Between 1914 and 1919, Germans and Austrians experienced previously unimaginable sociopolitical transformations: four years of war, military defeat, the collapse of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies, the creation of democratic republics, and the redrawing of the map of Central Europe. Through an analysis of new state symbols and the staging of political and cultural celebrations, this dissertation explores the multiple and conflicting ways in which Germans and Austrians sought to reconceptualize the relationships between nation, state and politics in the wake of the First World War. Whereas the political right argued that democracy was a foreign imposition, supporters of democracy in both countries went to great lengths to refute these claims. In particular, German and Austrian republicans endeavored to link their fledgling democracies to the established tradition of großdeutsch nationalism – the idea that a German nation-state should include Austria – in an attempt to legitimize their embattled republics. By using nineteenth-century großdeutsch symbols and showing continued support for an Anschluss (political union) even after the Entente forbade it, republicans hoped to create a transborder German national community that would be compatible with a democratic body politic. As a project that investigates the entangled and comparative histories of Germany and Austria, this dissertation makes three contributions to the study of German nationalism and modern Central European history. First, in revealing the pervasiveness of großdeutsch ideas and symbols at this time, I point to the necessity of looking at both Germany and Austria when considering topics such as the redefinition of national identity and the creation of democracy in post-World War I Central Europe. Second, it highlights the need to move beyond the binary categorizations of civic and ethnic nationalisms, which place German nationalism in the latter category. As the republicans’ use of großdeutsch nationalism demonstrates, the creation of a transborder German community was not simply the work of the extreme political right. Third, it contributes to recent scholarship which seeks to move past the entrenched question of why interwar German and Austrian democracies failed. Instead of simply viewing the two republics as failures, it investigates the ways in which citizens engaged with the new form of government, as well as the prospects for the success of democracy in the wake of military defeat. In drawing attention to the differences between the German and Austrian experiments with democracy, this dissertation points to the relative strengths of the Weimar Republic when compared to the First Austrian Republic.

Since the end of French colonial rule in Guinea, “independence” has held a central place in its political culture. Implying both dignity and self-determination for the sovereign people which possesses it, independence is a concept that has meaning only in relation to other nation-states and cultures. Yet the political elite that dominated Guinea’s First Republic constructed a new national culture around this concept. The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958-1971 examines Guinea’s assertion of its right to independence and the response of powerful Western players, especially the United States and France, as Guinea challenged their assumptions about the nature of African sovereignty. Considering the history of the international relations of a single African state that enjoyed limited international power and prestige challenges conventions in the historiography of both Africa and international relations. It illuminates and contextualizes expectations concerning the meaning of modernity, African sovereignty as a matter of international law, and the end of formal colonial rule coinciding with the tensions and competitions of the Cold War. The study demonstrates that the international context played a crucial role, both in conditioning the timing and form of decolonization and in shaping the international community’s adaptation of colonial patterns of economic and political interaction to the new reality of African nation-states. Focusing on the invention, development and reception of one country’s insistence on independence in turn illuminates significant issues and events: the end of French colonial rule; limitations on the sovereignty of non-European postcolonial states; the advent of neocolonialism and the failure of the nominally anti-colonial United States to oppose it; the ideological appeal of African unity as a means of safeguarding sovereignty and the compromises that its institutional form entailed; foreign aid and the notion that development for modernization could be stimulated from outside; and the implications of unlimited internal autonomy for a state’s people. Guinea’s independence ultimately challenged developing norms of Western economic and political interaction with new African states by complicating assumptions about the universality of Western notions of economic development, justice and morality.

