European history

AbstractThe Rise of Property and the Death of the Moral Economy: Enclosure and Social Unrest in Late-Eighteenth Century England – Ewan Martel

Eighteenth-century Great Britain was a kingdom marked by the rise of a property-based and highly individualistic conception of social and economic structures came a doctrine of improvement based upon extracting the most value from a tract of land possible. Parliamentary enclosure was critical to this change, seeing lands converted from something of communal value to individual property. This work argues that the growth and implementation of parliamentary enclosure was a source of immense social unrest in late-eighteenth century Britain as the process and its supporting ideologies were inherently counter-intuitive to traditional systems of communal land ownership and subsistence. This paper utilizes primary sources from both landowners implementing enclosure and the responses of commoners and enclosure's opponents to better understand the agency of the peasantry in their fight against a damaging practice and how forms of unrest were multi-faceted and prevalent, despite the growing power of the land-owing gentry.

Author Keywords: Class, Common Lands, Eighteenth-Century, Enclosure, Great Britain, Social Unrest

In 1945, few refugee cases were as complicated as those of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who found themselves stranded in defeated Germany but could neither return home due to antisemitic violence nor immigrate to most countries due to extant prewar visa restrictions. Between 1945 and 1947, some 150,000 Jews fleeing ongoing antisemitic violence joined them in American-occupied Bavaria, including thousands who had survived in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon Tony Judt has described as "surviving the peace." This thesis focuses on Föhrenwald, a United Nations refugee camp outside of Munich. It interweaves oral histories with archival materials from the United Nations and the American Joint Distribution Committee to apply Atina Grossmann's work on "close encounters" between Jews, Germans, and Americans to a single refugee camp. What emerges is a portrait of the vibrant, if transient, political, social, and educational life Jews built "in the wilderness" of Germany between 1945 and 1947.

Author Keywords: Displaced Persons, Föhrenwald, Holocaust survivors, Occupied Germany (1945–49), United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

This study examines interaction and accommodation between Western Christians and Muslims in the Levant between the Second and Third Crusades, 1145 to 1192, examining three groups: short term crusaders, members of military orders, and permanent settlers. While members of these groups possessed several personal and group identities, most shared a prescriptive religious identity that encouraged a common goal: holy war for the protection of the Holy Land from Muslims, whom they identified as a distinct, enemy `other.' Despite these prescriptive beliefs, when Christians came into contact with Muslims, particularly following longer and more varied contact, most engaged in some convergent accommodation, such as diplomatic accommodation, development of shared languages and gestures, or admiration for chivalric qualities. Those settled in the Levant accepted the existing economic and social structures, assuming the roles of previous elites, adopting certain local customs, sharing sacred spaces, medical knowledge, or even developing personal ties with Muslims.

Author Keywords: Accommodation, Christianity, Crusades, Identity, Islam

Utilizing pre-existing scholarship on post-conflict reconstruction in twentieth-century Europe, as well as a variety of French primary sources, this thesis explores the concept of national-moral reconstruction as utilized by French political leaders in the wake of their country's defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. In particular, this study analyzes the competing discourses employed by the Vichy regime and the various organizations of the French Resistance, as each group sought to explain to a broader public both the causes of the French defeat, as well as the repercussions of the German occupation of the country from June 1940 to August 1944. While previous scholarship has emphasized the physical and/or economic dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction--especially when considered in the context of the Second World War--this thesis focuses on issues of cultural identity and national history/memory in order to look at how French political leaders hoped to reconstruct the moral and cultural, as opposed to the strictly physical, fabric of their country in the wake of the comprehensive social, political, and military disaster brought about by the German occupation.

Author Keywords: collective memory, German occupation, national-moral reconstruction, Philippe Pétain, post-conflict reconstruction, Vichy France

This thesis explores middling reform-minded representations of plebeian children's material worlds in England from 1720 to 1780. Specifically, it examines depictions of chattel and place in imagery of children, to convey messages aligned with the reform initiatives of the eighteenth century. Using the Old Bailey Proceedings, prints by William Hogarth, and novels, it argues that contemporary concerns about idleness, vagrancy, consumerism, and delinquency, were reflected in the way the middling sort conceived of plebeian childhood. Ultimately these representations of plebeian children followed two major narratives: industry or idleness. If poor children were not industrious, they were idle. The culture of reform targeted these children with initiatives to instruct and control them. The producers spread their middling ideologies through a range of visual, fictional, and legal productions, all of which framed plebeian children as dependent and in need of education or training.

