Thesis advisor: Susan Michalczyk / This 2005-2006 Senior Honors Thesis is the story of Holocaust survivor Edgar Krasa and his experience in the Nazi concentration camps. As a human, I felt it was my duty to share his remarkable account with the world. As a writer, I have sought to leave him with something tangible, a small tribute to the suffering he endured. I have attempted to maintain a delicate balance between research and storytelling, as Mr. Krasa's story exists in the context of the theoretical framework I have studied. This work is not meant to speak only of gas chambers, death marches, bitter cold, and death. Rather, it stands as a testament to human loyalty, hope, determination, and unwavering belief in life. It is meant to expose the depths and resilience of the human soul. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2006. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

During the three years following the 1988 Olympic Games the Soviet Union and all of the East European countries established official relations with South Korea. This study is an economic history, focusing on the establishment of direct commercial relations between these countries, a process that began in 1968. It examines the development of direct economic relations between East Central Europe, the Soviet Union and South Korea from 1970 to 1990 to identify areas of conflict, competition and cooperation. The work begins with a historical overview of Russian/Soviet relations with the Korean peninsula from 1240 to 1970 and East Europe between 1950 and 1970. The second chapter uses a comparative model for communist countries to show the degree of centralization in South Korea, which helps to explain why South Korea, a "democratic" country, could develop and consistently maintain a policy, such as Nordpolitk, for over twenty years. The remaining chapters study development of formal and informal relations during the periods of 1970-1979, 1980-1988 and 1989-1991. The "people diplomacy" conducted through nonpolitical contact, such as trade, sports and cultural exchanges, during this period clearly aided the establishment of official relations between the Soviet Union, East European countries and South Korea. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2937. / Major Professor: Edward D. Wynot. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

The San Francisco Conference on International Organization lasted sixty-two days, April-June 1945, and wrote the Charter for the United Nations. Major issues for conference consideration included: Security Council voting and veto powers; the substantive and nonsubstantive authority to be granted the General Assembly; Trusteeships; American retention of the former Japanese naval bases in the Pacific; Regionalism; and invitations to Argentina, Poland and the two Soviet Republics--White Russia and the Ukraine--to join the world organization. Led by the working group of the five permanent members, although the United Kingdom, United States and the Soviet Union did wield the most power, the decisions reached on these issues were written into the Charter and molded the shape of the United Nations. / The interrelated forces at work during the conference were analyzed to facilitate tracing the decision-making process in writing the United Nations Charter. Difficulties did exist. Differences in perspectives among the Allies, set aside in the interest of wartime coalition unity, needed resolution at San Francisco. Within these parameters, emphasis was placed on United States' participation at the San Francisco Conference. The United States delegation was closely examined to provide insight into the development of American positions on key conference issues. / Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that the internationalist expectations for the United Nations were suppressed from the beginning by the nationalistic self-interest of all the attendent nations, large and small, at the conference. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-10, Section: A, page: 3331. / Major Professor: Thomas M. Campbell. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

A chronicle of the Second Battalion, 329th Infantry Regiment, 83d Infantry Division, involving five campaigns during World War II in the European Theater of Operations. It is a history of the Second Battalion as remembered and related by Granville Attaway Sharpe who was initially a company commander within the battalion, and then battalion commander of the unit. / In January, 1945 Granville Sharpe was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel at the age of twenty-four. He was the youngest infantry officer to hold that rank in the United States Army European Theater of Operations. He had landed on Omaha Beach as the commander of G Company, Second Battalion. After being wounded twice in Normandy, Captain Sharpe returned to the battalion from a field hospital and was given command of the Second Battalion on 4 August 1944. He remained in the position of battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel's job, for the remainder of the war. He proved to be a successful combat officer, with both natural leadership qualities and a concern for the safety and morale of his men. / The narrative includes stateside training for overseas service and then participation by the battalion from Omaha Beach on June, 1944 until the meeting with the Russian allies after crossing the Elbe River in May, 1945. / The chapter divisions correspond to the geographical mission changes of the 83d Division. Chapter One Preparation for service. Chapter Two Normandy. Chapter Three Brittany. Chapter Four Loire Valley and Luxembourg. Chapter Five Huertgen Forest. Chapter Six Ardennes. Chapter Seven Roer to the Rhine. Chapter Eight the race to the Elbe. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-08, Section: A, page: 2619. / Major Professor: James Pickett Jones. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