Since Mark Leone’s landmark 1979 study Roots of Modern Mormonism, a scholarly consensus has emerged that a key element of Mormon distinctiveness stems from one’s subscription to an alternate narrative or experience of history. In the past generation, scholarship on Mormon historical thought has addressed important issues arising from these insights from anthropological and sociological perspectives. These perspectives have joined a rich and venerable controversial literature seeking to “debunk” Mormon narratives, apologetic scholarship asserting their epistemic harmony or superiority, as well as fault-finding scholarship that constructs differences in Mormon historical thinking as a problem that must be solved. The lacuna that this project begins to fill is the lack of scholarship specifically in the field of intellectual history describing the various alternate narratives of the past that have been and are being developed by Mormons, their contents, the methodologies by which they are produced and the theories of historical causation that they entail. This dissertation examines nine chronica (historical narratives and associated theories of history) generated by Mormon thinkers during the twentieth century. Following Philip Barlow’s definition of “Mormon” as any religious group that includes the Book of Mormon in its canon, this project examines five chronica generated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism’s 14-million-strong Utah-based denomination), two generated by the Community of Christ (Mormonism’s 175,000-strong Missouri-based denomination) and two generated by independent Mormon fundamentalists (polygamists), one in Utah and the other in Mexico. In so doing it examines the thought of B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, W. Cleon Skousen, Ogden Kraut, Margarito Bautista, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson and a variety of CoC writers such as Harold Velt, Roy Cheville, Little Pigeon and F. Edward Butterworth. Following the work of Leone and Jan Shipps, it engages ethnographic perspectives on unique elements of Mormon temporal phenomenology and its relationship with ritual practice. It also examines how national political and religious movements interpenetrate with Mormonism to condition different understandings of the past; the interactions of Mormon understandings of the past with Mexican revolutionary nationalism and indigenismo, Cold War anti-communism, the 1970s New Left, Christian fundamentalism and Gilded Age progressivism are concurrently examined. Similarly, Mormon interactions with various epistemes and methodologies are canvassed, including New Testament criticism, cultural anthropology, conspiracy theory, medieval typology and the Cambridge myth and ritual school. Ultimately, a set of religious communities that prioritize subscription to a narrative of Israelite immigration to the Americas and pre-Columbian Christian history of the Western Hemisphere, including the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus Christ, has had to reach a special accommodation with history. This project is a study of the diverse accommodations that have been achieved, their epistemic bases and their sustainability in light of the different forms of time consciousness that underpin them.

This dissertation traces the competing forces of antisemitism and Jewish civic activism in French colonial Algeria from the 1870 Crémieux decree to the end of World War II. It examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. The dissertation centers on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other colonial groups, including French citizens from the metropole, newly naturalized non-French settlers, and Algerian Muslims. Periodic and recurring episodes of antisemitism resulted from competition for control over municipal government. In colonial Algeria, municipal governments acted as the major crucible for politics and patronage available to settlers and citizens. This dissertation contends that through the competition for the scarce resources and rights as citizens, various political groups in the colony exerted their claims on the state via the degradation of Algeria Jews, who were naturalized en masse in 1870. This competition resulted in antisemitic violence as well as an ongoing and hotly contested debate on the definition of French identity. As Algerian Jews assimilated as a result of the urging of their communal leaders and outside influences from metropolitan French Jews and Jewish organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, antisemites sought to limit Algerian Jewish access to rights. Algerian Jews faced particularly strong competition from the newly naturalized French settlers who emigrated from Italy, Spain, and Malta. These immigrants viewed the Algerian Jews as particularly dangerous status competitors. Rather than accept antisemitism as inevitable, Algerian Jews defended themselves against antisemitic attacks through the ii i formation of defense organizations such as the Comité Algérien des Études Sociales. They urged fellow Jews to fulfill their responsibilities to France, celebrating military service and sacrifices, and demanding that Jews exercise their right to vote. Algerian Jews negotiated the antisemitism of French and newly French settlers, as well as Algerian Muslims. French antisemites took advantage of Algerian Muslim frustrations with their inferior status and encouraged antisemitic violence among Algerian Muslims. Algerian Jews sought to diffuse such tensions by encourage fraternity with Algerian Muslims in the colony. As Algerian Jews assimilated and integrated into the French colony and civil society, they negotiated fraught relationships with other colonial groups, proving themselves as Frenchmen while encouraging unity with Algerian Muslims. Algerian Jews straddled the line between citizen and subject in the colonial context and fought to prove themselves as worthy French citizens in the face of competition and antisemitism. Although specific to the case of French colonial Algeria, these issues of competition for status, identity, and rights are complementary to studies of other colonial contexts and that of newly emerged states. Such debates about citizenship and belonging lie at the heart of much of the turmoil of twentieth century history.

