<p>This thesis uses newly available archival material from the Arehivio Storieo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, especially Ciano's Gabinetto, the Foreign Ministry office under which Mussolini and Ciano successively centralized and tightened Fascist control of foreign policy, as well as the Serie Affari PolWei, copies of telegrams from embassies abroad plus the diplomatic traffic sent from the Gabinetto to various embassies. This research represents the most comprehensive archival study to date. It also adds a substantially new interpretive cast to the historical debate. It considers but rejects the writings of recent revisionist Italian historians, especially the late Renzo De Felice and several of his students. Their work inaccurately presents a picture of Italy balanced between England and Germany, hoping to play the role of the 'decisive weight' in European affairs.</p> <p>This study argues instead that Benito Mussolini was the primary animator of Italian foreign policy during the 1930s. He was a programmatic thinker, whose ultranationalist mentalite included contempt for democracies, Bolshevism in Western Europe, and for the international Masonic order. More seriously, he held profoundly racist, militarist and social Darwinist beliefs, and routinely acted on these impulses. This complex of irrational beliefs led Mussolini to align Italy with Germany to expand the Italian Empire in East and North Africa at the expense ofBritain and France.</p> <p>From June 1936 to early February 1939, Mussolini clearly tightened Italian ties with Germany. These links allowed the Duce to challenge the Western democracies on a broad number of issues. Although Mussolini hoped to achieve many concessions through a process of alternate intimidation and conciliation, he ultimately knew that he could realize his main territorial goals only through war with France and Britain. Only an alliance with Hitler's Germany offered Mussolini the chance to achieve his grandiose imperial plans, though at the profound risk ofdomination by Germany and military defeat against Britain.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Battle of the Corner: Urban Policing and Rioting in the United States, 1943-1971 provides a national history of police reform and police-citizen conflicts in marginalized urban neighborhoods in the three decades after World War II. Examining more than a dozen cities, the dissertation shows how big-city police brass and downtown-friendly municipal elites in the late 1940s and 1950s attempted to professionalize urban law enforcement and regulate rank-and-file discretion through Police-Community Relations programs and novel stop-and-frisk preventive patrol schemes. These efforts ultimately failed to produce diligent yet impartial street policing. Beginning in the late 1950s, and increasing in severity and frequency until the early 1960s, young black and Latino working-class urban residents surrounded, taunted, and attacked police officers making routine arrests. These crowd rescues garnered national attention and prepared the ground for the urban rebellions of 1964 to 1968, many of which began with a controversial police incident on a crowded street corner. While telling a national story, Battle of the Corner provides deeper local context for postwar changes to street policing through detailed case studies highlighting the various stakeholders in reform efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American activists, block clubs, residents, and politicians pressured police for effective but fair and accountable tactical policing to check rising criminal violence and street disorder in neighborhoods increasingly blighted by urban renewal. Rank-and-file police unions fought civilian review boards and used new collective bargaining rights to stage job actions to obtain higher wages. They also obtained “bill of rights” contract provisions to shield members from misconduct investigations. Police management took advantage of newly-available federal and local resources after the riots to reorganize their departments into top-down bureaucratic organizations capable of conducting stop-and-frisk on a more systematic scale. By the early 1970s, a rising generation of urban black politicians confronted skyrocketing rates of criminal violence, armed militants intent on waging war on the police, and a politically-empowered rank-and-file angry and combative over the more intense threats and pressures they faced on the job. Battle of the Corner breaks ground in telling a national story of policing that juxtaposes elite decision-making and street confrontations and that analyzes a wide range of actors who held a stake in securing order and justice in urban neighborhoods. In chronicling how urban police departments emerged from the profound institutional crisis of the 1960s with greater power, resources, and authority, Battle of the Corner provides a history and a frame for understanding policing controversies today. / History

The following thesis describes the life and activities of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentinian journalist who was assigned to interview Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Masetti was responsible for broadcasting interviews with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara to the rest of Latin America for the first time, allowing people to understand what was happening in Cuba through the words of the Revolution’s leaders. Masetti returned to Cuba to found the first international Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina, which still exists today. However, ideological factionalism within Prensa Latina drove Masetti to resign in 1961. Afterwards, he worked closely with Che Guevara to foment a guerrilla uprising in the pair’s home country of Argentina, forming a guerrilla army known as the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP). Using the experiences of revolutionaries abroad in places like Cuba and Algeria, the EGP faced several setbacks in their area of operations, the province of Salta, that ultimately led to the group’s demise before their operations had truly begun. Masetti, cornered by the Argentine Gendarmerie, disappeared into the jungle in 1964, never to be seen again. His life illuminates aspects of transnational ideology, namely socialism, and its mosaic nature. His life also reveals facets of the informational and journalistic endeavors in Latin America during the Cold War.

