This thesis charts British and American policy-making towards Burma between the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962. In particular, it examines the role aid played in Burma's relations with the West and China and the Soviet Union: what it was offered, by whom, when and why, and how its leaders responded. Aid from the West began immediately after independence, when the British furnished the Burmese government with military aid against the communist insurgency that broke out in March 1948. Financial assistance was offered, but refused, in 1950. American help began under Harry Truman's administration, also in 1950, and continued under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Further proposals were developed by John F. Kennedy's administration, although these plans were thwarted by the military coup in 1962. In giving aid to Burma, British and American planners shared the same basic underlying aim - keeping the government in power and maintaining its independence from the communist bloc. Both believed that the provision of aid gave them some measure of influence over the government in Rangoon - that, in other words, their aid had some degree of coercive potential, somehow independent of the intentions or interests of the recipient state. However, rather than passive and appropriately grateful recipients of external aid, and the policy prescriptions that tended to come with it, the Burmese are revealed as surprisingly active and autonomous agents, prepared to manipulate their aid relationships to suit their own ends, rather than the objectives of their superpower partners in Washington and Moscow.

Since 2004, the CIA has been engaged in a covert campaign using remotely-operated drones to conduct targeted killings of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. The rapid escalation of this programme under the Obama administration has attracted the close attention of the media and of academic experts working in the foreign policy, defence and legal fields. However, while such attention has enhanced our understanding of the scale, effectiveness and legality of drone warfare, there has been little attempt to explain the origins of the programme and place it within wider US counterterrorism practice. This dissertation meets that need, making an original contribution to the study of American counterterrorism by tracing the historical origins of the programme back to a small but influential group of policy makers within the Reagan administration. The thesis reveals how a shared hardline vision of how best to deal with terrorists set in motion legal and technological developments which eventually culminated in the CIA’s drone programme three decades later. By identifying the parallels between the drone campaign and the demands of the hardliners within Reagan’s government, the thesis challenges the commonly held notion that the CIA’s entry into drone warfare marks an unprecedented escalation of US counterterrorism practices resulting from a post-9/11 mind-set. Instead it presents evidence that current US counterterrorism practice is the result of a gradual evolution over the past three decades. Rather than placing the focus upon the drones themselves, this historical review reveals that the CIA’s unmanned aircraft are simply the current tool which enables the United States to pursue the counterterrorism goal it has held for decades – the ability to unilaterally neutralize anti-American terrorists in safe havens around the world. The thesis reveals that the drone campaign should not be regarded as a product of post-9/11 policy, nor the result of the seductive nature of remote control warfare. Instead, the use of drones should be seen as the embodiment of America’s long-term counterterrorism goal.

This thesis challenges the predominant historiographical view of the post-1960s political environment in America as moving inexorably to the right by developing a fresh perspective on liberalism during the 1980s, a decade often proclaimed as the apogee of conservatism. By presenting substantial archival evidence that liberal politicians and organisations remained a vibrant and dynamic political force during the so-called ‘Reagan Revolution’, this thesis examines how liberals resisted the conservative challenge and worked towards developing a political approach for the post-New Deal era. Through reinterpreting the impact of liberalism, and the principal vehicle of its promulgation, the Democratic Party, this study examines the development of liberalism from three distinct, though interrelated stands of enquiry: exploring strategies concerning the intellectual; institutional; and mobilisation aspects of liberalism. Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 created a powerful incentive to rethink the direction of liberalism. Taking Congress as its first focus, this thesis demonstrates how continued Democratic control of the House of Representatives placed Capitol Hill at the centre of an intellectual process to update liberalism for the 1980s. Yet grassroots liberal groups also began their own process of reform, professionalising operations and increasing political influence. Thus, part of this thesis’ significance lies in its examination of the interactions between elected officials and liberal groups in Reagan’s shadow, exploring the institutional ties that would fuel liberal campaigns during the decade. As will be demonstrated, these processes combined to foster a liberal recovery of sorts by the close of the decade. Changing tone, instead of substance, allowed liberals to survive the 1980s intact, and this thesis argues that the decade should be seen as a far more complicated period of political contest than conventional orthodoxy holds. By examining how the emergence of ‘identity politics’, principally through race and gender issues, interacted with the evolution of liberalism and energised political communities to establish more effective coalition-building efforts, this thesis reveals the gestation of a nascent coalition of women, minorities, and young professionals that, through successful mobilisation strategies, would provide the electoral base for liberal victories in later decades. As the 1980s progressed, negotiating liberalism in opposition allowed networks to form and develop to sustain the liberal philosophy, help liberals attain success at state and congressional level, and arguably facilitate Bill Clinton’s subsequent presidential triumph in 1992. Therefore, by tracing the evolution and transformation of liberalism through the decade, this thesis contributes to and enhances our understanding of 1980s American political history.

