This thesis contains information pertaining to the events that led up to the Texas Revolution as well as the military campaigns and battles that ultimately led up to the secession with Mexico.

O objetivo desta tese é analisar como o romance A Tale of Two Cities de Charles Dickens reflete em sua estrutura questões políticas importantes que estavam presentes na sociedade inglesa no século XIX, principalmente a formação na Inglaterra de uma cultura antirrevolucionária que pintava a Revolução, usando o exemplo Francês, como um episódio comandado por uma multidão desvairada e fora de controle. Essa cultura encontra-se presente na forma como Dickens figurou a Revolução Francesa, nas incessantes comparações que faz entre a França e a Inglaterra e na constante oscilação no posicionamento do narrador. Ao mesmo tempo, a análise do romance nos permite ver que essa mesma cultura não excluiu totalmente a percepção de que a situação clamava por mudanças. Nossa hipótese é que subjacente ao enredo do romance e aderido à sua estrutura encontra-se a discussão acerca de duas soluções para a crise pressentida: a Reforma e a Revolução. O romance suscita, por causa da volubilidade do narrador, a defesa das duas posições, ora pendendo para a Revolução, pela crítica à aristocracia, ora para a Reforma, ao promover a demonização das massas. Defenderemos que essa oscilação culmina na construção de uma terceira solução, que, apesar de ser à primeira vista conservadora, torna-se radical ao expor a impossibilidade de outra saída política quando a Revolução é excluída do horizonte de possiblidades. / The objective of this thesis is to analyze how the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens reflects in its structure important political issues which were part of the English society in the 19th Century, mainly the construction of a counter-revolutionary culture which portrayed the Revolution, using the French example, as an episode led by a crazed mob. This culture is present in the way Dickens depicted the Revolution, in the recurrent comparisons between France and England and in the continuous shift in the narrators opinion. At the same time, the analysis of the novel enables us to observe that this very culture did not exclude the perception that the situation claimed for changes. Our hypothesis is that the issue underlying the plot of the novel and interwoven in its structure is the discussion about two solutions to the perceived crisis: Reform and Revolution. The novel raises, because of the volubility of the narrator, arguments in the defense of both positions, sometimes advocating the Revolution in the criticism against the aristocracy, sometimes supporting the Reform, in the demonising of the mob. We argue that the alternation between these two positions culminates in the construction of a third solution, which, althought conservative at first sight, turns out to be radical for exposing the impossilbity of any other political solution when the Revolution is excluded as a possiblility.

"Corresponding Republics" is a study of how letter writing practices shaped elite political organizing during the early years of the American, Dutch and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The heart of the project is a study of revolutionary leaders' correspondence and epistolary practices. Letters were the lifeblood of all early modern politics--the means to share information, develop strategies and resolve internecine disputes. This was particularly true of the eighteenth-century Atlantic patriot parties, which all faced the challenge of building cohesive movements in the fragmented political landscape of the old regime. Yet even though most studies of revolutionary politics make heavy use of private correspondence, nobody had yet examined the ways in which patriots' reliance on private letters and networks shaped the revolutions' broader political cultures. "Corresponding Republics" argues that the distinctive old regime private correspondence practices of patriots in each region persisted into the revolutionary period. These practices, which played a crucial role in patriots' political self-fashioning, helped produce different kinds of political networks and cultures of patriot organizing. Though by no means the whole explanation for the three revolutions' different courses, epistolary practices are an essential and untold part of that story. The main sources for the project are manuscript letters in American and European archives. The first three chapters of the dissertation examine inter-colonial organizing during the first years of the American Revolution. Chapters One and Two offer a revised view of the efforts by Sons of Liberty, as the patriot leaders called themselves, to build a cohesive inter-colonial patriot party from 1765 to 1772. They document patriots' deep immersion in mercantile correspondence and their persistence in using it after 1765. Yet this style, which raised high barriers to posing questions or engaging in debate, made it difficult for patriot leaders to have tactical discussions and coordinate their activities across the colonies. The Sons instead created a largely symbolic agreement on general principles of resistance. Chapter Three focuses on the developing relationship after 1772 between the patriots' private networks and public committees of correspondence. It shows how private letter writing helped the Sons organize formal inter-colonial corresponding committees in 1773, which reflected the private networks' focus on information transmission rather than discussion. Not until the meeting of the First Continental Congress in 1774 did patriot leaders develop an inter-colonial network whose affective depth enabled tactical and ideological debate. And even then, the patriots' epistolary tools still encouraged them to paper over serious differences about political strategy and ideology in order to maintain the unity of the colonies. The second half of the dissertation uses studies of national organizing in the Dutch and French Revolutions to examine what was distinctive about the Sons of Liberty's organizing efforts. The underlying problems the patriot movements confronted, I argue, were similar: like their American counterparts, Dutch and French patriots sought to build a cohesive political movement on a national scale through correspondence. In practice, however, the process differed significantly. French Jacobin leaders drew on a pre-revolutionary tradition of scholarly epistolarity, which encouraged discussion and dialogue among participants. These qualities helped them develop epistolary communities far more tightly knit than those of their American counterparts. This proved to be both an asset and a liability. It helped them forge a high degree of ideological and tactical unity within the movement. But it also made it more difficult for them to avoid internal disagreements, contributing to the serious internal dissention in 1792 that foreshadowed the eruption of violence among patriot leaders. The Dutch patriot elites, for their part, created highly hierarchical private and public networks. The division between the two types of networks, heightened by their reliance on courtly epistolary habits, inhibited their efforts to forge alliances with the growing popular militia movement. These divisions were a factor in the Dutch patriots' failure, in the short term, to successfully achieve their goal of seizing and holding national political power.

