Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a British historian of culture and a pioneer during the 1920s in linking history with the social sciences. Much existent writing on him today simply tries to summarize his views on the historical process or on specific time-periods. There is a fundamental lack of real historical perspective on Dawson, linking him to his own intellectual environment. This thesis attempts to remedy that lack. It demonstrates that the most important years in which to understand Dawson’s development were roughly those of the interwar period (1918-1939). During those years he wrote scholarly books as well as social and political commentaries. This thesis uses Dawson’s life and writings as a window into his world—hence it is a “study in British intellectual history between the world wars.” A number of contexts will be examined through relevant archival and published source material: textual, social, cultural, and biographical, all in order to account for the numerous ideas and events that raised questions in Dawson’s mind to which he then responded in his writings. Chapter one studies Dawson’s reputation from the interwar years up until today in order to highlight his broad visibility, the diverse images through which his work was viewed, and the central themes he engaged with and which are the subjects of the following chapters. Those themes are: (1) Dawson’s entry into British sociology during the 1920s; (2) his response to the question of human progress in Britain after the Great War; (3) his response to historiographical problems surrounding religious history, nationalism, and empiricism; (4) the various ideas of religion present in interwar Britain and the wider Western world by which Dawson informed his thinking not only about religion but also about (5) those “political religions” (as he saw them) taking shape in the totalitarian regimes during the interwar years. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to general knowledge of interwar British history, aid more historically sensitive readings of Dawson’s work today, and reveal something of Dawson’s “cultural mind”: the fundamental interdisciplinary and catholic ways of historical thinking by which he viewed the past and the present and which were his most important contributions to the discipline of history.

This thesis is concerned with extending the role that live performance might play in our understanding of the work of the interrelated avant-garde performance communities that emerged in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. This is a practice-led project that uses my own performance work as the site of its enquiry. In the last decade performance itself has begun to play a significant role in our understanding of and relationship to past performances, in the main through the increasing pervasion of re-enactment as an acknowledged historiographical trope. However, as a consequence of its association with re-enactment, the nature of the historiographical role afforded to performance is still primarily determined by its proximity to the archive and institutionalised modes of performance history. Challenging the primacy of the re-enactment as a means of embodied engagement with past performance, this research project explores how manipulation of my own performance practice might generate new forms of historical knowledge. In particular my focus is on using this practice to develop a new understanding of how the work of this earlier period altered y the experience of the urban landscape for those participating in the work, audience and performers alike. Structured around a rigorous analysis of three specific works from across this earlier period, I conceived a series of spatial ‘blueprints’ that were applied to my practice to create three new performance pieces. Using my own research and practice to renegotiate the relationship between live performance and the archive, I demonstrate the possibility for a new historiographical approach to past performance. This approach emphasises the role of the participants in the performance as generators of an alternative form of historical understanding embedded in ways of operating in the city.

<p>This dissertation interrogates existing scholarly paradigms regarding aetiology in the Histories of Herodotus in order to open up new avenues to approach a complex and varied topic. Since aetiology has mostly been treated as the study of cause and effect in the Histories, this work expands the purview of aetiology to include Herodotus’ explanations of origins more generally. The overarching goal in examining the methodological principles of Herodotean aetiology is to show the extent to which they resonate across the Histories according to their initial development in the proem, especially in those places that seem to deviate from the work’s driving force (i.e. the Persian Wars). Though the focus is on correlating the principles espoused in the proem with their deployment in Herodotus’ ethnographies and other seemingly divergent portions of his work, the dissertation also demonstrates the influence of these principles on some of the more “historical” aspects of the Histories where the struggle between Greeks and barbarians is concerned. The upshot is to make a novel case not only for the programmatic significance of the proem, but also for the cohesion of Herodotean methodology from cover to cover, a perennial concern for scholars of Greek history and historiography.</p><p>Chapter One illustrates how the proem to the Histories (1.1.0-1.5.3) prefigures Herodotus’ engagement with aetiological discussions throughout the Histories. Chapter Two indicates how the reading of the proem laid out in Chapter One allows for Herodotus’ deployment of aetiology in the Egyptian logos (especially where the pharaoh Psammetichus’ investigation of the origins of Egyptian language, nature, and custom are concerned) to be viewed within the methodological continuum of the Histories at large. Chapter Three connects Herodotus’ programmatic interest in the origins of erga (i.e. “works” or “achievements” manifested as monuments and deeds of abstract and concrete sorts) with the patterns addressed in Chapters One and Two. Chapter Four examines aetiological narratives in the Scythian logos and argues through them that this logos is as integral to the Histories as the analogous Egyptian logos studied in Chapter Two. Chapter Five demonstrates how the aetiologies associated with the Greeks’ collaboration with the Persians (i.e. medism) in the lead-up to the battle of Thermopylae recapitulate programmatic patterns isolated in previous chapters and thereby extend the methodological continuum of the Histories beyond the “ethnographic” logoi to some of the most representative “historical” logoi of Herodotus’ work. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation and makes one final case for methodological cohesion by showing the inextricability of the end of the Histories from its beginning.</p> / Dissertation

