<p>The basic question of "Political Cinema: The Historicity of an Encounter" is whether or not it is possible to think a concept of political cinema while affirming the autonomous capacities of both cinema as an art and politics as the thought of collective self-determination. Is it, in other words, possible to elaborate a relationship between cinema and politics that would at the same time establish a separation between the two and thus refuse to reduce one to the other. Such a relation of separation is called an encounter. Cinema encounters politics insofar as politics affects it and insofar as cinema can produce certain political effects, but also only insofar as cinema itself is immanently capable of configuring this relationship to politics. Following this conviction, the question of political cinema has to be considered at a distance from questions of genre, where political cinema would be merely one among other cinematic genres, and distinguished from the problem of political instrumentalization of cinema (propaganda). Political cinema refers to real cinematic inventions that happen in relation to processes of human emancipation.</p><p>"Political Cinema" tests this basic conviction through four separate case studies. These case studies are limited and local analyses, which nevertheless cover a broad historical background and are, furthermore, meant as concrete points from which more general theoretical questions can be addressed and formulated. The introductory statement (Chapter 1) sets up the theoretical stakes of the dissertation. Part I analyzes the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's appropriation of several elements of laughter - comedy, militant humor, carnival, caricature and satire, etc. - as specifically cinematic means Eisenstein used to bring his films as closely as possible to the revolutionary process of the October Revolution and the break the latter introduced into the history of humanity. Part II of the dissertation (Chapters 3 and 4), presents a discussion (primarily on the example of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times) of the figure of the worker as a forceful cinematic symbolization of the existence of the modern proletarian masses, through the creation of which, however, cinema does not give up the effective autonomy of its expression. Part III, which consists of an analysis of the work of the Palestinian director Michel Khleifi, shows how the filmmaker's strategy of blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction is an artistic procedure (a cinema of "documentary fiction") that makes visible the complexity of Palestinian historical experience and memory, but does so at a distance from any direct political discourse on the question of Palestine (Chapter 5). And finally, the Conclusion to the dissertation, presents an analysis of the recent Romanian film, which renders visible striking new ideas of political cinema that are, however, produced in the absence of anything more than mere traces of what deserves to be called politics (Chapter 6)</p> / Dissertation

The presence of early modern Spanish history in Spanish film has received only limited scholarly attention. The entire group of Spanish films dealing with the Spanish early modern era has never been placed under study by any overarching research. This dissertation reframes the evolution of the cinematographic representation of the Spanish past as it studies the mechanisms employed by Spanish films in representing an essential part of Spanish past: early modernity. Studied are 19 period films that group themselves around some of most representative subjects in early modernity: the Monarchy and Nobility, and the Spanish Inquisition. Studied also is the most expensive Spanish period film, Alatriste (2006). Through the analysis of artistic, industrial, historiographical, and political elements, and the deconstruction of the historical message of each film, as well as the analysis of their reception, it is clear that Spanish period films set in early modernity tell us as much about the time of their making and the shaping of the historical consciousness of Spain as they do about the era that they represent on screen.

<p>Uppsatsen är en induktiv studie med kvalitativa intervjuer, som undersöker gymnasielärare och historikers inställning till regeringens förslag om att historia A på gymnasiet ska fokusera på modern historia. Denna inställning ställer vi sedan i relation till begreppet historiemedvetande och får på detta sätt fram spännande resultat. Vi kunde se att åsikterna går isär, men att de alla i grund och botten har en gemensam tanke om vad som vore bäst för eleverna. Den stora skillnaden ligger i hur detta kan uppnås. Är det en fokusering på moderna tider, eller är det en lång tidsvandring som ger möjligheten att dra långa linjer som är det bästa? Vi kom fram till att en kurs på 100 poäng, som till största delen fokuserar på modern historia, och ger möjligheter att dra paralleller bakåt i tiden vore den bästa lösningen på problemet med dagens förslag. En nödvändighet är dock att samarbetet mellan skolstadierna fungerar.</p> / <p>This essay is an inductive study with qualitative interviews, which examines upper secondary school teachers’ and historians’ attitude to the government's proposal that History A in upper secondary school is to focus on modern history. We are discussing these attitudes in relation to the concept of History Awareness, which presented us with exciting results. Our study shows that there is a diversity of opinions on the topic, but that the interviewees in general have a common thought about what is best for the students. The big difference is in how this is supposed to be achieved. Is it a focus on modern history? Or is it long walks through time that gives the possibility to draw long lines that is the best? Our conclusion is that a class of 100 points, which mainly focuses on modern history, and presents possibilities to draw parallels to the past is the best solution to the problem with today's proposal. However, it is necessary that the cooperation between the different school stages is working.</p>

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings.

