Major differences in British Second World War films produced in wartime 1939-45 (idealising the 'People's War') and post-war versions produced between 1945-65 (promoting the return of elite masculinity) suggest a degree of cultural re-conditioning concerning the memory of war, by Britain's middle-class film-makers attuned to national and international concerns. Therefore, the focus and main aim of this thesis is to identify and examine previously ignored or inadequately scrutinized themes within the post-war genre to explain how, and why, film-makers redefined the Second World War and its myths, tapping deeply into the national psyche, stimulating and satisfying a voracious, continuing, British appetite. In examining the genre, and as established by historians such as John O'Connor, Pierre Sorlin and Jeffrey Richards, this thesis employs contextual analysis, using feature film as a primary historical documentary source. This involves close reading of the films in their historical and political context and the social situation which produced them - backed-up by empirical data, analysing what film-makers were saying at textual and sub-textual levels, and exploring structure, meaning and iconography as conveyed by script, image, acting and direction. The production, content and reception of these films have been evaluated and attention directed towards dialogue and language. In support of this, a wide variety of sources have been scrutinized: articles; fan magazines; novels; biographies; autobiographies; memoirs, film histories and wider historical and political works. The BFI Library and Special Collections Archive have been extensively mined with particular emphasis on press and campaign books and cinema ephemera. Newspapers and journals such as the Times, the New Statesman, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Worker have provided a range of perspectives. A sense of British ownership of this war pervades the genre. Accordingly, this thesis identifies four over-arching themes through which to explore it: the fusion of class, masculinity and national identity; women and femininity; reconciliation with the enemy; and the process of personal and national redemption and regeneration through the war experience. The study's fundamental originality rests in its approach. In offering a "political" (in its widest sense) reading of the films and an untried level of detailed analysis, it presents the genre's first full conceptualisation, challenging criticisms and assumptions that the genre was either a nostalgic replay of the Second World War, a recruitment vehicle or a catharsis. Several key findings have emerged from this thesis: Elite masculinity was used, not to devalue the 'People's War', but as exemplar of national identity, regeneration and British leadership. Recognizable through his metamorphosis from literature's well-loved pre-1914 imperialist hero, the officer hero was now a democratised master of the technology provided by Britain's brilliant, unthreatening scientists. Through them, Britain's unrivalled experience as a world leader was promoted at a time of international tensions and challenges to national supremacy. This study offers the first in-depth analysis of the prisoner-of-war sub-genre, and recognizes film-makers' efforts to ensure that serving homosexuals were also credited with fighting the Second World War. Crucially, far from being airbrushed from the genre, women were very definitely present and active in war films post-1945. Previously unsuspected balances, continuities and cross-overs between the 193945 films and of those of 1945-65 have been identified. Received wisdom that, with Cold War political pragmatism, the genie offered only revisionist depictions of Germany is also challenged. Evidence of film-makers' Janus-faced ambivalence towards German brutality and collective guilt has emerged and, whilst the Italians were redeemed, Japanese barbarism was vehemently expressed. Through its exploration of war's dysfunctional residue, this thesis has shown that combat dysfunction acted as 'heroic reinforcement', yet another way to praise, whilst allowing modest fallibility. Further insights into reactions to war were provided by depictions of malingers, revellers and those redeemed by war. British cinema offered a rare level of social comment with the homecoming legacy, as dysfunction embraced disaffected officers, crime and the failure of the 'New Jerusalem'— although it offered little on failed repatriation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, film-makers also showed that middle-class hegemony, always pragmatic, was elastic enough to offer critiques of officer elite heroics with the decline of deference, and to be more open in its depictions of women. These findings demonstrate that as a collection of primary documents, the genre's films reveal much about contemporaneous issues. Significantly, although its target audience was British youth, it reached global audiences.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1958. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 508-517).

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

This thesis analyses the British official attitudes and the gradual change of British policy towards Hungary and Hungarian revisionism in the period from the Anschluss in March 1938 to December 1941, when the British government declared war on Hungary. The primary focus of this thesis lies in the impact of Hungary`s territorial claims on British policy towards Hungary and Central Europe and upon the criteria Britain judged the territorial gains of Hungary between 1938 and 1941. This work is the result of the author`s research in British, American and Hungarian archives, along with his reflection on numerous documentary editions, diaries, memoirs and secondary sources. It aims to deepen our knowledge of Anglo-Hungarian relationship, British Central European policy and the British view of regional territorial disputes. At the same time, it is keen to dispel the myths and stereotypes of the British and Hungarian historiography, which have so far viewed Hungary as an unimportant factor in British Central European strategy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-105).

