Frederick Jackson Turner exercised considerable influence among American religious historians during the first four decades of the twentieth century, especially at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, William Warren Sweet, the father of American church history, became the major religious popularizer and adherent of Turner's frontier thesis. Sweet's professional secular training and adaptation of the frontier thesis in historiography allowed him to make church history a respectable academic study among American secular historians. After the Second World War American historiography underwent a shaking of its progressive foundations, and a similar parallel was found in religious historiography. The New Church History advanced considerably beyond Sweet's adaptation of the frontier thesis, especially in the writings of Sidney E. Mead, a Sweet student. By the 1950's consensus assumptions in historiography dominated both religious and secular American historiography. A flourishing of religious history about minority and ethnic groupings was another indicator of historians going beyond the frontier thesis. Such an advancement exemplified the shedding of Turner's Anglo-Saxon bias, and in Sweet's case an Anglo- Saxon-Protestant bias by American religious historians.

Operation Pedro Pan, as labeled by a Miami journalist, was a program backed by the Unites States federal government and executed by the Catholic Church which brought over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors to the U.S. between December 1960 and October 1962. I knew about this wave of immigration because my maternal grandparents were two of these children. I was surprised to find that most scholarship on Cuban immigration to the U.S. either neglects to mention the children’s exodus or only briefly references it in passing. This was even more surprising to me when I learned that Operation Pedro Pan was and still is the largest exodus of children in the Western Hemisphere. I was curious as to why it has been left out of a significant amount of scholarship on Cuban immigration, and in searching for answers, I instead came upon more questions. The most glaring of which was why there seemed to be two contrasting narratives about the history of Operation Pedro Pan.

One of the problems which has intrigued English historians for over a hundred years is that of the position of the common man in early England. Was he a freeman working land held communally by the village, or was he a serf laboring upon the land of an overlord? Since this question of freedom is inextricably interwoven with landholding concepts the problem may also be stated another way: Did private property in land exist from the earliest times, or is that institution the result of centuries of appropriation by individuals of land originally belonging to the commmunity as a whole? In the late 19th century a group of English historians devoted themselves to the study of this problem. The conclusions they reached varied considerably. The purpose of this essay is to examine some of those conclusions and the suppositions upon which they rest and to attempt to find methodological and ideological differences which may account for the varied results. The study will focus upon Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925), legal historian and jurisprudential scholar, whose best known works are concerned with this subject. Toward the end of the 18th century there developed in Germany a theory of the beginnings of society, known as the Mark theory, which described those beginnings as an idyllic period when mankind lived together in free communities. English historians found this thesis much to their liking: it fitted well with English ideals of freedom and democracy, and it supported popular belief in a strong Germanic, rather than Roman, influence in the development of English institutions. Beginning with John M. Kemble' s Saxons in England in 1849, English historians almost to a man accepted the theory without critical examination of the authorities upon which it rested. In 1883 however, an amateur historian, Frederic Seebohm, in The English Villa Community challenged the Mark theory and asserted that the English common man was originally a serf laboring on an estate which strongly resembled the Roman villa. Paul Vinogradoff, a talented Russian working in England on early agrarian history, sought new proof to sustain the cause of the common free man. In Villainage in England (1892) he attempted to prove that the early villein was free both legally and economically. He was supported by Frederic Maitland in Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), who found in the Domesday survey proof of vestigial freedom, which he held could only mean that the once free villein had lost much of his liberty during the late Anglo-Saxon period, and that his subjection was completed by the Norman conquerors. William Ashley, in several works, supported Seebohm' s position, but did not always agree with him. All four historians were products of conservative background. There were, however, differences in the more intimate details of their social surroundings, differences of family, education, religion, and in the case of Vinogradoff, of national origin. Vinogradoff and Maitland came from economically secure families, who provided for them the best education available; they were religious agnostics; both were legal historians. Seebohm’s and Ashleys families were not affluent, and the education they obtained came primarily from their own efforts; both were devout members of evangelical faiths; Ashley was an economic historian and Seebohm's best works were in the field of early agrarian history. Each of these men read the sparse evidence available on the subject from a particular point of view. Vinogradoff and Maitland concluded that the early English peasant was free and that his fall from freedom to serfdom during the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods was due to a large extent to a misinterpretation of his legal status. Seebohm and Ashley held he had been a serf from the time of the Teutonic settlements, and that his legal rights were never as important as his economic position.

