The aim of this master’s thesis in history of ideas is to investigate the idea circulation in the Swedish Green Party’s meetings with mass media 1980–1982. The study is based upon a series of theoretical premises. It is presumed that cultural expressions, such as speech, media use and visual representation, can be understood through studying how people think about society’s history, contemporary development and conceivable futures. Since ideas about society’s ongoing development also are presumed to be intertwined with social and cultural positions and practices, and may be expressed differently given different social and cultural circumstances, it is relevant to investigate on the one hand the Green Party’s political vision, and on the other hand how the formulation and reception of ideas took place between them and journalists.     The Green Party’s communication to the Swedish public is studied through on the one hand their own media channels, and on the other hand a selection of events where they were covered in mass media, communicating to the public via journalists. The study shows that the Green Party expected society’s ongoing development to lead to an environmental and human disaster, if not their vision of a democratic society, built on small-scale production, came true. These two conceivable futures were used to motivate political action in their present time. History, on the other hand, was used to criticize the present society built on economical growth and hierarchies. In the Green Party’s visionary society, mankind would embrace a natural lifestyle and thereby reunite with her, in growth society, lost democratic, accountable and creative nature. These ideas were related to societal processes, events and circulating ideas at the time. To get their messages across to the broad Swedish public, the Green Party arranged a press conference. Partly adapting to journalistic working methods for covering politics, the Green Party staged their alternative, small-scale ideology materially, musically and visually. The Green Party’s mass media appearance, along with their growth in membership numbers, made mass media coverage about them increase. In a parliamentary uncertain and politically hostile time, the party’s presented parliamentary strategies and political proposals awoke journalistic speculation. However, journalists’ news telling about the Green Party’s politics circulated, in different ways, around their parliamentary goal, prospects and future obligations. Thereby conceivable futures, as formulated by journalists, gave meaning to the Green Party’s formation, development and politics. These ideas were expressed in journalistic media use and interview praxis. Since around two decades, journalists were reporting more independently and confrontational on politics than previously.  Covering the Green Party, photographers, camera men and writers created meanings by using mediums, which sometimes were transferred between media forms, to support news narratives. Consequently, a political party trying to change a political lifestyle and exercise reached the Swedish public through mass media as a party mainly competing for parliamentary representation. These results contribute to ongoing research on how, and on what premises, political voices have reached the public through mass media throughout modern history.

This paper is an examination of the foreign policy attitudes of Indiana's United States Senators and Representatives during the critical years before the Second World War. My purpose is to determine whether these particular Mid-Westerners were a part of the isolationist bloc in Congress which exerted a significant influence on the formulation of foreign policy. The scope of the study is limited to an elucidation of the individual views as expressed in Congress b the members of the delegation and an analysis of the campaign for re-election waged by each of them as it relates to the broader issue.

In this study I have attempted to present the reaction of a Northern state, Indiana, to the movement for the adoption and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The significance of such a study results from the position of this amendment as the foundation of the Republican party's programs of national reconstruction and of Indiana as an important state in the movement for ratification. Of necessity, such a presentation involves a careful examination of the background of the two major political parties in Indiana as well as an investigation of the attitude of the state with regard to earch of the problems with which the Fourteenth Amendment attempted to deal.

Every father is the son of a mother. While this would appear to be a commonplace, studies of patrimonialism as a political system in the ancient Near East have rarely considered its implications. Royal women, as objects of exchange and as agents of political action, played a central role in negotiations between Late Bronze Age states and in dynastic struggles within these states. The relative positions of royal men were shaped by their relationships to royal women. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

