Following the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolution, the United States faced the daunting task of transitioning from an alliance of rebellious colonies to a unified republican government. From the outset the United States struggled to integrate their revolutionary ideology into a functional system of governance. The country’s national defense establishment typified this struggle. Professional armies, eighteenth-century Americans believed, remained antithetical to republican principles. Such forces, they believed, were the tools authoritarian leaders wielded to promote tyranny and suppress individual liberties. Their ranks were filled with aristocratic officers and mindless mercenary soldiers drawn from the lowest rungs of society. To preserve their revolutionary ideals, the young nation chose to place their national defense in the hands of local militias. Filled with citizen-soldiers, militias provided security while avoiding the evils of professional armies.The nation’s militia system following the revolution, however, remained in disarray. Based in local communities across the nation, the militia remained poorly organized, ill-equipped, and poorly trained. Local citizens, state and federal policymakers, and military officials remained committed to fixing the only military system compatible with their idealized republican society. In the first decade following the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the federal and state governments passed waves of legislation to try and reform the militia system. Despite these efforts, the militia, by the end of the federalist era, remained poorly organized, ill-equipped, and, in a single defining word, ineffective. The limited scholarly attention devoted to examining the militia during this period centers on the national political debate amongst elite politicians and the legislation they drafted to improve the militia. Such debates reveal how republican ideology, the same ideology which necessitated the militia, imposed constraints on the system. Historians, however, often remain less focused on actual militia organizations. Examining local militias illuminates the impact these republican constraints placed on the system. Exploring the thoughts and actions of local militiamen also reveals they too embraced republican principles. Their unique equalitarian conception of republicanism, however, contrasted with the conception most policymakers held. Militiamen resisted the militia system policymakers imposed, deeming it incompatible with true republican principles. Well-crafted legislation mattered little if militiamen refused to enact the system policymakers set forth. Instead of compromising, policymakers tried to rein in the unruly militias. These efforts provoked more resistance. Exhausted after years of failed reform, the government increasingly turned to the least republican option of all: a professional standing army. / History

After much debate during the war years over how best to respond to Nazi criminality, the United States embarked on an ambitious postwar trial program in occupied Germany, which consisted of three distinct trial sets: the International Military Trial at Nuremburg, the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, and military trials held at the former concentration camp at Dachau. Within the Dachau military tribunal programme, were the concentration camp trials in which personnel from the Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps were arraigned. These concentration camp trials at Dachau represented the principal attempt by the United States to punish Nazi crimes committed at the concentration camps liberated by the Americans. The prosecutors at Dachau tried 1,045 defendants accused of committing violations of the 'laws of war' as understood through 'customary' international and American military practice. The strain of using traditional military law to prosecute the unprecedented crimes in the Nazi concentration camps was exposed throughout the trials. To meet this challenge, the Dachau concentration camp courts included an inventive legal concept: the use of a 'criminal-conspiracy' charge-in effect arraigning defendants for participating the 'common design' of the concentration camp, 'a criminal organization'. American lawmakers had spent a good deal of time focused on the problem of how to begin the trials (What charges? What courts? Which defendants?) and very little time planning for the aftermath of the trials. Thus, by 1947 and 1948, in the face of growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the major problem with the Dachau trials was revealed -the lack of long term plans for the appellate process for those convicted. After two scandals that captured the press and the public's attention, the United States Congress held two official investigations of the entire Dachau tribunal programme. Although the resulting reviews, while critical of the Army's clemency process, were largely positive about the trials themselves, the Dachau trials faded from public memory.

This dissertation examines relations between Canadian soldiers and German civilians from March 1945 to April 1946. This study will show that Canadian relations with German civilians were, in part, an extension of relations with civilians in liberated countries, but were also something new altogether. At the beginning of the invasion of Germany, most Canadian soldiers did not wish to associate with Germans and followed a fraternization ban that had been put into effect. Canadians were more likely than American soldiers to believe in the ban. Soldiers were fed a propaganda campaign that told them all Germans were evil and needed to be punished for starting the war. As the invasion proceeded further into Germany, more Canadians realized that all Germans were not Nazis and began to fraternize with the ban still in place. In the Netherlands, where Canadians have been remembered as liberators, relations at times were also tense and bitter after the war ended. Canadians also had to deal with large number of Displaced Persons (DPs), who caused more headaches than German civilians for the occupation authorities.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald Mrozek / Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon used the ideology of military containment of Communism to justify U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. Until 1968, opponents of this intervention attacked the ideology of containment or its application to Vietnam. In 1968, opponents of the war switched tactics and began to focus instead on the President’s credibility. These arguments quickly became the dominant critique of the war through its end and were ultimately successful in ending it. The Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution were central to the change of opposition strategy in 1968. For Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin incident had provided the political impetus to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which the administration used as an insurance policy against Congressional dissent. For Congressional dissenters in 1968, inconsistencies in Johnson’s version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident allowed them to undermine the Resolution as a weapon against Congress. For the American people, revelations about the administration’s dishonesty during the incident simply added to grave doubts that Americans already had about Johnson’s credibility; the American people lost confidence in Johnson, ending his Presidency. The dramatic success of this new strategy—attacking the administration’s credibility—encouraged other opponents to follow suit, permanently altering the framework of debate over the war. This change in opposition strategy in 1968 had a number of important consequences. First, this change in rhetoric ultimately ended the war. To sustain his credibility against relentless attack, President Nixon repeatedly withdrew troops to prove to the American people he was ending the war. Nixon ran out of troops to withdraw and had to accept an unfavorable peace. Second, after the war, this framework for debate of military interventions established—between advocates using the ideology of containment and opponents attacking the administration’s credibility—would reemerge nearly every time an administration contemplated military intervention through the end of the Cold War. Finally, because opponents of military intervention stopped challenging containment in 1968, the American public continued to accept the precepts of containment and the Cold War consensus survived until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.