A Nazi news editor declared in 1934 that there were indefinable "magic connections" between news and politics. This dissertation demystifies those links between communications and society. An untold story of news networks lies behind the media sources that we mine constantly as historians. In particular, news agencies, the essential bottleneck of news supply, remain obscured behind the newspapers printing their reports. This study explores why news agencies became the intuitive modern form of news collection and dissemination and how they functioned as a central locus for tussles over the creation of news from events, the limits of government or business control over news, and the role of technology in revising communications infrastructures. 1905 to 1945 represented the zenith of German faith in news agencies’ ability to overturn the existing world order. Along with industrialists and academics, politicians and bureaucrats thought that news agencies could change not only Germany’s role in global communications, but politics, economics, and society too. Coupled with technical advances in wireless telegraphy, news agencies seemed the best means to improve Germany’s international reputation, boost foreign trade, and create societal cohesion at home. News agencies seemed the key to controlling public opinion as well as to creating global news networks conducive to Germany. This news agency consensus united German elites of all political stripes in the belief that news agencies provided an ideal outlet to solve political, social, and economic problems. While such schemes did not always succeed, German news agencies often altered the modern infrastructure of global communications. They briefly achieved media dominance on the oceans, challenged Reuters’ and Agence Havas’ control of European news, and became a leading supplier of news to South America and East Asia in the Nazi period. This work illustrates the interdependence of communications and history by integrating approaches from business history, communications studies, sociology, book history, and the history of technology. It shows the spread and success of German news at a moment when news agencies played a central and underappreciated role in the negotiation of a new relationship between politics, economics, and society in first half of the twentieth century. / History

This dissertation examines attempts at the revival of Buddhism in India from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Typically, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism in 1956 is seen as the start of the neo-Buddhist movement in India. I see this important post-colonial moment as an endpoint in a larger trajectory of efforts at reviving Buddhism in India. The term "revival" itself arose as a result of a particular understanding of Indian history as having had a Buddhist phase in the distant past. Buddhism is also seen in the historiography as a British colonial discovery (or "recovery") for their Indian subjects viz. a range of archaeological and philological endeavors starting in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that there was a quite prolific Indian discourse on Buddhism starting from the late nineteenth century that segued into secret histories of cosmopolitanism, modernity, nationalism and caste radicalism in India. In this context I examine a constellation of figures including the Sri Lankan Buddhist ideologue and activist Anagarika Dharmapala, Buddhist studies scholars like Beni Madhab Barua, the Hindi writer, socialist, and sometime Buddhist monk Rahula Sankrityayana, the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and Ambedkar himself among others, to explicate how Buddhism was constructed and deployed in the service of these ideologies and pervaded both liberal and radical Indian thought formations. In the process, Buddhism came to be characterized as both a universal and national religion, as the first modern faith system long before the actual advent of the modern age, as a system of ethics that espoused liberal values, an ethos of gender and caste equality, and independent and rational thinking, as a veritable civil religion for a new nation, and as a liberation theology for Dalits in India and indeed for the entire nation. My dissertation is about the people, networks, ideas and things that made this possible. / History

This thesis focuses on the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) and his diverse range of graphic production, from illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women, referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" (Yumeji-shiki bijin) in newspaper illustrations, coterie magazines, postcards, frontispieces, posters, and advertisements. Such works circulated widely and within the context of a growing female readership and the emergence of a new media environment that transformed the print medium from its "floating world" profile of the previous century into a technically diverse medium of modern visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. Yumeji's graphic works participated in the generation of new kinds of modern identity. An extensive consideration of Yumeji's life and works reveals his role in the cultivation of a new demography of viewers and readers. / History of Art and Architecture

