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In this thesis I look at the Arkansas Project and more specifically the racial dynamics within the project and the surrounding communities in Arkansas where SNCC engaged to assist the residents fight for their civil rights. In addition, I analyze how the differences in the urban and rural communities were affected by the racial dynamics of the project's leadership. The Arkansas project was led by William Hansen, a white man, which made him and the project unique from not only other SNCC projects, but other civil rights organizations. This distinction made the strategy that had to be implemented with the project staff internally and also externally in the Arkansas communities different because his race had to be taken into consideration for all purposes. Another aspect that came into play in Arkansas was the fact that some of their activities occurred in urban communities and others occurred in rural communities. These difference in communities affected not only how the local blacks received the SNCC volunteers, but also affected how local whites received the SNCC volunteers. Although the fact that the Arkansas Project had a white field director made it unique and the racial dynamics worthy of scholarly investigation, Bill Hansen's racial identity was far from the only reason that the organization's work in Arkansas is historically significant. This thesis also looks at the important activities in which SNCC engaged and impacted because of their presence in Arkansas. Of those activities, SNCC impacted the creation of several local groups where local citizens helped to fight for their civil rights, in fighting for their civil rights, those groups engaged in sit-ins, protests, and fighting legal battles in court where some of their cases made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court and impacted the civil rights movement in the south. Two important legal cases that had ramifications for the civil rights movement beyond the state that originated in Arkansas. The cases of Lupper v. State of Arkansas and Raney v. Board of Education made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court out of Arkansas. They helped shape the civil rights movement because Lupper helped clarify sit-in cases and the constitutionality of the arrests. The arrests were deemed unconstitutional because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination in places of public accommodation and allowed peaceful attempts to be served like any other member of the public from punishable activities in spite of the fact the activities occurred prior to the date of its enactment. In addition, Raney helped define desegregation efforts in the south as many states attempted to avoid the Brown v. Board of Education decision by implementing "freedom of choice plans." Freedom of choice plans were state attempts to circumvent the Brown decision by making the students and their family choose which school they would attend. These cases helped shape the civil rights movement and dealt with sit ins and integrating schools. This thesis provides an important addition to the scholarship about SNCC and SNCC's Arkansas Project.

Cotutelle entre Université de Montréal et Université Rennes 2 / Les subdélégués des intendances servent indirectement le roi de France au niveau local. L’étude de leur institution dans cinq intendances offre un point de vue original sur l’État d’Ancien régime et son administration. Des subdélégations existent dans toutes les provinces du royaume : dans les pays d’élections, d’États et d’imposition comme dans les colonies. Les étudier offre une perspective inédite sur cette typologie et surtout sur la centralisation du royaume de France. Par une prosopographie comparative, sont étudiés 687 subdélégués des 159 subdélégations des intendances de Caen en Basse-Normandie, Fort-Royal dans les Petites Antilles, Lille en Flandres, Québec au Canada et Rennes en Bretagne. Cette méthode permet des comparaisons inter-provinciales et transatlantiques, comme intra-provinciales, et une analyse multiscalaire de l’administration royale. Les subdélégations se révèlent alors comme des institutions d’intendance, mises au service de la royauté et exercées par des notables. Fiscalité, justice civile ou contentieux administratif, enquêtes et statistiques, milice et corvée royales, marchés publics, tutelle des municipalités, épidémies et assistances, de nombreux pouvoirs les concernent. En pratique, ils varient entre provinces et entre subdélégations. Partout, ils sont pris en charge par des magistrats, des maires, des commissaires de la Marine, des conseillers pensionnaires ou d’autres notables locaux. Entre bureaucratie et clientélisme, ils participent à une centralisation administrative limitée. Les subdélégations engendrent surtout de multiples médiations du pouvoir royal, le transformant par des déclinaisons provinciales et des traductions locales. / Subdelegates of the intendancies indirectly served the king of France at the local level. The study of their institution in five intendancies offers an original point of view on the Ancien Regime state and its administration. Subdelegations existed in all the provinces of the kingdom: in those known as pays d’élections, pays d’États or pays d’imposition, as well as in the colonies. Studying them makes it possible to question this typology and especially the centralization of the Kingdom of France. By comparative prosopography, 687 subdelegates in the 159 subdelegations of the intendancies of Caen in Lower Normandy, Fort-Royal in the Lesser Antilles, Lille in Flanders, Quebec in Canada and Rennes in Brittany are studied. This method allows for inter-provincial and transatlantic as well as intra-provincial comparisons and a multiscalar analysis of the royal administration. Subdelegations emerge as institutions of intendancy, in the service of the monarchy and exercised by local notables. Taxation, civil justice or administrative litigation, investigations, surveys and statistics, royal militia and corvée, public contracts, epidemics and assistance, supervision of municipalities, many powers concern them. In practice, they varied between provinces and between subdelegations. Everywhere, magistrates, mayors, marine commissioners or other notables served as subdelegates. Between bureaucracy and patronage, they participated in a limited administrative centralization. Subdelegations mainly generated multiple mediations of royal power, transforming it through provincial variations and local translations.

