Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less viable. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. These literary texts, or what I label "con-script," are not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematize their own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of "false documents," the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English-, Spanish-, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. "The Art of Con-Fessing" juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries supposedly written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their "own" personal writing. "Mediations of Media" features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in "Con-Centering the Archive" via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.

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The purpose of this study was to explore what exactly bound post-Second World War American conservatives together. Since modern conservatism's recent birth in the United States in the last half century or more, many historians have claimed that both anti-communism and capitalism kept conservatives working in cooperation. My contention was that the intellectual founder of postwar conservatism, Russell Kirk, made imagination, and not anti-communism or capitalism, the thrust behind that movement in his seminal work The Conservative Mind. In The Conservative Mind, published in 1953, Russell Kirk created a conservative genealogy that began with English parliamentarian Edmund Burke. Using Burke and his dislike for the modern revolutionary spirit, Kirk uncovered a supposedly conservative seed that began in late eighteenth-century England, and traced it through various interlocutors into the United States that culminated in the writings of American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot. What Kirk really did was to create a counter-narrative to the American liberal tradition that usually began with the French Revolution and revolutionary figures such as English-American revolutionary Thomas Paine. One of my goals was to demystify the fusionist thesis, which states that conservatism is a monolithic entity of shared qualities. I demonstrated that major differences existed from conservatism's postwar origins in 1953. I do this by using the concept of textual communities. A textual community is a group of people led by a privileged interpreter—someone such as Russell Kirk—who translates a text, for example Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, for followers. What happens in a textual community is that the privileged interpreter explains to followers how to read a text and then forms boundaries around a particular rendering of a book. I argue that conservatism was full of these textual communities and privileged interpreters. Therefore, in consecutive chapters, I look at the careers of Russell Kirk, John Lukacs, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Gottfried to demonstrate how this concept fleshed out from 1953 and well into the first decade of the new millennium. / Ph. D.

Histories of public administration’s early intellectual development have little to report on the influences of pragmatism as developed by philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. This dissertation contributes to the literature of the history of public administration by documenting this “slighting” and assessing its consequences. The dissertation concludes that public administration does indeed have a heritage in pragmatism, but this heritage does not emanate directly from the philosophical pragmatism of Peirce, James, or Dewey. Rather, it is found in the disguised or silent pragmatism of Mary Parker Follett, the popularized, corrupted, and nominal pragmatisms of Charles A. Beard and Herbert Simon, and the implicit pragmatism of Dwight Waldo. The discovery of this heritage of “hidden” pragmatism Carries with it significant implications for the way we think about public administration as a field of study. Most importantly, it means that we have a distorted and incomplete view of our past. Our failure to understand the heritage of pragmatism means that we cannot see pragmatism as a legitimate alternative to the positivism and behavioralism that dominate contemporary mainstream public administration. / Ph. D.

This thesis follows Quṭb al‐Dīn al‐Shīrāzī (d. 1311), a brilliant and influential polymath, through the eighty years of his long life and focuses on him navigating changing environments in the Persianate Mongol world (i.e., the second half of the thirteenth century to the early decades of the fourteenth century). In order to retrace his life, this study draws extensively on contemporary chronicles, biographical dictionaries, autobiographies, hagiographies, and some of his own manuscripts to illuminate parts of his life unknown before. Through that, this thesis illustrates Quṭb al‐Dīn al‐Shīrāzī’s intellectual, political, and religious networks, with special attention to his patrons. Moreover, even though his fame in the modern world is primarily due to his astronomical treatises as part of the Maragha school, my thesis demonstrates his investment in medicine, Sufism, and religious sciences, including jurisprudence, Qurʼān interpretations, and ḥadīth studies. Hence, Quṭb al-Dīn is an example of an intellectual in the Ilkhanid realm who developed informal networks transcending political, linguistic, and genre boundaries, that spanned an area from the western fringes of Anatolia to Khorasan, through bustling late medieval metropolises such as Shiraz, Sivas, Konya, Baghdad, Cairo, Tabriz, and Maragha.