<p>What accounts for the rise of defense intellectuals in the early Cold War? Why did these academics reject university life to accept positions in the foreign policy establishment? Why were so many of German origin? "The Night Watchman" answers these questions through a contextual biography of the German exile Hans Speier, a foreign policy expert who in the 1940s and 1950s consulted for the State Department and executive branch, and helped found the RAND Corporation, Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the program in international communication at MIT's Center for International Studies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, witnessing ordinary Germans vote enthusiastically for Adolf Hitler engendered a skepticism of democracy in Speier and a cohort of social democratic intellectuals. Once Hitler assumed power in 1933, Speier and his colleagues were forced to flee Central Europe for the United States. In America, a number of these left wing exiles banded together with U.S. progressives to argue that if democracy was to survive as a viable political form in a world beset with "totalitarian" threats, intellectual experts, not ordinary people, must become the shapers of foreign policy. Only intellectuals, Speier and others argued, could ensure that the United States committed its vast resources to the defeat of totalitarianism.</p><p>World War II provided Speier and his academic cohort with the opportunity to transform their ideas into reality. Called upon by government officials who required the services of intellectuals familiar with the German language and culture, hundreds of social scientists joined the Office of War Information, Office of Strategic Services, and other new organizations of the wartime government. After the war, this first generation of defense intellectuals, uninterested in returning to the relative tranquility of academia, allied with government and military officials to create a network of state and corporate institutions that reproduced the wartime experience on a permanent basis. Speier himself became chief of RAND's Social Science Division and a consultant responsible for advising the Ford Foundation on where to direct its resources. In the latter capacity, he counseled the foundation to fund institutions that provided a home to intellectuals concerned with refining the methods of social science to improve policy-relevant knowledge.</p><p>Speier's interwar experiences with Nazism and postwar understanding of Joseph Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and West Berlin led him to conclude that all totalitarian societies, be they fascist or communist, were run by elites who did not wish to reach détente with the United States. For this reason, Speier declared, U.S. decision-makers should treat all Soviet diplomatic overtures as feints designed to trick the western alliance into weakening its international standing. He further argued that because totalitarian states were autocracies in which the public had no say in foreign affairs, the United States should not use propaganda to win ordinary people living in the Soviet Union to its side, but should instead employ methods of psychological warfare to disrupt the personal and professional networks of Soviet elites. Speier's position at RAND and his relationship with the State Department provided him with opportunities to disseminate his opinions throughout the foreign policy establishment. By virtue of his central location in this institutional matrix, Speier influenced a number of key U.S. foreign policies, including the inflexible negotiating position adopted by U.S. delegates at the Korean War armistice talks; the tactics of U.S. psychological warfare directed against East Germany and the Soviet Union; and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Open Skies" proposal at the 1955 Geneva Summit.</p><p>By the 1960s, Speier had helped institutionalize both a system in which intellectuals had direct access to foreign policymakers and a policy culture that privileged expertise. His trajectory demonstrates that the Cold War national security state, broadly defined to include governmental, nongovernmental, and university-associated research centers, was not solely a proximate reaction to the perceived Soviet threat, as historians have argued, but was also the realization of a decades-old, expert-centered political vision formed in response to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.</p> / Dissertation

In this thesis I diagnose the health of the United State’s constitutional regime and extensively explore the changing relationship between Congress and the president. I began by diving into the arguments laid out in The Federalist Papers to explain the basis of America’s separation of powers system. I then explore the rise of presidential power and the increase in congressional deference and abdication through the lens of the budget process and war authority. Next, I provide suggestions for ways in which Congress should assert itself. Lastly, I provide recent indications that Congress may be willing to express its institutional will. In conclusion, I argue that the modern world has changed the incentive structure for representatives who now cater primarily to their constituents and avoid making controversial decisions instead of acting as a check on executive power. I distribute blame between Congress and American citizens for allowing this change to occur and stress the importance of civic education and civic participation in a healthy constitutional regime.

Without northern doughface Democrats, and northern states like Indiana, the South could not have held dominance in American politics during the sectional crisis. Anchoring the extreme end of the doughface North was Indiana’s slaveholding senator Jesse Bright (his holdings were in Kentucky). Yet, he was no flailing radical pushed to the margins of northern politics. Bright was the chief party boss who by the mid to late 1850s controlled the state of Indiana. He was one of the most influential leaders getting James Buchanan into the presidency. He did this, in part, because Indiana was a conservative state that disliked anti-slavery agitators. Still, most Hoosiers were not partisans in favor of slavery. Bright was able to lead Indiana politics during the 1850s because he had become a powerful political boss. American politics in the 1840s and 1850s was built around state level organizations. With elections going through constant and irregular cycles, hopeful candidates needed a strong organization capable of providing money, press literature and mobilization of voters. They needed someone with grit, savvy and energy to organize various groups, and no one was more successful at this in Indiana than Bright. Bright did this, in part, by understanding the baser motives of men, and more importantly, could satisfy these wants with graft, bribery, patronage and other inducements. If that was not enough to motivation, he used fear, bullying and good old fashioned steam rolling tactics to bludgeon his enemies into submission. Bright’s extreme doughface attitudes did not make him popular, but his organizing skills made him a powerful leader. He helped prop the slave-power in American politics through the 1850s, but his efforts also alienated a wide swath of northerners, especially in Indiana. By 1860, a northern Republican Party took control of American politics, as northerners came to reject the slave-masters and the slave-power. This dissertation argues that Bright played a pivotal role in propping the slave-power. But ultimately Bright’s political downfall was part of a larger rejection of southern politics.

