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x, 90 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / As a key figure in Imperial Russia's Great Reforms from 1861 to 1874, Count Dmitrii Alekseevich Miliutin has received a good deal of attention by historians and scholars; however, his recently published memoirs have yet to be used extensively as the foundation for any study. Having them readily at one's fingertips would be a boon by itself, but to examine them using a different methodology could potentially provide a totally unique perspective. The methodology in question was based on the assumption that war influenced societies and society affected how war was conducted. By reexamining Imperial Russia's military administrative and social reforms with the newly published memoirs and afore-mentioned methodology, Miliutin's logic in formulating the reforms became apparent, as did his intended results, which included a challenge to the privileged status of Russia's ensconced power elites. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Alan Kimball, Chair; Dr. Julie Hessler; Dr. Alex Dracobly

Faced with the great and expanding volume of modern records created by government and other bodies, archivists have necessarily had to make choices about what to preserve and what to destroy. The conceptual basis for appraisal and practical implementation of appraisal in any given body of records are still matters not thoroughly worked out by archivists and archives. This thesis examines the conceptual basis of appraisal as it has been revealed in the literature on the subject, and applies to concepts found in the literature to appraisal of World War I military personnel files. The research strategy involves a reading of the professional literature on appraisal to determine the concepts which have been developed to rule the appraisal process, a survey of the disposition of military personnel records by several combatant states during World War I, and an analysis of Canadian military personnel records of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I. Some attention has been paid to the military historiography and in particular to studies that appear to be relevant to a discussion of appraisal of military personnel records. It was found that by and large military personnel records were not treated as are other personnel or case files, which have rarely been preserved in their entirety by archives. Although the reasons for this are not entirely clear, a study of the CEF military personnel records suggests that they can be objectively analysed in the way archivists have proposed for other records. It is proposed that an initial analysis based on standards contemporary with the records can be undertaken, and a further, later appraisal can be made based on the research use to which the records are put in the interval. As well, the various options open to the Public Archives of Canada, which holds the CEF military personnel records, are discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

This thesis traces the relationship between militarism and geographical thought in the United States during the early Cold War. It does so by traveling across certain spaces, or environments, which preoccupied American geopolitics and American science during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, geopolitics and science, understood during the Second World War as markedly distinct terms, came together uniquely to wage the Cold War from the position of strategy. The most intriguing and influential conjunctions were made possible by militarism, not in the deterministic sense of conditioning technologies or funding lines, but as a result of antagonistic, violent practices pervading American life. These practices reaffirmed America's status as distinctly, powerfully modern, while shoring up the burden of global responsibility that appeared to accompany this preeminence. Through militarist reasoning, the American world was turned into an object that needed securing - resulting in a profoundly insecure proliferation of danger that demanded an equal measure of global action and retreat behind new lines of defence. And in these American spaces, whether expanded or compressed, the identity of America itself was defined. From the global horizons of air power and the regional divisions of area studies to the laboratories of continental and civil defence research, the spaces of the American Cold War were material, in the sense that militarism's reach was clearly felt on innumerable human and natural landscapes, not least within the United States. Equally, however, these environments were the product of imaginative geographies, perceptual and representational techniques that inscribed borders, defined hierarchies, and framed populations governmentally. Such conceptions of space were similarly militarist, not least because they drew from the innovations of Second World War social science to reframe the outlines of a Cold War world. Militarism's methods redefined geographical thought and its spaces, prioritizing certain locations and conventions while marginalizing others. Strategic studies formed a key component of the social sciences emboldened by the successes and excesses of wartime science. As social scientists grappled with the contradictions of mid-century modernity, most retreated behind the formidable theories of their more accomplished academic relatives, and many moved into the laboratories previously associated with these same intellectual stalwarts. The result was that at every scale, geography was increasingly simulated, a habit that paralleled the abstractions concurrently promoted in the name of political decisiveness. But simulation also meant that Cold War spaces were more than the product of intangible musings; they were constructed, and in the process acquired solidity but also simplicity. It was in the fashioning of artificial environments that the fragility of strategy was revealed most fully, but also where militarism's power could be most clearly expressed. The term associated with this paradoxical condition was 'frontier', a zone of fragile, transformational activity. Enthusiastic Cold Warriors were fond of transferring this word from a geopolitical past to a scientific future. But in their present, frontiers possessed the characteristics of both. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

