Arkansas state politics during the Civil War was influenced by the preceding thirty years and many of the state's problems for which political answers were sought were similar to problems experienced in this period of political development. The war simply magnified and multiplied the problems faced by the state. This thesis is concerned with identifying the political forces in the state and their development, with investigating problems to which political solutions were sought and attempts made to solve these. Finally, an effort is made to determine the effectiveness of the various political moves made during the terms of Governors Rector and Flanagin.

This thesis discusses the Reconstruction period in the southern United States, including the events leading up to Reconstruction, the socioeconomic factors of Reconstruction itself, and the effect it had on both black and white societies.

In existence from 1959 to 1965, the Richmond Civil War Centennial Committee was formed for the purpose of planning and executing Richmond’s Civil War centennial commemoration. In this thesis, the author will examine the history of the Richmond Civil War Centennial Committee (RCWCC) and its efforts to develop a new historical narrative of Richmond and the Civil War. This paper will assess Richmond’s previous attempts to commemorate the Civil War and will argue that the RCWCC contributed to the advancement of Richmond’s Civil War narrative by de-emphasizing past Confederate celebration attempts led by heritage groups and advancing a “reconciliation” narrative. Furthermore, this thesis will examine Richmond’s current attempt to commemorate the Civil War sesquicentennial and explore the influence of the RCWCC on this effort. Lastly, this paper will consider the future prospects for Civil War commemoration in Richmond.

This thesis examines the diary of Ellen Wallace, a woman who lived in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, during the American Civil War. A diligent diarist, Ellen recorded not only the workings of her farm and household, but also her interactions with slaves, her worries about secession, and her shifting views on President Lincoln, emancipation and the war itself. At the start of the war, Ellen was a staunch Unionist. By war's end, she was a Confederate. This thesis will examine the factors that contributed to Ellen's changing political ideals and how she sought to reconcile her opposing beliefs. Ellen occupied a role rarely discussed in Civil War scholarship: not a member of the southern paternalist society, or a northern abolitionist. Ellen was a slave‐owning woman who supported the Union cause.

The thesis pinpoints the responsibility of external powers in the tragic course of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as their influence on the policy making its leaders, from 1997 to 2001. It points out that, given the country’s geostrategic position in the heart of Africa and its immense natural resources, foreign governments play the preeminent role in the shaping of its destiny, particularly during the abovementioned five-year period marked by the two Congo Wars. This role had been blunt in the demise of Mobutu’s 32 year-long reckless, kleptocratic regime, as a consequence of the shift, by the United States of America aiming to safeguard its hegemonic interests in Central Africa, of the strategically pivotal pawn from Zaire to Uganda in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Thus, craving a great influence in the continent and sponsored by multinational companies from North America, Belgium, Australia and South Africa, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, along with his ex-subordinate Rwandan Deputy President Paul Kagame, patronized in October 1996 the Alliance of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), a Congolese rebel group led by Laurent Kabila and committed to oust Field Marshal Mobutu who bit the dust on 17 May 1997. The superseding AFDL reign will be mainly featured by the takeover of key positions of the state authority by Rwandans and Ugandans (keeping President Kabila in the thrall of his two eastern mentors), the throttling of the democratic process, the conditioning by major powers of any funding of Kinshasa’s triennial development programme to the Kabila regime’s observance of democracy, human rights and a UN investigation of the mass killing of Hutu Rwandese refugees on the DRC’s soil. That international community’s stance infuriated the Congolese leader who reconsidered all mining contracts signed with multinationals, developing anti-West discourse, promoted South-South cooperation, and expressed Rwandans and Ugandans from the Congo. The Western-backed Rwanda and Uganda bounced back by undertaking a military toppling of Laurent Kabila; but they reaped a fiasco because of three factors: intervention of Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad and Sudan siding with Kinshasa; dissention within the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD); and tension between Kigali and Kampala that initiated the creation of a new rebel group: the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC). The stalemate brought about by this situation and the involvement of the UN, the OAU, the SADC, the US, France and Belgium compelled the warring parties to conclude the Lusaka Agreement, setting up a roadmap for the war end, the inter-Congolese dialogue, a new transitional government, and an electoral process toward the democratic rebirth in the DRC. However, the Lusaka Agreement will be implemented thanks to the rise of Major General Joseph Kabila, after the assassination of his phantasmagoric father Laurent Kabila, paving the way to the Third Republic.

