Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2008. / Adviser: Steven L. Goldman.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Syracuse University, 2005. / "Publication number AAT 3194010."

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Michael A. Ramsay / This dissertation examines combat leadership in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in infantry and machine gun units at the company level and below to highlight the linkages between the training and professional development of junior officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and the army's overall military effectiveness in World War I. Between 1865 and 1918, the growing lethality of the battlefield had forced changes to tactics and formations that placed novel demands on small unit leaders. The proliferation of new weapons in infantry companies and the thinning and extension of formations required junior officers and NCOs able to exercise an unparalleled degree of initiative and independence while also mastering new tactical and technical skills. When the United States entered World War I, the Regular Army was still grappling with how to reconcile its traditional expectations of small unit leadership with the new "skill sets" required of junior leaders in modern warfare. Faced with the need to produce officers and NCOs to lead its rapidly expanding mass army, the regulars improvised a system for identifying, training, and assigning company-level leaders. Unfortunately, the Regular Army's unpreparedness to wage a modern war, and the host of systemic problems associated with raising a mass army, meant that much of the training of these key leaders was so ill-focused and incomplete that the new officers and NCOs were woefully unprepared to face the tactical challenges that awaited them in France. These problems were only compounded when unexpected casualties among officers and NCOs in the summer and fall of 1918 led to a further curtailment in leader training the U. S. Army. The end result of the U. S. Army's failure to adequately train and develop its junior leaders was that its combat units often lacked the flexibility and "know how" to fight without suffering prohibitively high casualties. When the junior leaders failed, faltered and bungled, the AEF's battles became confused and uncoordinated slugging matches that confounded the plans and expectations of the army's senior leaders. The heavy casualties that resulted from these slugging matches further undermined the AEF's effectiveness by reducing the morale and cohesion of the army's combat units and hindering the army's overall ability to learn from its mistakes due to the high turn-over of junior officers and NCOs.

An historical consensus has coalesced around the view that Canadian-American relations reached a nadir from 1961-1963. The argument is that due to differences of both personality and policy John Diefenbaker, Canada's Prime Minister, and US President John Kennedy loathed each other. Scholars have subsequently debated over who was more to blame for this, but their analyses have been incomplete because the American side has largely been ignored. As most, if not all, of the historians who have examined the Diefenbaker-Kennedy era have been Canadian, American archival sources have been used sparingly. Drawing upon the rich documentary collection in the US National Archives and the Kennedy Presidential Library, this thesis argues, in contrast to what many have contended, that US foreign policy was in fact quite complimentary towards Diefenbaker's government. This was primarily because American policy-makers were aware of the potent force of Canadian nationalism, which their experiences with Diefenbaker only confirmed.

In the first comparative study of Canadian and American foreign policy during the Korean War, this thesis argues that, while Canada and the U.S. shared some similar foreign policy goals and interpretations of the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1951, their national security policies were fundamentally distinct. In turn, these differing interpretations had a significant influence on each country's understanding of the Korean War. The United States believed that it had to uphold its international prestige by defending freedom everywhere in order to remain secure. Consequently, the Harry S. Truman administration pursued an aggressive campaign in Korea against the Soviet Union in order to safeguard its position as the leader of the free world. Conversely, Canada, which was preoccupied with its own sovereignty and content with a limited view of containment, had little interest in American objectives. Instead, Louis St. Laurent's government, influenced by past experiences with Great Power politics, sought to limit the excesses of the Truman administration in order to defend its autonomy. The consequence of this divergence forced officials in Ottawa and Washington to reconsider not only their national security strategies but also their relations with one another.

Historians have enhanced our understanding of United States foreign policy in Asia, Latin, and Central America. My dissertation contributes to this literature by exploring U.S. foreign relations in the Caribbean by taking a close look at Haiti. While both nations achieved independence during the Age of Revolutions, by the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915–1934. In investigating the history of U.S. and Haitian diplomacy, one figure appeared repeatedly in my archival research and fieldwork in both nations, Charlemagne Peralte. During the U.S. intervention, Peralte rose as a leader of a Haitian guerrilla group known as the cacos who positioned themselves as nationalists fighting for Haiti's sovereignty. Under Peralte's direction, the cacos battled the occupying forces and also promoted their cause as a global call for democracy. Though Peralte died in 1919, his significance to Haitians assumed epic proportions as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata of Mexico, Augusto Sandino of Nicaragua, and Che Guevera in Cuba. Haitians on the island and across the Americas in the Diaspora revive Peralte's history and meaning throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing on unexplored primary sources, marines' records, and oral histories, etc, my study seeks to move Charlemagne Peralte from the margins to the center in historiography surrounding 'bandits,' rebels, and national leaders. The work first traces U.S. and Haitian relations from their revolutions to the various events leading to the occupation in 1915. It then captures the tenor of the early occupation years by analyzing the various modes of resistance that erupted because of the intervention. Embedded in this protest against imperialism were Peralte and the actions of the cacos. The dissertation also reflects on the post-occupation years from 1948 to 1986 to examine the nations' foreign relations. Finally, the work documents the apotheosis of the cacos leader to examine the meaning behind the ongoing historical preservations of Peralte in Haiti and amongst the Haitian Diaspora community in the U.S. and Canada. The study documents how Peralte's story, and the historical remembrances of him, shed light on U.S. and Haitian diplomacy from the 19th through the 20th centuries.

