My dissertation interrogates Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s representation of African women in her literary oeuvre. I argue that her female characters bear witness to intersecting oppressions of African women portraying them as being extremely marginalized at home and lacking achievable alternate homes. This study also interrogates Adichie’s feminist philosophy and posits that she typically agitates for equality for all regardless of sex, gender, race, and/or other defining identities. Lastly, I argue that Adichie uses the practice of the African novel to rewrite the character of African women in African literature where her uniqueness hinges on her interrogation of the place of Africans in contemporary world culture, in turn, uses the novel to critique society’s hierarchies of privilege and oppression and of stereotypical representation of Africa and Africans in the world arena.

This narrative chronicles the dissemination of sacred music from the eastern seaboard to the West and South spanning a time frame from the colonial era to the latter part of the Early Nationalist Period (1700-1820). Musical culture in its migration away from the eastern seaboard also parallels the greater western and southern expansion of the United States from its initial configuration of localized regional subgroups to the beginnings of a larger national identity. From this conceptual base, sacred music becomes a vehicle for understanding not only religious and musical changes over time, but also the broader maturity of a nation. Focusing on this period allows for inquiries both into the development of hymnody in the Middle Atlantic, and the subsequent developments of the West and South. These chronological delimitations allow for a discussion of musical practice beginning with formative sacred music developments and continuing to the incorporation of techniques shaped by reform-minded musicians from the eastern seaboard. The following topics guided the construction of this thesis: explicating how the Middle Atlantic region shaped compositional trends, aesthetic, and performance practice of the American West and South; identifying the various southern cultures as understood by eighteenth and nineteenth-century southerners and their application to sacred music practice; understanding how nineteenth-century Americans distinguished between the West and the South; understanding how southern and western music relates to individual denominations and cultures within these areas; and understanding performance practice common to the evangelical and non-evangelical branches of individual sects. Identifying patterns of development in American sacred music of the South and West involves documentation of performance practice, denominational aesthetics, and tunebook bibliography. The study of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century material by twentieth-and-twenty-first-century writers has falsely defined cultural borders of this region according to a post-bellum conceptualization of the boundaries of the North and South. Prior to 1850, writers defined their borders according to a different set of geographic boundaries than today. Consequently, this thesis differs in terms of geographic and cultural definitions of the North and South from current scholarship because of this writer’s application of colonial and Early Nationalist understandings of American culture.

This thesis focuses on the domestic use of plant-based medicines within Early Modern English and Colonial American households, and establishes the defining framework of a domestic botanical culture. It reconstructs the relationship between domestic, popular, and learned medical cultures to reveal the breadth of that practice, demonstrating the unique characteristics of the domestic culture which are underpinned by a shared canon of herbs and a high degree of flexible adaptability by individual practitioners. The botanicals (medicinal plants and the remedies made from them) are themselves analysed through the genres of household receipt book manuscripts, private letters, and journals, as well as almanacs, vernacular medical books, travel writing and settler texts in order to explore more fully and expand our understanding of the domestic culture within a broad social setting. Oral, scribal, and print networks are reconstructed in order to demonstrate that domestic medical practitioners shared a distinctive and influential medical construct, commonly portrayed by current scholarship as a mere reflection of popular and learned practices. Close engagement with both Early Modern English and Colonial women’s receipt books in particular reveals a commonality of practice based upon a shared materia medica which was sensitive and responsive to individual adaptation. Old and new world herbs are examined as a means of providing ingress into this shared and communal domestic practice, as well as to highlight the prevalence and importance of household individualization. The clear commonality of plants in trans-Atlantic domestic use demonstrates a continuous, shared, inherited practice which ends only with eighteenth-century Colonial inclusion of indigenous plants not found in the shared canon. Contemporary views of Early Modern and Colonial domestic medical practice are explored in order to argue that far from simply reflecting learned medical thinking and practice, domestic knowledge and use of botanical medicines was uniquely practical, communal, and flexible in its administration and expression.