This study is the first in-depth examination of military religiosity in the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th and early 17th century. Despite a lack of research into military religious sensibilities historians have uncritically repeated a contemporary stereotype that branded soldiers as ‘un-Christian'. The study argues that soldiers were not religiously deviant but that their spirituality differed little from that of their contemporaries. However, one aspect of post-Reformation culture, confessional thinking, was noticeably absent in the military, both structurally and in everyday life. These latitudinarian attitudes were fostered by warlords, as is reflected in martial law, and become evident in military diaries as well as the conduct of warfare in the period. The occurrence of military religious violence does not detract from this general atmosphere of ‘toleration'. Instances of confessional violence have to be considered exceptional given the predominantly unproblematic coexistence of adherents of different confessions within the military and daily encounters with populations of all creeds. An examination of attitudes towards dying, death and burial shows that, while the importance of dying well according to the ars moriendi was recognized in the military, the reality of soldier life made orderly deaths frequently impossible. Soldiers' religious attitudes were therefore in some ways more pragmatic than those of the civilian population but soldiers of all denominations shared universal Christian norms, a finding that fundamentally challenges previous negative estimations regarding military religiosity.

Between 1900 and 1939 the Greek-Catholic parish clergy in Galicia underwent a transformation of its social, national, political and cultural consciousness. In part this was the result of the political changes taking place in the province, as its Ruthenian population developed a Ukrainian national consciousness expressed during the interregnum between Austrian and Polish rule by the creation of the Western Ukrainian Popular Republic, and later, in the increasingly restrictive atmosphere of inter-war Poland, by the activity of both moderate and radical nationalist groups. In part this transformation was conditioned by the decline of the priestly caste and the rise of a new type of priest, usually a celibate of village origin. The transformation was also the result of a conscious programme initiated by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi to raise the moral and educational level of the clergy. To this end he reformed the L'viv seminary, established a theological academy, and organised full seminaries in Stanyslaviv and Peremyshl'. This prepared the parish priest to deal with a growingly nationalistic and often anti-clerical intelligentsia, and a village coming increasingly under its influence. At the same time, the parish clergy evolved a new sense of its identity, gradually abandoning the Russophile orientation of the Old Ruthenians and adopting first Ruthenian populism, then Ukrainian nationalism. Thus they found common cause with the secular intelligentsia. However, the Ukrainian orientation forced them to redefine the Eastern Ukrainian tradition in a manner compatible with Catholicism, and to formulate their stance towards Orthodoxy and the Kievan Byzantine tradition. Though split between Byzantinists and Westernisers, the clergy developed a strong sense of their place as leaders of Galician Ukrainian society, albeit in occasional competition with the nationalist intelligentsia, and of their mission as bearers of Catholicism in the East.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

The thesis has two overarching objectives. One is to understand monetary policy in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia during 1990s and early 2000s; the other to use these findings to shed light on monetary policy in less developed, but highly open and financially integrated market economies. In order to achieve its aims, it analyses specific factors with significant influence on the conduct or outcomes of monetary policy in these countries; it analyses the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Central Europe, based on a technique called vector autoregression; and examines use of principal types of constraints on policy discretion, such as central bank independence, exchange rate commitments and domestic targets for monetary policy, in countries of the sample. The thesis finds that strong internal and external pressures, together with frequent bouts of fiscal irresponsibility and sizeable additive and parametric uncertainty regarding the working of the economy, led, in all four countries, to pronounced macroeconomic vulnerability and a need for periodic adjustment to dangerous fiscal and external imbalances. Reaction of policy-makers in countries of the sample to this environment can be characterized as discretion constrained by a strong nominal anchor and real exchange rate considerations. Experience of Central European countries shows that various elements of a commitment by monetary authorities are not duplicatory or contradictory, but interdependent in contributing to the goal of constraining discretion. During the period studied, the two key overall developments in policy were the gradual shift of emphasis from exchange rate targets to domestic targets and (within domestic targets) a shift from monetary targets to inflation targets. This approach has been largely successful.