<p>This dissertation is a study of lordship and its expression through the Catholic League army's institutions during the early years of the Thirty Years War. It draws on letters, reports and other chancery documents from the Bavarian State Archive to examine how duke Maximilian I of Bavaria [r 1597-1651] and his officers re-negotiated their respective command privileges within the army so as to better accommodate each other's practices of lordship through its operations. In exchange for their continued investment in his military power the duke's officers, that is, his military contractors, bargained to preserve, and then expand, customary lordly prerogatives within their commands. </p><p>More broadly the dissertation argues that Maximilian's negotiations with his contractors reflected deeper struggles among the Holy Roman Empire's nobilities over how to incorporate their own lordship within the evolving structures of the imperial state. Nobles who fought in Maximilian's service staked their wealth and landed power on his success in securing a preeminent position relative to the monarchy and, with it, their own place among the empire's governing elite. </p><p>In the process the dissertation probes and questions the role historians have usually assigned military contractors within wider processes of state-formation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and, in particular, the Holy Roman Empire. It views contractors not as profiteering mercenaries who pursued war for gain at the state's expense, but rather as elites who sought to invest in modes of power-sharing that would preserve and strengthen their military role in governance.</p> / Dissertation

Over the course of several centuries during the High and Late Middle Ages the people of Holland developed a vast water-management infrastructure to protect themselves against flooding. Enormous sections of the province lay at or below sea-level, so it was only through constant diligence that they kept their lands dry. They found that the best way to maintain these flood defenses was through cooperation and consensus forming at the local and regional level. Those who would be affected an inundation were given a chance to participate in the decision-making process about how to prevent floods from occurring. These environmental influences led those in Holland to develop a culture based on discussion, debate, compromise, and consensus forming. In the historiography this approach is known as the poldermodel. In the late sixteenth century a series of natural and human-made floods would test the limits of the poldermodel in Holland. In November 1570 the All Saints Day Flood struck the province and several others located along the North Sea. This natural disaster was arguably the worst flood ever to hit Holland, devastating the flood defenses across the province. Before they had time to repair all the damages, war erupted in 1572 as those in Holland revolted against their Spanish Habsburg sovereign. Since the rebel forces in Holland were outmatched by the Habsburg forces they frequently used floods for strategic ends. These military inundations were carried out almost indiscriminately and with little to no regard of the long-term consequences. During the siege of Leiden in 1574 the rebels set roughly half of the province temporarily underwater so they could reach the city with ships and prevent it from falling into Spanish hands. That the rebels adopted the motto better broken lands than lost lands demonstrates how far they were willing to go with the use of the military inundations. These floods essentially broke the poldermodel in Holland. Many of the different cities represented in the provincial assembly the States of Holland placed civic priorities above all else. The city of Gouda in particular simply refused to send delegates to the meetings until the Leidschendam was repaired which had been breached during the siege of Leiden. In the end the city sent out its militia and closed the opening itself, without the States permission. This civic particularism prevented discussion, debate, and the ability to form consensus. It was the individuals with water-management experience which ultimately repaired the poldermodel. They developed a number of ways to satisfy the civic interests and rebuild the discussion culture in the province. When the war resumed following a short truce from 1576 to 1579 known as the Pacification of Ghent, the States of Holland maintained the poldermodel by shifting the burden of the inundations onto neighboring provinces, and constructing fortifications to keep the enemy out of Holland.

The First World War saw a multitude of facial wounds, with veterans coming home with severe facial mutilation numbering in the thousands. These veterans have been somewhat overlooked in the historiography of medicine in World War I, and this work seeks to remedy that by examining every aspect of their lives, from the moment of the wound, to the aftermath of their return home. The medical professionals who treated these men gave a great deal of thought to the philosophy behind their work, and frequently voiced the opinion that their work was essential for the wellness of these mens psyches. This is because patients with facial wounds experienced a double trauma, resulting in both the loss of function and the loss of psychic identity. If surgeons were unsuccessful in covering over severe wounds, sculptors stepped in to take over for them, crafting fine tin masks for the men to wear until they themselves expired. The masks came to serve as a visual reminder of medicines inability to cover the wounds of war. Finally, these men experienced unpleasant reactions upon returning home, because their wounds did not fit in with the way that Europeans preferred to memorialize the First World War. The personal accounts of soldiers and medical workers speak to this notion.

The 1930s were the heyday for left-wing politics in the United States. Soon to be lost in the increasingly ideologically rigid world of Cold War America, socialist politics flourished in labor halls and urban ballrooms in the pre-WWII years. One group of these leftists, named the New York intellectuals, characterized this flourishing radicalism in the 1930s. By the 1950s, however, these same radicals became politically centrist stalwarts of what Arthur Schlesinger termed âThe Vital Centerâ of American politics. New York intellectuals like Dwight McCarthy and Hannah Arendt contributed to the construction of the Cold War liberal consensus that defined 1950s America. In their radical days in the 1930s the New York intellectuals took inspiration from the newly elected Popular Front government of Spain â formed from a broad array of liberals, leftists, and socialists â as a shining example of radicalist success. In 1936, however, Spanish general Francisco Franco ousted the Popular Front government through the prolonged Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Americaâs subsequent recognition of Francoâs rule shattered any beneficent image of the nation. However the Spanish Civil War remained a touchstone of identity for the New York intellectuals after World War II. This paper examines how these key American intellectuals engaged with and memorialized the Spanish Civil War as a shifting locus of political identity between the 1930s and 1950s, particularly how the process of aid to refugees from the Spanish Civil War reflected these intellectualsâ ideological shift from radical politicos on the periphery of U.S. politics to forming its center.

