This dissertation examines the use of motion-picture film by the American Prosecution before and during the 'Trial of the Major War Criminals' at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Germany, 1945-1946. My research is based on never before used material including newly discovered film, official papers, and private letters. I argue that investigating the use of film, more than any other medium, enables us to comprehend the American Prosecution's vision of justice after the Second World War. I focus on three crucial themes: the political, juridical and moral concerns of the American planners and prosecutors. Although much historical scholarship focuses on American designs to 're-educate' Germans, I show that the American planners of Nuremberg felt that the education of Americans was also essential. The trial was designed to draw a distinction between Nazi 'barbarism' and 'Western civilization' and presented an opportunity that Americans used to promote their political values at home as well as abroad. They used film to affirm and showcase - to millions of their fellow citizens - some of the values and methods of liberal democracy. The American planners and prosecutors viewed the Nazi defendants as responsible representatives of the German people and used the controversial doctrine of 'conspiracy' to facilitate the new principle of individual accountability in international law. Additionally, they also proclaimed that planning and waging 'aggressive' war had constituted, years before the Nazis came to power, criminal activity. Yet representing 'conspiracy' and 'aggression' with film graphically exposed the limits of law in dealing with unprecedented injustice. The particular form of spectacle arising from the American use of film at Nuremberg has remained overlooked by scholarship in a variety of relevant fields. The American Prosecution staged a form of morality play with film. The aim, however, was not the redemption of the Nazi defendants; it was, rather, only to condemn and punish them. The Americans confronted the defendants with images of atrocity, as well as images of themselves. This technique functioned as a theatrical device in which onlookers felt that they could examine the defendants for signs (or the absence) of remorse. This spectacle enabled the presentation of a particularly powerful moral case against the defendants and the Nazi ideology they had espoused. This dissertation, therefore, offers a new contribution to our understanding of the visual culture of legal procedure by using an historical case-study of transitional justice after the Second World War.

This thesis examines the promotion of California and Florida from 1869 to 1919, a period when both states were transformed from remote, under-populated locales into two of the most publicised states in America. Using an interdisciplinary approach which analyses cultural representations of the states within a broader socioeconomic context, the thesis traces how railroad and land companies, agriculturists, chambers of commerce, state agencies, and journalists fashioned new identities for California and Florida as Semi- Tropical American lands. As their boosters competed in a bid to attract settlers, tourists, and investors, they played upon republican and colonialist discourses within American society and expansion. Evoking ideas about race, climate, and environment, promoters depicted California and Florida as parts of a benign middle zone between an increasingly urban-industrial North and socially “primitive” tropics. At a time of traumatic industrial change, California and Florida promised American rebirth in nature, through renewing health and leisure, prosperous agriculture, and superior cities. The selling visions were created by and for white Americans, however, and focused on the “semi-tropical” benefits for Anglo visitors and residents. Ethnic and racial minorities were marginalised as romantic, unprogressive peoples who were best suited to manual labour roles which reinforced Anglo-American progress. The thesis thus argues that boosters alloyed republican ideals of independent living to processes of racial hierarchy, creating a seductive, expansionist imagery which sold semi-tropical California and Florida.

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that, during the post war and early Cold War years, the US Federal government, and in particular the Executive branch, was inspired to increase the role which it played in the US Education system. It also seeks to chart the methods it utilised in order to do so. One inspiration was the desire to direct the US education system towards a curriculum which better benefitted the nation’s Cold War effort, including placing a greater emphasis upon scientific education and training, more tightly regulating the discussion over democratic vs. communist ideologies in the classroom and the pursuit of a greater equalisation in opportunity for African American students. Further inspiration was provided by both the widespread expansion of centralised government programs and the increased importance of education to social progress witnessed across the world after the Second World War, and both President Truman’s own personal commitment to the equalisation of education opportunity, and the Democratic Party’s pursuit of black votes during the Truman Administration. This thesis charts the Executive and Judicial branches’ innovative and unorthodox usage of the powers available to them in order to garner greater influence over the education system, and assesses the varying rates of success of these programmes in order to demonstrate the significant and irrevocable shift in the relationship between the US Federal government and the US education system which occurred during the early Cold War.

