This dissertation examines the new emphasis on childhood in France that came from the destructiveness and trauma of the First World War. After the Great War, the French sought to rebuild their nation by redefining both young people's social responsibilities and adults' duties towards children. Politicians, educators, scientists, a social activists sought greater control over what seemed to be an increasingly valuable and potentially volatile social group. From 1918 to 1949, I argue, in public debates about the fashioning of a new, post-war youth culture, traditionalist, idealist, and scientific conceptions of childhood were competing alternatives. Each of these ways of thinking and talking about the social and cultural role of the next generation expressed different visions of the French nation in response to national crisis. Through the schools, family legislation, and leisure culture such as youth groups and the children's press, the younger generation assumed a new social and cultural position. French youth began to be seen as a national community, set apart by their age status from the rest of society, yet reflecting patriotic ideals and deeply-rooted French values. The new and distinct youth culture developed as part of post-war recovery served to mediate young people's relationship the nation, circumventing the earlier primacy of family relationships as the basis for social identity. During this time, French children were pulled out of the more private space of the family. This increased the sense of the power of youth as a collective entity, which also contributed to new fears of youth rebellion. These underlying tensions, between tradition and science and between heroism and rebellion, also led to the implementation of official regulation of French youth culture, notably through the passage in 1949 of a law censoring children's periodicals. Throughout this period, with state support, scientific theories gained the greatest authority over constructing the French child's world, but this new public space retained a deep-seated connection to adult-envisioned national ideals. In reforming the role of the younger generation after the war, the French found grounds for hope and national rejuvenation.

This dissertation explores maps as powerful representations of landscapes and pasts. The Ordnance Survey maps of 19th century Ireland are artifacts encoded with messages about social identity, social relations of power and are culturally meaningful within their historical context. Maps are shaped by the contemporary understandings of people, landscapes and the past, and in turn help to influence and reinforce those perceptions. By making maps the subject of problem-directed research, I questioned the role of maps in reflecting and shaping cultural perceptions of space and the past on the landscape, and illustrated that maps are sites of many interactions. The first edition Ordnance Survey maps of a study area in Co. Sligo (northwestern Ireland) were systematically analyzed. Using a phenomenological approach to landscape (which is both theoretical and methodological), I investigated how the maps represented the experiential landscape and past: how they depicted dwelling and belonging in place; movement and action through space; and a sense of both of these as constructed in time, specifically in the past. The process of surveying and mapping, as well as the maps themselves, are a complex mediation of many different perspectives and sometimes conflicting knowledges of place, time and meaning held by different groups including: the Ordnance Survey officials, field surveyors, Victorian antiquarians, the landlord class, the local tenantry. Although the maps depicted colonial images of the landscape, people and past, they also recorded local knowledge, access and intimacy and a sense of belonging. This research adds the voice (or in some cases the conspicuous and intended silence) of the local community to our understanding of the early 19th century in Ireland. More than colonial tools, maps are useful for revealing the experiences of the local people living in the landscape. The maps also encoded an understanding of the Irish past. Mapping places of the past created powerful images that helped to shape and reinforce competing notions of social identity, social relations of power and cultural meaning. This research illustrates how the Ordnance Survey maps of the early 19th century shaped the construction of the past and the tradition of archaeology in Ireland.

This thesis shows how the public law (compulsory) chamber has been adopted in post-communist Hungary bearing many of the marks of a former socialist regulatory bureaucracy, while claiming democratic content, and cultural and historical continuity. Although centralized public law organizations are common in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, their adoption and impact on democratization and marketization in a post-communist society is the special concern of this dissertation. A guild typology is proposed which allows for an historical structural comparison of the new Hungarian business chamber to other civic organizations such as early western European craft guilds, post-war German chambers, American and Soviet trade unions, American and British chambers of commerce, and earlier Hungarian guilds, chambers, and socialist organizations. It is observed that compulsory organizations have consistently been established where a lack or suppression of a civil society exists; where conditions of limited market development pertain; and where there is an absence of strong traditions and institutions securing individual rights. Utilizing historical materials, legal founding documents, and 1996 interview data on chamber members, business leaders, and officials in Pecs, Hungary, the thesis highlights a socio-political tradeoff between elite and nationalist development goals, and local socio-political processes. Although a centralized chamber system may apply limited resources more efficiently (for example attracting and channelling foreign investments) than private chamber systems, the price of compulsory public law chambers in a disorganized and atomized post-communist society may well be the failure (or postponement) of the emergence of voluntary civic organizations. The persistence of centralized regulatory bureaucracies will primarily benefit an entrenched elite in the political and economic fields for the foreseeable future.

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