This thesis interrogates the construction of identity and self-presentation strategies in the discourse of the current President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama. The study seeks to answer questions about how the President constructs the various identities evident in his discourse, what kinds of resources are drawn upon, and how the resulting identities contribute to gain the support of the audience and the progression of political discourse in general. The present study sheds light on the construction of the personal, relational and collective identities utilising a pluralistic mixed-method approach. It draws upon the tools provided by corpus linguistics alongside a more fine-grained, narrative-based critical discourse analysis. The qualitative analysis offers a methodological synergy based on the insights of research conducted in critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and narrative analysis. The study investigates not only the way identities are constructed and defended, but also their significance in shaping the professional image of the President as a caring and self-made leader. Moreover, the study examines the construction of attitudinal identity in Obama’s discourse, whether in reflecting upon his own attitude or in reference to the collective identity of the American people or the Democratic Party as a whole. The study concludes with a consideration of the potential significance of the present research, along with suggestions for future research explorations.

This thesis examines conceptions of time and history in five American novels published between 1995 and 2012 which take as their subject matter events associated with the counterculture and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The thesis is organized around close readings of five novels. The first chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus (1995) and argues that it incorporates a number of problematic temporal experiences which have the effect of establishing a key tension of all the novels considered here: the concern with contextualizing and historicizing particular events and cultural atmospheres while remaining faithful to utopian ideas of radical change. Chapter two argues that Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) is oriented both structurally and thematically towards a future in which the relationship between the 1960s and 1990s will more clearly understandable. The third chapter examines the way Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) explores the multiplicitous nature of historical narratives, and how he distinguishes between those narratives and a conception of the bare events beneath them. The focus of chapter four is Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012) and examines how conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature influence theories of time, mythic histories and post-apocalyptic narratives. The final chapter on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) argues that the tension between continuation and change found in the conversion narrative is partly reconciled by a conception of time that allows the moment of radical utopian change (the moment of conversion) to be one of re-entrance into history. At stake throughout is the way these novels’ interpretation of particular events and larger cultural tendencies reveals and makes manifest various processes of historicization. I maintain a dual focus on the way these novels present historicization as something undertaken by individuals and societies and the ways in which these novels themselves not only engage in historicizations of the period but are in various ways self-conscious about doing so. If contemporary scholarship on the emergence of what has been called post-postmodern literature (Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Hoberek, Adam Kelly, Caren Irr) identifies a return to temporal concerns in recent fiction, the readings that comprise my thesis also make use of conceptions of time and history by Mark Currie, Jacques Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Mailer, Christopher Lasch, and Robert N. Bellah (among others) in order to ask: what are the particular material contours of the experiences of time and history manifested in these recent examples of the ‘sixties novel’?

This thesis examines the early stages of the transformation of emblematic political prints into political caricature from the beginning of the Seven Years' War (1756) to the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War (1783). Both contextual and iconographical issues are investigated in relation to the debates occasioned by Britain's imperial project, which marked a period of dramatic expansion during the Seven Years' War, and ended with the loss of the American colonies, consequently framing this thesis as a study of political prints during the rise and fall of the so-called 'First British Empire'. Previous studies of eighteenth-century political prints have largely ignored the complex and lengthy evolutionary process by which the emblematic mode amalgamated with caricatural representation, and have consequently concluded that political prints excluded emblems entirely by the end of the 1770s. However, this study emphasizes the significance of the Wilkite movement for the promotion and preservation of emblems, and investigates how pictorial political argument was perceived and received in eighteenth-century British society, arguing that wider tastes and opinions regarding the utilization of political prints gradually shifted to accept both modes of representation. Moreover, the marketplace, legal status, topicality, and manufacturing methods of political prints are analyzed in terms of understanding the precarious nature of their consumption and those that endeavoured to engage in political printmaking. The evolution, establishment, and subsequent appropriation of pictorial tropes is discussed from the early modern period to the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of caricature, while tracing the adaptation of representational models in American colonial prints that employed emblems already entrenched in British pictorial political debate. Political prints from the two largest print collections, the British Museum and the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale are consulted, along with a number of eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, to develop the earlier research by M. Dorothy George, Charles Press, Herbert Atherton, Diana Donald, Amelia Rauser, and Eirwen Nicholson.

Military computer games continue to evoke a uniquely contradictory public, intellectual, and critical response. Whilst denigrated as child’s play, they are played by millions of adults; whilst dismissed as simplistic, they are used in education, therapy, and military training; and whilst classed as meaningless, they arouse fears over media effects and the propagandist influence of their representations of combat. They remain the object of intense suspicion, and as part of a new and growing mass medium, they are blamed for everything from obesity to falling literacy standards, and from murder to Abu Ghraib. Much of the suspicion surrounding military computer games has been caused by the development of the military-entertainment complex - the relationship between the computer game industry and the U.S. military which has seen the production of dual-use games, co-produced by the military and the computer game industry and released for both military training and commercial sale. This relationship has placed military computer games at the centre of an intensely politicized debate in which they have become characterized as a mass medium which functions under the control of the military and political establishment and which promotes the militaristic ideals of the neoconservative Bush administration. This thesis serves as a fundamental reevaluation of such preconceptions and prejudices, and in particular, a complete reevaluation of the understanding of the relationship between computer games and American militarism. Its analysis focuses on three main areas: firstly, the content of military computer games; secondly, the determinants which affect the production and representation of war in computer games; and thirdly, the contribution of the representation of war in computer games to the misunderstandings and misconceptions concerning warfare which, in turn, have supported American militaristic beliefs.

