This study explores the existentialist themes in the life and work of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The testimony of secondary sources demonstrated that Guevara was well read in the works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Though Guevara did not mention his existentialism explicitly in his works, significant correspondence exists between his perspective and that of the French authors. / The primary correspondence between Guevara and the existentialists is their attempt to reincorporate the individual into an understanding of revolutionary struggle. In this attempt, they returned to the radical humanism of the early Marx that the dogmatic heritage of Marxist positivism and scientism rejected. The existentialists portrayed the individual as the creator of history, not a passive cog or victim of historical processes. / Sartre and Guevara analyzed the "bonds of interiority" that held the individual to the fighting group and the ways that the fighting group expressed the freedom of the individual. For both writers, the fighting group was not only a means of revolutionary struggle, but was also the incarnation of free praxis within a group structure. / Guevara's revolutionary existentialism attempted to reinstall the acting person at the center of history and to underscore the quality of adventure in every historical undertaking. But Guevara's leap into the future demonstrated that history is both more resistant to change and more open to contingency than he had expected. His life and death were a striking example of the way hope and futility are mixed in every historical project. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4146. / Major Professor: Donald Clarke Hodges. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

The migration of nearly one million Cubans to the United States since 1959 was triggered primarily by complex revolutionary changes in Cuba, and the United States' response to such changes, which included, among other measures, encouraging the migration. In addition to ostensibly humanitarian reasons, every administration from Eisenhower to Reagan has, in one way or another, welcomed refugees from Cuba in order to attain political objectives against Fidel Castro's revolution. Although those objectives have varied through the years, at least two have remained constant: (1) to destabilize Castro's government by draining it of vital human resources (e.g.: physicians, teachers, technicians) and (2) to discredit the revolution through the flight of thousands from a "Communist" to a "free" country. Castro, on the other hand, has also used the migration as an escape valve to rid Cuba of internal enemies, and unproductive citizens. / This study analyzes the political dynamics at work during the migration by focusing on the unusual events and episodes that have made it in many ways unique: The Unaccompanied Children's Program, the Camarioca boatlift of 1965, the airlift of 1965-1973, and the Mariel boatlift of 1980. A comparative perspective is provided through analysis of the Haitian and Central American refugee crises of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In addition, the following events affecting Cuba-United States relations are also discussed at some length: The Cold War, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Missile Crisis, and the dialogue between Cuba's revolutionary government and the Cuban exile community. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-01, Section: A, page: 0285. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0302. Adviser: Jeffrey L. Gould. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Feb. 8, 2007)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 24, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0719. Adviser: Peter Guardino.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Advisers: James S. Saeger; John Savage.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 8, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-05, Section: A, page: 1756. Adviser: Arlene Diaz.

This study investigates those 1,046 men who applied to work for the Portuguese Inquisition in the Captaincy-General of Pernambuco, one of Portugal's oldest, wealthiest, and most densely populated colonies in Brazil, between 1613 and 1821. It challenges the "myth" of the Inquisition that continues to obscure our understanding of the Inquisition, the men who ran it, and the society that upheld it. The Inquisition's procedures of selection, the privileges it offered, the rich symbolic repertoire it utilized, and the institutions it organized, such as the militia company of familiares and the brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, all contributed to the construction of inquisitional prestige, honor, power, and status. I show that the Inquisition became one of several institutions that supplied the necessary "proofs" of purity and status that many families and individuals needed to legitimize and maintain their social standing. The criteria the Inquisition used to select its officials resonated with Pernambucan cultural values and had very real applicability in the colony. Inquisitional appointments came to be used in local power struggles to discredit rivals and inquisitional authority was abused by those who sought personal gain or advantage in personal rivalries. But by the end of the eighteenth century, a complex combination of forces, including the restriction of inquisitional privileges, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the elimination of legalized discrimination, coalesced to force open the ranks of the Inquisition contributing to a decline in inquisitional power and prestige and an accompanying decline in the prestige value of inquisitional appointments and the Inquisition's ability to produce and maintain the honor, prestige, status and power it once supplied.