This dissertation is a study of initiatives to recover the Jewish past and of the emergence of Sephardic Studies in Spain from 1845 to 1935. It explores the ways the Jewish past became central to efforts to construct and claim a Spanish patria, through its appropriation and integration into the nation's official national historical narrative, or historia patria. The construction of this history was highly contentious, as historians and politicians brought Spain's Jewish past to bear in debates over political reform, in discussions of religious and national identity, and in elaborating diverse political and cultural movements. Moreover, it demonstrates how the recovery of the Jewish past connected--via a Spanish variant of the so-called "Jewish question"--to nationalist political and cultural movements such as Neo-Catholicism, Orientalism, Regenerationism, Hispanism, and Fascism. In all of these contexts, attempts to reclaim Spain's Jewish past--however impassioned, and however committed--remained fractured and ambivalent, making such efforts to "recover" Spain's Jews as partial as they were compromised.

The United States commands the most powerful conventional military in the world. This extraordinary advantage in conventional power should enable the United States to coerce target states without having to fire a single shot. Yet, over the past two decades, leaders of Iraq, Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya have dismissed U.S. threats and invited military clashes with the world's sole superpower. What explains the United States' inability to coerce many of the world's weakest targets with compellent military threats? I argue that the United States' compellent threats fail more frequently in the post-Cold War period because they are costly neither to issue nor to execute. That is, because it is not risky for the United States to issue compellent threats, and because it is relatively cheap for the United States to use military force, the threat of force does not signal to target states that the United States is highly motivated to defeat them. For this reason, a target will resist a U.S. threat that is immediately credible in the belief that the United States will apply limited force, but will not apply decisive force if the target continues to resist after the United States executes its threat. The costly compellence theory asserts that only threats that are costly for the unipole to issue and to execute will be effective in compelling target states to yield before the application of force. To illustrate this logic, I present a basic formal model of a unipole that issues a compellent threat against a weak target state. The model suggests that both unipoles that are highly motivated to prevail over targets and those that are not will behave identically in the early stages of a crisis, i.e., they are both willing to execute military threats in many equilibria. The model suggests that, under many conditions, the target cannot infer from the willingness to issue and to execute a compellent threat that the United States is highly motivated to defeat it, and consequently, it is likely to resist. I then argue that the United States has developed a model of warfare that dramatically limits the human, political, and financial costs of employing force. As the unipole, it is not costly for the United States to issue compellent threats in the post-Cold War period. The United States has also pursued many strategies that limit the costs of force: it relies on an all-volunteer military increasingly supplemented by private contractors; it has developed a force structure based on the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) thesis that relies increasingly on airpower and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); it employs force in conjunction with allies who contribute money and troops to U.S. coercive campaigns; it employs deficit spending to pay for its military operations; and, it actively limits collateral damage inflicted on target states. In combination, these strategies both lower the costs of employing force and undermine the effectiveness of U.S. compellent threats. To evaluate the logic of the costly compellence theory, I present a new dataset on the United States' use of compellent threats 1945-2007. I demonstrate that the United States has employed compellent threats more frequently since the end of the Cold War, and that these threats have been less effective on average in the post-Cold War period. These observations are consistent with the logic of the costly compellence theory. I also evaluate four cases in which the United States issued compellent threats against weak opponents. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 2011 threat against Libya constitute "most-likely" cases for the costly compellence theory. The theory accurately predicts that the Soviets would concede in 1962 and that Qaddafi would resist the United States' demands in 2011. I also compare the United States' 1991 and 2003 threats against Saddam Hussein. Saddam's resistance in 1991 is consistent with the logic of costly compellence. I evaluate sources captured after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to evaluate why Saddam Hussein chose to resist the more costly threat in 2003. Finally, I argue that the United States is likely to continue its efforts to minimize the costs of employing force and to emphasize the use of technology over ground troops. My study suggests that these strategies will both enhance the ease with which the United States can employ force and decrease the effectiveness of U.S. compellent threats, because they suggest to potential targets that the United States lacks the motivation to defeat them.