Previous historiography on late Qing naval technology has been geared toward locating the root causes of the Qing’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Pushing back against this teleological view of late Qing naval development, this dissertation underscores the global, multidirectional, and highly contingent processes undergirding the Qing’s naval rebuilding project in the late nineteenth century. Starting from the 1860s, the Qing empire strove to reassert itself as a competitive naval power by establishing new dockyards and arsenals; procuring arms, warships, and machineries from abroad; as well as dispatching educational missions to European naval schools, technical institutes, factories, and shipyards. The Chinese diplomats and students that the Qing sent overseas served as transnational agents who cultivated close-knit networks with Western diplomats, merchants, shipbuilders, military officers, and arms manufacturers. These networks formed the basis upon which the Qing navigated a global marketplace of warships and armaments spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Tracing the personal, material, and institutional networks connecting late Qing China to the world’s naval technology reveals how the Qing engaged actively in a global regime of arms production and arms trading. This regime, driven by the transnational sourcing of raw materials and the export-oriented tendencies of Western arms manufacturers, gave rise to a shared, decentralized, and surprisingly open terrain of material circulation and technological transmission. It produced highly fluid circuits of military industrial products and knowledge that blurred the boundaries between the arms race and the arms trade, secrecy and openness, competition and collaboration. This dissertation shows how the Qing tapped into these tensions through intertwining networks of trade and diplomacy. It also shows how the material and logistical processes underlying the importation of warships, machineries, and shipbuilding components constituted crucial channels for the transfer of naval engineering knowledge from the West to China.

This dissertation takes as its subjects East European Jewish women who sold sex in their homelands and/or abroad and situates their engagement in sex work within the broader structures these women navigated – labor markets, state laws on residence and migration, community and family. This project turns working-class Jewish women, who migrated within and from Eastern Europe and sold sexual services, into protagonists in their own story and writes them back into modern Eastern European Jewish economic and migration histories. Between 1870 and 1939, Eastern European Jews suffered from consistent official and unofficial anti-Jewish discrimination in the labor market. This discrimination, combined with ongoing economic changes and crises, hindered Jewish socio-economic advancement and instead drove more and more Jews into poverty. Both married and single women were pressed financially to find gainful employment but encountered a labor market with too few opportunities. In these circumstances, the state-sanctioned sex industry, which was Jewish madams and pimps had their part, provided them with economic prospects and facilitated their physical mobility, which was a privilege in this period. By 1914, Jews, especially women, found it almost impossible to leave the Russian Empire legally. After the Great War, immigration restrictions became a virtually global phenomenon, again severely limiting the options of Jews for leaving Eastern Europe. In the interwar years, anxieties about trafficking turned into laws restricting single women's movement and preventing immigration to popular destinations, such as the United States or Argentina. Despite these challenges, some Eastern European Jewish women who sold sex turned out to be particularly mobile. They moved within Eastern Europe, crossing borders between empires, and regularly circulated across seas and oceans to the Middle East and the Americas. By viewing these women as economic actors and labor migrants, this dissertation seeks to reconceptualize prostitution as one of the ways in which Eastern European Jews from the working poor navigated the transformative and increasingly challenging period between 1870 and 1939. This rewriting of Jewish prostitution as a rich social history of Eastern European Jewish women from the lower classes relies on a wide range of sources that, on the one hand, provide access to the women’s voices (though rarely unmediated) and, on the other, expose how class-biased and moralistic interpretation has been imposed on their life stories. Unlike most of the previous studies on this topic, this project looks at Jewish prostitution from the Eastern European perspective and uses materials produced by this Jewish population and the surrounding society – Jewish and non-Jewish press in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew; Habsburg, Russian, and Polish state-produced labor and prostitution reports as well as ministerial and police records.