This thesis locates John G. Diefenbaker’s electoral triumphs in the general elections of 1957 and 1958 and his subsequent world tour within the context of the revival of Conservative nationalism in the postwar period. To make his case against a Liberal government that had been in power for twenty-two years, Diefenbaker had to engage the public in a response to political events based on an appreciation of an abstract and not quite palpable threat to democracy and a national way of life. He did so by harnessing the persuasive techniques of public relations and the new medium of television—a powerful combination that Diefenbaker knew could most effectively tell and sell a national narrative. The signature he settled on was the “New National Policy.” The choice harkened back to a discourse of Conservative nationalism that spoke of the antiquity of his party ideology and rediscovered the heroes who founded the nation. The “New National Policy” was a therapeutic ethos designed to assuage voters’ fears about mass consumption, continentalism, communism, and the end of empire: it ensured that the greatness of events and men of the past could guarantee the ideas and values of the present; it was gendered in its construction of patriotic manhood, exalted motherhood, and icons of nationalist ideology; it was transnational in scope; it told of a relation of cause-and-effect that resembled a theory of history more than a blueprint for public policy; it was fashioned to disarm critical analysis because it conformed to the structures and traditions of storytelling and the clichés of historical memory. This thesis makes three interrelated arguments. First, it argues that the systems of values and meanings on which Diefenbaker drew cannot be understood by analyzing his personal foibles or tracing his rise and fall through a series of events. Partisan narratives are built out of the dialectical interchange between warring political ideologies and are stories fitted to character, circumstance, and experience. Second, it suggests that Diefenbaker was a transitional figure whose vision, message, leadership style, and public relations campaign seemed to best fit the barely discernable dimensions of the political and cultural change of the immediate postwar decades. Finally, by examining resurgence of Conservative nationalism in the context of imperial decline, it seeks to show that partisan narratives in English Canada in the 1960s cannot be understood outside of the larger transnational contexts in which they emerged.

Since the end of French colonial rule in Guinea, “independence” has held a central place in its political culture. Implying both dignity and self-determination for the sovereign people which possesses it, independence is a concept that has meaning only in relation to other nation-states and cultures. Yet the political elite that dominated Guinea’s First Republic constructed a new national culture around this concept. The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958-1971 examines Guinea’s assertion of its right to independence and the response of powerful Western players, especially the United States and France, as Guinea challenged their assumptions about the nature of African sovereignty. Considering the history of the international relations of a single African state that enjoyed limited international power and prestige challenges conventions in the historiography of both Africa and international relations. It illuminates and contextualizes expectations concerning the meaning of modernity, African sovereignty as a matter of international law, and the end of formal colonial rule coinciding with the tensions and competitions of the Cold War. The study demonstrates that the international context played a crucial role, both in conditioning the timing and form of decolonization and in shaping the international community’s adaptation of colonial patterns of economic and political interaction to the new reality of African nation-states. Focusing on the invention, development and reception of one country’s insistence on independence in turn illuminates significant issues and events: the end of French colonial rule; limitations on the sovereignty of non-European postcolonial states; the advent of neocolonialism and the failure of the nominally anti-colonial United States to oppose it; the ideological appeal of African unity as a means of safeguarding sovereignty and the compromises that its institutional form entailed; foreign aid and the notion that development for modernization could be stimulated from outside; and the implications of unlimited internal autonomy for a state’s people. Guinea’s independence ultimately challenged developing norms of Western economic and political interaction with new African states by complicating assumptions about the universality of Western notions of economic development, justice and morality.