During the 1930s, the Republic of Czechoslovakia endeavored to construct a system of modern fortifications along its frontiers to protect the Republic from German and Hungarian aggression and from external Versailles revisionism. Czechoslovakia's fortifications have been greatly misrepresented through comparison with the Maginot Line. By utilizing extant German military reports, this thesis demonstrates that Czechoslovakia's fortifications were incomplete and were much weaker than the Maginot Line at the time of the Munich Crisis in 1938. The German threat of war against Czechoslovakia was very real in 1938 and Germany would have penetrated most of the fortifications and defeated Czechoslovakia quickly had a German-Czech war occurred in 1938.

This dissertation seeks to answer two primary questions stemming from the war between the United States and Mexico: 1) What methods did the United States Army Quartermaster Department employ during the war to achieve their goals of supporting armies in the field? 2) In executing these methods, what lasting impact did the presence of the Quartermaster Department leave on the Lower Río Grande borderland, specifically South Texas during the interwar period from 1848-1860? In order to obtain a complete understanding of what the Department did during the war, a discussion of the creation, evolution, and methodology of the Quartermaster Department lays the foundation for effective analysis of the department's wartime methods and post-war influence. It is equally essential to understand the history of South Texas prior to the Mexican War under the successive control of Spain, Mexico and the United States and how that shaped the wartime situation. The wartime discussion of Department operations is divided into three chapters, reflecting each of the main theaters and illustrating the respective methods and influence within each area. The final two chapters address the impact of the war on South Texas and how the presence of the Quartermaster Department on the Río Grande served as a catalyst for economic, social, and political changes in this borderland region. Combining primary source analysis of wartime logistics with a synthesis of divergent military and social histories of the Lower Río Grande borderland demonstrates the influence of the Department on South Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. The presence of the Quartermaster Department created an economic environment that favored Anglo-American entrepreneurs, allowing them to grow in wealth and begin to supplant the traditional Tejano/Mexican-American power structure in South Texas. Despite remaining an ethnic minority, Anglos used this situational advantage to dominate the region politically. This outcome shaped South Texas for decades to follow.

This dissertation describes the various military outposts on the Texas frontier between 1866 and 1886. It is arranged geographically, with each chapter covering a major fort or geographical area and the smaller posts associated with it. Official military records and government reports serve as the primary sources of data. In 1866 when the United States Army returned to the defense of Texas after four years of civil war, the state's frontier lay open to depredations from several Indian tribes and from lawless elements in Mexico. The army responded to those attacks by establishing several lines of major forts to protect the various danger areas of the frontier. To extend its control and protection to remote, vulnerable, or strategically important points within its jurisdiction, each major fort established outposts. Two main categories of outposts existed in Texas, subposts and picket stations. Subposts served as permanent scouting camps or guarded strategic points or lines of communication. Picket stations protected outlying locations, such as stage stations, that were particularly vulnerable to attack. Because Indians raiding in Texas usually operated in fairly small groups, garrisons at outposts were similarly small. Company-sized detachments generally garrisoned subposts, and picket stations seldom held more than a dozen troops, often fewer. The army used outposts haphazardly during the first few years after the Civil War. Commanders developed standard tactics for outpost garrisons, but they failed to form a comprehensive strategy incorporating a series of outposts in the plan to pacify a particular region until the late 1870s. At that time, Colonel Benjamin Grierson and others began forming a systematic network of outposts in far West Texas. Concentrating his outposts at the region's few water sources, Grierson was able to use those posts as an effective part of a strategy that eventually brought an end to danger from Apaches in that part of the state.

Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and their Body Servants is an examination of the relationship between Texas Confederates and the slaves they brought with them during and after the American Civil War. The five chapter study seeks to make sense of the complex relationships shared by some Confederate masters and their black body servants in order to better understand the place of "black Confederates" in Civil War memory. This thesis begins with an examination of what kind of Texans brought body servants to war with them and the motivations they may have had for doing so. Chapter three explores the interactions between master and slave while on the march. Chapter four, the crux of the study, focuses on a number of examples that demonstrate the complex nature of the master slave relationship in a war time environment, and the effects of these relationships during the post-Civil War era.

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