This dissertation examines the cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions religious women made in the production of secular and religious books in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. It presents the first comparative study of nuns' book production across Italy and introduces new manuscripts to the canon of nuns' bookwork. Though the scholarship of the last fifty years has increased our understanding of the institutional and individual lives of nuns, little research has been done on their production and exchange of texts. Nun-scribes and manuscript painters produced liturgical, devotional and administrative books for use in-house, as well as for secular and religious communities and individuals outside the walls of the convents. Evidence of their bookwork repositions them as active participants in a rich spiritual, intellectual and artistic life and broadens their sphere of activity and influence to include a wide community of secular and religious patrons, artistic collaborators, scholars, family members, and book-buying clientele. Through a close examination of the material evidence in their manuscripts, this study illustrates how nuns used the production and exchange of texts to further their individual and institutional goals. This dissertation makes an important contribution to the current understanding nuns' spiritual, artistic and intellectual life and practice and significantly reshapes the current understanding of women's education and learning in Renaissance and early modern Italy (1400-1650).

During the 1930s a large number of cultural artifacts presented rural Iowa to national audiences as an ideal place where the "real" America still flourished despite the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Artist Grant Wood's lush landscapes, novelist Phil Stong's trustworthy farmers, and cartoonist "Ding" Darling's pragmatic Iowans, are among the creations that comforted Americans from 1930-1936. These texts gained attention from audiences not only because they invoked peaceful pastoral imagery, but also because they frequently presented a monolithic patriarchal society without ethnic and racial diversity or social class distinctions. This presentation of Caucasian normativity was a tonic for many Americans who felt unnerved by the floundering economy and still recognized the deep divisions of the previous decade, which had resulted in race riots, immigration restrictions, and labor unrest. These splits were still present in the 1930s, even though that decade has come to be remembered primarily for the economic crisis and dust storms which spawned famous representations of Dust Bowl migrants. Those conditions were real, but the cultural importance of productive, honest (white) Iowa farmers during the first half of the Depression has, by comparison, been largely forgotten. In four chapters which respectively analyze journalism, art and literature, films, and political speeches from the period, I seek to rectify this historical oversight and offer a glimpse into how Americans, when faced with an ongoing crisis, may be encouraged to embrace a "simpler" way of life belonging to an imagined past.

.Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers in Utah combined a unique set of religious beliefs with a fervent agrarianism and a strong sense of community. They encountered a specific arid environment along the Wasatch Front. A distinctive cultural set of irrigation institutions and practices developed out of the complex interchanges between nature and culture in Cache Valley, Utah, between 1860 and 1916. The structure of water flow, and conflicts over water rights and responsibilities, reflected the fundamental tensions within Mormon communities between individual gain and collective progress; it also reflected the patriarchal essence of Mormon culture. The season-to-season workings of irrigation institutions that distributed water from the Logan River, whether large irrigation districts or neighborhood canal cooperatives, showed how Mormon communities developed systems of exchange for water that allowed each individual irrigator to take water in direct proportion to the amount of labor, cash, or crops he contributed to the group's collective construction and upkeep of canals. The democratic nature of these exchanges, however, were tempered by natural hierarchies inherent in the geography of water canals, and by community hierarchies of power. A small group of elite town fathers held most of the responsibility for irrigation administration, and used their influence -in disputes over water. Those town fathers also tended to own more land than other irrigators. They often owned valuable land in proximity to the canals themselves. Between settlement in 1860 and the Call Decree in 1916, Logan River irrigators worked together to formulate a water distribution system that allowed for both the growth of local communities and for continued adherence to the basic religious principles on which the communities were founded. They also struggled to follow seasonal cycles of water use that fit within the natural cycles of the rise and fall of the water level in the river. Whether at the level of the high-line canal, the city block, or the family garden, Mormon water systems constituted an interesting example of the ways in which culture and the environment come together to shape natural resource use, especially in the arid regions of the American west.

