This work offers a panoramic sweep of the use of Roman Imperial Iconographies and literary traditions from the 14th through 17th centuries.

The aim of this thesis is to elucidate Homeric aesthetical, ethical, and political values; the relation between these values and those of the polis; and what this relation tells us about the place of Homeric society in our account of the development of the polis. I argue that the system of value that we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey is predicated on the ideas of portion, proportion, and proper distribution. These ideas, I contend, animate the Homeric conception of justice and of appropriateness. Further, I argue that this system shares much ground with the middling ideology of the polis, but is different from this ideology in respect of the discourse of sōphrosunē and of being mesos/metrios. From this, I maintain that the Homeric worldview reflects the social and material conditions of a world that shares the basic values of the polis but is not as sociologically complex as the polis. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>The present study is an attempt to describe and explain the institutional history and intellectual discussions of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Britain during the period 1914-1945. Since its inception on December 31, 1914, the FOR has commonly been described by historians and other authors as an interdenominational Christian pacifist organization. Yet, the establishment and maintenance of peace was not the ultimate aim of the founding members. What they envisioned was the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Peace, they argued, would be an indubitable consequence of the Kingdom. However, FOR members often did not agree with one another about the method by which the Kingdom could be inaugurated. During the period discussed in this thesis, the FOR gradually narrowed its focus. From striving to achieve the Kingdom of God, which encompassed all aspects of life, the Fellowship shifted its attention to what are generally regarded as matters pertaining primarily to pacifism. By the advent of World War II, however, the wider perception of the FOR's mission had been reasserted by many members.</p> <p>This pendular movement is described in the four parts of the thesis. Part I looks at the matrix out of which the FOR grew, the gestation period, the nature of the envisaged Kingdom, the growth and the activities of the Fellowship until the end of World War I. Part II, covering the period 1919-1929, surveys the FOR's internal struggles, the changing theological climate and the Fellowship's attempts, however unsuccessful, at creating a new society. During the 1930s, described in Part III, the FOR was largely a single issue interdenominational Christian pacifist organization, providing the churches and other pacifist organizations with a vast amount of literature on pacifism. During the second world war, discussed in Part IV, the FOR entered a new phase which yet invites comparison to 1914. The publications and activities, especially those of the second half of the war, readily recall the original FOR vision.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis explores the migration of the chile pepper, or capsicum anuum, from Mesoamerica into the Old World after 1500, focusing on two case studies of the Aleppo pepper in Syria and paprika in what was once Hungarian Nagyvarad, and which is now Romanian Oradea. Using foodways as a historical lens, and considering the movement of food as historical, it can be seen that the chile pepper, despite its low profit value, illustrates a globalization that existed well before modern times, and it came to cement itself within many different cultures as a symbol of identity. Despite its far-away origins, the chile pepper took over the Old World, particularly those societies that were once controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and came to represent the common man in newly formed post-Colonial nations.

Arikara people had been adapting their tribal structures to European influences since Europeans first arrived on the northern Plains in the early seventeenth century. Their sedentary lifestyle, focused on agriculture and hunting, increasingly included trade with French, British, and American trappers by the seventeenth century. The goods procured from European traders, such as firearms and other metallurgical works, began to upset the balance of geopolitical power on the Plains, setting the stage for the violence and political realignments at the center of this thesis. As my research reveals, by the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, tensions between the frontiersmen and the Indigenous people across the northern Plains reached new heights. As Arikara oral histories, United States diplomatic records, ethnological sources – such as travel writings – and correspondence from frontier settlers and soldiers reveal, the Arikara tribe struggled to innovate and reshape their societies in the face of colonial expansionism and hostilities with other Indigenous polities.

