<p>This dissertation examines sermons delivered by Confessing Church pastors in the Nazi dictatorship. The approach of most historians has focused on the history of the Christian institutions, its leaders, and its persecution by the Nazi regime, leaving the most elemental task of the pastor ? that is, preaching ? largely unexamined. The question left unaddressed is how well did Confessing pastors fare in articulating their views of the Nazi regime and the persecution of the Jews through their sermons? To answer this question, I analyzed 910 sermons by Confessing Church pastors, all delivered or disseminated between 1933 and the end of World War II in Europe. I argue that new trends in preaching popular among Confessing Church pastors discouraged deviation from the biblical text in sermons, and thus one result was few criticisms concerning German politics and society. Nevertheless, a minority of pastors criticized the Nazi regime and its leaders for their racial ideology and claims of ?Aryan? superiority, and also for unjust persecutions against Christians. They condemned Nazism as a morally corrupt ideology in contradiction to Christianity. Further, I argue that these sermons provide mixed messages about Jews and Judaism. While on the one hand, the sermons express admiration for Judaism as a foundation for Christianity and Jews as spiritual cousins; on the other hand, the sermons express religious prejudice in the form of anti-Judaic tropes that corroborated the Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews and Judaism as inferior. In the final section of the dissertation I explore the ministries of German pastors of Jewish descent and argue that they not only experienced persecution from the Nazi state, but also from their own congregations. Nevertheless, the themes of their sermons are consistent with those found in those of their colleagues. My research demonstrates that the German churches were in fact places to offer criticism of the Nazi regime, which was often veiled through biblical imagery and metaphor. Yet the messages reveal criticism from a position of obedience and subservience to the state, and at the same time the expose a confused ambiguity about the Jews and Judaism and their relation to Christians in Nazi Germany.

<p> In the study of the Holocaust and the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime, emphasis is most frequently placed on the attempted extermination of the Jewish population of Europe. While this focus is not misplaced, the result of this focus often forces other persecuted groups into the background. The persecution of the Jehovah&rsquo;s Witnesses of Germany is often given limited attention in Holocaust historiography. Although not designated for extermination like the Jews, the Nazi regime sought to bring about an end to the presence of this religious sect, viewing the Witnesses as a threat to the unity of the German Reich. This paper draws on the theories of Benedict Anderson and Hannah Arendt and uses the region of present-day North Rhine-Westphalia as a case study in an effort to explain how and why the Jehovah&rsquo;s Witnesses (unlike other sectarian religions) came to be seen as enemies of the Reich. It is estimated that there were 2,500 documented cases of state-sponsored persecution inflicted upon Witnesses living in North Rhine-Westphalia. The types of persecution varied from trial and imprisonment in concentration camps, to the removal of children from the care of their parents, to execution. Although the numbers of individuals targeted do not rival those of the Jews, their marginalization in the study of the Holocaust and genocide limits our understanding of the scope of this crime against humanity. This paper is an attempt to correct this deficiency.</p>

<p> This work explores the development, maintenance, and fracture or transformation of the collective identity that defined the British upper class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the historical/cultural narratives that developed around the fracture of that collective identity, and on the affect that both identity fracture and narratives exercised on British society, culture, and politics during and after the First World War. We examine the process by which that collective identity was transmitted from generation to generation, examine the damage done to upper class collective identity during and in the wake of WW I, and explore the expression of that damaged identity in the development and influence of historical/cultural narratives generally identified as Lost Generation narratives. </p><p> The theoretical framework used in this dissertation is based on the work of a group of sociologists that includes Alberto Melucci, Manuel Castells, Harold Kerbo, John Ogbu, Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Kai Erikson. Their analyses are grounded in Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory&mdash;a body of theory that seeks to describe the formation, maintenance, and transformation of both individual and collective identities. The historical analysis used in this effort involves the work of a range of historians and theoreticians. These include historians who focus on British social/cultural history and/or on the history of Britain during the First World War (e.g. J.M. Winter, David Cannadine, Samuel Hynes, Lawrence James, Paul Fussell, and Angela Lambert) as well as historians and theoreticians who focus on literary interpretation and on the use of narrative in history (e.g. Keith Jenkins, Hayden White, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault). The historical analysis includes research in primary sources from historical actors discussed in the dissertation. These include diaires, letters, and memoirs by Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Seigfried Sassoon, and JRR Tolkien; letters and expedition journals of George Mallory; and JRR Tolkien's working notebooks regarding the development of his fictional works.</p><p>

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251814."

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.

Modern Freemasonry emerged in the early eighteenth-century as part of European Enlightenment culture and gradually spread to the American continent. Masonry immediately aroused suspicion and continues to evoke controversy today. This study documents the development and maturation of lodge principles during the eighteenth century and then moves to specific periods of conflict between masons and antimasons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a comparative history of Freemasonry and antimasonry in the Russian Empire just after the Revolution of 1905, in France during the early decades of the Third French Republic, and in Massachusetts, 1826-1832. During each of these periods, in each area, antimasons coalesced to close lodge doors. Antimasons achieved temporary successes in two of the three cases. This study explains why antimasonry emerged as a political phenomena common to early constitutional states in the context of expanding male, suffrage rights, and an emerging market economy. It frames a dialogue between masons and antimasons concerning politics, religion, science, economics and morality, through an analysis of masonic and masonic presses and published works. Debate between masons and antimasons centered around new definitions of the public sphere, the separation of Church and state, the role of the press, and proper public morality in an elective order.