Taking Paris as its geographical nexus, this dissertation tracks European and African modernist appropriations of African sculpture across a three-tiered historical trajectory spanning from 1905 to 1980. Part I charts engagements with West and Central African masks and statues by the Fauves and Pablo Picasso; Part II assesses the work of pioneering black South African artists Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto; and Part III chronicles the nationalization of modern art in Senegal under President Léopold Sédar Senghor. Through examinations of the cross-cultural, formal, and politicized dynamics of African sculpture--or so-called art nègre--in modern art discourse and practice on two continents, the dissertation argues that European and African artists shared certain form-based approaches to African objects, coupled with tactical understandings of those objects' cultural origins. The artists diverged--both individually and by movement--insofar as they appropriated African art to different ends reflective of historical period, social context, and personal approach. More broadly, the dissertation argues that the early-20th-century European avant-garde "discovery" of African sculpture became globally significant through its eventual catalytic role for modern art movements in Africa. It argues that some of the most important modernist appropriators of African sculptural forms were African painters who both studied and subverted their European precursors in that practice.

This dissertation explores the multifaceted life of Kurt Birrenbach as a window into the historical evolution of a Liberal German Atlanticism during the post-World War II era. While tracing the development of this Atlanticism into a "mature," establishment phenomenon, themes addressed include the founding and financing of an elaborate infrastructure, the creation of extensive political networks also stretching abroad, the execution of ambitious public relations actions, and distinct tendencies towards geographic and thematic expansion. Those challenges confronting Atlanticism in the Federal Republic, among them the persistence of Conservative Abendland perspectives and, later, the rise on the Left of interrelated pacifist, anti-nuclear and environmental movements, are touched upon as well. The broader historiographical issues examined encompass postwar continuity and discontinuity in the Federal Republic, processes of Americanization, the functioning of transnational networks, the impact of generational change, and the political engagement of West German business.

Titled Foreign Things No Longer Foreign: How South Koreans Ate U.S. Food, my research investigates the ways in which surplus American food were familiarized in daily Korean life. When food such as wheat flour and powdered milk was largely alien to their diet before 1945, many Koreans encountered the new American food in free feeding stations, in school lunch programs, and as wages-in-kind by working in public construction programs, ran by varying actors such as the U.S. Operations Missions in Korea, South Korean central and provincial governments, and foreign voluntary agencies. By exploring different channels through which surplus American food was distributed, I argue that political factors were more crucial than economic and cultural aspects in making wheat flour and powdered milk popular in South Korea. The two main political factors were the changing purposes of U.S. foreign food assistance and the South Korean state’s use of the surplus food. The distribution channels of surplus American food tells us about a process of globalization that did not begin with market expansion, and also about the cultural and social transformations born out of these distributions. In addition to feeding the hungry, U.S. food programs funded the joint U.S.-South Korean military build-up against North Korea, and Food for Peace programs also helped building rural villages, reclaiming upland for farming, and establishing oyster and seaweed culture-fields in coastal areas. Instead of opting for development, requiring large capital investment, technological expertise, and machineries, these surplus food programs only used surplus American grains and unskilled Korean labor.

This dissertation examines the shape, objectives, and fate of the anti-immigrationist movement from 1955 to 1981. During this period, groups and individuals operated within the confines of the British political system to advocate for the restriction of non-white immigration to the UK and also to minimize the perceived negative impact these immigrants were having upon the social and economic fabric of the UK. The study argues that by attaching their anti-immigrationist objections to existing political concerns, including anxieties about the welfare state, and by advocating for anti-immigrationist policies and legislation within the confines of established techniques of political activism and protest, anti-immigrationists were far more successful than they might otherwise have been, and indeed more successful than academic studies and popular opinion have portrayed them. However, their reliance upon a language of active citizenship and genuine democracy to justify their arguments to restrict immigration proved to be less popular with elite politicians and senior civil servants than a language of inclusivity and civil rights. As such, while much of the substantive legislation which anti-immigrationists advocated for was implemented at the highest level of government, the anti-immigrationist ethos, and the language in which they expressed their views, was not adopted by these powerful individuals, resulting in a foreclosure and minimization of the role of anti-immigrationists in agitating for the implementation of this legislation and body of policy. Furthermore, the decline of the anti-immigrationist movement was less the result of the success of the left in persuading the right to abandon its commitment to anti-immigrationism than of the success of the extreme right in claiming anti-immigrationism as its own, to the dismay of the more moderate right and centre-right.