The dissertation, "The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces (1840--1914)," is a comparative and transnational analysis of the discourses and practices that the German empire used to map out, describe, and regulate Polish-speaking citizens in Imperial Germany. It studies the cultural and biological definitions of Polish subjects not only through the scientific works of Germans and Poles in Central Europe, but also through their experiences with colonial projects in German Africa. Inspired by the works of postcolonial and imperial studies on subjectivity, I study multiple levels of subject positioning, nested imperial and colonial relations, and constructions of national/colonial cartographies using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature. I argue that many ideological elements informing power relations and cultural practices in distant colonies also applied to the Prussian-Polish provinces, especially when considering the politics of the state regulating populations and epidemic diseases in the borderlands. Poles were often portrayed in the German empire as internal others who shared characteristics with the colonized and required similar strategies of control. / In addition to providing a historical context for the health conditions of the Prussian-Polish provinces, the dissertation analyzes the complicated process by which these territories became stigmatized as disease-stricken places. I show this transformation by studying debates about cholera and typhus epidemics in the region. The project also examines the different Polish scientific organizations that were founded not only as a "self-help" strategy used to confront diseases, but also as a method to counter the Germanizing projects and the leading medical discourses about the region. The close analysis of Polish writings from this period demonstrates that Polish-speaking citizens under the German empire were not passive receptors of state policies and discourses, but they were actively challenging these conceptions by calling into question imperial civilizing agendas and developing at the same time their own civilizing and colonial fantasies. By studying these medical and political debates, the dissertation uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, scientific expeditions, and colonial agendas.

In the eighteenth century, European rulers pursued a common policy of enlightened centralism, which assaulted the rights of self-governing corporations in the name of material, social, and economic progress. For the towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, enlightened centralism began under King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764--1796) and continued uninterrupted through the partitions of Poland into the mid-nineteenth century. Employing the petitions, financial records, and demographic data of a select group of towns from Poland and Ukraine, this study investigates the consequences of enlightened centralization for the political and economic lives of burghers, Jews, and other town dwellers in Poland-Lithuania and some of its successor states: the Russian Empire (after 1795), Austrian West Galicia (1795--1809), the Duchy of Warsaw (1806--1815), and the Congress Kingdom of Poland (after 1815). A particular emphasis is placed on the fate of so-called private towns, which possessed royal charters and rights of self-government but belonged to individuals. When divorced from the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization and population growth, enlightened centralization in the towns of Poland-Lithuania did not produce the economic growth, administrative efficiency or social improvements that served to justify the abrogation of self-government in the minds of Enlightenment writers and many modern historians. Instead, centralizing policies weakened the political rights of townsmen, imposed enormous administrative costs, and substituted an ineffective and legalistic system for local control. Private towns fared the worst under centralization because state control undermined the ability and incentive of owners to offer attractive conditions to townsmen, and these unusual entities experienced an absolute decline in population and wealth after 1795.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-02, Section: A, page: 0677. Adviser: Alexander Rabinowitch. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed March 13, 2007)."

The subject of the investigation is the controversial figure of the legislator. The dissertation concerns two defining directions of political modernity: the project of autonomy and the emergence of economic freedom; and identifies the effects of their collision on the philosophical destiny of one of the most interesting figures of Western culture: the legislator. Profoundly influenced by the Greek political imagery, Rousseau's oeuvre represents one of the most interesting modern interpretations of the ancient model of political autonomy. Even if Rousseau identifies the community as the alpha and omega of the law-making process, he still postulates the existence of an exceptional mind (the legislator) capable of both molding the social consciousness and correcting the excess of the collective hubris. An advocate of political autonomy expressed through political will and decision, the French thinker and his social model will encounter a fierce opposition from the economists gathered under the banner of economic liberalism (laissez-faire ideology). Believing in a "natural/providential order" which reveals itself through the natural laws of economy, the social philosophers of the economic school criticized Rousseau's social design and proposed a fresh perspective in which the legislator's prestige and authority would significantly diminish. From Rousseau to Molinari through the physiocrates (Quesnay, Baudeau, Lemercier de la Riviere), the Jacobins and the economists of the nineteenth century (Dunoyer, Bastiat, Molinari) this thesis seeks to map the legislator's rise and decline in eighteenth and nineteenth century France.

