In late imperial China the forensic examination of dead bodies in homicide cases was a sophisticated field of technical practice which developed through the collaboration of coroners, legal specialists, and literati-officials. After the fall of the Qing empire (1644-1911), successive governments of the Republican period (1912-1949) adopted the late imperial state's technologies of forensic examination in their attempts to institute a modern court system. This dissertation investigates the process through which modern police, coroners, legal officials, laboratory scientists, and urban publics debated, reimagined, and ultimately accepted this long-standing field of technical practice as a foundation for the modern Chinese state and its legal order. The first half of this dissertation examines the forensic practices of the Qing empire and the ways in which they were integrated into Republican statecraft after 1912. Chapters One and Two argue that the late imperial bureaucracy successfully implemented a centralized system of forensic examination that shaped the ways in which coroners and local officials throughout the empire inspected dead bodies, analyzed causes of death, and documented their findings. Relying on the wide distribution of minimal amounts of forensic knowledge and skill, this arrangement made possible high degrees of consistency in examination practices while facilitating central authorities' bureaucratic supervision over local forensic cases. While the "expertise" of individual coroners could become important under certain circumstances, it was not necessary for the legitimation of forensic evidence or knowledge in routine homicide cases. Rather, the bureaucracy expected that officials and coroners would simply follow official procedure, a way of legitimating inquest findings that could be used effectively across local jurisdictions despite uneven levels of forensic knowledge and skill among local officials and coroners. Chapters Three and Four turn to the important role that these forensic practices played in Republican Beijing for the dual projects of administering the city and constructing a modern court system. Through a case study of the forensic work of police, coroners, and judicial officials in the city and around north China, these chapters argue that by adopting the bureaucratized examination practices of the late imperial state, the Republican court system facilitated modern procurators' professional jurisdiction over a crucial area of the administration of justice while facilitating the integration of forensic evidence and judicial investigation. It is in this sense that coroners and their forensic practices came to play a crucial role in the emergence of a modern legal order. The second half of the dissertation explores the ways in which new conceptions and practices of scientific expertise were reconciled with the older, yet still authoritative, practices of late imperial forensics. Chapter Five explores the ways in which a new discourse of professional knowledge and expertise based on conceptual distinctions between "experience" and "theory" led to a complex reconceptualization of the epistemological status of late imperial forensic knowledge. While this new discourse served to legitimate new forms of forensic expertise based on scientific medicine, it also provided coroners and others invested in late imperial forensic practices with possibilities for reimagining older conceptions of knowledge in new, epistemologically authoritative ways. Chapters Six and Seven turn to the ways in which anatomic-pathological dissection and laboratory science were integrated into the forensic investigation of deaths in Republican judicial practice. Chapter Six argues that the implementation of forensic autopsies in Republican Shanghai and, to a lesser extent, Beijing did not in fact challenge judicial officials' and coroners' professional authority over the forensic inspection of dead bodies. Chapter Seven examines the ways in which a new community of medico-legal scientists in 1930s Shanghai and Beijing attempted to extend their forensic expertise from the laboratory into local courtrooms. By tracing the itineraries of the physical evidence examined in the first medico-legal laboratories, this chapter shows that the local coroners who collected the evidence for testing played a crucial role in the establishment of legal medicine in China. Chapter Eight turns to the ways in which coroners themselves made use of modern science to legitimize their own, older forensic practices. By exploring the ways in which legal officials, coroners, and medico-legal scientists made use of popularized science in their attempts to update late imperial forensic practices, this chapter demonstrates that "science" had diverse meanings, could legitimate disparate forms of knowledge and expertise, and could support different professional causes - not simply that of professional legal medicine. Far from passive objects of forensic examination, the dead bodies that populate this dissertation are active agents: they challenged examiners with mysterious wounds, ambiguous anatomy, or the tendency to decay away along with the evidence. As sensational objects of media coverage or simply reminders of the unjustly dead, the cultural and social meanings of corpses influenced the actions of those who examined them, demonstrating in the process the dialogue that science always maintains with culture and society. By foregrounding the ways in which "experts" of all kinds engaged with the material challenges and legal and cultural meanings of the dead body, this study demonstrates the dynamic interrelatedness, or co-production, of experts and objects of expertise, of social power and natural knowledge, and of statecraft and science.