This thesis reconstructs and explains the arms relationship that successive U.S. administrations developed with the Shah of Iran between 1950 and 1979. This relationship has generally been neglected in the extant literature leading to a series of omissions and distortions in the historical record. By detailing how and why Iran transitioned from a low order military aid recipient in the 1950s to America’s primary military credit customer in the late 1960s and 1970s, this thesis provides a detailed and original contribution to the understanding of a key Cold War episode. By drawing on extensive declassified archival records, the investigation demonstrates the not only the importance of the arms relationship but also how it reflected, and contributed to, the wider evolution of U.S.-­‐ Iranian relations from a position of Iranian client state dependency to a situation where the U.S. became heavily leveraged to the Shah for protection of the Gulf and beyond -­‐ until the policy met its disastrous end in 1979 as an antithetical regime took power in Iran.

This thesis seeks to foreground and analyse black female subjectivity by recourse to dramatic texts by twentieth-century African-American women playwrights, African- American historical narratives, and black and post-structuralist feminist theories. An attempt is made at the outset to re-assess African-American historico-political conditions in the 1920s and 1960s in order to explore the relationship between black political activism and cultural production. Although African-American social upheavals of the 1960s have come to be characterised as "revolutionary", it is necessary to critically re-evaluate the organisational hierarchy and ideological impetus that underpinned the black civil rights organisations, in order to interrogate the intractable relationship between mainstream white institutions and black civil rights organisations. Within this critical framework, the absence of African-American women from historical narratives is particularly marked, despite the fact that black women were also working at the interstices between cultural production and political activism. In contrast, historical narratives of the 1920s and the Harlem renaissance situate the contributions of African-American women alongside those of African-American men. The dramatic works of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Mary Burrill, two prominent figures of the Harlem renaissance,d emonstrateb lack women's efforts to articulate and dramatise the prevailing conditions of racism and sexism at a time when African- Americans' lives continued to be blighted by Jim Crowism. These "maverick" women playwrights are a part of a continuum of black women who seek to challenge mainstream and white patriarchal hegemony. The second half of the thesis attempts to create a link between the plays of the "mother playwrights" and contemporary black women writers who continue the tradition of fusing cultural production and political activism. It's Morning by Shirley Graham and Beloved by Toni Morrison both foreground infanticide as an act of counter-insurgency, under white supremacist ideology. This raises the issue of the ways in which the contemporary black female writer perceives black female subjectivity. On this subject, black feminist scholars write of the multifarious nature of black female subjectivity and as a consequence of this, black feminist epistemologists seek to reflect the multiple dilemmas inherent in black female materiality within white mainstream society. Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf is a seminal example of a black feminist dramatic text (choreopoem) that offers representations of black female subjectivity as multiple, and in process. The final chapter offers a detailed analysis of Shange's choreopoem and this leads me to define the black female subject (referred to as the Coloured body after Shange's "colored girls"/women) as a "shifting subject", (in contradistinction to a unitary subjecthood), that embodies radical possibilities for change. In conclusion, attempts are made to examine the way in which I myself attempt to resist homologisation into a mainstream and white academic institution, offering my own background, as theatre academic as material(ity) for the hypothesis of the "shifting subject".

Neoconservatism reached its zenith as a school of thought when it became associated with the Iraq War. Although the war was largely considered a failure, it raised the profile of neoconservatism as a school of thought. Many studies were completed which pointed to the influence of prominent members of the George W. Bush administration who were considered to be ideologically neoconservative. When Obama won the presidency in 2008, it was assumed that the influence of neoconservatives, or neoconservatism more broadly, would be over. However, given neoconservatism’s historical foundations and the tenacity of its adherents it seemed important to consider whether this has been the case. Therefore, this thesis set out to answer the question: To what extent have neoconservatives, and neoconservatism more broadly, influenced foreign policy debates during the Obama administration? I argue that neoconservatism has remained not only salient within foreign policy debates, but prominent in these debates, during Obama’s two terms in office. An examination of US foreign policy towards the nuclear crisis in Iran and the Syrian civil war indicates that neoconservatism had a substantive influence on the policy debates and the options considered within them, particularly in Congress. In some instances, neoconservative policy entrepreneurs contributed to legislation. Furthermore, this thesis finds that neoconservatism has been the predominant approach to foreign policy within the Republican Party on the issues of Iran and Syria during the period under review.

