This study offers a look at the ways in which discourse shaped by the contemporary Israel-Palestine conflict serves as a framework for modern historiography on Palestine. It focuses specifically on the variety of historical narratives proffered as to the “truth” of the Crusade period in Palestine, roughly the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, and their mobilization in political agendas through the Zionist-Crusader analogy. This comparison, a historical analogy likening Zionists to Frankish Crusaders or the State of Israel to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, appears frequently in contemporary dialogue on the Israel-Palestine conflict; it comes from a diverse range of sources and for a variety of political ends, showing that the politicization of history of the contested land is a widespread phenomenon that is limited neither to academic nor political circles. Furthermore, this study argues that common national, religious, or ethnic identities do not guarantee common political conclusions or agreement on the “facts” of the Crusader past. On a broader level, this study investigates the theoretical underpinnings of national histories and their employment as political devices in nationalist movements, as well as explores the role of individual agency in creating and deploying nationalist historical narratives within the framework of the Zionist-Crusader analogy. In the specific context of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the modern State of Israel, this theoretical component focuses primarily on applications of Crusade history to supporting or challenging contemporary political-religious claims to the land of Israel-Palestine.

This thesis explores the historical development of personal status law, which governs a person’s marriage, divorce, and custody rights. It is significant because it is part of a framework that has defined women’s rights for centuries. I will argue that personal status law is a patriarchal framework that has been reinforced over time, leading up to the creation of nation-states in the Middle East. As such, this is the “institution” of personal status that will be traced using historical institutionalism theory. In this thesis I will argue that personal status has undergone a critical juncture, or crucial moment of potential to change, in both Jordan and Iraq’s founding, and that this has consequentially affected personal status law development and responses to the women’s movement throughout the 20th century in both countries. This thesis briefly reviews the role of women’s rights and the development of law in pre-Islam era, Islam and the Qur’an, and the Ottoman Empire in order to describe the institution of personal status law. Next, I review the history of Jordan and then Iraq and identify the critical juncture of personal status in historical context. In each chapter I will also explore the matter of de facto, or what women’s rights are like in practice, as an example of the institution at work in the patriarchal protection paradox.

The main objective of American foreign policy in the Middle East, during the post-War period of 1946-1958, was to safeguard the area against Soviet intrusions. This thesis attempts to examine the causes for the failure of the United States to achieve this objective. It concludes that this failure is the result of an alienation of the major national forces in the Middle East. The United States alienated the Arab world by openly and unreservedly supporting Zionist aims in Palestine. She alienated newly independent states by establishing close cooperation with Britain and France, their former colonial masters. She alienated revolutionary nationalists by supporting reactionary and traditional rulers against them and by opposing their ideals of neutrality and revolutionary change. In doing so, the United States opened the way for the Soviet Union to challenge her position and threaten her interests in the area. By emphasizing the military aspects of containment, she demonstrated a lack of understanding of the nature of the Soviet threat. The revolutionary nationalists sought to obtain military, economic, and technical aid without conditions or political strings. By insisting on imposing her conditions of alliance against communism and securing concessions and guarantees, including the safety and security of Israel, the United States made it impossible for the nationalist forces to cooperate with her. They, therefore, were forced to deal with the Soviet Union, whose aid was offered with no conditions or strings attached. The American response to isolate and weaken those states which accepted Soviet aid, through such means as the Eisenhower Doctrine, brought on a most serious deterioration in relations never before encountered by the United States and the most spectacular successes ever realized by the Soviet Union in the Middle East.

Many historians refer to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as the first genocide of the twentieth century. In the context of the first global war, the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were systematically persecuted and many eliminated while the world watched. Yet today, American memory and conception of the Armenian Genocide is remarkably different from similar historical events such as the Holocaust. The Armenian Genocide and America's reaction to it is a forgotten event in American memory. In an attempt to better understand this process of forgetting, this thesis analyzes the Washington Post's news coverage of the Armenian Genocide. By cataloguing, categorizing, and analysizing this news coverage, this thesis suggests Americans had sufficient information about the events and national reaction to it to form a memory. Therefore, the reasons for twenty-first century collective loss of memory in the minds of Americans must be traced to other sources.