During the 1930s, Mexico was in the middle of a healing process after three decades of revolutionary turmoil and reform. The outbreak of revolution in 1910 had created friction between various interest groups such as the Church, the labor movement, peasants, industrialists, and politicians. In the following decades, divisions among those groups intensified as the country struggled to resolve revolutionary conflict and, in the process, looked for someone to blame. As World War II approached, divisive domestic conditions prompted Mexican government officials to develop their own internal wartime agenda. World War II became a major turning point in the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. It gave the country an opportunity, for the first time since the revolution, to unite against a common external enemy, and to militarize as a united nation against that enemy. The government-sponsored propaganda campaign became an important tool for reuniting Mexicans. The government took advantage of the unity achieved during World War II to promote a modernization and industrialization program during and after the war. A close examination of wartime propaganda reveals aggressive calls to unity mixed with a subtle promotion of modernity and industrialization. In contrast to outside propaganda produced primarily by the United States, the Mexican government's wartime messages used nationalist rhetoric and symbols to defend the country's internal interests during and after the war. U.S. propaganda promoted the idea of the "American Way of Life," a concept which glorified a middle-class consumer lifestyle, led by the United States. While U.S. wartime messages frequently provoked resentment among Mexicans, they also largely succeeded in creating a demand for the consumer goods advertised in the propaganda campaign. Avila Camacho used that demand to solidify popular support for his industrialization agenda. By the end of the war, divisive revolutionary factions that had dominated in the 1930s found themselves significantly weakened by the government's wartime measures. Through a combination of policy and propaganda, President Manuel Avila Camacho put together a wartime program that allowed him to unite the country against a common, external enemy and to pursue an aggressive industrialization program. Most importantly, World War II allowed him to justify his industrialization program as a new direction for the Mexican Revolution.

This dissertation examines the intersections between honor, violence and social change in the construction of masculine identities among the poor free inhabitants of the semiarid sertao (or backlands) of the Brazilian Northeastern province of Ceara between 1845 and 1889. Calling into question the enduring representation of the sertanejos (or backlanders) as conditioned by a timeless culture to violently defend their honor, this study demonstrates that backlands' notions of honorable manhood and a violent type of masculinity during this period were defined through a complex interaction between social, economic and political transformations, exacerbation of violence as well as cultural concepts of honor. Between 1845 and the mid 1860s, changes in landholding patterns allowed many sertanejos access to land and the ability to participate in the expanding agricultural and cattle-ranching economies of the province. As small farmers and ranchers, sertanejos articulated a notion of masculine honor that was linked to their autonomy in their economic activities, ability to provide for their families, and patriarchal control of women at home. Beginning in the mid 1860s, a new series of social-economic transformations disrupted the small farmers' and ranchers' fragile survival system, exercised great pressure on social relations, and exacerbated masculine violence. Indeed, violence became the primary means through which increasingly dislocated sertanejos attempted to solve a variety of conflicts ranging from defending resources to earning a livelihood. In this context, masculine honor became more closely linked with violence. Poor young men who were unable to establish their honor through other means turned to violence as a way to assert their manhood. Men cast their acts of aggression against an increasingly visible group of autonomous women who lived outside of male control as an attempt to reestablish a patriarchal order and, thereby, secure their honor. The process of Imperial State formation in the backlands was another significant factor in the normalization of a notion of honor that was contingent on a capacity for violence. Between 1850 and 1889, the expansion of institutions of social control that relied on armed sertanejos as agents of the State intensified violent conflict and contributed to the incitement of violent masculinities among the poor.

This dissertation provides an institutional history of the Mexican Congress, exploring the origins of single-party rule in Mexico. The investigation offers a revised interpretation of the evolution of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, originally known as the National Revolutionary Party, or PNR), the development of executive power over the legislative branch, and the emergence of a new political elite. The research demonstrates that, contrary to conventional explanations, the official revolutionary party did not result from a momentary crisis provoked by the 1928 assassination of President-Elect Alvaro Obregon. Instead, it evolved over the previous decade through a process of development occurring within and around the Congress. Alliances between political parties and congressional blocs negotiated during the formative era of the 1920s created the foundation for the later emergence of the official revolutionary party. The rapid spread of the PNR, and its overwhelming success in the 1930 elections, occurred because the party was built upon these pre-existing structures. The study also demonstrates that Presidential dominance of the Congress, or "Presidentialism," did not derive entirely from law or the structure of the republican system of government, as has often been argued, but rather developed incrementally in conjunction with the evolution of party organization. In effect, the party became the mechanism for executive dominance. The investigation concludes with an examination of the role of honour and extra-legal privilege in the creation and definition of a new political elite.