This dissertation studies the cultural traces of the experience of fear in relation to the social and cultural legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. By applying the theoretical and narratological insights afforded by the horror genre and through the figure of the monster, the research identifies and analyzes alternative memories of the traumatic past, exploring the experience of fear within film and literature to reveal and claim an unrecognized approach to the representation of the war, with key critical findings and implications regarding the shaping and interpretation of the Spanish social imaginary of this event in this most persistent of cultural debates. Chapter II, explores the maquis in Luna de lobos (1985) by Julio Llamazares, tracing the human involution of a group of men that seeking refuge from Francoist repression become monstrous shells of themselves. It pursues this degradation to rethink the locus of the monster, finding it in the monstrous policies of the regime, that demands the exorcism of the resistance movement—the ultimate Other—rendering it ghostly by community and family as the cornerstone foundational violence of a new society. Chapter III, delves into the cinematographic representation of monsters and monstrous elements in Pa negre (2010) by Agustí Villaronga. It studies the competing narratives in postwar Spain that turn a child of the defeated into a monstrous regime supporter, a process that suggests the origins of contemporary society as the monstrous traces of Francoist society. It analyzes the features that render its protagonist, first, a monster in the eyes of the new regime—along the lines of the classical monster—to later on, through disappointment, shame and betrayal, a monster to his family and social class—thus becoming a modern monster. Chapter IV tackles a cinematographic allegorical representation of the past in Balada triste de trompeta (2010) by Álex de la Iglesia, a tour de force that attempts to be a total narrative of the war, a collage of historical memory through the monstrous moments that define Francoism. The fusion of elements from “esperpento”, horror and melodramatic national romance render a unique postnational satire.