In 1873, the capture of a private American vessel, the Virginius, by a Cuban warship almost brought the United States and Spain to war. The Spanish warship the Tornado seized the Virginius as it ran arms and ammunition to Cuban revolutionaries attempting to claim independence from Spain; fifty-three members of the shipâs crew were put to death by Spanish authorities in Cuba. A widespread popular reaction to this incident, termed the Virginius Affair, swept through the United States while newspapers and citizens agitated for war against Spain. Although the U.S. did not go to war against Spain in 1873, the Virginius Affair had lasting consequences on the three overlapping fields of U.S. Spanish Relations, American politics, and the outcome of the Cuban revolution of 1868-1878, often called the Ten Years War. Historians of these three fields, however, have consistently overlooked the Virginius Affair due to limitations within each of their disciplines that obscure the importance of international politics and non-state actors in affecting history. In order to move past this type of restrictive analysis this paper uses a microhistorical approach to contextualize the Virginius Affair in international politics, following the small and individual actions of Americans, Spaniards, and Cubans localized through the study of the two central ships in the conflict: the Virginius and the Tornado. The long and fraught histories of these two ships reveal the deep networks that connected the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century as well as demonstrating the importance of contingency in shaping history.

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It is most interesting, indeed, to try and understand the thinking of eighteenth-century philosophers in regards to the slavery institution and the Negro. Jefferson has held the interest of many students when it comes to the study of the Negro. With this in mind, the writer concentrated upon the writings of Jefferson in terms of the slave-trade and the Negro. Jefferson personally hated the slave-trade, however, he felt the Negro inferior. The chief purpose of this study was to show Jefferson's dichotomy of nature in trying to justify his beliefs in natural rights for all, but excluding the Negro. For his writings, the writer relied heavily upon Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson and Boyd, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. It was primarily in these books that the writer was able to research the historical writings of Jefferson concerning the Negro slave-trade. The completion of the study revealed to the writer that Jefferson can still be regarded as a liberal and a crusader for Negro freedom as far as eighteenth-century liberalism extends itself. Jefferson's writings clearly display his confusion in terms of equality for the Negro within white society. Hopefully, the study of Jefferson's attitude toward the Negro and slavery will reveal to others the importance of his thoughts with respect to Negro freedom. It should also show that had Jefferson's proposals been accepted perhaps a Civil War could have been averted. Later writers and students of history will be able to look at this study to analyze Thomas Jefferson's treatment of the Negro, and should be able to clearly see the confusion within Jefferson's time concerning the slavery and Negro problem.

This dissertation is an examination of the American presidency and its use of personal diplomacy in the second half of the twentieth century. Through letter writing, telephone conversations, visits to the White House, and trips abroad, presidents engaged with world leaders on an increasingly large scale. For most of the nationâs history, presidents did not interact with their foreign counterparts. Not until the post-World War II period did personal diplomacy became common. Covering the presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, the dissertation examines the forces that led occupants of the White House toward the practice. Rather than a phenomenon based on personality or personal predilection, presidents engaged in diplomacy at the highest-level for similar reasons. The project argues that four main factors pushed presidents toward the frequent use of personal diplomacy: 1) the imperatives of the international environment; 2) domestic political incentives; 3) pressure from foreign leaders for presidential time; 4) and presidential desire for control. Additionally, the dissertation explores the role presidents most frequently played when engaged in personal diplomacy. Often the primary focus of personal diplomacy was not necessarily political, but rather psychological. In this way, the American leader became a counselor for other world leaders. Presidents, particularly in the midst of the Cold War, felt the need to reassure and calm the fears of their counterparts. Other leaders did not necessarily see presidents performing this function, but presidents and their aides did. A work of both history and political science, the dissertation contributes to histories of U.S. foreign relations and the American presidency, as well as political science literature on the institution. Examining the use of personal diplomacy across presidential administrations provides a clearer view of how the United States engaged with the world in the second half of the twentieth century, offering a fuller, richer understanding of Americaâs role in the world and of the exercise of presidential power.

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Upon his inauguration in 1977, American President Jimmy Carter promised to make human rights the soul of his foreign policy, thus subordinating what he considered Americas inordinate fear of communism in the broader Cold War. Central America quickly became the testing grounds for these campaign promises as the region erupted into crisis, with serious revolutionary threats first emerging in Nicaragua and later growing more serious in nearby Guatemala. Given these threats, each of these governments turned up the pressure on their respective leftist opposition movements and frequently violated internationally recognized human rights. What happened to Carters human rights program in a region in which traditional American Cold War security concerns seemed to conflict with Carters stated desire to promote human rights? To what degree did the Reagan administration continue Carters promotion of human rights in the region as the crisis seemingly grew more violent and out of control? These are some of the central questions that this paper seeks to answer. Ultimately, while Carter demonstrates a continued commitment to his human rights policy in the face of a great deal of pressure, both domestic and foreign, the Reagan administration distances itself from much of Carters rhetoric, while applying human rights in an uneven way to the Central American region.