Writers of golden age crime fiction (1920 to 1945), and in particular female writers, have been seen by many critics as socially and politically detached. Their texts have been read as morality tales, theoretically rich mise en scenès, or psychic fantasies, by necessity emerging from an historical epoch with unique cultural and social concerns, but only obliquely engaging with these concerns by toying with unstable identities, or through playful, but doomed, private transgressions. The thesis overturns assumptions about the crime novel as a negation of the present moment, detached and escapist, by demonstrating how crime narratives responded to public debates which highlighted some of the most pressing legal and philosophical concerns of their time. Grounded in meticulous historical research, the thesis draws attention to contemporary debates between antagonistic psychological schools – giving equal space to debates within psychoanalysis and adaptive neuroscience – and charts how these debates were reflected in crime writing. Chapter two explores the contestation of the M’Naghten laws on criminal responsibility in light of Ronald True’s case (1922), followed by readings of crime narratives in which perpetrators have ambiguous and controversial legal status in regard to criminal responsibility. At the intersection of psychiatric discourse and the popular literary imagination, a critical and ethical perspective developed which not only conveyed a version of psychological discourse to a wider public, but profoundly reworked the foundations of the genre as the ritual unveiling of deviancy and the restoration of the rational institutions of society. In similar vein, chapter three explores the status of the ‘Born Criminal’ in law and medicine, and looks at crime writer Gladys Mitchell’s efforts to expose both the pitfalls of categorisation, and competing discourses’ limitations in adequately accounting for crime. Chapter four, whilst maintaining close medical-legal focus, opens up the study to consider how understandings of deviant selfhood in modernist writing inflected crime writers’ representations of unconscious and epileptic killers. Finally, chapter five continues this intertextual approach by asserting that certain crime novels express an exhaustion with the genre’s classic rational and scientific heroes, and turn instead to the affective epistemologies and notions of subconscious synthesis concomitantly being celebrated in modernist writing. Altering the position of the authoritative detective in ways that profoundly alter the politics of the form, the chapter and the thesis in total propose a reading of golden age crime fiction more responsive to cultural, psychological and legal debates of the era, leading to a reassessment of the form as neither escapist nor purely affirmative of the status quo.

The Boy Scout Movement is one of the most influential youth movements of the twentieth century. Begun in the context of Edwardian imperialism as a foil to fears of racial decline, the movement’s militarism became a liability following the First World War, when Scouting’s widespread, trans-national popularity forced it to enter the political sphere that dominates international relations. Based on extensive archival research in both the United Kingdom and Canada, this thesis traces the evolution of the Scout Movement from a British imperial institution into an international brotherhood in the 1920s and 1930s. It reveals a tense relationship between the worldwide membership and the central administration of the movement. Despite efforts by founder Robert Baden-Powell to create an image of unity, Scouting proved ungovernable from a single ideological source, and local conditions dictated the form that it took in each domestic situation. Scouting therefore both deeply influenced, and was influenced by, the cultures and communities into which it was transplanted.

Historians writing on the subject of race have largely focused on the period after the Second World War: the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 has become a defining symbol of Britain’s immigration history. Studies that examine the earlier decades of the twentieth century privilege either imperial or scientific discourses on race. This focus neglects the variety of social and cultural discourses through which the idea of racial difference was disseminated to the British public. This thesis focuses on the idea of race in the 1920s and 1930s and explores how other peoples and places were constructed in the British imagination through three separate but interconnected themes: religion, entertainment and childhood experiences. The thesis has three central arguments: firstly it argues that racial discourses were varied; secondly, that while Britain’s cities offered opportunities for interracial contact, most British people’s experiences of the racial other were limited to the realm of the imagination, nourished by a variety of constructions emanating from churches, schools, entertainment venues and the home; thirdly, that the racial other was constructed in the British imagination as a source of both fear and desire. Religion was one of the dominant forces disseminating ideas about racial difference to the British public in the interwar years. Religious leaders were able to construct an image of other peoples and places through their connection to important annual events such as Empire Day and in their commentaries on current events; their response to the 1919 race riots illustrates how religion, empire and politics intersected on matters of race and national identity. Missionary groups also played an important role in constructing ideas about race, especially to children, through missionary exhibitions. The role of religion in society in the interwar years has been underplayed and yet religious discourses on race that were familiar in the nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth. In the realm of popular entertainment, both blackface and orientalist productions excelled in the art of racial disguise. These productions underline the contradiction at the heart of race discourse between fear and desire; fear of a difference that undermined the notion of white supremacy and thus the strength of Britain’s Empire, and a simultaneous desire to ‘know’ the ‘other’, be that through cultural interactions or physical intimacy. The act of dressing-up as the racial ‘other’ was a crucial means of exploring fantasies of the ‘other’ without transgressing contemporary racial boundaries. Newspaper reviews of popular entertainments constructed a narrative on race that used both positive and negative stereotypes. The history of licensing and censorship in the files of the Lord Chamberlain’s Archive reveals contemporary anxieties about race focusing particularly on miscegenation. People were encouraged to imagine racial difference in a variety of ways and from a young age. The stereotyped images presented to children are open to less nuanced interpretation than those aimed at adults and more than any other were composed of binary oppositions between black and white, civilised and savage, ancient and modern. Evidence from newspapers and the Mass-Observation Archive highlights how children were encouraged to imagine racial difference and the variety and complexity of childhood experiences that defined people’s ideas about race. This thesis builds on an established body of work on the subject of race and uses a variety of sources in order to advance the discussion beyond a narrow focus on empire or scientific debates towards a more comprehensive analysis of the circulation of the idea of race in interwar Britain. It focuses on an era that has received less scholarly attention than the years after 1945 and highlights the variety of discourses on race that permeated the social and cultural life of interwar Britain.