In the wake of the Protestant penetration into the Near East, Jacob Spori was sent to Constantinople in 1884 to open a mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Turkey. Spori and later his companion, Joseph M. Tanner, preached first to the Europeans of Constantinople, then projected their efforts down into the major cities of Palestine. Among the German colonists, the missionaries found several valuable converts, most of whom emigrated to Utah.Ferdinand F. Hintze gained the title "Father of the Armenian Mission" through his extensive preaching tours throughout the interior of Asia Minor. He found the Armenians to be curious, imaginative, creative, but lacking in leadership ability and stability, being very enthusiastic for a cause one day and a few months later wanting nothing to do with it. It was among these Armenians that the Mormon mission developed.

An intelligent understanding of international relationships requires a special study of the critical places where continuous crisis arises. It was felt, therefore, desirable to examine a significant aspect of the conflict between the Arab World and the State of Israel that provides the subject of this study. The economic boycott of Israel has assumed a grave significance in international relations, yet to the author's knowledge this subject has not been investigated in a scholarly and comprehensive manner in any available publication. The writer embarks on this topic in the hope that it may provide the American student of Middle Eastern affairs with the essential data for its clear understanding.

This thesis is an examination of the long historical processes that have led to the Israel/Palestine conflict to the contemporary period, focusing mostly on the period before Israeli independence and the 1948 war that created the Jewish state. As Zionism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century to combat the antisemitism of Europe, practical and political facets of the movement sought immigration to Palestine, an area occupied by a large population of Arab natives. The answer to how the Zionists would achieve a Jewish state in that region, largely ignoring the indigenous population, fostered disagreements and a split in the Zionist ideology. The Revisionist Zionist organization was founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and favored a more militant orientation. With an “Iron Wall” manifesto, and as time passed and international aid waned, the Revisionists evolved into an anticolonial movement that not only viewed Palestinians as an obstacle to the Jewish state but turned their anticolonial furor toward the British and United Nations threats. That evolution reached a crescendo in 1948 when the Revisionist paramilitary group Lehi assassinated the UN Mediator, Count Bernadotte. That act was a catalyst that began the end of the war and the solidification of a Palestinian refugee crisis that persists to the present. As the Iron Wall Doctrine evolved from the early teachings of Jabotinsky through anticolonial violence and the removal of native Arabs from the new state of Israel, future prime ministers who were former Revisionist terrorists maintained the prescribed perpetual state of war Jabotinsky predicted with the now landless Palestinians. This research concludes that both Jabotinsky and Bernadotte were crucial characters in the narrative that allowed for the Iron Wall Doctrine, and thus the Jewish state, to not only exist but to carry on beyond the 1948 independence into the long standing conflict it has become.

Religion and religious ritual has been linked to providing individuals and entire communities with the ability to cope in the aftermath of life-changing traumas. This thesis explores the intersection of coping and ritual in the aftermath of the recent persecution of the Yezidi people. The methodology utilizes qualitative interviews and participant observation which was conducted in Ainkawa, Lalish and Bashiqa during fieldwork that took place in July 2017. A sample of 25 Yezidis who remain displaced in Northern Iraq were asked to describe their experience of coping in the aftermath of the Sinjar Massacre. I argue that the introduction of a baptismal ritual extended to adult women became a medium to reclaim identity. This allowed women who were abducted to symbolically re- declare themselves as Yezidi, cope with the trauma, reintegrate into the community and reclaim their identity through ritual, which presents healing in a framework that is largely relatable.

British imperialism of the Ottoman Empire is analyzed in terms of power and influence. Changes in gender roles, nationalism, and culture are all examined through the lens of imperialism. The discourse flows thematically and discusses brief histories of both Britain and the Ottoman Empire. The construction of the Imperial Museum created a unified image of the nation through the collection of material items. As a result of European imperialism, the Ottoman Empire developed a sense of national culture.

Mohammad Khordadian is a gay, Iranian American dancer and entertainer who immigrated to the United States from Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution. Since his arrival to the United States, Khordadian has produced countless instructional and presentational dance videos which garnered enormous popularity among diasporic Iranians and Iranians in Iran alike. I locate a tension between his adoration by the public and the immense anxiety that male Iranian dancers can induce in other Iranians. Khordadian invokes the historical evolution of the archetypal Iranian male dancer/entertainers written about in Persian literature and poetry --the 12 to 16-year-old, handsome boys with older lovers. As Orientalists linked these sinful relationships to male homosociality and sexual repression in Islam, the memory of the male dancer has been repressed out of an Iranian desire to fold into the pale of Western modernity. Khordadian, with his over-the-top gestures (what I will call “queer gestures”), the transnational circulation of these gestures through instructional videos, and his lived experience as a gay Iranian man, transgresses the boundaries set by heteronormativity and Orientalism. However, this is not without a myriad of complications.