Rein of Renegades is an introduction to the young adult contemporary fantasy novel of the same name. It is prefaced with an explication of various drafts written throughout adolescence. I am trying to reclaim things I've misplaced or dropped. Over the past few years, I've had much too many trinkets to carry. There went the melodramatic allegations from my teenage writing voice, cracked on a classroom floor. There went the ability to sit, stomach deep, so steadily grounded in another world, this escape blurred with the strawberry ice cream I dripped onto the campus concrete. Writing the ideal love becomes complicated, jaded, too realistic when the hands writing it are always reaching for someone who never reaches back at the right time

Why does constitutionalism sustain itself as the primary language of politics in a postcolonial democracy like India? This dissertation answers this question by arguing that constitutionalism sustains itself as the primary language of politics for Indian democracy because of enduring anticolonial justifications for it that emerge from epistemically diverse worldviews in Indian society. In particular, this dissertation explores Islamic and anti-caste justifications for an anticolonial pluralist political conception of constitutionalism in India. In studying constitutionalism as an outcome of diverse anticolonial justifications for it, this dissertation demonstrates that the political conception of constitutionalism in India is not merely a continuation of liberal-imperial ideas of constitutionalism. Instead, popular justifications of constitutionalism in India, even in its current moment of crisis, have a genealogy that emerges from epistemically diverse anticolonial justifications of constitutionalism that took shape during constitutionalism's moment of creation in India. It makes this argument in three steps. First, by interrogating how liberal imperialism constructed the political domain in colonial India. Second, by exploring how anticolonialism critiqued this liberal imperial construction of the political domain and used these criticisms to justify a pluralist political conception for postcolonial constitutionalism. Third, by analyzing how these anticolonial justifications of constitutionalism are employed in postcolonial Indian democracy to maintain constitutionalism as the language of politics even when it faces a severe threat from Hindu majoritarianism. This dissertation demonstrates that anticolonial justifications of constitutionalism in India, which emerged from Islamic and anti-caste worldviews, remain relevant to the democratic discourse around constitutionalism and the political conception that it shapes for India by examining four significant justifications for constitutionalism in India. The first justification is captured by anticolonial worldmaking adopted by constitutionalism in India to acknowledge, forefront, and make legible to political life the background conditions for common life in India. This justification of worldmaking, which anticolonial thought regularly reflected on and brought to the fore of public life in India, includes (a) deeply ingrained dispositions about mutual coexistence that subconsciously shaped its participants for a millennium through the unfolding of overlapping geographical, linguistic, ethical and social worlds of diverse worldviews in India, and (b) agentic forms of participation, shaped by diverse groups in India coming into public spaces and employing constitutionally guaranteed political freedoms, to discursively construct the world that is India as one that is plural, progressive and enables self-respect despite being shaped by non-secular ideas. The second form of justification for constitutionalism in India lies in the use of non-secular conceptions of progress, where progress is not simply captured by a developmental conception but by the ethical modes of learning and knowledge-building through which constitutionalism enables diverse people to learn about others in the political community and develop a conception of fraternity. This dissertation shows how conceptions of fraternity that justify constitutionalism in India enable a non-secular conception of progress, pluralism, and self-respect in democracy in India. However, it also examines how a majoritarian conception of constitutional democracy threatens this conception of fraternity in India's postcolonial democracy. The third justification of constitutionalism emerges from endorsements for it that emerge from its capacity to enable self-respect, where diverse individuals who are shaped by the institutions and normative order established by constitutionalism demand that this order enable recognition, communication, association, and self-consciousness across the diverse groups that shape Indian society. Such a conception of self-respect, which derives its ideas from anticolonial conceptions of self-respect, is more expansive than conceptions of self-respect that emerge from Transatlantic liberalism because it reflects how colonialism shaped counter-concepts to self-respect across whole societies and worldviews, and not just as conditions that impact individuals alone. When this pluralist and emancipatory political conception of constitutionalism is threatened by other interpretations of constitutionalism by those in power, as it is by religious majoritarianism in its current moment of crisis, it is reaffirmed in sites of civil disobedience across India's postcolonial democracy where epistemically diverse interpretations of constitutionalism are not only respected but esteemed as justifications for constitutionalism in India. Such a form of participation in democratic politics through civil disobedience has led to a justificatory discourse around constitutionalism that draws on a pluralist conception of participation as the fourth justification of constitutionalism in India. These four interlinked justifications of constitutionalism in India have enabled a plural political conception of constitutionalism that survives in India, despite the threat to it from Hindu majoritarian politics. In exploring why justificatory discourse around constitutionalism enables democracy in India, this dissertation also develops an anticolonial u conception of justification as a form of making political principles legible to diverse peoples who were formerly colonized, as opposed to a strictly rational discourse of separating right from wrong in public reason that shapes democratic societies.

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