This dissertation, a study of one strand of French exoticism, discusses the representation and reception of the Black African and Caribbean Other, both of whom the French called the “nègre,” from the Great War until 1930. Using a wide array of sources (novels, travelogues, advertisements, and photographs), I argue that representations of the nègre, from French West Africa and the Antilles were constructed ambivalently in the French social imagination to define boundaries of the French self and to mediate cultural changes and social anxieties that World War I had furthered. In Part I, I demonstrate how the Black African came to be represented as a grand enfant in popular culture during and after the Great War. This representation set the stage for the emergence of négrophilisme in the 1920s and for some romantic mixed-race relationships. But the grand enfant was a contested representation, and this dissertation shows that a battle to define the post-war “Black soul” broke out after René Maran, a Black Frenchman, published his novel, Batouala (1921). In Part II, I analyze how the French depicted the Black African as the Other in “ethnographic” exhibitions, photographs, and advertisements. In the 1920s, the French represented the Black African as an exotic, primitive “type” in efforts to define post-war moral and social identities. In Part III, I examine three French travelers to Africa. Writers Lucie Cousturier and André Gide demonstrate a limited French conception of extending fraternity to the Other and a reluctance to embrace the “oceanic” in Africa. Popular response to La Croisière noire, an automobile expedition through Africa, serves as the basis of my analysis of heroic exoticism. Last, I examine French exoticist desires at the Bal nègre, a dance hall where ethno-eroticism and carnivalesque mixing of races flourished. Some contemporary observers, like writer Paul Morand, feared fluidity across the color line. Morand's exoticism is invoked to demonstrate how négrophilisme and négrophobisme became intertwined in the French social imagination in the 1920s. Thus this dissertation offers a complex account of French history that problematizes the myth of a non-racist France.

Under what conditions can one expect to see a sustained system of community management of forests in operation? Considerable theoretical scepticism has been expressed by economists and others about the viability of any such institution. In this view, such institutions will inevitably result in a "tragedy of the commons." However, evidence from around the world has accumulated in recent years which suggests that common property institutions do exist, and in some cases, have existed for a long time. Using archival sources in India and the U.K., this thesis explores the fate of community management of forests in a region of the central Himalayas known as Kumaun. Kumaun was under British administration over the period 1815-1949. The forests of the region were not under formal state management till the 1860s. In fact, there is evidence of customary cooperative arrangements--informal local institutions--before the arbitrary takeover of forests by the new administrators. The new property regime had a disruptive effect on local institutions and precipitated much deforestation, especially since the state did not have the logistical wherewithal to enforce the new forest rules at a time when local arrangements had lost credibility. Two schools of thought emerged within the state bureaucracy to address the emerging crisis of rapidly diminishing forests. The "centralizers" argued for more effective supervision and an increase in state power in order to protect the forests. The "devolutionists," by contrast, canvassed for decentralized management by user communities. Several decades of experimentation with centralized methods failed to protect forests effectively and caused much political protest. The government ultimately had to resurrect local institutions in the 1920s. In the beginning this was a failure, since community management had lost all credibility in the eyes of local users. However, persistent efforts by government officers finally paid off and the new system of van panchayats (village forest councils) finally solved a problem which the state, on its own, could not.

This thesis surveys the sounds of everyday street and work life to argue for a reassessment of the way historians have understood community, space, materiality and identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Germany and Britain. It will demonstrate that sound played an important role in the organisation of urban space and social order. Furthermore it will show how the historical subject as listener emphasises the volatility of identity, place-making and community. Sounds either defined a community through positive responses or created conflict where one group heard the sounds of another group as noise. Sound helps to define the social groups that this thesis focuses on, such as experts, intellectuals, local administrators, immigrants or factory labourers. The ephemeral nature of sound and the subjectivity of listening, however, also pull apart such neat definitions and reveal the fractures within each of these social groups. Throughout this thesis, differing reactions to everyday sounds in the conurbations of Manchester and Düsseldorf will demonstrate how communities sought to define themselves and their environments through the production and reception of sound. What emerges is a re-composition of everyday life in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century that challenges examinations of it based on images of class, sociability and culture. Düsseldorf and Manchester were substantial cities that grew during the period studied here and underwent similar processes of technological change that affected both the social order and the physical environment. This thesis demonstrates that the audibility of specific technologies, buildings and machines physically affected listeners, and that working classes, middle-class professionals and local administrators all created regimes of noise intent on controlling behaviour in streets and workplaces. One of the key tropes within studies of sound is that listening places the historical subject at the centre of their environment while seeing places them outside of it. Using this idea, this thesis will make an original contribution to a number of debates. First of all, sounds broke down visual boundaries between street and workplace and this dissertation examines how that changes historical notions of place and space. Secondly, this thesis establishes how sound exposes the lines of fracture and cohesion within and between social groups that historians of popular street culture have tried to emphasise through class relations. Thirdly, sound allows for a re-examination of the power structures in which factory labourers and immigrants worked and lived as it presents practices of listening and sound production that breathe new life into ‘histories from below’ and challenge the top-down approaches associated with governmentality. Finally, this thesis will challenge the notion of noise as unwanted sound, prevalent in the growing number of histories on urban noise by demonstrating the diversity of everyday and medical reactions to ‘noise’ and exploring the problem of ‘silence’ in negotiations of migrant and worker identity and the development of road technologies. Overall, this thesis will determine that the role of sound in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century complicates historical debates on the physical and social organisation of urban space. Different communities transformed their identities around shared listening practices and adapted their rhythms of everyday life to sounds that resonated between street and home, work and leisure.