The years from 1810 to 1840 deal with one of the most decisive periods in Indiana's history, first as a territory and later as a state. Few periods have seen greater political and material development. During these years great problems, such as the organization of the state government, the disposition of the public lands by the Federal government, and the construction of internal improvements by the national and state governments, had to be solved by those who bore the responsibilities of public office. Great national political movements were in the making. These matured into powerful forces, shaping not only national policies but reaching down and influencing state political and economic alignments and policies. Among the names of families who guided the political affairs of Indiana at the beginning of statehood, none is more prominent than that of Noble. Two Noble brothers, James and Noah, rose to the highest possible positions within the commonwealth. James served as one of the first two United States senators from Indiana, and he continued a member of that body fifteen years,- until his death in 1831. Noah, the younger brother, was elected the fifth Governor of the state in 1831. The third brother, Lazarus, held the Office of Receiver of Public Moneys in the Brookville Land Office. He died at an early age.

The United States, during both the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations, pursued humanitarian relief in the Horn of Africa and East Africa with an eye towards Cold War politics. During the Carter administration the focus was on Ethiopia and the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, while during the Reagan administration the United States’ efforts were mainly targeted towards Sudan and the regime of Gaffar Nimeiry. In both instances, the United States was concerned with the politics of the Cold War, trying to create a more positive image of the U.S. abroad by relieving world hunger, while also propping up governments that supported U.S. interests during the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

California has long been credited for being an environmental policy pioneer. It only achieved this status after allowing pollution to develop for decades, however. As the aerospace and other manufacturing industries took off during World War II, the environment was sacrificed for industrial capitalism. In the 1950s, California began to respond to pollution after concern was expressed by the state and its residents. Today, the US EPA has adopted California emissions standards and looks to the state for guidance when establishing its policies regarding mobile emissions; California is an environmental policy leader. While California is recognized as an environmental leader, China is perceived as having forfeited the environment in exchange for rapid industrial growth starting in 1978. As pollution has worsened in China, the rest of the world has watched the Chinese Communist Party ignore its growing problem. Recently, the Chinese government started to acknowledge the growing concerns and expressed an interest in learning what it can do to mitigate its pollution problem. To this end, the Chinese government has been sending delegations of policymakers and researchers to California to learn from California’s successes and failures regarding environmental policy. This thesis compares California’s and China’s environmental degradation and policy response to the issue of pollution. Both California and China developed by way of industrial capitalism and have worked together in the past. California and China are inextricably linked, and have an opportunity to learn from one another and to work together to reach a common goal of pollution reduction.

Dwight D. Eisenhower has been criticized as an anti-intellectual by scholars such as Richard Hofstadter. Eisenhower’s tenure as president of Columbia University was one segment of his career he was particularly criticized for because of his non-traditional approach to education there. This paper examines Eisenhower’s time at Columbia to explain how anti-intellectualism played into his university administration. It explains how his personality and general outlook came to clash with the intellectual environment of Columbia especially in the wake of the faculty revolt against former Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler. It argues that Eisenhower utilized the Columbia institution to promote a Cold War educational agenda, which often belittled Columbia intellectuals and their scholarly pursuits. However, this paper also counter-argues that Eisenhower, despite accusations of anti-intellectualism, was an academically interested man who never engaged in true suppression of free thought despite pressure from McCarthyite influences in American government, media and business.

The Japanese government has a vested interest in either avoiding discussion of its war-torn past or arguing for a revisionist take. The need to play up Japanese victimization over Japanese aggression during World War II has led to many museums having their exhibits censored or revised to fit this narrative goal. During the 1990’s, Japan’s national discourse was more open to discussions of war crimes and the damage caused by their aggression. This in turn led to the creation of many “peace museums” that are intended to discuss and confront this history as frankly as possible. At the beginning of the 21st century, public discourse turned against these museums and only private museums have avoided censorship. Some museums, like the Osaka International Peace Center, have been devastated by the censorship. This museum and other museums with similar narrative issues raise questions about appropriate narrative on display. What is appropriate to censor for the sake of respect for the dead? What must be included for the sake of historical accuracy and honesty about the past? These questions are investigated at four different peace museums throughout Japan.

The public career of Maurice Hudson Thatcher was wedded to one of the most interesting epochs in Kentucky history and Kentucky politics. From 1895, with his election as county clerk of Butler County, to his defeat for the United States Senate in 1932, Maurice Thatcher was intimately involved in almost every statewide political campaign. He participated in the rise of the Republican party to a point where it was a definite force in state politics and won almost as many statewide races as it lost. He also participated in the party’s relegation to minority status with the advent of the depression of the 1930s. In the period from 1895 until 1932 he made politics his career and it served him well. Though he was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1898, his private law practice was confined to only two brief periods in which he practiced his profession in Louisville. The remainder of his time was spent in politics, a profession he called “public service,” and which he found an honorable and rewarding one.

Although historians have done in-­‐depth researched on Black police in the South, before the Civil War and during Reconstruction, they seldom assess black policemen’s role in New Orleans between the Battle of Liberty Place and 1913. The men discussed here argue that despite the hardening racial attitudes in Post-­‐ Reconstruction South, in New Orleans opportunity still existed for Blacks to serve in positions of authority, perhaps a heritage of the city’s earlier tri-­‐partite racial order. The information obtained from primary sources such as police manuals, beat books, and newspapers, counters the widely held belief that African American presence in the police during this period was completely defined by Jim Crow. This work presents updated and corrected evidence that Blacks were enrolled in the New Orleans Police Department during the time of Jim Crow, challenging the notion that after 1909 Blacks in New Orleans were not part of the police department.