Most people’s perceptions of the Second World War leave little room for static, attritional fighting; instead, free-flowing manoeuvre warfare, such as Blitzkrieg, is seen as the norm. In reality, however, much of the terrain fought over in 1939-45 was unsuitable for such a war and, as a result, bloody attritional battles and trench fighting were common. Thus ordinary infantrymen spent the majority of their time at the front burrowing underground for protection. Although these trenches were never as fixed or elaborate as those on the Western Front a generation earlier, the men who served in Italy, Normandy, Holland and Germany, nonetheless shared an experience remarkably similar to that of their predecessors in Flanders, Picardy, Champagne and Artois. This is an area which has been largely neglected by scholars. While the first war produced a mountain of books on the experience of trench warfare, the same cannot be said of the second war. This thesis will attempt to fill that gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of static warfare in the Second World War from the point of view of British infantry morale. It draws widely on contemporary letters and diaries, psychiatric and medical reports and official documentation – not to mention personal narratives and accounts published after the war – and will attempt to interpret these sources in light of modern research and organise them into a logical framework. Ultimately it is hoped that this will provide fresh insight into a relatively under-researched area of twentieth century history.

Erik Satie (1866-1925) lived, worked, walked, and died in Paris. The key locations of his career – all within a single urban region – are well known and well researched. Yet he has often been presented as an eccentric individualist far removed from any social or geographical context. This thesis seeks to address – and redress – the decontextualisation of Satie’s career by re-imagining his music and biography in terms of the places and mobilities of turn-of-the-century Paris. To that end, it draws on a range of documentary and fictional material, including journalistic and scholarly reception texts, illustrated musical scores, chanson collections, contemporary visual culture, and cinematic representations of the people, place(s), and period(s) in question. These diverse primary and secondary sources are discussed and interpreted via a set of on-going debates at the intersection of historical musicology, cultural history, and urban geography. Some of these debates can be traced through existing research on the geography of music. Others are more local to this project and derive their value from suggesting alternative approaches to familiar problems in the study of French musical modernism. The main aim throughout is to develop a better understanding of the relations existing between Satie’s musical life, his compositional strategies, and the changing urban environment in which he plied his trade. Chapters One and Two focus on the working-class suburb of Arcueil and the ‘bohemian’ enclave of Montmartre. Chapters Three and Four are organised thematically around issues of musical humour and everyday life. By using the particular example of Satie’s Paris, the thesis proposes that more general avenues of enquiry are opened up into music and the city, thus demonstrating the potential benefits of incorporating the urban-geographic imagination into historical musicology more broadly, and bringing musicological thinking to bear on inter-disciplinary discussions about space, place, and mobility.

This thesis describes the sixty years of transatlantic interaction, connection, dislocation and reconstruction in Anglo-Carolinian trade between 1730 and 1790. Focussing on about two dozen of London’s ‘Carolina traders’, it integrates their personal and collective stories of profit and loss, reputation and notoriety, and political activity and inactivity, with the broader forces they shaped and were in turn shaped by – forces of economic growth, political stability and instability, and imperial harmony and disharmony. Through their conjoined political and commercial agency – a dual role better appreciated by contemporaries than by historians – they profoundly influenced commerce between Britain and South Carolina. Their intermediation served firstly as a stabilising force in the Anglo-Carolinian polity as they procured favourable treatment for the colony’s goods and represented its grievances in the imperial metropolis. An important influence on this was their ‘absentee’ ownership of property in South Carolina and the thesis explores in depth the underappreciated prevalence and significance of this transatlantic absenteeism. From the mid-1760s, however, the traders’ political and commercial agency aggravated intra-imperial discord. Disputes between British merchants and their Carolinian correspondents reflected in microcosm the geo-political shifts of the time and reveal at an inter-personal level how resistance to British imperial authority developed among Carolinians. Furthermore, these disputes played a constitutive role in this resistance, as the purported commercial iniquities and political orientations of British merchants led their correspondents to question and reject the commercial and political norms that had once sustained Anglo-Carolinian relations. The thesis thus helps explain how South Carolina moved, often imperceptibly, against British authority during the 1760s and early 1770s by emphasising commercial discord within the growing political-economic friction. It further contributes to the burgeoning historiography of the eighteenth-century ‘Atlantic world’ by exploring the reconstruction of trading links between Britain and South Carolina after American independence. It reveals how strongly these were influenced by pre-war politics. In so doing, it demonstrates that Carolinians exercised greater commercial discretion after the war than contemporaries and historians have appreciated, and thus challenges contentions of South Carolina’s continuing commercial subservience to British trading interests.