The education of noble girls in medieval France| Vincent of Beauvais and "De eruditione filiorum nobilium"

<p>As a multinational state with a population that spoke eleven different languages, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was considered an anachronism during the age of heightened nationalism leading up to the First World War. This situation has made the search for a single Austro-Hungarian identity so difficult that many historians have declared it impossible. Yet the Dual Monarchy possessed one potentially unifying cultural aspect that has long been critically neglected: the extensive repertoire of marches and patriotic music performed by the military bands of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army. This Militärmusik actively blended idioms representing the various nationalist musics from around the empire in an attempt to reflect and even celebrate its multinational makeup. Much in the same way that the Army took in recruits from all over the empire, its diverse Militärkapellmeister - many of whom were nationalists themselves - absorbed the local music of their garrison towns and incorporated it into their patriotic compositions. Though it flew in the face of the rampant ethnonationalism of the time, this Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik was an enormous popular success; Eduard Hanslick and Gustav Mahler were drawn to it, Joseph Roth and Stephan Zweig lionized it, and in 1914, hundreds of thousands of young men from every nation of the empire marched headlong to their ultimate deaths on the Eastern Front with the music of an Austro-Hungarian march in their ears. This dissertation explores how military instrumental music reflected a special kind of multinational Austro-Hungarian state identity between 1867 and 1914. In the first part of my dissertation, I examine the complex political backdrop of the era and discuss the role and demographic makeup of the k.u.k. Armee. I then go on to profile the military musicians themselves, describe the idiomatic instrumentation of the military ensembles, and analyze significant surviving works from this repertoire by Julius Fucik and Carl Michel Ziehrer. The results of this study show how Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik synthesized conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism to create a unique musical identity that, to paraphrase Kaiser Franz Joseph, brought together the best elements of each nation for the benefit of all.</p> / Dissertation

It is common but too simplistic to say that Old English literature shows the unconscious blending of the traditional Germanic heroic ethos and the early Christian aversion to war. The matter is more complex. Throughout the Latin West, Christian perceptions of a tension between sanctity and warfare changed over the period from the arrival of Roman Christianity in England (AD 597) to the period following the Norman Conquest of 1066. Christian disdain for and rejection of warfare (at times no more than nominal) gave way eventually to active participation in wars considered "just" or "holy." Anglo-Saxon literature, in both Latin and Old English, documented this changing ethos and also played a significant role in its development. The earliest extant Anglo-Saxon hagiographic texts featured a new type of holy man, the martyred warrior king, whose role in spreading Christianity in England culminated in a dramatic death in battle fighting enemies portrayed by hagiographers as bloodthirsty pagans. During the same period, other Anglo-Saxon writers depicted warriors who transformed themselves into soldiers of Christ, armed only with the weapons of faith. These and later Anglo-Saxon literary works explored the intersection of violence and the sacred in often conflicting ways, in some instances helping to lead Christian spirituality toward the more martial spirit that would eventually culminate in Pope Urban II's preaching of the First Crusade in 1095, but in other cases preserving intact many early Christians' radical opposition to war. Aspects of crusading ideology existed alongside Christian opposition to war throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. This study examines hagiographers' changing literary tropes as subtle but important reflections of medieval Christianity's evolution from rejecting the sword to tolerating and even wielding it. Hagiographers used various narrative topoi to recount the lives of warrior saints, and, as the ambient Christian ethos changed, so did their employment of these themes. The tension between forbearance and militancy, even in the earliest English lives of saints, is more profound and more culturally complex than what is generally understood as merely the Germanic heroic trappings of Anglo-Saxon Christian literature.

