German nationalist activists in the nationalized political atmosphere of interwar Yugoslavia, some ethnic Germans remained indifferent to national identity or else identified as Croats or Magyars. There were also those who pined for Habsburg Hungary, which had offered a dynastic alternative to national identity before 1918. Still others' identity remained shaped by confession as Catholic or Protestant. We conclude therefore by observing the paradoxical situation whereby Nazi-oriented extreme nationalism coexisted with instances of German national indifference in Yugoslavia until the eve of the Second World War.
Fathers and Sons: American Blues and British Rock Music, 1960-1970
(2008-11-30) Kellett, Andrew James; Herf, Jeffrey C; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the unique cultural phenomenon of British blues-based rock music in the 1960s. It provides answers to two important questions of trans-Atlantic intellectual and cultural history. First, this dissertation will provide answers to two questions. First, it interrogates how and why African-American blues music became so popular amongst a segment of young, primarily middle-class men in Great Britain. It maps out "blues trade routes"--that is, the methods by which the music was transmitted to Britain. It explains the enthusiasm shown by young male Britishers largely in terms of their alienation from, and dissatisfaction with, mainstream British masculinity. Seen in this light, the "adoption" of African-American bluesmen as replacement "fathers" can be seen as an attempt to fill a perceived cultural need. This dissertation will also examine how these young British men, having formed bands to perform their own music, began in the mid-1960s to branch out from the blues. In a developing dialogue with like-minded bands from the United States, bands such as the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds started combining the lessons of the blues with other cultural influences such as jazz, classical music and English folk. The resulting cultural bricolage innovated popular music on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1970s onward. The dissertation draws on a variety of primary sources, including the popular music press, published interviews with key musicians, and, of course, the recorded music itself. Fathers and Sons uses the development of popular music to address issues that have traditionally been central to the study of ideas and cultures. These include: the role of interpersonal relationships in disseminating ideas and culture; the impact of distance and proximity in impelling cultural innovation; the occurrences of bursts of creativity in distinct places at distinct times; and the ways in which gender and sexual identity are performed and negotiated through mass consumer culture. These are salient issues with which intellectual and cultural historians have dealt for decades. Thus, Fathers and Sons seeks a broader audience than merely that which would be interested in American blues, British rock music, or both.

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