The Macedonian Campaign of World War I (October 1915-November 1918) traditionally remains one of the understudied theatres of the historiography of the conflict. Despite its vital importance in the outcome of the war, it is still considered as a mere sideshow compared to the Western Front and the Gallipoli Campaign. This dissertation presents a much-needed re-evaluation of the Macedonian Campaign's diplomatic and political origins within the war's early context. In doing so, this study first concentrates on a longue durée perspective and assesses the main historical events in the Balkans and Central Europe from the end of the French Revolution to World War I. In a perspective running throughout the entire nineteenth century, this dissertation integrates the importance of nascent nationalism in the Balkans and examine the Austro-Hungarian Empire's steady decline and subsequent diplomatic realignment toward the Balkans. Similarly, this work depicts the intense power struggle in Southeastern Europe between some of this story's main protagonists, namely the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. This dissertation also evaluates the rise of new regional powers such as Bulgaria and Serbia and examines their connection to the European balance of power and general diplomatic equilibrium. In the first half of this dissertation, I present an overview of some of the most crucial episodes that paved the way to the onset of World War I and the inception of the Macedonian Campaign: The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Congress of Berlin of 1878, The Bosnian Crisis of 1908-1909, the Italo-Ottoman War of 1911-1912, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In the second part of this study, the main thread of the analysis is the crucial Anglo-French relations that took place between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I. This study describes the importance of Anglo-French relations regarding the Macedonian Campaign's inception and highlights the fragile nature of the Entente Cordiale and some of the fundamental issues that affected the Anglo-French conduct of military operations on the Western Front as well as in the Balkans. Therefore, this study underlines why the Macedonian Campaign, suffered so much from a lack of care, preparation, and a much-needed strategic insight and leadership that could have decisively influenced the campaign and potentially have altered the outcome of an eventually successful Allied endeavor in the Balkans.

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The entrance of the German Invasion of Poland and depiction thereof into modern historiographical conversations offers historians superior articulation of the creation of historical memory, mythos, and identity ‒ especially in wider terms of European Imperialism. By utilizing the current trends in gendering of empire, the use of auto-biography and life writing to understand felt realities and obfuscated truths, and the attempts by empire to queer and utilize labeled deviations to control and gain power over their colonized subjects, one is presented a better understanding of how the German Invasion of Poland fits into the story of empire and indigeneity. That story continues past the Third Reich however, as German propaganda in its various forms was accepted as truth after the Second World War, providing justification for and rationalizing post war political power structures of Western nations. As the threat of a cold war with the USSR loomed, many in the American military felt it necessary to accept and support German myths about their military prowess (and non-culpability for the Holocaust) and the inferiority of Slavic military forces. By analyzing not the myths themselves, but how they were created and propagated, historians can add to this historical conversation a case study of just how two seemingly opposed power structures can mobilize similar myths as justification for their own desires and decisions, and in doing so, mythologize the identity and memory of the earnest beginning of the Holocaust.

Conservative talk radio has had a long and controversial history in the United States of America. Two early controversial radio hosts who rose to fame in the United States were the "radio priest" Charles Coughlin (1889-1979), a Roman Catholic priest who had a massive national radio audience of approximately 30 million people during the 1930s, and the Reverend Robert P. Shuler (1879-1965), the fundamentalist Evangelical pastor of the 5,000 member Trinity Methodist Church in Los Angeles California. This thesis examines Charles Coughlin and Robert P. Shuler's use of recognized propaganda techniques as defined by Harold Laswell, Walter Lippmann, Ronald H. Carpenter, Alfred McClung Lee, Elizabeth Briant Lee, and others, especially in casting themselves as favored social elites, using their insider information to warn followers that other elites meant them harm. In an era when digital communication easily magnifies demagoguery, understanding the various methods and effects of propaganda as practices by these two figures might help contemporary audiences discern whether a communicator intends to promote the general welfare of society or merely their own interests. Additionally, this thesis examines Coughlin and Shuler's relationship with populist political movements.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / On March 30, 1972 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) launched a conventional offensive, dubbed the Easter Offensive, against South Vietnam. In response to this act President Richard Nixon ordered the United States Air Force (USAF) and Navy (USN) to resume bombing North Vietnam. For the next nine months, USAF conducted offensive operations against the whole of the DRV in an attempt to accomplish four major objectives. First, USAF units sought to interdict sufficiently the North Vietnamese Army's (NVA's) supply lines to preclude continued conventional operations in South Vietnam. Second, President Nixon had directed the Air Force to inflict sufficient punishment on North Vietnam in order to deter further aggression against its southern neighbor. Third, as implied by the Nixon Doctrine, USAF was to establish convincingly its ability to conduct conventional operations in support of an allied nation during a major conflict. Finally, with the introduction of B-52 bombers in December 1972, the Air Force was to maintain the credibility of manned strategic aircraft as part of American nuclear deterrence policy. Historically, the United States Air Force and many civilian observers have maintained that the United States Air Force succeeded in all four tasks. However, the evidence strongly indicates that the United States Air Force not only failed to achieve all but the interdiction objective during the course of operations against North Vietnam, but that this defeat stemmed from the decision not to develop a comprehensive Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) doctrine from 1968 through 1972. In choosing this course of action, USAF's military and civilian leaders guaranteed that American forces would be unable to bring sufficient force to bear to achieve President Nixon's goals. Furthermore, by choosing this course of action and, in addition, refocusing the Air Force on nuclear delivery rather than enhancing USAF's capability to penetrate an integrated air defense (IADS), these same leaders ignored the results of Operation Rolling Thunder. The consequence of this choice, as will be shown in the following pages, was an outcome that had serious implications for the United States' Cold War conventional and nuclear military policy.