<p>“The Time of Politics and the Politics of Time: Exploring the Role of Temporality in British Constitutional Development during the Long Nineteenth Century,” studies the role of time in the development of Britain’s liberal democracy. Conceptually, it explores time both as a structure that the procedural framework of the British Parliament produced and as an historical perception that the technological culture of modernity constructed. In both cases, the study focuses on the constitutional significance of perceived fluctuations within the scarcity of political time as well as imagined changes in the pace and continuity of history. Methodologically, I use these conceptualizations of time in order to examine the intersection of four seemingly disparate political phenomena in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: namely, the perceived expansion of democracy, the instrumentalization of rationality in political culture, the devaluation of deliberative practices as forms of political action, and the rise of mass political dissatisfaction with the efficiency of Parliament.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Over ten thousand Britons fought as police in the First Irish War ( 1920-21 ). Most of these British police were ex-soldiers, veterans of the Great War and members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RfC), called 'Black and Tans' for their mixed uniforms of dark police green and military khaki. Ex-officers joined a separate force, the Auxiliary Division (ADRIC), a special emergency gendarmerie, heavily armed and organized in military-style companies. Pitted against the guerrillas of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries took many 'reprisals', assassinating Irish republicans and burning their homes and shops. As a consequence, their name became a byword for crime and violence, and the specter of 'black-and-tannery' has haunted Ireland ever since.</p> <p>This dissertation uses evidence from both British and Irish archives and from British newspapers to study the British police and their behaviour in the First Irish War. According to legend the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were ex-convicts and psychopaths, hardened by prison and crazed by war. In fact, most of them were quite ordinary men, whose violent and criminal behaviour was a proud of circumstance, not character. The British government would not believe that the conflict in Ireland was a war, and relied on the police to suppress the rebel 'murder gang.' Unsuited for guerrilla warfare, the RIC was already losing its discipline and committing atrocities before its British reinforcements arrived. British constables lived and worked alongside Irish constables, and followed their example, good or bad. Freed from the sometimes moderate influence of the constabulary's Irish majority, Auxiliaries behaved with even greater license than Black and Tans. The violence of the British and Irish police was overlooked and even encouraged by the British government, which was anxious to keep up the pretence that Irish revolutionaries were merely terrorists and gangsters.</p> / Doctor of Science (PhD)

<p>In seeking to explain why male authors assumed female pseudonyms in seventeenth-century literature, this dissertation explores male-to-female cross-dressing in Jacobean drama, effeminizing representations of parliament in Civil War propaganda, and parodies of women’s sexualized, political speech during the Interregnum and Restoration periods. My dissertation concludes that the sexualized female persona evolved over the course of the seventeenth century as a vehicle through which male authors could critique rival iterations of patriarchal hierarchy forwarded by Stuart kings and by parliament without challenging their own positions of masculine privilege within those hierarchies.</p> <p>My first chapter explores the political critiques of Jacobean absolutism embedded in the cross-gender performance narratives of Ben Jonson’s <em>Epicoene </em>(1609)<em> </em>and the anonymous play <em>Swetnam the Woman-Hater </em>(1620). In my second chapter I link male-to-female drag’s ability to critique an absolutist patriarchal paradigm to the satirical attacks on parliamentary models of polyvocal patriarchal rule in 1640s print. My final chapter investigates how female authors often find themselves shut out of the political discussions that female impersonations spark by taking up Sarah Jinner’s almanacs of 1658-60. Jinner’s almanacs combine predictions of rampant sexual wantonness with a critique of the waning Protectorate regime. I examine how the pseudonymous response to those almanacs from “Sarah Ginnor” depoliticizes Jinner’s sexual commentary on the Protectorate government.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Between 1987 and 1991, Soviet filmmakers and journalists utilized Gorbachev’s glasnost reform policy to depict or discuss sexuality in cinema and the popular press. I argue that Soviet film and popular press discourses on sex in this period reveal a continuity of conservative sexual mores, which were interwoven with social and moral conservatism regarding the centerpiece of Soviet society, the Soviet family. Furthermore, these discourses take on a fundamentally misogynistic tone, in that women are tasked with defending sexual purity, and thus familial integrity, while simultaneously being cast as those most susceptible to the power of sexual enticement. Thus, the comparatively permissive discourse about sex and sexuality in the 1980s can be interpreted not as a “sexual revolution,” but as an explosion in social and moral anxieties, that were unique to the glasnost period, about the Soviet way of life. Additionally, this study challenges the concept of the totalitarian Soviet system by highlighting intellectuals’ persevering conservatism during a period where the state did not expressly govern or censor discourses on sex and sexuality.

This thesis examines the representation of the settler societies of the British Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa were represented as a distinct part of the Empire, united by the idea that these parts of the Empire were ‘more British’ than the rest, and, had a shared heritage and culture and a predominant British settler population. It was represented as a landscape of opportunity built on layers of representations in the sources of the period from advertisements and panoramas to travel accounts and emigration literature. The settler societies were represented as a ‘Greater Britain’ or ‘Better Britains’, an imagining of the settler societies based on what the British wanted for themselves rather than as a true representation of four parts of the Empire. The notion of ‘Better Britains’ delves into British ideas of their past, present and future. If they were ‘better’, what were they improving on? What qualities and aspects of society were included and excluded? It was an idealised image but also flexible, a malleable landscape where the British could live out desires. Opportunity was found in the land, resources and climate, but also within the modernity of the cities and ideas of social advancement and of the freedom of the frontier.