This thesis is about British disengagement from the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. Britain never had colonies in the region, but had held significant imperial sway over nine Protected States since the nineteenth century. The informal empire remained intact until the Labour government (1964-70) announced its intention to leave, in consequence of which Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates became independent in 1971. This thesis attempts three things. First, it draws on extensive archival research to provide the fullest possible account of British withdrawal: why it had to leave, how it did and what followed. The Gulf rulers wanted to maintain British protection for their own security, but Britain decided nonetheless on military retreat, because it needed to placate the domestic constituency in order to push forward the reversal of social reforms due to economic retrenchment. The Gulf rulers responded quickly, yet unsuccessfully, in deciding how many states would be formed as they achieve independence. It was only after the Gulf rulers and the British diplomats on the ground made late and mutually acceptable compromises about coming together that the nine Protected States became three new independent sovereign states. In the end, Britain was able to leave the Gulf peacefully, and the new states retained close relations with Britain. Second, the study of an informal empire illuminates the enduring collaborative relationship between Britain and the Gulf rulers, characterised by the nominal sovereignty given to the Protected States. This relationship not only helped Britain maintain its imperial sway at little cost, but also made possible a peaceful withdrawal and the orderly emergence of the new states. Third, this informal empire characterised by collaboration and nominal sovereignty laid the structural foundations for the later international society in the region – a point more generally telling for the study of international relations.

This dissertation investigates how personal military service, which during the immensely popular Crimean War of 1854-6 was regarded as the business only of an abstract and lowly soldier-class, had by the eve of the Great War taken on the aspect of a clear and universal citizenly duty in London press discourse. It utilises text-searchable digitised newspaper archives to exhaustively review the whole body of relevant press debate in thirteen key London periodicals, identifying key shifts and trends in press conceptions of civilian military obligation over the six decades between the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 and the eve of the Great War in 1914. The analytical narrative that emerges highlights the importance of key events, including the Crimean War, Indian Mutiny, wars of Prussian expansionism, and Boer War, in promoting and shaping the coherent conception of citizenly duty towards military service that would go on to underpin not only the mass enlistments of 1914 but also the acceptance of conscription in 1916. It suggests also the important role of broader cultural and political trends – in particular, the advent of militarist Imperialism, the growing legitimacy of the state, the shift towards a more collectivist ‘social democratic’ liberalism, and the emergence of ‘contractual’ theories of citizenship – in facilitating a reconciliation between the military imperative towards mass civilian military participation and existing liberal values and ideologies. This dissertation reveals that the societal consensus on the duty to enlist in 1914 was by no means a foregone cultural conclusion, nor indeed the relic of an earlier heroic age, but rather the dynamic product of evolution and contestation over six decades. The present study not only provides vital context to our understanding of the ‘rush to the colours’ of 1914, but also represents the first historical investigation of an important and much-neglected aspect of the relationship between war and society.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problem posed by homosexuality in Dante's Commedia. I look at several topics and questions : A) What are the implications of homosexuality in regards to both justice in the polis and to divine justice in the next world? B) What are the poetics of queer variance? C) What are the oedipal issues surrounding the Dantean father-figures VIrgil, Brunetto Latini, and other males? D) What is the role of the pedagogic Eros in promoting a strong national bond and social ethos? E) Where does Dante situate "sodomites" (and, by extension, what role does desire play) in the schemata of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, and why is this important? All of these questions are interrelated and have a bearing on Dante's notion of the good society and divine justice. / by Albert Morris. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Orientador: Jean Marcel Carvalho França / Banca: Lucia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves / Banca: Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira / Resumo: Com o desembarque da corte portuguesa no Rio de Janeiro, em 1808, tornou-se necessário assegurar o funcionamento da monarquia lusitana em terras brasileiras. Constituir um novo império no Brasil significava dotar a cidade do Rio de Janeiro, escolhida como sede da monarquia, de contornos um pouco mais europeizados, tendo em vista a precariedade da urbe encontrada pela casa de Bragança. Durante a primeira metade do século XIX, entre as instituições fundadas no Rio de Janeiro com a finalidade de "civilizar" a cidade e seus habitantes, destacam-se a Intendência Geral de Polícia da Corte e a Sociedade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, instituições cujos registros legaram a imagem de uma cidade cada vez mais civilizada. No entanto, esta perspectiva de um Rio de Janeiro em processo de modernização não foi a única construída pelos homens oitocentistas. Isso porque alguns viajantes estrangeiros, em suas narrativas de viagem, destacaram em detalhes a imagem de uma urbe de aspectos predominantemente coloniais e atrasados. Diante deste quadro, proponho analisar os discursos policial, médico-higiênico e dos viajantes estrangeiros com o objetivo principal de mapear a convivência de diferentes perspectivas da europeização do Rio de Janeiro construídas por aqueles que viveram ou passaram pela cidade durante a primeira metade do Oitocentos / Abstract: With the arrival of the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro, in 1808, it became necessary to ensure the functioning of the Lusitanian monarchy on Brazilian lands. To establish a new empire in Brazil meant to provide the city of Rio de Janeiro, chosen as the seat of the monarchy, the contours a little more Europeanized, in view of the precariousness of the town found by the house of Bragança. During the first half of the nineteenth century, among the institutions founded in Rio de Janeiro in order to "civilized" the city and its inhabitants, stand out the General Stewardship of the Court Police and the Medical Society of Rio de Janeiro, institutions whose records bequeathed the image of a city increasingly civilized. However, this perspective of a Rio de Janeiro in the process of modernization was not the only one built by the nineteenth-century men. This is because some foreign travelers, in their travel narratives, highlighted in details the image of a city with aspects predominantly colonial and backward. Given this situation, I propose to analyze the police, the medical-hygienic and the foreign travelers' discourses with the principal objective of mapping the coexistence of different perspectives of the Europeanization of the Rio de Janeiro built by those who lived or passed through the city during the first half of the Eight hundred / Mestre