This thesis is concerned with the history of folk music collecting in America and seeks to demonstrate the overriding importance of the political, socio – cultural, intellectual, and technological contexts on this work of folk music collecting. It does so via an examination the work of five of the principal folk music collectors in America in the 19th and 20th centuries: Francis Child, Cecil Sharp, John Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Harry Smith, arguing that the work of each of them was impacted by various contexts which were central to their theories of folk music, their collecting methodologies, and what they did with the material they collected. Each of these collectors, whose work was governed by the context in which they were working, introduced transformations in the theory, practice, and output of folk music collecting. These transformations are held to represent the American collecting tradition, and are in fact what define the American collecting tradition and allow it to continue developing as a discipline from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

The history of newborn resuscitation in the twentieth century presented thus far in the writings of practitioner-historians describes a ‘hands-off’ attitude to newborn care prior to the 1950s. These practioner-historians tend to recount a positivist narrative with the rapid expansion of newborn care after WWII and the eventual logical uptake of endotracheal intubation and positive pressure resuscitation as the most effective method for treating asphyxia neonatorum. This thesis challenges this positivist narrative my examining the resuscitation of the newborn in Britain and America during the interwar period through to the late 1960s. It uncovers a much more complex and non-linear narrative for the development of newborn resuscitation during the twentieth century, uncovering some interesting themes which the practitioner-histories have not addressed. These themes include the interactions between neonatal and fetal physiologists and their research with clinicians and clinical practice, and the role of new groups of clinicians, the paediatricians and anaesthetists, in newborn resuscitation during this period. Many of the practitioner-histories ridicule what they deem to be ‘failed’ resuscitation techniques, seeing them as ‘deveiations’ from the eventual widespread adoption of positive pressure methods. My analysis of both the clinical and scientific debates surrounding both the use of positive pressure methods and some of these ‘failed’ techniques provides a more complex and detailed story. Two techniques in particular, intragastric oxygen and hyperbaric oxygen, provide useful case-studies to reflect on the factors which influenced the development of newborn resuscitation during the twentieth-century. One important factor which is analysed in detail is the formation of a network of scientists and clinicians with a shared interest in the neonate, which emerged during the 1950s. This ‘neonatal network’ has been identified and mapped, and its actions are discussed in detail. The thesis argues that the neonatal network played a fundamental role in directing neonatal research and care during the 1950s and 1960s. The case of newborn resuscitation is used to highlight the interactions of the network members. The history of newborn resuscitation is used to reflect on some wider themes of late-twentieth century medicine. It highlights the divided role of the post-war academic clinician, who was responsible for both clinical care and research. It also illustrates common trends such as the move towards super-specialization in medicine, the increasingly technological nature of medical care and the growing authority of science in the clinic. The research has analysed a variety of sources including the archives of the Ministry of Health, Medical Research Council, Scottish Home and Health Department, the Neonatal Society and National Birthday Trust Fund. Oral histories have been used to map the relationships forged between key actors. A variety of published resources, including journal articles, textbooks and conference proceedings, have also been studied to track both the changes in neonatal care and changes in the physiological understanding of the newborn.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate some significant examples of the process by which jazz has been shaped by the music industry and government and their ideas of the place of jazz within American culture and society. The examples demonstrate that the history and traditions of jazz are not fixed entities, but rather constructions used to understand and utilise issues of race, national identity, cultural value, and musical authenticity and innovation. Engagement with such issues has been central to identifying jazz as America’s music, as it earned this status from its worldwide popularity and its identity as an innovative black American art form. Recognition for jazz as American music, in conjunction with its improvisational nature, consequently led to the identification of jazz as ‘democratic’ music through its role in racial integration in America and in its representation of American democracy in government propaganda programmes. The different histories of jazz and its status as democratic, American music have all been especially important to the development of House Concurrent Resolution 57 in 1987, referred to as the Jazz Preservation Act (JPA). Authored by Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan, the JPA defined jazz as a ‘national treasure’ that deserved public support and inclusion in the education system. Few in the industry have criticised the recognition and public subsidy of jazz, but many have found fault with the JPA’s definitions of jazz and its history that have dictated this support. While the JPA has essentially continued the practice of shaping jazz through ideas of its place within American culture and society, it has provided immense resources to promote a fixed history and canon for jazz. Specifically, the JPA has promoted jazz as the American music, taking a particular stance on the histories of race and discrimination in the industry and the definitions of authentic jazz that had been sources of disagreement, competition, and creativity since the release of the first jazz record in 1917.