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Comment la période nazie et la Shoah ont-elles été présentées dans les manuels d’histoire de fin de premier cycle de l’enseignement secondaire, publiés de 1950 à nos jours, en Allemagne, au Royaume-Uni, en Belgique francophone et en France ? Une étude comparative de leur contenu sera proposée, en accordant une place centrale à l’évolution de celui-ci et à l’apport, tant de la recherche historique que des différents événements ayant composé l’actualité de ces sujets depuis plus de cinquante ans. Alors que l’opinion publique européenne évoque fréquemment le profond mutisme sur la période nazie et la Shoah jusqu’à la fin des années quatre-vingts, les manuels d’histoire offrent, dès les années cinquante, un ensemble d’informations aux élèves de 14 à 16 ans, en Allemagne en particulier. Ces éléments de connaissance, certes lacunaires et imparfaits au départ, apparurent donc très tôt, rompant le silence, avant d’être considérablement augmentés et précisés à la fin du vingtième siècle. À l’échelle de notre étude, une nette différence quantitative et qualitative se dessine entre le solide contenu des manuels allemands et français, à un degré moindre toutefois, et les ouvrages britanniques, nettement plus limités sur notre sujet, les publications scolaires wallonnes ayant été très rares durant le dernier quart du vingtième siècle. / We can wonder how the nazi period and the Shoah have been presented in the history textbooks for secondary schools which have been published since 1950 in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in French-speaking Belgium and in France.We will compare their contents, by underlining the evolution of this content and the influence of the historic researches as well as the various events which have been topical over the last fifty years. Whilst the European public opinion often mentions the deep silence about this nazi period and the Shoah up to the late nineties, German textbooks provided pupils, aged 14 to 16, with important information, from the fifties. Although incomplete and imperfect at the beginning, this knowledge was quickly offered and broke the silence before being dramatically increased and more precise at the turn of the century. As far as quantity and quality are concerned, there is a sharp contrast between the German and French textbooks and the British ones which deal much less with this topic. As for Walloon textbooks, they were scarce from the seventies to 2000.

Against the Tide investigates systematically for the first time how resistances to methodologies advanced by historians associated with the Annales School, one of the most influential twentieth-century schools of historical thought, came to exist in England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States between 1900 and 1970. It defines ‘methodology' in broad terms as the practice of history and poses a series of questions about resistances: who or what created them? What constituted them? Did they centre on a particular methodology, Annales historian or the Annales School as a whole? And what did opposition to methodologies incorporate: technical debates in isolation or wider issues associated with politics, religion and philosophy? The dissertation uses an interdisciplinary conceptual framework,drawing together ideas advanced in the history of science, sociology of education and knowledge, and comparative history, in order to answer these questions. The responses offered refer to and draw on a selection of sources: one hundred and nine scholars' private archives, the articles, books, critical reviews and published letters of a variety of historians and segments of the growing literature both about the Annales School and about the institutions within which the historical discipline operated during the twentieth century. They suggest that resistances played an important part in the international dissemination of Annales historians' methodologies, that resistors held different ideas about the Annales School from those of its creators and divergent methodological commitments, but that they like Annales historians often sought to enhance historical research and sometimes worked on the same subjects but in different and occasionally equally inventive ways. Overall, the findings illustrate a limited but important part of Annales' own history and thereby help to cast the School in new light on terms other than its own by placing it in the transnational context of twentieth-century transatlantic historiography.