Against the backdrop of the 1933 and 1959 Cuban Revolutions, dance became highly politicized as performers interacted with the state and expressed ideas choreographically about race, gender, and social change. Starting in the 1930s, citizens invested in ballet as a means for cultural progress. In the 1940s and 1950s, a growing cadre of ballet professionals and their supporters advocated for the government to subsidize the form. Simultaneously, carnival, cabaret, and concert dancers sparked widespread discussion about nation and racial formation, specifically the place of blackness and whiteness in Cuba. As a result, performers and patrons established the political valence of dance as means for reflecting on larger questions about self and society. After 1959, dancers adapted to the regime change while pursuing longstanding projects. Ballet dancers performed aggressive choreography in fatigues, along with traditional ballets from Europe and Russia, as part of their revolutionary repertoire. Dance teachers built upon previous pedagogical efforts and contributed to new social engineering projects to “improve” Cuban youth. In parallel, modern and folkloric dancers choreographically critiqued patriarchy and race relations in a supposedly post-racial society. These performances developed a Cuban way of dancing and watching dance, the latter characterized as engaged and talkative. Dancers and publics built a vibrant establishment that eventually transcended national borders with Cubans dancing and teaching abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, dancers contributed to the growing tourist industry and pushed for institutional changes at home in the late 1980s. In 1990, Cuba entered a crisis that destabilized the relationship between dance and politics that had developed over the previous six decades. During this period, different dance forms including cabaret, carnival, ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance received various levels of public and state support. I argue that there were important continuities in dance hierarchies with ballet holding the greatest cultural and political capital starting in the 1930s. I also contend that dancers of different genres employed similar tactics to navigate sociopolitical shifts and expressive parameters across the decades. They consistently shaped dance institutions and asserted the value of their work to revolution and nationhood. This social and cultural history of Cuban dance sheds light on the reach and limitations of state power in Cuba as numerous constituencies engaged with the revolution, maneuvering for agency within a limited public sphere.

What role did documents play in the governance of the British Empire during an age of unprecedented geopolitical transformation? Paperwork, Governance, and Archive in the British Empire During the Age of Revolutions answers this question by examining the role of paperwork in British imperial governance in the Atlantic World during the eras of the American and French Revolutions. The dissertation argues that paperwork served as the facilitative technology through which administrative interactions between metropolitan officials and their imperial servants were conducted. Through the creation and circulation of particular material forms, late eighteenth century bureaucrats across the different offices involved in imperial administration–including the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, the Secretary of State, and the Customs–articulated and enforced an ‘imperial constitution’ that elevated the power of royal sovereignty in the governance of the British empire. This role of paperwork remained consistent throughout the late eighteenth century despite the pressures of revolution and war that transformed the imperial state in other respects. But at the end of the eighteenth century, imperial administrators developed a new approach to documents that had previously been pronounced only in domestic governance: the transformation of the archive from its role as a container of documents, into an active site of policy-making. Paperwork–meaning any document produced either in response to official demand, or written by bureaucrats in the execution of the processes of administration; and the constellations of practices in which bureaucrats engaged when using them–made Britain’s otherwise ungovernable empire cohere across vast oceanic and territorial expanses. Through the dispatch and circulation of particular forms, the different institutions responsible for exercising authority over imperial possessions in the Atlantic Basin enacted the specific administrative tasks that preserved the political viability of the imperial constitution. Every act of governance involved the seemingly limitless production of paperwork: from collecting taxes (reliant upon keeping account books and receipts) and navigating ships (dependent upon logbooks and geographical atlases), to negotiating treaties (through diplomatic letter writing and drafting) and maintaining order (requiring the composition and circulation of legal codes). The first chapter of the dissertation provides an overview of the structure and growth of imperial bureaucracy and communications in the British empire during the long eighteenth century. The second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters examine how the central institutions involved in governing the British empire in the Atlantic world, including the Board of Trade; the Secretary of State; the Admiralty; and the Customs and Treasury, used documents. While each of these different institutions relied upon different kinds of documents in executing their administrative tasks, in each case the administrative use of paperwork articulated, enforced, and facilitated the relationships of hierarchy and deference between metropolitan and colonial administrators that characterized sovereignty in the British empire. The administrative use of paperwork, these chapters show, centered upon bureaucrats’ use of documents to demonstrate to their superiors that they understood expectations for proper official conduct, and were acting accordingly. This constitutional and facilitative role of documents, the dissertation argues, continued to inhere in administrative culture during the late eighteenth century despite a set of significant political challenges–notably the American and French Revolutions–to British imperial power. Yet, in one key respect, the material practices of imperial bureaucracy changed in this period. Beginning in the 1790s, administrators began to systematically use the vast archives of paperwork accumulating in the offices and repositories of the British state as sources of knowledge and evidence to inform the development of imperial strategy against the French in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. These practices of archival use revived modes of bureaucratic governance that had been developed centuries earlier, and were characteristics of a distinctively ‘early modern’ style of administration. The dissertation concludes by suggesting the complications that this history of the bureaucratic archive introduces for extant accounts of British ‘modernity.’ For over a century, scholarship has fruitfully attended to the ideological origins, political development, and administrative history of the British empire in the long eighteenth century. But virtually all of this research has looked through paperwork for evidence of other phenomena, rather than attempting to understand the significance that contemporaries ascribed to the material forms they used. By accounting for the role of documents in the history of British imperial governance, the dissertation also models an approach to writing the histories of states and empires that departs from both structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives on governance by attending instead to the specificities of bureaucratic practice.