Thesis advisor: Marilynn Johnson / This dissertation examines how a coalition of nationalist organizations invented, revised, and popularized the performance of patriotic traditions in everyday life in the United States. Between 1920 and 1955, the Nationalist Network encouraged public schools, local governments, and sports and entertainment venues to incorporate patriotic symbols and rituals into Americans’ daily lives. This “everyday nationalism” included traditions as simple as displaying the American flag in front of government buildings or as elaborate as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or performing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Network’s strategy entailed popularizing patriotic traditions in American society before asking for the endorsement of the federal and state governments. Some of these traditions remain integral to American national identity in the twenty-first century, in large part because the Network normalized the idea that patriotism must be publicly performed. The Nationalist Network comprised a variety of civic, hereditary, and veterans’ organizations, most notably the Daughters of the American Revolution, American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars, which collaborated to advance their goal of spreading everyday nationalism. These organizations largely represented upper middle-class, white, Protestant, American-born citizens and the groups’ leaders believed that immigrants, people of color, workers, and others different from themselves were inherently less patriotic and needed to regularly perform patriotic traditions to truly become American. The Network began popularizing patriotic traditions as part of everyday life in the 1890s but between 1920 and 1955, its work became politically polarized. During these decades, right- and left-wing forces within the Network contested whether American national identity should be exclusive or inclusive. By examining the period between 1920 and 1955, we can see how different ideological factions of the Network used patriotic culture to appeal to Americans’ sense of national pride and to advance their particular beliefs about what the United States can and should represent. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Utopian Dreams, National Realities: Intellectual Cooperation and the League of Nations chronicles the work of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI). This dissertation demonstrates how the CICI’s utopian vision of international peace was actively challenged by national tensions and agendas in the interwar period. It examines the idealistic goals of the movement by focusing on the narratives and motivations of key committee members as they worked toward their own ideas of peace. The challenge of nationalism is illustrated through an analysis of major disagreements between CICI members as well as through biographical case studies of lesser-known members. The pursuit of “moral disarmament,” or the process of changing mentalities towards war, was a central component of the CICI’s work. Both education and film were envisioned as ways to influence the public and engender anti-war sentiment. This work argues that the League of Nations’ conception of internationalism was Eurocentric and moral disarmament was formulated within an Anglo-American context. Both of these limitations narrowed the influence of the CICI’s peace work to certain geographical areas of influence and effectively marginalized less powerful nations and individuals within it.

Using local primary sources, this work answers two questions. Firstly, is there a transnational political connection, reflected ideologically or materially, between the readership of Robitnytsia in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928? Secondly, what are the interests of the readership of Robitnytsia, as reflected in the Letters section? The answers to these questions are relevant to social historians because their focus is on content generated by the female readership of the journal, not the content generated by the male activists and political leaders who both contributed to and edited it. This work also highlights the value of Robitnytsia as a historical source of Canada, labour, gender, women's, and transnational 1 2 3 Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada: A History (Toronto, 1975), 7. Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada [...], 7. Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada [...], 9. histories; one that has been under-utilized to date and is readily available to researchers in Winnipeg and other cities across Canada. To evaluate and provide an analysis of Robitnytsia as a source of primary evidence, a brief introduction to the ULFTA, Robitnytsia, and the Soviet Cultural Revolution is helpful to the reader. After addressing the relevant historiography, the three chapters that follow provide analysis and the relevant context for the source work, including photographs and illustrations from the journal. Photographs featured on the covers of Robitnytsia provide insight into the imagery of the journal, as well as to the rhetoric associated with well-known images and icons within the working class Ukrainian community in Winnipeg. Discovering the answer to the second question posed in this work was straightforward, as the priorities and interests of the working women in Winnipeg were highly localized and specific, including recognizable and accessible priorities to even those readers who are not familiar with the work of the ULFTA. These interests included basic literacy, education, labour organization, and participation in political and social activities. The evidence regarding a transnational link to the Soviet Union, the first question of this work, was even more clear: at the grassroots level, there was no such transnational link between the Ukrainian Left in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928. / October 2016