The tenth-century German bishop was more than just a spiritual leader, he was also a territorial lord with secular power. These bishops also lived in an environment where violence was sometimes a way of life. His culture contained a social dynamic that saw violence as a tool for defending and maintaining honor and as a mechanism for dispute resolution. Therefore, some bishops behaved violently, either to defend their diocese from threats or to serve their own political intrigues. In some instances bishops were said to be more skilled in warfare than secular lords. However, while some clergy participated in warfare and violence, others sought to limit it through application of canon law and peacemaking. With some clergy participating in violence and others decreeing that it be banned, there were mixed messages regarding clerical violence in this era. The bishop's role in warfare and violence, especially in Germany, has only been partially addressed by modern scholars. This deficit is part of an overall shortage of medieval German military scholarship. Furthermore, the historiography on bishops in the central Middle Ages (c. 900-1200) has generally covered two narratives: the bishop as a territorial lord or his role as a church reformer. This leaves a gap in scholarship that describes how an individual bishop justified or rationalized clerical participation in violence and warfare, including his own. This paper addresses that need by reporting how one German bishop, Thietmar of Merseburg (b. 975, 1009-18), reflected on and portrayed clerical violence and warfare in his Chronicon. Thietmar's attitudes towards violence were as complex as the times in which he lived, and were influenced by his secularism and religiosity. When it came to his justifications for clerical violence and warfare, Thietmar was more concerned about the clergyman's ability to perform as a military leader, and whether or not the violent actions were justified on their own merits. While he sometimes conveyed unease with some acts of clerical violence, and at times was careful to note distinctions between secular and spiritual realms, nevertheless he did not criticize a member of the clergy for violence on the basis of his religious station nor spiritual beliefs. Indeed, Thietmar was a torn individual, struggling with his religious convictions while living in a world where violence was habitual, and where he saw it as his duty to protect his flock. In this regard Thietmar should be considered a realist.

This dissertation is an historical and philosophical study on the development of a subjective concept of individual rights. It takes the form of a history of ideas informed by genealogical methods of inquiry. Rather than seeking an origin for and underlying truth to human rights, it treats human rights as a product of various historical developments which are capable of being investigated in terms of their contingency as well as their continuous traditions. The thesis begins with an analysis of political theory in ancient Greek thought, primarily as a means of suggesting possible alternative political philosophies to the rights-based approach dominant in modern Western societies. The thesis then considers the theologicalpolitical discourse on sovereignty in the early Middle Ages, revolving around the doctrine of divine right and influenced by the function of the Christian Church in defining the nature of government. This is followed by an examination of the emergence of hierarchical, feudal relations and the formulation of feudal rights as based on proprietary notions and coinciding with individual liberties. In the following chapter there is a discussion of the juridical construction of sovereign power that emerged from the reception of Roman law and the development of canon law, the influence of legal textuality on the granting of rights and liberties, and the emergence of a discourse on public right as a way of defining the relationship between the prince and his subjects and thus delimiting sovereign authority. Finally, the thesis considers the legacy of the theory of natural rights and its relationship to forms of liberty, with an analysis of: firstly, the idea of natural rights that developed through canon law and the discussions surrounding the Franciscan poverty disputes; secondly, the role of property rights in the formulation of the rights of liberty; thirdly, the Christian understanding of liberty as a subjective attribute or power through the theo-ontological theory of human nature as represented by the free will; and fourthly, the transformation in Renaissance and early modern legal and political theory of the concept of liberty into a political doctrine about individual autonomy and inherent freedom. The purpose of the dissertation is to describe the multiple and complex historical processes from which the idea of subjective rights has emerged, as a means of understanding how human rights have come to play a seemingly essential role in modern legal and political discourses and practices.

The British Civil Wars were not just physical battles but ideological battles as well. Legitimate authority was hotly contested and each faction vied for public support by invoking a mandate meaningful to a heterogeneous audience: the safeguarding of the family and the patriarchal order. In early modern England and Scotland, the family was understood as emblematic of the social and political order; thus, the protection of the family – both private and political - was presented as the surest way of assuaging God’s wrath and re-establishing order in the three kingdoms. This thesis demonstrates the ubiquity of the language of patriarchy in the Civil Wars and the extent to which political and ideological debates centred on questions of legitimate patriarchal authority.