Since Mark Leone’s landmark 1979 study Roots of Modern Mormonism, a scholarly consensus has emerged that a key element of Mormon distinctiveness stems from one’s subscription to an alternate narrative or experience of history. In the past generation, scholarship on Mormon historical thought has addressed important issues arising from these insights from anthropological and sociological perspectives. These perspectives have joined a rich and venerable controversial literature seeking to “debunk” Mormon narratives, apologetic scholarship asserting their epistemic harmony or superiority, as well as fault-finding scholarship that constructs differences in Mormon historical thinking as a problem that must be solved. The lacuna that this project begins to fill is the lack of scholarship specifically in the field of intellectual history describing the various alternate narratives of the past that have been and are being developed by Mormons, their contents, the methodologies by which they are produced and the theories of historical causation that they entail. This dissertation examines nine chronica (historical narratives and associated theories of history) generated by Mormon thinkers during the twentieth century. Following Philip Barlow’s definition of “Mormon” as any religious group that includes the Book of Mormon in its canon, this project examines five chronica generated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism’s 14-million-strong Utah-based denomination), two generated by the Community of Christ (Mormonism’s 175,000-strong Missouri-based denomination) and two generated by independent Mormon fundamentalists (polygamists), one in Utah and the other in Mexico. In so doing it examines the thought of B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, W. Cleon Skousen, Ogden Kraut, Margarito Bautista, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson and a variety of CoC writers such as Harold Velt, Roy Cheville, Little Pigeon and F. Edward Butterworth. Following the work of Leone and Jan Shipps, it engages ethnographic perspectives on unique elements of Mormon temporal phenomenology and its relationship with ritual practice. It also examines how national political and religious movements interpenetrate with Mormonism to condition different understandings of the past; the interactions of Mormon understandings of the past with Mexican revolutionary nationalism and indigenismo, Cold War anti-communism, the 1970s New Left, Christian fundamentalism and Gilded Age progressivism are concurrently examined. Similarly, Mormon interactions with various epistemes and methodologies are canvassed, including New Testament criticism, cultural anthropology, conspiracy theory, medieval typology and the Cambridge myth and ritual school. Ultimately, a set of religious communities that prioritize subscription to a narrative of Israelite immigration to the Americas and pre-Columbian Christian history of the Western Hemisphere, including the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus Christ, has had to reach a special accommodation with history. This project is a study of the diverse accommodations that have been achieved, their epistemic bases and their sustainability in light of the different forms of time consciousness that underpin them.

This dissertation traces the competing forces of antisemitism and Jewish civic activism in French colonial Algeria from the 1870 Crémieux decree to the end of World War II. It examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. The dissertation centers on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other colonial groups, including French citizens from the metropole, newly naturalized non-French settlers, and Algerian Muslims. Periodic and recurring episodes of antisemitism resulted from competition for control over municipal government. In colonial Algeria, municipal governments acted as the major crucible for politics and patronage available to settlers and citizens. This dissertation contends that through the competition for the scarce resources and rights as citizens, various political groups in the colony exerted their claims on the state via the degradation of Algeria Jews, who were naturalized en masse in 1870. This competition resulted in antisemitic violence as well as an ongoing and hotly contested debate on the definition of French identity. As Algerian Jews assimilated as a result of the urging of their communal leaders and outside influences from metropolitan French Jews and Jewish organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, antisemites sought to limit Algerian Jewish access to rights. Algerian Jews faced particularly strong competition from the newly naturalized French settlers who emigrated from Italy, Spain, and Malta. These immigrants viewed the Algerian Jews as particularly dangerous status competitors. Rather than accept antisemitism as inevitable, Algerian Jews defended themselves against antisemitic attacks through the ii i formation of defense organizations such as the Comité Algérien des Études Sociales. They urged fellow Jews to fulfill their responsibilities to France, celebrating military service and sacrifices, and demanding that Jews exercise their right to vote. Algerian Jews negotiated the antisemitism of French and newly French settlers, as well as Algerian Muslims. French antisemites took advantage of Algerian Muslim frustrations with their inferior status and encouraged antisemitic violence among Algerian Muslims. Algerian Jews sought to diffuse such tensions by encourage fraternity with Algerian Muslims in the colony. As Algerian Jews assimilated and integrated into the French colony and civil society, they negotiated fraught relationships with other colonial groups, proving themselves as Frenchmen while encouraging unity with Algerian Muslims. Algerian Jews straddled the line between citizen and subject in the colonial context and fought to prove themselves as worthy French citizens in the face of competition and antisemitism. Although specific to the case of French colonial Algeria, these issues of competition for status, identity, and rights are complementary to studies of other colonial contexts and that of newly emerged states. Such debates about citizenship and belonging lie at the heart of much of the turmoil of twentieth century history.

