In the aftermath of a violent war waged in the name of fascist utopian visions, German museum educators nonetheless explained the political benefits of technology. They did so in view of the new demands for democracy, but as divided Cold War adversaries as well. Educators in four museums uniquely tailored their national and geopolitical lessons to the publics of Munich, Schwerin, Dresden, and West Berlin. However, the democratic technological societies depicted by the museums all contained similar tensions that did not overcome the problems of fascist politics. By wedding democracy, technology, and education unambiguously together, the aims and exhibitions of technology museums ultimately epitomized the persistent allure of utopia in politics well beyond 1945. To begin with, portraying a straightforward connection between technology and democracy was problematic. When museum exhibitions illustrated the tremendous promise of science and technology for creating the "good life," they focused on the powerful and vast extension of human tool-making capacity. However, modern technological systems were also profoundly destabilizing and de-centering for individual subjects, because they created the possibility of 1984-like political repression, environmental degradation, class division, and, most frighteningly, human annihilation. Also, issues in education posed difficulties for a democracy, since the authority of educators themselves was particularly contested in the aftermath of Nazism and the protests of 1968. Yet technology museums minimized social tensions and maintained the advantages of technology for peaceful, equal relations among liberated peoples, thus deferring the resolution of contradictions to the utopias they depicted. In the end, education in Cold War German technology museums continued to resonate with the utopian impulses of National Socialist politics. However, ideology was not the only thing that made the museums utopian, since technology and education themselves had powerful implications for the relationship among individuals, society, and the world.

This dissertation focuses on women, consumer culture, and crime in England in the early to later nineteenth century (1800-1880). As England's textile industry produced goods, especially cotton, on a larger and cheaper scale, consumer culture was also being transformed in bazaars and small shopfronts across England. Rather than serving as passive consumers of the production of English factories, English consumers, particularly women, took an active role in shaping the British economy not by more efficient production, but through their creation of a feminized marketplace. They created a realm of fashion, frippery, and display tailored to the female consumer. They demanded discounted luxuries, making products more affordable for the middling classes. Women's involvement in this seedy business of selling was especially troubling to male, middle-class critics. Accused by such male luminaries as Thackeray and Trollope of selling without substance, the new modes of retailing, including bazaar shopping, "cheap" shops, and large drapery emporiums grew in popularity and were the progenitors of the great department stores. The new culture of unchecked consumerism aroused fears of crime and fraud by both buyer and seller. According to critics, the acts of buying and selling became facades in the new marketplaces--just another opportunity for fraud, trickery, and theft--largely perpetrated by undeserving women seeking genteel status through its material symbols. This criticism of fraudulent consumption masked fears of this threatening transformation of English consumer culture, and the women who both inhabited and held positions of power in this culture. If England was once a nation of shopkeepers, by the 1860s, critics contended, it had become a nation of frauds and shoplifters with women in the lead of those satisfied with the pursuit of selling without substance. Utilizing sources from trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports, literature, popular ballads, and magazines, this study contributes to the fields of gender studies, women's history, economic history, the history of crime, and consumer culture in England.

As a music-producing part of Europe between 1843--1957 Scandinavia is well known through composers such as Jean Sibelius (1865--1957), Carl Nielsen (1865--1931) and especially Edward Grieg (1843--1907). Grieg is still a national hero in his home country and was immensely popular during his lifetime in Europe as his piano music found its way into the homes of the average music lover. Sweden, the biggest Scandinavian country, has as rich a cultural heritage as Norway, a tremendous treasure of folk music, and a highly important political and historical influence over Scandinavia. Why didn't it have a composer during this time to put Sweden on the international landscape? In this dissertation, I will attempt to answer this question. I will compare Grieg with Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871--1927) who was a remarkable Swedish composer and pianist and the major composer of piano music in Sweden during this time. I will start by giving a brief history of Grieg's and Stenhammar's lives and careers as well as examples of how they expressed themselves through the piano. In chapter three and four, I will discuss facts and circumstances that have been to Sweden's disadvantage in developing a musical atmosphere that could have been seen in other countries as something typically Swedish.

Scholarly studies of the nation as a socially constructed community, while accurate, do not explain how individuals in a predominantly agricultural society build and mobilize a national community outside of traditional political arenas and without the resources of a bureaucratic nation-state. This investigation of late-nineteenth-century Romanian nation building under the Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People, or Astra, examines the educational and cultural activities Astra used to communicate nationalist messages to Romanian villagers and the responses of those villagers who funded and participated in Astra's movement. I argue that thousands of villagers participated in Astra events because Astra created a forum that addressed their needs and interests and raised their social status. Villagers never achieved equality with their social superiors in Astra, but villagers became more equal to them as Romanians than they had been as mere villagers. It was not easy to incorporate villagers into the association. As this dissertation shows, nation building is a contentious undertaking subject to diverse social pressures and full of internal conflicts and contradictions. Astra leaders hoped to build a unified and prosperous national community, but their initial attempts to transform peasants into rational and efficient farmers with academic programs mostly appealed to Romanian intellectuals. In order to retain their educated members and to attract peasants to the association, Astra leaders legitimized two competing images of the Romanian national community, one based on the values of educated Romanian professionals and one based on traditional peasant culture. The dual representations of the nation both created the impression that a unified national community existed and underscored the divisions in the community, making it possible to think of the nation as a homogeneous community while simultaneously contesting its boundaries. Resulting contestation, I argue, enabled rural Romanians to challenge Astra's professionals for more influence over the national movement and forced intellectuals to address rural interests. Although this study examines the specifics of Astra's national movement, it also offers a potentially fruitful approach for understanding nation building among other marginal groups in search of greater power and autonomy over their own lives.