Émile Durkheims "Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse" (1912) zählen zu den "Klassikern" der Religionssoziologie und Durkheim selbst unbestritten zu den "Gründungsvätern" der Disziplin. In der umfangreichen Sekundärliteratur zu Durkheim und seinem "Meisterwerk" hat die kritische Rezeption des Werks bislang jedoch nur wenig Betrachtung gefunden. Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert einen systematischen Überblick der theologischen Rezeption des Werks zwischen 1912 bis 1930 im französischsprachigen Kontext. Insofern Durkheims Studie bewusst als wissenschaftlicher Schlag gegen traditionelle Religionsverständnisse gedacht war und einen gezielten Beitrag zu den aufgeheizten Diskussionen über neue Ansätze der Religionsforschung darstellte, bilden die kritischen Auseinandersetzungen der Theologen die Dispute über die Deutungshoheiten innerhalb der Religionsforschung zum Entstehungskontext des Werks verdichtet ab. Mit der Aufarbeitung der kritischen Rezeption vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Debatten innerhalb des französischen Wissenschaftskontextes und der (katholischen) Theologie wird der "soziologische Klassiker" in seine intellektuellen Entstehungskontexte zurückgeführt. Dieser Blick auf das Werk als historischer Debattenbeitrag erlaubt, gegenwärtige "Gründungsnarrative" sowie soziologiegeschichtliche Kanonbildung kritisch zu hinterfragen. Dabei wird erkennbar, dass der komplexe Gründungsprozess der Soziologie in Frankreich nicht allein auf die herausragenden Arbeiten eines Einzelnen zurückgeführt werden kann, sondern der kollaborative Charakter des Gründens stärker herausgestellt werden muss. Daneben sind auch die notwendigen institutionellen und intellektuellen Bedingungen für die erfolgreiche "Gründung" der Religionssoziologie zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts anzuerkennen. / Émile Durkheim’s 'Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse' (1912) counts as one of the 'classics' of sociology of religion, while Durkheim himself is undisputedly considered one of the 'founding fathers' of the discipline. Despite extensive secondary literature on Durkheim and his 'masterpiece', the critical reception of his work has received comparatively little attention. This dissertation presents a systematic overview of the theological reception of the work between 1912 and 1930 in the Frenchspeaking context. Durkheim’s study was intended as an attack against traditional understandings of religion and also contributed to heated discussions about new approaches to the study of religion. Therefore, the critical reception from theologians during the publishing context provides important insight into disputes about sovereignties within the study of religion. By reappraising the reception against the backdrop of historical debates within the French scientific community and (Catholic) theology, the 'sociological classic' is returned to its original intellectual context. Considering the book as a historical contribution to debates allows us to critically question contemporary 'founding narratives', as well as canon formation within the sociology of religion. In doing so, it becomes apparent that the complex founding process of sociology in France cannot be attributed solely to the outstanding work of one individual, instead one must emphasise the collaborative nature of founding. In addition, the necessary institutional and intellectual conditions for the successful 'founding' of the sociology of religion at the beginning of the 20th century must also be acknowledged.

This thesis investigates cognition and knowledge in a rich selection of late medieval Florentine commonplace books (zibaldoni) and diaries (ricordanze) with a special focus on Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibaldone Quaresimale. In Chapter Two a new methodology, named Mental Model Framework in History (MMFH), is elaborated. By studying mental processes such as categorisation and decision making, MMFH enables us to study cognition in historical documents. The dissertation is based on a computer-assisted analysis described in Chapter Three . This has brought together a number of technologies (Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web, Text Encoding Initiative) and used them according to the interpretative goals of the MMFH. Chapter Four investigates the knowledge-constructing practice of late medieval Florentines, and concludes that commonplace books and diaries were tools of information management and knowledge transmission. The core chapters study four domains of thinking: space, time, agency and perception. Chapter Five analyses social recognition and judgement in Renaissance Florence and reveals how a new ethical thought took shape, one that prepared the transition to capitalism. By applying decision and game theory, Chapter Six examines horizontal friendship, a bond that functioned as an informal but risky social insurance in Florence. Chapter Seven studies how Florentines used superlatives to construct a hierarchy of the world, with Florence on the top. This was the manifestation of a fierce competition within and outside the walls of Florence, competition that strongly influenced the social and physical environment of the city. By studying selection, periodisation and causal reasoning, Chapter Eight pinpoints the gradual secularisation of the conception of time. The thesis concludes that the late medieval revolution in information culture marked by the gradual transition from an overwhelmingly oral culture to an increasingly literate culture produced quantitative and qualitative changes in human thought. This largely contributed to the birth of modern thought, and to the late medieval transformation of the social and physical environment.