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A survey of the first two decades of the French Communist Party's propaganda reveals a wide range of female imagery, from the androgynous, Soviet-style militant of the 1920s to the fashionable, feminine figure of the 1930s. Earlier scholars noting this discrepancy argued that the Party first adopted the Soviet "new woman," based on the Marxist principle of absolute gender equality but rejected it just over a decade later in order to broaden their appeal to the French masses. These studies, however, were restricted by the limited access to the French Communist Party's interwar-era archives. Using recently-digitized Party meeting records, reports, letters, and propaganda material, this MA thesis takes a second look at the Party's attitude toward gender roles and mobilizing women in the interwar period (1920 – 1939). Finding that female Party members directed the work among women according to a complex internal logic which justified dropping the Soviet new woman for a more conventional model, this thesis argues that the Party's changing stance on gender roles reflected the strength of the French republican notions of gender and politics which shaped the Party's response to the Soviet model of womanhood.

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This research studies small and young nation nationalisms that emerged from the breakdown of imperial states after WWI. The focus is on political philosophies that are generated by the nationalist-oriented intellectuals. It is asked here if small nation nationalist ideas are different from those of large nations and to what extent nationalist conceptions are due to intellectuals' political position and ideals. The evidence was collected from the nationalist writing of Latvian intellectuals from around 1860 until 1939. It was concluded that the prevalence of certain themes in Latvian nationalist philosophy was due to the nationalist intellectuals' notions of perfect national existence and their attitude toward and involvement in the political process. The results also showed that Latvian nationalist ideas differed from those of large nation nationalisms. Most importantly, small nation nationalist philosophies turned out to be particularly flexible and able to borrow ideas from other political contexts as well as adapt to changing political reality.

The searches for the cultural spaces of early modern European beliefs in the supernatural have followed many trails. While more complete descriptions of these searches will emerge below, some common features of the picture of these historical inquiries can be briefly summarized. The division between "popular" and "elite" understanding of the supernatural is one such feature of these spaces. Works in the latter category generally focus on an intellectual history of the beliefs that warranted the supernatural; Stuart Clark's distinguished Thinking with Demons is an example of this genre. The second, more common, category is the study of popular manifestation of the supernatural in this period. Carlo Ginzburg's Night Battles and Robin Briggs's Witches and Neighbors illustrate this kind of study. A second feature, particular to the historical works focusing on popular beliefs, is the use of anthropological methods to inform these works. The final element of this historiography is a less common but powerful tool of analysis, geography. While historians have gained much insight using both these methods, my intent is to expand these results by using two separate sites of research: Normandy, France, and Kent, England. This work uses these sights and these methods to examine archival records of witchcraft trials from each site over the period 1560-1680. Using a tight geographical focus, qualitative and quantitative features of Norman and Kentish witchcraft are examined. The study ends with some comparisons and contrasts in the results of that research. The overall purpose of the work is to allow an examination of the broader underpinnings of the supernatural in this period.

This dissertation investigates the literary landscape in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The first chapter provides the historical context and examines the different generations of authors growing up in the GDR. The term 'Wenderoman' is coined through the historical event of the opening of the Berlin Wall, also referred to as turning point or change, and subsequently followed by the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. The second chapter demonstrates how the assimilation of East German people into the free market economy has been interpreted by scholars such as Paul Cooke in the context of Postcolonialism. This theoretical framework allows for a study of the patterns and structures that guide this new fictional genre within Wende-literature. In the prototypical Wenderoman viable individual identities are created by taking its main protagonist/s through the historical Wende which also provides the context for a personal Wende. The GDR Secret Police, whether in the background or foreground of the plot, is an essential element in the plot, as is a major city, generally Berlin. Each chapter, from chapters three to seven, provides an analysis of a Wenderoman according to these categories. Chapter eight concludes that one of the most important consequences of the Wende is the requirement to create a German history and identity which accepts responsibility for Nazism (the GDR by and large repudiated any such responsibility) and GDR state repression (West Germans do not see this as a common German heritage). The reverse side to this is that West Germans must accept East Germans' positive evaluations of aspects of their GDR past, just as East Germans must accept both the positive and negative consequences of a market economy and democracy. Coming from very different angles to the definition of German identity, East and West Germans define themselves in very different ways in Wenderomanen.

This dissertation examines the relationship between citizenship and the growth of standing national armies in early modern Europe. The works of Niccolo Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Carl von Clausewitz are examined in detail to account for the evolution of realist political-military strategy in the balance-of-power state system. My thesis is that the state's recurring efforts to mobilize citizenship--construed as armed virtue--and its development of ever-more violent technologies and strategies of war rendered the balance-of-power unstable. The opening chapter surveys the legacy of realism in the history of international relations theory. Chapter two surveys how the modern state system developed out of the declining Christian Commonwealth of medieval Europe. Each of the three following chapters locates a realist theorist within the historical context in which he wrote and was active as a political-military reformer: Machiavelli and the crisis of the Florentine Republic; Frederick the Great's struggle to form a Prussian Army; and Clausewitz's effort during the Reform Era to respond on a revolutionary scale to the challenge of total Napoleonic warfare. By studying the political context in which secular realism in early modern Europe developed a balance-of-power state system, I show the genesis of political-military strategies that even today prepare for war in order to achieve international peace. My study of mobilized citizenship, military strategy, and the state's preparation for war shows that the balance-of-power is inherently unstable. A state system that arose on the basis of limited and pre-emptive wars can scarcely serve as a worthy model for international relations in the era of total war, indeed, of nuclear war.