The East Africa Royal Commission, 1953-55, was a wide-ranging investigation of the necessary conditions for promoting the economic development of the colonial dependencies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. Commissioners conceived their task as apolitical, but evidence gathered from government officials and the public--including members of the African, Asian, and European communities within the region--demonstrated that politics and economics were not easily separable. Officials, settlers, and Africans presented contending historical narratives explaining the past, present, and future of East Africa. African witnesses took the opportunity to address the state, demanding redress for the injustices of colonialism. In their report, the commissioners suppressed the African dissent, largely ignored settler demands, and privileged much of the official narrative. The commission presented colonial development, achieved through multiracial cooperation, as the hope for East Africa's future. The report detailed the technical, and administrative requirements for future economic growth, but ultimately their proposals hinged upon the "human factor," especially the problem of winning the willing cooperation of the African people for the development program. The work of the commission revealed divisions among its members over the question of the degree of government intervention and control that should be exerted in the economy; the laissez-faire tone of the report was tempered by its substantive recommendations, which sanctioned continued official guidance of development plans. Following the report's publication, British commentators in government and among the public took up the debate. Left-wing critics denounced the document as a free-market tract that proposed exposing Africans to the full blast of an agricultural and industrial revolution, similar to that which had inflicted suffering upon British workers in the nineteenth century, without attempting to cushion the effects. Some of them also demanded faster movement towards self-government in the colonies. Conservatives rejected that idea, although they did generally support continued, paternalistic interventions by colonial officials. Despite the United Kingdom's evident inability to finance the recommended program of development, many commentators from different ideological perspectives viewed development as the culmination of Britain's imperial mission.

The French government portrayed its 1918 annexation of Alsace as a liberation of the region from German tyranny and the fulfillment of France's national destiny. In subsequent purges, French officials deported Germans from the region and confiscated their properties. The purpose of the government's anti-German policies was to re-integrate Alsace and its native inhabitants into the French national community by severing the region's ties to Germany and Germans. Alsace became a crucible for the politics of national identity as individuals suffered, exploited, and challenged harsh state policies. The state and the nation have been long-standing problems in European politics and in historical studies, but only in recent decades---and especially with the rapid development of the European Union---have historians widely recognized the value of emphasizing the region as a lens for understanding the development of the nation-state. This study explores the volatile conflicts between three pressures in Alsace after the Great War: state policies, regional interests, and the politics of national identity. It views the nation in Alsace from many different perspectives. It contrasts the French national myth of Alsatian identity with the profound constitutional dilemmas that stymied both Germany's and France's exercise of sovereignty over the region. France's incomplete anti-German purges revealed many cosmopolitan communities that transcended national categories. As reintegrated French citizens, Alsatians shaped the commemoration of their German war dead to accord with a dominant narrative of French triumphalism. France's anti-German policies in Alsace represent an isolated imagining of the national community. This study interprets cultural history as the nexus of the legal, political, economic, and social conflicts that dominated the construction of French Alsace.

This ethnography addresses how former Italian radical activists of the 70s negotiate their militant past with their present predicament. This is done by comparing and contrasting the public discourse (historical texts and legal proceedings) with the activists' own interpretations of their past. Since most of the historians of these social movement are themselves former activists, their contrasting versions of the period contained in their texts are seen as expressions, at the level of intellectual discourse, of the inherently conflictive legacy of the 70s. It is widely acknowledged that the emergence of left wing armed struggle and the ensuing state repression prevents a balanced evaluation of this period. By examining the "Sofri case", I argue that the emergency legislation adopted by the state to convict members of clandestine organizations, has determined what counts as a normative history of the period. I also argue that such normative implications re-actualize a conservative view of Italian national identity, which sees the state as pastoral authority. I thus suggest that "terrorism" is a symbolic marker consistent with this moralizing project, since, by essentializing the subjectivity of the "terrorists" it also prevents former activists who did not engage in clandestine violence from publicly articulate a balanced version of their own past.

There are two distinctly different ages in Eastern Europe; their distinctions manifest simultaneously in attitudes toward the body, toward communication, toward taking action. My thesis is a beginning of a genealogy of the crowd form: from the military marches and stadium spectacles characteristic of the hard totalitarian era of Eastern Europe to the crowd of the students' and citizens' protest in Belgrade 96/97. The protest persisted for four months and, in its creativity, managed to transcend the self-referential mechanics of a resistance project. The formal manifestations of the general and specific attitude shifts toward the regime and toward the city make me believe that it is possible to visualize social phenomena and practices as 'drawing machines,' working at various scales, drawing the way that a dancing body describes its kinaesthetic sphere, by intervening in space. I have been drawing the protest event primarily in video, in order that the experience of these mappings always fits the basic definition of an event.

This thesis has two main themes: that law is of primary importance to Scotland as a nation and to Scottish nationalism and that the distinctiveness of Scots law is threatened by a discernible tendency towards anglicisation or standardisation with English law. The thesis examines the nature of culture and nationalism in general, and in the Scottish context in particular, and discusses the foundational elements of Scotland's nationhood. Law is specifically considered in the latter two contexts. Thereafter, some elements which substantiate the claim of distinctiveness made for Scots law are identified and one view of the mechanisms by which it is becoming anglicised is presented. Finally, justifications for actively pursuing the survival of the Scottish legal system as a distinctive body of norms are outlined and action which could be taken to ensure that survival is discussed.

There is no comprehensive monograph dealing with the complex legal issues of compensation for the damage done to European Jews by the Nazi regime. The purpose of this thesis is to set forth and analyze the political and legislative means employed by the Hungarian Government to settle human rights claims brought by Hungarian Jewish citizens and Jewish organizations arising from Hungarian legislation discriminating against Jews, and from the nationalization and confiscation of property by the former communist regime in Hungary. The thesis also examines the German compensation system as it applies to Hungarian Jewish citizens.