This thesis examines the utopian writings of Robert Hugh Benson, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley in the context of contemporary and modern nationally conscious discourses. Focusing on the period of 1910-1939, the present study explores the terms and strategies whereby utopian visions of a World State, premised on religion or universal governance, engage with, and contribute to, constructions of England as a specific topography, with a political culture, social hierarchies, religious sensibilities, and literary tradition. Informed by literary history, utopian theory, studies of national character and nationalism, the thesis argues that the writings of Benson, Wells and Huxley communicate an ascertainable reciprocity between these authors’ utopian imagination and national susceptibilities. The thesis investigates the ways in which the studied fictions endorse visions of a World State, offering a mediated response not only to the contemporary condition of England, but also to England’s topographic, political, and socio-cultural continuity. Of particular interest is a re-invocation of Southern England as either a fictional setting or a liminal environment for the emergence of a World State. The study also investigates the narrative anxieties about the retreat of Liberalism from the national political scene, being superseded by the restrictive regimes of a World State; and a fictional renewal of social hierarchies as nationally conscious models for efficient government. The thesis further accounts for the authorial engagements with continuity, examining Benson’s investment in dynastic rule, Wells’s hostility to revolution, and Huxley’s redefinition of the ‘English poetic mind’ to oppose the dissolution of national literary traditions in a global future. In exploring the extent to which alternative versions of England (Catholic, Cosmopolitan, Alien) dominate the visions of world unity, this thesis contends that the nationality of a World State manifests itself not in the universal ends that such visions seek to achieve, but in the nationally conscious means they press into service.

This thesis deals with the transformation of social and political behavior of Prague students in the 1930's. The work follows the requirements and expectations of students. Their unfulfilled view reveals the dissatisfaction of students, which led to the escalation of student clear-cut political and social views. The thirties brought in a student movement onset of extreme nationalist, but also left-wing tendencies of both the Czech and the German side. The work is based on the documents of student faculty associations, the student journals and memoir texts. The aim is to analyze, against whom was directed the dissatisfaction of students, which ideas had students about the proper organization of the state and society, what were the differences in political and social thought between the faculties and student groups and how were students percieved by society. Work is also interested in what influence on stduents movement had the clash Czech, German and Jewish students in Prague. How was influenced the students thinking of their social status and how identified the individual student associations. The work aims to contribute to the completion of the image of interwar czechoslovak society.

The issue of Jewish minorities especially during the time of WW2 was discussed many times already. In a number of sources is relatively accurately captured the political situation and the gradual elimination of Jews from society, not to mention the persecution itself. This topic has me wondering about since I was about Jews and World War 2 learned. Already in elementary school I was reading children's encyclopedias most this topic and still could not understand how something like this could happen. What I got older, the more information I investigated, but still without understanding the causes why the Jews, whom you made that had so cruelly ended, and again and again the same question, how is it possible that this could happen in the recent past? ? Thesis Theme for me was clear because of that. I had quite a lot of information about Jewish life during the war, but I did not know too much about their origin and especially fascinated by the origins of their control what circumstances preceded the war. As a basis for a complete understanding of all contexts, in my opinion, necessary to start from the beginning. Who are the Jews, where they were married, where they came from, who they were, what they ate and how they are treated as a minority. After finding this information, for me it...

The presented Master's thesis, titled "Otakar Šourek (1883-1956) - Music critic and writer", deals with Otakar Šourek, the author of the most extensive monograph on Antonín Dvořák to date. Šourek played a significant role in the musical life of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918 - 1938). He worked for numerous music institutions and wrote music reviews, articles and studies for many journals and magazines, as well as books. On the basic of the description of Šourek's public work and his engagement in several music "scandals" in the first Czechoslovak Republic, the thesis strives to evaluate Šourek's position amid the musical life of the time and characterise him as a music critic. The thesis draws upon the study of source materials from Otakar Šourek's personal effects, deposited at the National Museum - Czech Museum of Music, and study of the period press. Key words: music criticism, music, music of the first half of the 20th century, the first Czechoslovak Republic, interwar period, Otakar Šourek