Nguyen-Marshall, Van

This thesis demonstrates how the proper application of theoretical archaeological and osteological methods to archival documents can be both illuminating and vital to create a fuller understanding of those who have been historically silenced. By performing an archival analysis informed by an archaeological background, the first four volumes of the Registers of Liberated Africans from Freetown, Sierra Leone are "excavated." In addition to demographic data, four categories of analysis are presented, including Types of Illness and Symptoms, Types of Trauma, Types of Injury and/or Illness, and Multiple Symptoms and Illness. This data was collected during participation in a much larger transcription project using a unique methodology. The following analysis was conducted using a collection of interdisciplinary theories, including theoretical osteoarchaeology, practical osteology, medical anthropology, archival and linguistic analysis and numerical presentation. Discussions include the frequency of diseases, slave ships and barracoons as disease environments, potential causes for common injuries, the difficulties and evolution of medical language, and the limitations of both archival and archaeological work for medical and trauma investigation. While both archival and archaeological methods miss key information, using them in tandem offers a more complete view of a historical person and their life experiences.

Author Keywords: Archive, Disease, Liberated Africans, Osteoarchaeology, Sierra Leone, Trauma

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 divided national public opinions throughout the West. One of the factors behind such split was religious beliefs. This was the case for the United States and Ireland where Francisco Franco's rebels got significant public support. This work argues that both the Irish and American Catholic Church hierarchies and laity Catholics' support of the Nationalists had dramatic effects domestically. This thesis expands previous scholarship on the Spanish Civil War by utilizing primary sources from both American and Irish archives to understand the intention, forms, and controversy of Irish and American Catholics' support of the Nationalists.

Author Keywords: Anti-clericalism, Catholicism, Clergy, De Valera, FDR, Spanish Civil War

This thesis offers a comprehensive look at the changing roles of a colonial built railway in what is now eastern Botswana. It was built for the extraction of mineral wealth and migration of cheap African labour in Southern Africa but it later assumed a different role of shaping the modern Botswana state. The thesis deals with several other issues related to the railway in Bechuanaland including land alienation, the colonial disregard of the chiefs' authority, racial discrimination and the economic underdevelopment of Bechuanaland. Since there were no other significant colonial developments at the time of independence, this thesis argues that the railway was the only important feature of the British colonisation of Bechuanaland. From early on, the railway attracted different cultures, identities and religions. It was also instrumental in the introduction of an indigenous capitalist class into Bechuanaland.

Author Keywords: Bechuanaland, Botswana, colonisation, migration, railway, underdevelopment

This thesis examines low-ranking British soldiers' memoirs in the nineteenth century to determine the extent to which they identified with Christianity and how their expressions of faith differed from each other. Using twelve narratives published between 1811–1863, it finds that all of these soldiers identified themselves with Protestant Christianity and, more importantly, considered irreligion an evil which could not be justified by any decent British citizen. Furthermore, it argues that soldiers' identity construction was largely determined by the degree of depth of their religious understanding. It uses the work of William Wilberforce to contextualize these soldiers' expressions of faith and demonstrates how military writing can be more fully understood as representing a spectrum between nominal Christianity and real or true Christianity. This project strives to demonstrate that the religiosity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain has a significant impact upon our understanding of their time.

Author Keywords: Britain, Christianity, memoirs, Military, soldiers, William Wilberforce

The Royal Philanthropic Society (RPS) was the first institution in England to care for young offenders. While historians have demonstrated the legal importance of this institution, none have examined the experience of the youths it attempted to reform. The admission registers of the RPS reveal the importance of adults and peers in the experiences of the inmates of the institution, as both could be sources of conflict and support. Youths could express power over their own lives by resisting the authority of adults, but also by conforming to the rules of the RPS. Inmates could restrict the choices of their peers by working with the RPS, but also through peer pressure or violence. Networks of collaboration and youth culture could also exert a positive impact on peers. Because this thesis represents male youths as actors, it makes a significant addition to recent histories emphasizing the impact of the subaltern groups on eighteenth-century reform movements.

Author Keywords: Conformity, Juvenile Delinquency, Penal Reform, Power Relationships, Royal Philanthropic Society, Youth Culutre

This thesis provides an in-depth and chronological study of the development of civil aviation in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (today's Botswana), and the role played by the British Government in the development of this form of transport. The thesis argues that Her Majesty's Government's neglect and very little interest in its protectorate's civil aviation represented a form of underdevelopment.

The study also reveals the constant contradiction between the neglect of the imperial government and the constant lobbying on the part of colonial administration in the Protectorate for the establishment of an air service. To the colonial administrators, civil aviation represented a symbol of modernity and progress as well as more practical advantages such as mobility. The thesis finally concludes that the Bechuanaland Protectorate's first airline was established due to growing nationalism both locally and on the continent, at large. The British Government facilitated the establishment of the airline as an attempt to appear benevolent to the protectorate on the eve of independence.

In dialogue with the critical scholarship on war and remembrance, my research deals with the construction, contestation and negotiation of collective memory in contemporary Vietnam with a focus on commemorations devoted to dead soldiers. Utilizing the methodologies of cultural studies and ethnography, this research seeks to comprehend the politics of memory which characterize collective memory as a social phenomenon whose meanings, interpretations and forms are variedly constructed from a certain social group to the next. Empirically, in this research, constitutive elements of Vietnamese postwar memoryscapes including the hero-centered discourse sanctioned by the Communist Party and the Socialist state, the family remembrance rooted in religious and kinship mandates and the newly emerged online ecology of memory are examined in their own nature as well as in their complicated intertwinements and constant interactions with each other. Case studies and specific methods of individual interview, participant observation and cultural analysis enable the author to approach and identify a wide range of forms and intersections between official and vernacular practices, between oral and living history and institutionalized and cultural presentations of memory. While considering these issues specifically in the Vietnamese context, my dissertation contributes to the increasing theoretical debates in the field of memory studies by exploring the relation of power and the symbolic struggle within and between different social agents involved. As it emphasizes the dynamic and power of memory, this research furthermore situates the phenomenon of collective memory in its dialogues with a broader cultural political environment of postwar society, which is characterized as a hybrid condition embracing processes of nationalism, modernization and post-socialist transformation. Significantly, during these dialogues, as demonstrated in this research, memory works embrace presentism and future-oriented functions which require any social group who is involved to negotiate and renegotiate its position, and to structure and restructure its power. Last but not least it must construct and reconstruct its own versions of the past.

Author Keywords: collective memory, Dead soldiers, postwar society, Socialist Vietnam, the politics of memory, war remembrance