The orthodox narrative of the First World War, which maintains that the conflict was futile, unnecessary and wasteful, continues to dominate historical representations of the war. Attempts by revisionist historians to dispute this interpretation have made little impact on Britain’s collective memory of the conflict. The Christmas truce has come to represent the frustration and anger that soldiers felt towards the meaningless war they had been trapped into fighting. However, the Christmas truce, which at the time it occurred was seen as an event of minimal importance, was not an act of defiance, but one which arose from the unprecedented conditions of static trench warfare and the adaptation of the soldiers to that environment. An examination of contemporaneous accounts of the truce demonstrates that it was viewed by the soldiers involved as merely a brief holiday, and that British army commanders generally ignored or tolerated the truce, eventually releasing orders preventing its continuation or reoccurrence but taking no steps to punish any of the men who took part in it. A review of the letters and diaries of truce participants sheds light on the event itself, while simultaneously challenging the orthodox narrative of the First World War.

“Men at some time are masters of their fate: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Thus Shakespeare has the wily Cassius speak, and thus Matthew Lyon must have believed; else he had not contended so fiercely, so incessantly, and so interminably against such adverse circumstances as the average individual would have submitted to sooner or later. Many may have thought so; the facts often indicated so; yet never in a true sense was Matthew Lyon an underling. His fierce spirit was supreme over material things. Even while an indentured servant he resented and successfully resisted the efforts of his master to direct or control his democratic principles. Suppliant though he was in his later years for political preferment, on account of his financial losses ensuing from a curtailment of our commerce during the Napoleonic wars and our own War of 1812 and by a political defeat resulting from his having opposed the administrative policies which preceded our entrance into that war, yet even in that period of political and financial reverses his restless, forceful pen, schooled in the denunciatory era of the Jefferson-Hamilton party strife, wielded an influence not to be disregarded, even by the new political leaders of the day. Still, Fate, thwarted by an indomitable spirit in life, may now be exercising her influence, for the conflict that marked the career of this “pugnacious but incorruptible” son of Erin did not cease with his demise. It is with difficulty that one can construct from the conflicting statements concerning his actions and career an approximately accurate account of the most significant events of that career. Such is the task the writer will attempt to perform, dealing chiefly with that period succeeding Lyon’s arrival in Kentucky, where for the second time he entered into the activities essential to the development, on a large scale, of an industrial center in frontier life, and where, with better success and less strife than he had formerly experienced, he re-entered the political arena. Concerning Lyon’s commercial and political experiences in the West very little has been written save occasional brief articles, often inaccurate and founded more or less on hearsay and tradition. McLaughlin’s very unsatisfactory biographical history of Lyon deals but briefly with his Kentucky career; in Aunt Leanna or Early Scenes in Kentucky and also in Recollections of a Frontier Life, written by Lyon’s youngest daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Roe, primarily in the interest of abolition and Methodism, respectively, are related some things of interest concerning Lyon; but since these are the reminiscences of one far removed in time and space from the scenes and events described, her accounts are not wholly reliable. Other secondary matter is more or less a repetition of the outstanding facts of Lyon’s life for contrary to what might be supposed, Lyon enjoyed in his own day a well-founded national fame. From Lyon’s own writings, found in newspapers and various collections in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, from county court records, from departmental, national and state documents, and from occasional secondary matter the writer has obtained the facts contained in this thesis. Certain incidents in Lyon’s early life so strongly influenced his character and his importance that a knowledge of them was considered necessary to an understanding and appreciation of his later life; for this reason Chapters I and II are included.

The 2010 freshman class bears an uncanny resemble to their idealistic counterparts from 1994. Their campaign rhetoric, motivations and beliefs are almost interchangeable. The triumphs and especially frustrations and failures of their first terms also bear stark similarities. Most critically, the freshmen's conservative agenda suffered a disappointing electoral rebuke in their first elections as incumbents. Both the 1996 and 2012 presidential year congressional elections halted the respective momentum of the Republican Revolution and the Tea Party. The lessons of the 104th Congress offer many lessons to the freshmen of the 112th, namely that ideological "revolutions" in America (in this case, those of a conservative nature) struggle to deal with the challenges of governing. This thesis will examine and compare the rhetoric and motivations of the freshmen during their initial campaigns, and the triumphs and tribulations of their first terms in a city that is resistant to sudden and sweeping changes. The title of this work, "Taking Back America," reflects the sense of urgency and gravitas that spiritually united both classes of freshmen. The personal observations recorded in Linda Killian‘s The Freshman (1998) and Robert Draper‘s When the Tea Party Came to Town (2012) form the foundation of this examination, which focuses entirely on the U.S. House of Representatives.