Against the Tide investigates systematically for the first time how resistances to methodologies advanced by historians associated with the Annales School, one of the most influential twentieth-century schools of historical thought, came to exist in England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States between 1900 and 1970. It defines ‘methodology' in broad terms as the practice of history and poses a series of questions about resistances: who or what created them? What constituted them? Did they centre on a particular methodology, Annales historian or the Annales School as a whole? And what did opposition to methodologies incorporate: technical debates in isolation or wider issues associated with politics, religion and philosophy? The dissertation uses an interdisciplinary conceptual framework,drawing together ideas advanced in the history of science, sociology of education and knowledge, and comparative history, in order to answer these questions. The responses offered refer to and draw on a selection of sources: one hundred and nine scholars' private archives, the articles, books, critical reviews and published letters of a variety of historians and segments of the growing literature both about the Annales School and about the institutions within which the historical discipline operated during the twentieth century. They suggest that resistances played an important part in the international dissemination of Annales historians' methodologies, that resistors held different ideas about the Annales School from those of its creators and divergent methodological commitments, but that they like Annales historians often sought to enhance historical research and sometimes worked on the same subjects but in different and occasionally equally inventive ways. Overall, the findings illustrate a limited but important part of Annales' own history and thereby help to cast the School in new light on terms other than its own by placing it in the transnational context of twentieth-century transatlantic historiography.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / This thesis explores international and domestic factors that constitute continuities in U.S. foreign and security policy regarding trans-Atlantic relations. Since the founding of the Atlantic Alliance burden sharing has been one of the major sources of conflict between the United States and its European NATO allies. Despite the reluctance to spend more than minimal amounts on military capabilities in most European NATO countries the issue did not become a major concern in the U.S. Congress between 1951 and 1966. It was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that proposals - including the Mansfield Resolutions and Amendments - were introduced in the Senate calling for a substantial reduction in the number of U.S. troops in Europe. The debates provoked by these proposals threw light on the various determinants of U.S. policy towards Europe. The contemporary relevance of the issue resides in the fact that most of the elements responsible for the emergence of the Mansfield Amendments are still influential in U.S. foreign and security policy. This circumstance might lead to comparable proposals and debates in the near future. / Civilian, Hungarian Ministry of Defense

This thesis examines the changes that occurred in the French identity of Huguenot immigrants to colonial Carolina. In their pursuit of prosperity and religious toleration, the Huguenots' identity evolved from one of French religious refugees to that of white South Carolinians. How and why this evolution occurred is the focus of this study. Upon arriving in the colony in the 1680s and 1690s, the Huguenots' identity was based on several common factors: their French language, their Calvinist religion, and their French heritage. As the immigrant group began to build their new lives in Carolina, these identifying factors began to disappear. The first generation's identity evolved from French immigrants to British subjects when they were challenged on the issues of their political and religious rights and, in response to these challenges, requested to become naturalized subjects. The second generation faced economic challenges that pitted planters against the wealthier merchants in a colony-wide debate over the printing of paper currency. This conflict created divisions within the Huguenot group as well and furthered their identity from British subjects to planters or merchants. Another shift in the Huguenots' identity took place within the third generation when they were faced with a slave uprising in 1739. The Huguenots' involvement in finding a legislative solution to the revolt completes this evolutionary process as the grandchildren of the immigrant generation become white South Carolinians. This thesis expands the historical data available on immigrant groups and their behaviors within colonial settlements.

This submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy focuses on works for large instrumental ensemble in conjunction with the voice. Instrumental ensemble and vocal mediums such as the orchestral art song, the song cycle and the opera in one act, provide platforms to explore the expressiveness of the lyrical dramatic voice and the dialectic tension between composing for the solo voice with a range of instrumental ensemble forces. The portfolio of compositions includes the orchestral song, The Woman Who Refused to Dance; the orchestral song trilogy, Spirit Songs; and the opera in one act, Queen Nanny of the Maroons. Issues of composition technique, vocal expression and operatic narrative are examined and in addition the three named works explore notions of post-colonial heroic representation of subjects that might not usually attract ideological recognition in Western European art music contexts. Methods for developing inclusive, post-modern musical language for the mixed instrumental and vocal ensemble are explored; including the employment of spoken word expression and the integration of popular music idioms within contemporary Western European art music contexts. In the writing of lyrics for the songs and libretto for the opera, increased responsibility is assumed in the completion of vocal works in addition to musical consideration to find the effects on the works when the roles of composer and writer are combined. With the opera in one act for solo voice, forming the major contribution to the portfolio, critical components that lead to effective music drama are assessed.

PhD (English) / Department of English / See the attached abstract below

In Spain, in 1501 the conversion of Muslims to Christianity was thought possible, hence the decreed baptisms; by the end of the century metanoia was deemed impossible. Similarly, religious otherness was thought to be surmountable; yet, it ultimately became indelible or racialized. These construction processes helped to discursively justify the expulsions of Christians, baptized descendants of Muslims, in the years 1609-1614. The importance of language in these justifications was arrived at through the study of referential language in texts, and a trans-Atlantic comparative approach. The discursive (re)construction and (re)inscription of otherness were traced through a variety of sixteenth-century ecclesial texts. Before these communities came to be named the so-called “moriscos” there were important changes in meaning and usage of other phrases and terms, such as “new Christian” and “newly converted.” The referential language was still in transition throughout the century and the processes are easily hidden by the historiographical premature and (over)use of the term “morisco.” Moreover, the full transition toward the racialized term “morisco” occurred closer to the eighteenth century and mostly across the Atlantic. The justifications rely on these communities being non-Christian and non-Spanish: suspect and alien. “Morisco” is not often a good metonymy. The fact that “moriscos” discursively came to be considered non-Spanish and non-Christian did not mean that there was actual discernible or insurmountable otherness. Therefore, a level of difference in the peninsula was posited through the study of referential language related to Amerindians before and after baptism: especially given that Amerindians remained “indios” after baptism—an indication that difference could be overcome in the peninsula. Furthermore, an analysis of the Sistema de Castas where “morisco” was used revealed that the proliferation of categories on both sides of the Atlantic was to prevent these communities from ever reaching the status of old Christian or Spanish.

One of the unsolved problems of modern science is whether the pre-Columbian peoples of the New World developed completely independently of cultural influences from the Old World or if there was a trans-oceanic contact? A number of scientists agree that there are many – and often remarkable – similarities between the cultures of pre-Columbian America and those of the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, there is no agreement, as yet, on how cultural diffusion can be differentiated from independent invention. Scientific analysis shows that scholarly positions are often strongly pre-formed from paradigms (scientific based assumptions), which tend to hinder consideration of solid scientific data offered by geo-biology and its trans-disciplinary examination of the subject under investigation here. An unambiguous answer to the question, what historical processes led to the emergence of the ancient American agriculture, hasn\'t been given. However, the archaeological discovery of crops with clear trans-oceanic origin, in addition to advances in molecular biology, increasingly support the hypothesis that humans from the distant past influenced each other across the oceans at a much earlier stage. The vegetation and zoo-geography indicate, by numerous examples that some species could only have spread through perhaps unintentional (passive) human transmission [1]. There are two very old crops found in the „New World‟, which contradict the paradigm of a completely independent origin for American agriculture. These are the African Bottle Gourd (Lagenaria siceraria L.) and the ancestral cotton species (Gossypium herbaceum L.) of the domesticated spin able sub-genus of tetraploid cotton. The historical spread of both types has been under discussion for decades, especially in respect of trans-oceanic human contact with the American continent. There has also been a debate in the \"Old World\" ever since the discovery of nicotine and cocaine in Egyptian mummies, centering around whether \"New World\" plants (or the ingredients) might have been transmitted in the reverse direction, back to the presumed start in centers of the Ancient World\'s oldest civilizations.