I examine how religion is presented in the Annals of Tacitus, and how it resonates with and adds complexity to the larger themes of the historian’s narrative. Memory is essential to understanding the place of religion in the narrative, for Tacitus constructs a picture of a Rome with ‘religious amnesia.’ The Annals are populated with characters, both emperors and their subjects, who fail to maintain the traditional religious practices of their forebears by neglecting prodigies and omens, committing impious murders, and even participating in the destruction of Rome’s sacred buildings. Alongside this forgetfulness of traditional religious practice runs the construction of a new memory – that of the deified Augustus – which leads to the veneration of living emperors in terms appropriate to gods. This religious narrative resonates with and illuminates Tacitean observations on the nature of power in imperial Rome. Furthermore, tracing the prominence of religious memory in the text improves our understanding of how Tacitus thinks about the past, and particularly how he thinks about the role of the historian in shaping memory for his readers. I consider various religious categories and their function in Tacitus’ writings, and how his characters interact with them: calendars (do Tacitus’ Romans preserve or change the traditional scheduling of festivals?), architecture (what determines the building of or alterations to temples and other religious monuments?), liturgy (do they worship in the same ways their ancestors did?), and images (how do they treat cult statues?). I analyze the patterns of behaviour, both in terms of ritual practice and in how Tacitus’ characters think about and interpret the supernatural, and consider how Rome’s religious past features in these patterns. The thesis is structured according to the reigns of individual emperors. Four chapters chart Tiberius’ accession, Germanicus’ death, its aftermath, and Sejanus’ rise to power; one chapter examines the religious antiquarian Claudius; and the final chapter analyzes Nero’s impieties and their consequences.

The great drama of China has been the repeated attempts to bring under single control and preserve the unity of its vast territories, so varied ethnically, socially, and geographically. Han Chinese confidence in the integrity of their own identity has been lastingly unsettled by long periods of fragmentation into regional states, and even in times of political unity the heart-searching has continued: what went wrong? What lessons could be learned for the future? The Southern and Northern Dynasties’ era (317-589 AD) was the longest period of political fragmentation in the imperial era. Its political and social confusion gave rise to differences in later accounts of it. In the eleventh century, scholar-officials intensively debated the issue of imperial rule during this period. At stake was the integrity of the Han Chinese state. On one side were historians who accorded legitimacy to the barbarian dynasties of the north; on the other were those who favoured the southern Han Chinese-ruled dynasties. By the time Song’s power base transferred south in 1127, a strong sense of a Han Chinese identity had developed and pro-Southern opinion predominated. This study approaches the Southern and Northern Dynasties’s era indirectly. It examines it through the most prominent work of eleventh-century historiography, the keystone written history of early imperial China, Sima Guang’s 司馬光 Zi zhi tong jian 資治通鑑 – the main focus of this study. That text has played a central role in shaping later understanding of imperial China’s political traditions and, as a corollary, has contributed to the formation of a Han Chinese self-identity. Yet Sima Guang’s representation of China’s past, though well-researched and written, was inevitably coloured by personal political and social experiences, and by his current commitments – by spin, in fact. This study will argue that at the heart of Sima Guang’s representation of the Southern and Northern Dynasties was a concern for the political survival of the eleventh-century state under which he served. He needed to understand and explicate the political and moral lessons of the earlier period in order to present an imperial vision that would avoid its frailties. This study therefore investigates and demonstrates the previously unexplored extent to which contemporary political concerns informed Sima Guang’s account. By developing a reading of Zi zhi tong jian as an ideological and textual construct, and more than just a simple account of the past, this study affords insights into the composition of historical writing in imperial China, as well as the complexities of the political environment that spawned it. It shows that works of historiography like Zi zhi tong jian served a more nuanced function than later scholarship suggests, and it brings into focus important questions of historical and literary authority.

Classic Maya civilization which flourished A.D. 250- 900 fell from causes unknown. This study traces the evidences and interpretations of those who sought to explain the downfall. Discussion begins with treatment of the ideas of pre-archaeological travellers to the region and then shifts to the twentieth century. Themes of internal collapse are explored, first focusing on such catastrophes as earthquakes and epidemics, followed by an examination of Maya gricultural technology and its possible failure. The fifth chapter, on internal violence and external influences as causes of Maya collapse, analyzes theories of peasant revolt, wars between autonomous Maya city-states., and the strong possibility of outright invasion by other aboriginal peoples.

This art historiographical study focuses on African American artist Elizabeth Catlett’s linocut series I Am the Negro Woman, composed of fifteen images and executed in 1947 while Catlett was a visiting artist at the Taller de Graphica Popular in Mexico City. The series was exhibited shortly thereafter at the Barnett Aden Gallery in Washington, D.C., only to be largely marginalized by the art historical discourse of the following twenty-five years; however, during the Civil Rights Movement, a renewed interest in Catlett and her works began to develop. Later Feminist and Post-colonial art historians, seeking to widen the narrow mid-twentieth century canon, incrementally began to address these images in accordance with their respective interests, expanding the scholarship and increasing the exhibition of the series. The reputation of these images continues to grow, moving I Am the Negro Woman out of the margins of the art historical discourse into a more valued and recognized position.