This thesis is a cultural tour of the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. It is concerned with the way in which Europeans employed stories to claim land and, conversely, their fears that the land would claim them.The stories considered are taken from literature and folk legend. The concept of liminality is important to the work because the mountains are a threshold, a demarcation between the city and the bush. Allied with the notion of liminality in the mountains is that of the uncanny (as defined by Freud). The work is divided into four sections. The first section, A POCKET GUIDE, introduces the terrain to be traversed. Section 2, FOUND, centres around the notion of foundation. Section 3, PASSAGE, links LOST and FOUND. LOST is the converse of FOUND. It explores our fears that the land will consume us.This fear is often expressed in the notion that the bush, beneath a surface beauty, has a dark and dangerous aspect and that it will swallow up the unwary. This idea is evident in the notion of possession - that a certain place can take hold of a person and induce a prescribed response from them - and of haunting, in which a spirit is tied to a specific location. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Democracy and tragedy were intrinsically linked during the time of the Athenian city-state. Yet this symbiosis, vital as it was then, is largely forgotten today. The dearth of serious political discussion is all the more puzzling since political scientists and international relations scholars write extensively on tragedy and democracy, often via a return to ancient Athens. However, these efforts have largely neglected the intrinsic links between democracy and tragedy; preferring instead to focus on either democracy or tragedy. Exploration of their essential links has, by and large, become confined to studies in philology and cultural history. The objective of this Thesis is to explore the contemporary political relevance of the ancient symbiosis of democracy and tragedy. It argues that the most politically important insight of this symbiosis today stems from tragedy’s so-called multivocal form: its ability to bring a variety of – otherwise marginalised – stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate. In particular, this Thesis explores two novel lessons that tragedy’s multivocal form can potentially teach contemporary democrats seeking to extend the institutions and procedures of democracy in the age of globalisation. The first is the understanding that the idea and practice of democracy should not be solely concerned with the institution of order in political life. Tragedy teaches us the lesson that while order is necessary for a stable and productive communal existence sites of disorder too provide insights into dilemmas posed by political instability, inequality, exclusion, and flux. A truly democratic order must seek to include and give voice to democratic disorder. Given this, the second lesson that this Thesis highlights from its study of Athenian tragedy’s multivocal form is the need to draw on both factual and fictional sources of knowledge in an effort to negotiate and overcome contemporary democratic dilemmas. Only by broadening the scope of reality, through a resort to fiction, can democrats hope to legitimate a variety of – otherwise marginalised – stories, characters and voices today.

This study analyzes East German representations of Hungary in cultural texts to investigate the emergence of a German socialist identity in the 1950s and 1960s. I further contend that post-1945 self- and collective identity in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was complex and formulated by official, intellectual, and mass perceptions. By examining East German iconography of Hungary it becomes clear that socialist identity in the early years of the dictatorship relied on traditional expressions of society as well as ideology. Hungary provided East Germans with a practical model for socialist friendship. Though the GDR was a state that ostensibly celebrated multiculturalism, East German texts presented the People’s Republic of Hungary almost as another Germany with a shared heritage and culture. They articulated this palatable image of Hungary through the lens of ideology (Marxist-Leninist internationalism) and through traditional cultural definitions. This study concludes that East Germans used a composite of socialist ideas and folk customs to draw parallels with Hungary and create a distinct character that was both German and socialist.

The “twice-looted” archives refer to a vast body of documents that were looted by Nazi agencies during, and again by Soviet Army units immediately following World War II. The archives were taken in the context of the two most intensive programs of cultural heritage looting in modern history. Their fate remained unknown until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, many efforts have been made to return the documents to their original owners. However, significant obstacles have hindered restitution, leaving a large body of foreign archives in Russia. By connecting the history and current status of the “twice-looted” archives to archival theory and ethical principles on cultural heritage property, this thesis provides a foundation from which to approach archival restitution. The analysis of recent additions to archival theory provides new understandings of archival meaning that may facilitate the restitution of archives displaced by war. Reviewing the details of the archives’ successive seizures leading to their extended residency in the secret “Special Archive” (TsGOA) and discussing restitution developments on national and international levels reveals how exploitation of archives during war violates archival principles. Concluding with specific case studies further illustrates the complex nature of archives and archival meaning and its significance for archival restitution. These discussions reveal the damages that result when archives become targets of war. This in turn, encourages respect for archives and brings attention to the necessity of safeguarding archival heritage.