Author Keywords: Children, Eighteenth-century, England, Material History, Plebeian, representations

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 study analyzes Christian European perceptions of group identity and beliefs in early modern geographic literature, as exemplified by John Ogilby's Africa (1670), a selective translation of Olfert Dapper's 1668 work, and its descriptions of West-Central Africa. Ogilby's work, congruently with contemporary geographic literature, employed the Christian religion as a key marker of group identity, using it as a lens to interpret and define the collective identities of African societies it described. Using a theoretical framework derived from Daniel Bar-Tal's Group Beliefs, the thesis demonstrates that Africa portrayed the officially Christian kingdom of Kongo as superior to its non-Christian neighbours, consistently represented in a negative light. This attitude reflected normative European beliefs of Christian superiority fanned by the period's intense denominationalism and religious anxiety. Africa's general ecumenism towards other Christian denominations and its maintained "othering" of non-Christian Africans was closely linked to Ogilby's own sense of self-identity and group beliefs shaped by his life experiences in the seventeenth-century British Isles.

Author Keywords: Africa, Christianity, Identity, Kongo, Ogilby, Syncretism

The Spanish Civil War was a theatre of political tension where democracy, communism, and fascism clashed during the interwar period, starting in July 1936 and ending in April 1939. The war defied the traditional concept of a civil war as Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union became involved. All three saw Spain as a testing ground for new military technologies. Meanwhile the United States government stayed steadfast in its isolationist approach to foreign conflict and sent no aid to either side. American military attachés, who are military observers to foreign nations, in Spain witnessed the ongoing conflict, creating detailed reports of their observations before, during, and after the war. This thesis argues that the reports, which contained valuable information regarding military technology and doctrine, had little impact on American military innovation during the interwar period. This was due to both politically dictated neglect and doctrine prejudice regarding European conflicts. Based on the attaché reports, this thesis will explain what Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union learned about aviation, tanks, and artillery from their participation in Spain. This will be contrasted with the state of the United States' military at the same time to demonstrate not only the little impact the attaché reports had on the trajectory of the American military, but how the military lagged behind those in Spain upon the beginning of the Second World War.

Author Keywords: American military attachés, Germany, Italy, Military Intelligence Division, Soviet Union, Spanish Civil War

The dissertation explores the aesthetic anthropology of Georges Bataille and his collaborators in the Collège de Sociologie, a distinguished group of intellectuals including Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossowski, and Walter Benjamin among others. At the dissertation's outset the role, influence, discovery and indeed invention of the Marquis de Sade as the almost mythic prefiguring for so much French aesthetic thought in the period beginning after World War One and up until even the present day is advanced. Before Freud in Vienna, Sade in Paris: the central thematic axis of the following addresses Eros noir, a term for reflecting on the danger and violence of sexuality that Freud theorizes with the "death drive." The deconstruction of the nude as an object and form in particular in the artwork of Hans Bellmer and the writing and art of Pierre Klossowski comprises the latter two chapters of the dissertation, which provides examples of perversion through the study of simulacra and phantasms. The thwarted pursuit of community in the vacated space of Nietzsche's death of a God is a persistent leitmotif of the following in the account it offers of the thought of Georges Bataille and other members of the Collège de Sociologie. Eros noir, at the fatal cusp between ascendant manifest sex and a latent diminished Christianity, underwrites much of the French intellectual contribution to the symbology of cultural modernism.

Author Keywords: Bataille, Georges, 1897-1962, Collège de Sociologie, Eroticism, Sade, marquis de, 1740-1814, Surrealism, The Uncanny

Carlism and anarchism were revolutionary social movements that acquired significant popular support during the most intensive period of modernization in Spain (mid 19th to mid 20th centuries). It was noted but not well explored by contemporaries and historians that these enemies were similar in their hostility towards modernization and in their intense idealism. This thesis compares the two movements in order to determine the nature of their commonality and what this suggests about ideological enemies. A range of sources were consulted, including scholarship on modern Spain, biographical information on individuals who converted from Carlism to anarchism and contemporary print media. It was concluded that they were produced by the same destabilizing processes of disentailment and industrialization, which drew the working classes towards proposals that would have otherwise seemed implausibly utopian. The thesis further suggests that they were uniquely idealistic, in that they put moral integrity before the success of their cause.

Author Keywords: anarchism, Carlism, enemy other, modernization, Modern Spain, social movements