Thema: Lateinamerika – ein Sub-Kontinent scheint im Windschatten der Weltpolitik zu stehen. Doch südlich des Rio Grande steht die Zeit nicht still – ganz im Gegenteil! Hier sind Prozesse im Gange, die oft einmalig, manchmal auch wegweisend sind, jedoch stets zum Nachdenken anregen. Die sehr verschiedenen Rollen, die das Militär in den politischen Systemen dieser Länder gespielt hat und heute spielt, wird von lateinamerikanischen und deutschen Autoren diskutiert. Dabei geht es um regionale Sicherheit im 21. Jahrhundert, aber auch um differenzierte Blicke in die Geschichte. Statistiken bieten einen guten Überblick über das Militärische, und Buchbesprechungen zum Politischen runden den Schwerpunkt dieses Winterheftes ab. Streitplatz: Rot-Grün ist beendet, Bilanz wird gezogen. Dies nicht nur bei den Finanzen, sondern auch in der Außenpolitik. Wie fällt diese im Kapitel „Ostpolitik“ aus? Die Antworten werden sicherlich kontrovers sein. Schwarz-Rot hat begonnen. Auch für die neue Regierung wird das Verhältnis zu den östlichen Nachbarn zur einer Herausforderung, gleich ob zu Prag, Warschau, Kiew oder Moskau. Wie diese Beziehungen gestaltet werden sollen, ist auch umstritten. Jochen Franzke bilanziert kritisch die Ostpolitik der letzten Jahre und plädiert für einen konzeptionellen Wechsel. Welt- Trends startet mit diesem Beitrag eine neue Debatte zur deutschen Außenpolitik.

The role of the military in the Peruvian revolution of 1968 is the key point of this article. The author, founder of the ELN guerrilla organization, worked together with the military and describes its situation and intentions in a very personal way. Different internal and external factors that led to the failure of the revolution are analysed in detail. The conflicts between the left-wing military and the civilian left are especially emphasized.

Können Araber Demokratie? Im Jahr II des Arabischen Frühlings werden erste zarte Triebe der Hoffnungen, die in diese Richtung neigten, von Soldatenstiefeln und flüchtenden Demonstranten zertreten. Die versiegelte Zeit brach auf, doch was ist erreicht worden? In der neuen Ausgabe ziehen wir eine Bilanz, die ebenso sachlich wie zwiespältig ist. Sie zeigt Erfolge, ohne zu beschönigen. Probleme werden sichtbar gemacht, aber auch Wege zu ihrer Lösung. Auch Europa ist gefragt: Wir müssen zu einem neuen, partnerschaftlichen Verhältnis mit den sich wandelnden arabischen Nationen finden!

This study examines whether social media had an influence on the revolution in Egypt. Social media was an important tool for the revolution since the president Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian regime strictly controls the media. However social media was not the determining factor for the revolution, the revolt evolved due to many underlying factors. Social media facilitated communication, made the mobilization effective and, spread information to the inhabitants and to the rest of the world. The authors are discussing this theme from the new institutionalism perspective, democracy- and revolutionary theories and based on six selected interview persons; activists, researchers and journalists.

This thesis points to the existence of a bourgeois revolution in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Against all approaches of the historiography on the subject which employ outmoded criteria and point to a duality between the moments in 1908 and 1923 / it employs contemporary arguments on bourgeois revolutions and argues that the Ottoman Empire witnessed a single revolutionary sequence which occurred between July 1908 and November 1922. The thesis also suggests the idea that this single revolutionary sequence of the Ottoman Empire was a bourgeois revolution.