This work is the study of the dual movement of a people. Firstly, the Serbs physically migrated, starting in the 1880s and concluding in the 1910s, from the Balkans to the Chicago region. Secondly, by the late 1930s, these immigrants had moved racially from being an indeterminate racial group to being part of the white race. When Serbs came to the Chicago region, Protestant native-born Americans did not consider them to be white. From the Serbs' arrival around the turn of the century to the early 1930s, Chicago area Progressives and residents constructed a racialized view of these Serbs. The Serbs, according to these mostly Anglo Americans, were uncivilized. Middle-class immigrant Serbs, declaring a need for racial improvement, constructed themselves as civilized and white. These Serbs pointed back to centuries of Serbian civilization and culture as proof of their fitness to participate in Anglo-American society. Serbian history showed they were a truly democratic and civilized people, not the tribal savages that Anglo-Americans saw. Immigrant Serbs, through benefit and fraternal organizations, also promoted the Yugoslav ideal as the path toward civilization. Creating a Yugoslav kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes would show Americans that all Serbs everywhere were democratic and civilized. With the rise of xenophobia and racism during the 1920s, the United States experienced a crisis in race and citizenship. Serbs stood at the crossroads of this crisis. While middle-class Serbs continued promoting themselves as white and civilized, Anglo Americans realized that they too could benefit from these Serbian middle class' efforts. The Serbs, Anglo-Americans argued, should become citizens and pledge their allegiance to the United States. Through this process of citizenship, the Serbs would learn to be good Americans, a key to becoming white. As part of the white race, the Serbs would no longer present a challenge to Anglo-American racial hegemony.

During the early 1570s, a dispute over the theological definition of original sin rent the central German county of Mansfeld, homeland of Martin Luther. The controversy, initiated by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, divided the conservative Gnesio-Lutheran clergy into two hostile camps. One, led by the Superintendent Hieronymus Mencel, was centered in the city of Eisleben and rejected Flacius's definition of original sin. The other, centered in the city of Tal Mansfeld, was led by the powerful deacon, historian, and polemicist Cyriacus Spangenberg, and accepted Flacius's definition. This dissertation examines the central doctrinal premises over which these clerics fought, as well as their broader implications for Lutheran theology, before turning to other social, political, and economic factors that influenced the clerics' decisions to side with one group or the other. But the controversy was not limited to the clergy. The counts of Mansfeld, numbering between seven and ten during the period and stemming from three dynastic lines, also split over the issue of original sin. One line sided with the group of clerics centered in Eisleben, two with the pastors headquartered in Tal Mansfeld. This study explores the involvement of the counts in the debate over doctrine, but also addresses the various political and other non-religious forces that caused them to split over the issue. With the pastors preaching and pamphleteering and the counts battling among themselves, it did not take long for the laity to become deeply involved and divided over the issue of original sin. Contemporary sources suggest that the miners of Mansfeld fought in the streets and taverns over the issue. This study explores how the clerics articulated the debate to the laity, and the degree to which these commoners understood it. Furthermore, it explores social and other non-religious reasons why the laity took sides in this doctrinal debate. This dissertation argues that although a variety of forces were at play pushing members of these three groups--the clerics, counts, and commoners--in one direction or another, an interest in the doctrinal issue and its implications for wider theology was a motivating theme central to each group.

Representations of Germany's crisis of anti-foreigner violence and ambivalent government policies regarding guestworkers misrepresent this crisis and reproduce several myths: that Germany has only recently relied on foreign labor, that Germany is an unusually "homogenous" nation, has experienced little integration of foreigners, and is not and cannot become an "immigration" country. These myths hinge on a widespread "forgetting" of much of German labor history. This paper outlines this missing history. Features common to past and present "guestworker" policies are highlighted. An examination of modern German citizenship and naturalization laws suggests that guestworker crises derive from a fundamental contradiction between economic and political interests. The current crisis can be viewed as one phase of a longer unresolved conflict between economic goals and the definition of the German nation. Such a perspective is generally avoided, however, as earlier periods of conflict are erased through widespread collective forgetting.