Thesis advisor: Brinton Lykes / In the 20th century, conflicts in Latin America between government armies and guerrilla groups escalated into devastating civil wars. During these wars, the armed forces frequently classified children as enemy targets. This paper will discuss the civil wars waged in Guatemala from the 1960s to 1996, and in El Salvador, between the years of 1979 to 1992. Similarities and differences between the conflicts in these two nations will be examined to explore the use of violence against children in Latin America, including how they were tortured, killed and forced to join guerrilla or government forces. An analysis of these two wars reveals the government and army’s intention to destroy community, trust, culture, and every aspect of normal life. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Wilson / Witnessing Empire is a cultural history of the American war correspondent. I trace the figure through various points of crisis in the making of U.S. sovereignty including the U.S.-Mexico War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. Locating correspondents like Herman Melville, Richard Harding Davis, and Stephen Crane in what Mary Louise Pratt terms "contact zones"--areas of cross-cultural exchange and contest--I show in this interdisciplinary work how the figure emerged through confronting U.S. state power with "on the spot" visual and textual witness accounts of the violence entailed by that power in a period of territorial expansion across the hemisphere, mass media development, and renewed aesthetic challenges to representing war. Revising critical appraisals of U.S. empire, including those of Amy Kaplan, that argue that the war correspondent is simply an apologist for U.S. imperialism through a facile use of romance, realism, spectacle, and sensationalism, I argue that the figure carves out a unique vision via such familiar conventions to unveil the contradictions of U.S. imperialism--particularly, its reliance on a narrative of liberation and protection through conquest. The dissertation thus unveils the correspondent as ambivalent towards this narrative as his witnessed accounts reveal subjects less protected, than abandoned by the state. I argue that through exposing the violence of this abandonment, the correspondent develops a new literary convention that exposes the consequences of modern war. In Chapter 1, I historically situate war correspondence as an emergent form, comparing the writings of the New Orleans-based Picayune war correspondent George Wilkins Kendall, composed on the eve of the U.S.-Mexico War, with Herman Melville's Typee. An unorthodox travel narrative, Typee can be more effectively read as an inaugural work of war correspondence in its challenging of "race war" as a discourse employed to cement state power in the contact zone. Chapter 2 takes up the "on the spot" pencil line drawings of the Civil War "special artists." Comparing these artists' works with the published engravings in the newspapers at the time and the illustrated histories at the turn-of-the-century, I address the visual rhetoric by which war correspondents depicted the crisis of sovereignty entailed by the Civil War. The second half of the dissertation illustrates the emergence of war correspondence as a unique aesthetic form. Chapter 3 looks at how Richard Harding Davis crafts war correspondence as a critique of U.S. imperialism's spectacle-oriented "anti-imperialist" liberation narrative by opposing the production of an "imperial news apparatus" at the turn-of-the-century with the advent of the Spanish-American War. In Chapter 4, I show how Stephen Crane, like Davis, was inspired by the anti-statism and transnationalism of the antebellum filibuster. From his initial experiments in Red Badge of Courage, Crane was focused on the subjectivity of the witness in his correspondence and fiction, ultimately allegorizing the violence of U.S. imperial power and its abandonment of citizens and non-citizens alike in war zone. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This is a thesis about English and American imaginative identification with Italy in the period 1848–1865, facilitated by and expressed through periodicals and newspapers. At the centre of the thesis sits New England magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which during the Civil War emerged as a vehicle for abolitionist literature, but which also published extensively on Italy. The Risorgimento, the movement that sought Italian unification, triumphed in 1861—the same year that the battle of Fort Sumter signalled the start of the American Civil War that would last until 1865. This thesis investigates the transatlantic relationship between the Risorgimento and the Civil War as it emerged in The Atlantic Monthly, The Springfield Daily Republican and other nineteenth–century publications, and it does so through contextualised readings of Arthur Hugh Clough, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson. These three seemingly very disparate authors are connected by The Atlantic Monthly: Clough’s epistolary poem on the fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, Amours de Voyage, was first published there in 1858; Harriet Beecher Stowe serialised her historical Italian romance Agnes of Sorrento in The Atlantic Monthly between 1861 and 1862; and Dickinson was inspired to write a series of poems on Italy and volcanoes after reading both The Atlantic Monthly and local morning newspaper The Springfield Daily Republican. They are also connected by their fascination with Italy. This thesis argues that nineteenth–century periodicals need to be studied in a transatlantic context: they cannot be read, in the traditional style of Benedict Anderson, as simple affirmations of nationalism and national culture. Another way of putting it is to say that this thesis is about a series of exchanges of influence and thought that get attached to national projects but are in themselves international.

Afghanistan has been one of the most protracted conflicts modern era, but theories of civil war onset fail to explain the war’s causes or its patterns of violence. This thesis examines the origins of the post-2001 period of the conflict through the perspective of state formation; although many civil wars today unfold in newly-forming states, the processes of center-periphery relations and elite incorporation have been little studied in the context of political violence. The thesis first describes how Afghanistan’s embeddedness in the international state system and global markets undermined the nascent state’s efforts to centralize and bureaucratize, leading instead to warlordism and neopatrimonialism. Second, it demonstrates that the development of an insurgency after 2001 was due not to ethnic grievance or rebel opportunities for profit, but rather to the degree to which local elites were excluded from state patronage. Third, it examines the role of ideology and social position in the Afghan Taliban movement. The dissertation seeks to offer a theory of political violence in Afghanistan that can, mutatis mutandis, help explain key features of civil war in newly-forming states.