This thesis explores the fiction of American author Richard Yates to propose that his work provides an insistent questioning and alternative vision of postwar American culture. Such an approach is informed by a revisionist account of four distinct yet interconnected areas of postwar culture: the role of the non-heroic soldier stepping in and out of World War II; suburbanisation and fashioning of anti-suburban performance; demarcation of gender roles and unraveling of sexual conservatism in the 1950s; consideration of what constituted the normative within postwar discourse and representations of mental illness in Yates’ work. These four spheres of interest form the backbone to this study in its combined aim of reclaiming Yates’ fiction in line with a more progressive historical framework while shaping a new critical appreciation of his fiction. Such analysis will be primed by an opening discussion that illustrates how Yates’ fiction has frequently been ensconced in a limited interpretative lens: an approach, that I argue, has kept Yates on the periphery of the canon and ultimately resulted in the neglect of an author who provided a rich, progressive and historically significant dialogue of postwar American life. This PhD arrives at a point when Yatesian scholarship is finally gaining momentum after the cumulative impact of a comprehensive biography, a faithful film adaptation of his seminal text Revolutionary Road (1961), plus the recent re-issue of his catalogue of work. An assessment as to why he remained on the margins of success for the duration of his career is therefore of pressing interest in light of this recent critical and commercial recognition.

This thesis investigates UK-US relations with regard to the South Asian Crisis of 1971. Through a focus on an understudied point of disagreement within the relationship between Prime Minister Edward Heath and President Richard Nixon, the thesis sheds further light on Anglo-American relations in the early 1970s. Through analysis of archival documents on both sides of the Atlantic, this thesis contributes to the growing revisionist literature that has moved away from a focus upon Heath’s pro-Europeanism as the cause of problems in the Anglo-American relationship at the time. Rather, a more nuanced approach that also investigates the impact of the secretive foreign policymaking style of the Nixon White House is taken into account. The thesis reveals the issues in communication and differences of interests that, in December 1971, led the UK and US delegations at the UN Security Council to tacitly advocate for opposite sides of a hot war in South Asia. The thesis assesses the effect that these heated disagreements had upon the Anglo-American relationship going into 1972 and 1973.

During the nuclear crisis years of 1958 to 1961, millions of U.S. citizens were instructed by their federal government that the best chance of surviving a direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union resided in converting their backyards or basements into family fallout shelters. Directing their policies towards middle-class suburban America, civil defence policymakers asked citizens to realign their lives and family relationships in accordance with a new doctrine of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival, stating that middle-class suburban fathers had the capacity and resources to protect both themselves and their families from the worst possible manmade disaster. “Every Home a Fortress: The Fallout Shelter Father in Cold War America” is the first historical study of fatherhood and the family fallout shelter during the early Cold War. Focusing specifically on the cultural and political representations of fatherhood and masculinity in the formation of and public reaction to the doctrine of civil defence, this project examines the tension between the politics of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival and the lived reality. The process and practice of fallout shelter construction represented an almost unprecedented level of state penetration into the private sphere. Yet, as the ideal of shelter fatherhood permeated society, a widening gap emerged between the political rhetoric of civil defence and the everyday experience of the ordinary Americans facing the prospect of building a family fallout shelter and surviving the next war. Each chapter of this thesis explores the lived reality of civil defence, highlighting the ways in which U.S. fathers interpreted and reinterpreted the act of private shelter construction. Rather than fostering one singular politicised vision of Cold War fatherhood, this thesis argues that fallout shelters brought to the surface a variety of interlinked visions of Cold War fatherhood, rooted in narratives of domesticity, militarism, and survivalism. Central to these narratives of masculinity was the private fallout shelter itself, a malleable Cold War space that inspired a new national discourse around notions of nationhood, domestic duty, and collective assumptions of what it meant to be a father in the nuclear age.

This thesis represents the first extensive critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns and the early United States of America. Spanning literature, history and memory studies, the following chapters take an interdisciplinary approach towards investigating the methods by which Burns and his works rose to prominence and came to be of cultural and literary significance in America. Theoretically, these converging disciplines intersect through a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as the 'national poet of Scotland' onto the various socio-cultural connections that facilitated the spread of his work and reputation. In addition to Scottish literary studies, the thesis contributes to the broader fields of Transatlantic, Transnational and American Studies. Previous studies have suggested that Burns's popularity in the early United States might be attributed to his kinship with 'national' American ideals of freedom, egalitarianism and individual liberty. While some of the evidence supports this claim, this thesis argues that it also wrongly assumes a spatiotemporal unity for the nineteenth-century American nation. It concludes by suggesting that future critical studies of the poet must heed the multifarious complexities of 'national' paradigms, pointing the way to further work on the reception and influence of Burns in other 'global' or, indeed, transnational contexts.