This thesis locates John G. Diefenbaker’s electoral triumphs in the general elections of 1957 and 1958 and his subsequent world tour within the context of the revival of Conservative nationalism in the postwar period. To make his case against a Liberal government that had been in power for twenty-two years, Diefenbaker had to engage the public in a response to political events based on an appreciation of an abstract and not quite palpable threat to democracy and a national way of life. He did so by harnessing the persuasive techniques of public relations and the new medium of television—a powerful combination that Diefenbaker knew could most effectively tell and sell a national narrative. The signature he settled on was the “New National Policy.” The choice harkened back to a discourse of Conservative nationalism that spoke of the antiquity of his party ideology and rediscovered the heroes who founded the nation. The “New National Policy” was a therapeutic ethos designed to assuage voters’ fears about mass consumption, continentalism, communism, and the end of empire: it ensured that the greatness of events and men of the past could guarantee the ideas and values of the present; it was gendered in its construction of patriotic manhood, exalted motherhood, and icons of nationalist ideology; it was transnational in scope; it told of a relation of cause-and-effect that resembled a theory of history more than a blueprint for public policy; it was fashioned to disarm critical analysis because it conformed to the structures and traditions of storytelling and the clichés of historical memory. This thesis makes three interrelated arguments. First, it argues that the systems of values and meanings on which Diefenbaker drew cannot be understood by analyzing his personal foibles or tracing his rise and fall through a series of events. Partisan narratives are built out of the dialectical interchange between warring political ideologies and are stories fitted to character, circumstance, and experience. Second, it suggests that Diefenbaker was a transitional figure whose vision, message, leadership style, and public relations campaign seemed to best fit the barely discernable dimensions of the political and cultural change of the immediate postwar decades. Finally, by examining resurgence of Conservative nationalism in the context of imperial decline, it seeks to show that partisan narratives in English Canada in the 1960s cannot be understood outside of the larger transnational contexts in which they emerged.

John Donne’s poetry has long been famous for its metaphysical conceits, which powerfully register the impact of the “New Philosophy,” yet the question of how his work is implicated in the new forms of knowledge-making that exploded in the early seventeenth century has remained unanswered. “Donne and the Sidereus nuncius” examines the relation between method and metaphor on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution by reading the poetry and prose of Donne in the context of developments in early modern astronomy, anatomy and natural philosophy. I focus primarily on two texts, Ignatius, his Conclave (1610) and the Anniversaries (1611-2), which are linked not only by chronology, but also by their mutual concern with the effects of distorted perception on the process of understanding the universe. Written directly after the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (1610), these works offer a historicized perspective on Donne’s changing use of scientific metaphor in relation to the transformative crux of the discovery of the telescope, which provided a startling new optical metaphor for the process of knowing. In this context, “Donne and the Sidereus nuncius” considers the conceptual work performed by scientific metaphor as part of an ongoing transformation from emblematic to analogic figuration. Donne’s search for material that is, in his phrase, “appliable” to other subjects, depends on an analogic conception of metaphor, a comparison that enables new thinking by identifying underlying commonalities between disparate objects. Building on this understanding of metaphor as comparative, I examine Donne’s self-conscious use of metaphors of methodical knowledge making—invention, innovation, anatomy and progress—in the context of instrumental metaphors, such as the telescope, spectacles, perspective, and travel narratives. In doing so, I suggest that Donne’s metaphorical conceits explore the conflict between scientific attempts to discern order in nature and the distorting effects of methodological frameworks imposed on the object of analysis.