The dissertation examines the interrelationship between professional and public discourses on Jewish health and the politics of citizenship in Russia across the revolutionary divides of the early twentieth century. In Russia, like in other countries of the time, medical consensus held that Jews exhibited different rates of various diseases compared to Gentiles, such as a higher incidence of diabetes and a lower rate of syphilis. The validity of such data aside, the production and interpretation of these statistics reveal how the criteria of civil enfranchisement and group identity changed over the period in question. Debates about Jewish health at the time addressed two major themes: whether Jews could be full-fledged citizens and whether they constituted a particular ethnic/"racial" group. However, as the dissertation argues, it was concepts of citizenship that generated racial discourse and nationalist ideologies, in this case, and not the other way around. Two concepts of race coexisted in Russian professional and public discourses during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one historical-cultural and the other biological. This dissertation demonstrates that the former was much more politically and intellectually productive than the latter. Biological concepts of race had limited currency at the time and, as a rule, were subordinated to the discourse of ethnicity. At the same time, notions of civilization and the autonomous personality were crucial for debates about Jewish health, Jewish civil status, and the politics of formal and informal citizenship in Russia before 1917. After the Bolshevik revolution, these concepts continued to affect the state's social policies, even though they became divorced from the formal criteria of citizenship. Since the Russian empire and, in a different manner, the early Bolshevik state did not have universal and uniform citizenship based on the idea of natural rights, this study offers useful comparative material for the history of citizenship in general, and the politics of citizenship in empires and composite states in particular. It also offers a contextual, underdeterministic interpretation of the political significance of "race" which departs from established teleological and deterministic narratives of the history of racial thought. / History

Robert Leighton (1610/11-1684) was a significant Scottish churchman of the seventeenth-century. He has been the subject of religious confessional history-writing which continues to skew our understanding of him. This thesis offers a radical reassessment of the first fifty years of Leighton’s life based upon the available primary evidence. The formative influences of Leighton’s Puritan anti-Episcopal father and his student years at the Town College of Edinburgh are re-evaluated. The possibility that he studied in Huguenot France in the 1630s is posited. Using his relationship with the Earl of Lothian to illuminate his involvement in the Covenanting movement, he is placed in Scotland from 1638. Leighton’s commitment to the Covenant and to Presbyterianism is reconsidered by charting Leighton’s career as minister of Newbattle (1641-1653) and his appointment as Principal of the Town College by the English occupiers in 1653. His decision to become a Restoration bishop in 1661 is reviewed having regard to a new understanding of his journey towards Episcopacy and by careful attention to his own words and actions. This study concludes that our comprehension of the Church of Scotland during the Covenanting, Interregnum and Restoration periods is heightened by re-discovering the real Leighton.

The 1909-1918 era can be regarded as the formative years of MI5, as it developed from a small counter-espionage bureau into an established security intelligence agency. MI5 had two main roles during this period; counter-espionage, and advising the War Office on how to deal with the police and the civilian population, particularly aliens. Most of the existing literature tends to focus on the development of MI5 as a whole and pays little attention to the six individual branches that constituted MI5 by the armistice. Recently released MI5 documents in The National Archives (rnA) make it possible to examine MI5 at the micro level and set out the intimate workings of its six branches. The study examines the evolution of MI5 from its formation in October 1909 to the end of the First World War in November 1918, paying particular attention to three questions. First, what did a map of the structure of the MI5 organisation look like and "how" did it develop during these years? Secondly, "why" did it develop as it did? Thirdly, "how effective" was MI5 throughout this period? MI5 began as a one-man affair in 1909, tasked with the limited remit of ascertaining the extent of Gemlan espionage in Britain and an uncertain future. By the armistice MI5's role had expanded considerably and it had begun to develop into an established security intelligence agency, with 844 personnel spread over six branches covering the investigation of espionage, prevention, records, ports and travellers, overseas, and alien workers. This study suggests that the main driver of these developments, if one key factor can be singled out, was the changing perception of the nature of the threat posed by German espionage. However, because some within official circles equated all forms of opposition to Government policy with support for Germany, increasing attention also began to be paid to the possibility that industrial umest, pacifists and others who opposed the Government might actually be being directed by a German "hidden hand". From 1917 onwards MI5's development was driven by a conviction that it had defeated German espionage, such that Germany had switched its efforts to promoting Bolshevism and other forms of umest in order to undermine British society. However, MI5's activities were restricted to investigating if there was really any enemy influence behind such things, while Special Branch was to focus on labour unrest generally. This study makes an original and useful contribution to knowledge in three noteworthy respects. First, it sets out probably the most detailed description of MI5's organisational structure available. Secondly, it poses the stimulating question of "how to measure" the effectiveness of a counter-espionage agency? Thirdly, it suggests that, contrary to claims that Vemon Kell was an "empire builder" who wanted a greater role in labour intelligence, Kell felt it appropriate that MI5's activities should be restricted to the investigation of cases of peace propaganda and sedition that arose from enemy activities and did not actually want MI5 to assume a broader role in labour intelligence at that time.