This dissertation studies premodern temple architecture, freestanding sculpted stones, and Tamil language inscriptions patronized by south Indian merchants in south India and China. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, Indian Ocean trade was at its apex, connecting populations on European and Asian continents through complex interlocking networks. Southern India's Tamil region, in particular, has been described as the fulcrum of the Indian Ocean circuit; however, knowledge of intra-Asian contact and exchange from this period has been derived mostly from Arabic and Chinese sources, which are abundant in comparison with the subcontinent's dearth of written history. My project redresses this lacuna by investigating the material culture of Tamil merchants, and aims to recover their history through visual evidence, authored by individuals who left few written traces of their voyages across the Indian Ocean. The arguments of my dissertation are based primarily on unpublished and unstudied monuments and inscriptions, weaving together threads from multiple disciplines--art history, literature, epigraphy, and social theory--and from across cultures, the interconnected region of the eastern Indian Ocean and the South China Seas, spanning the Sanskritic, Tamil, Malay, and Sinocentric realms. My dissertation challenges traditional narratives of Indian art history that have long attributed the majority of monumental architecture to royal patrons, focusing instead on the artistic production of cosmopolitan merchants who navigated both elite and non-elite realms of society. I argue that by constructing monuments throughout the Indian Ocean trade circuit, merchants with ties to southern India's Tamil region formulated a coherent group identity in the absence of a central authority. Similar impulses also are visible in merchants' literary production, illustrated through several newly translated panegyric texts, which preface mercantile donations appearing on temple walls in the modern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Moreover, my work analyzes the complex processes of translation visible in literary and material culture commissioned by merchants, resulting from inter-regional and intercultural encounters among artisans, patrons, and local communities. Rather than identifying a monolithic source for merchants' artistic innovations, in each chapter I demonstrate the multiple ways in which merchants employed visual codes from different social realms (courtly, mercantile, and agrarian) to create their built environments. In Chapter Four, I provide a detailed reconstruction and historical chronology of a late thirteenth century temple in Quanzhou, coastal Fujian Province, and southeastern China, which both echoes and transforms architectural forms of contemporaneous temples in India's Tamil region. Piecing together over 300 carvings discovered in the region in light of archaeological and art historical evidence, I develop a chronology of the temple's history, and propose that Ming forces destroyed the temple scarcely a century after its creation. In Chapter Three, I interpret stone temples patronized by the largest south Indian merchant association, the Ainnurruvar, as being integral to their self-fashioning in India and abroad. While the temples do not project a merchant identity per se, I show that they employ an artistic vocabulary deeply entrenched in the visual language of the Tamil region. Chapter Two looks at other forms through which merchants created a shared mercantile culture, including literary expressions and freestanding sculptural stones. These texts demonstrate that merchants engaged in both elite and non-elite artistic production. Chapter One analyzes the distribution, content, and context of Tamil merchant sponsored inscriptions within the Indian Ocean circuit, focusing on the modern regions of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh. An appendix offers new translations of important Tamil language mercantile inscriptions discovered throughout south India.

At the heart of this dissertation is a detailed analysis of the Sasun violence of 1893-1894. I used a variety of sources: consular reports (British, American, French, Russian, Italian); missionary material from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM); and Ottoman archival documents. My dissertation examines how different accounts of the violence were disseminated and censored in the years following the violence of 1894. My central argument is that State centralization and the efforts of the Ottoman State to maintain a monopoly of legitimate violence and legitimate narrative must be understood in order to explain both the violence in Sasun and the larger breakdown of communal relations between the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire. To summarize by way of chapter headings and short descriptions: I first examine two sharply divergent explanations for what happened in the mountains of Sasun in August and September of 1894. The first narrative, maintained by scholars within Ottoman Studies, presents the violence in Sasun as the first major rebellion of Armenian nationalists against the State. The second narrative, held by many scholars in Armenian Studies, has presented the violence as the first major episode of Ottoman State mass violence against its Armenian populace. This difference in interpreting the violence of Sasun as either a massacre or a rebellion can be traced back to 1894. Although these narratives are based on very different primary documents and assumptions, they both analyze the events in Sasun in terms of a broader story of Armenian Nationalism and State opposition to that Nationalism. The scholars of Ottoman Studies who have delved into the question of what happened in Sasun in 1894 have relied primarily on one account, a report by Zeki Paşa, the commander of the Ottoman forces in the area. Scholars within Armenian Studies have used a more diverse set of sources to tell the story (memoirs, foreign consul accounts, and contemporary newspapers). The goal of this dissertation is to trace all of the available narratives of Sasun to their origins and to evaluate all of the evidence together. I conclude the first chapter with a different approach that places more weight on the longue durée history of the Ottoman State’s efforts to centralize its authority by gaining a monopoly of both legitimate force and legitimate narrative. In the second chapter I examine how three technologies (modern firearms, steamboats and telegraphs) were used to centralize Ottoman authority in the East. Through these technologies, the Ottoman State was able to first conquer and then, over the course of decades, entrench State rule in areas that had hitherto been autonomous. This centralization had some unintended effects as the new technologies dramatically changed local relations in Muş and Sasun. The spread of high-powered firearms from Europe, the availability of steam travel on the Black Sea and telegraphs dramatically changed local relations in Muş and Sasun. From the point of view of the inhabitants of Muş and Sasun, this period of centralization or reordering (Tanzimat) represented nothing less than a violent conquest by the State. As the local Emirs that traditionally ruled in plain of Muş were toppled, a new system of Warlord-Bureaucrats (assigned by the Ottoman Central Authority) grew in its place. For many, this new system simply meant that, increasingly, local resources were sent off to build palaces in Istanbul. One of the unintended consequences of these transformations was the creation of new forms of political identity as Armenian peasants from many areas began in Istanbul to identify their homeland as a geographically bounded place known as ‘Armenia.’ In the third chapter, I situate the beginning of the ‘Armenian issue’ as a struggle near Muş between Armenian peasants and their warlord Musa Bey. When peasants from Muş staged a protest against Musa Bey in Istanbul, the local struggle soon gained international attention. To undercut the charges of corruption, Abdülhamid II ordered Musa Bey to Istanbul to stand trial. When Musa Bey was acquitted in a highly irregular three-day trial, a group of young students at the Istanbul Medical School joined together with students from abroad to form the first branch of the Hunchak (Bell), a radical movement for Armenian political liberation. Back in Muş, the struggle between peasants and Warlord-Bureaucrats such as Musa Bey was a major factor in the creation of the Fedayi movement, a collection of Armenian self-defense groups who espoused Armenian political liberation. The combination of international attention, the formation of the Hunchak in Istanbul and the advent of the Fedayi in the Eastern provinces terrified the Ottoman State. Convinced that history was repeating itself, in the manner of the Bulgarian rebellion of 1876, the Ottoman State sanctioned greater repression of any dissent or sign of political organization within the Armenian communities of the East. Certain officials within the Ottoman Government benefited financially from this more authoritarian governance, and used the paranoia of the Ottoman center to enrich themselves. The result of all of this are the massacres in the Sasun mountains where Ottoman soldiers systematically murdered one to two thousand Armenian villagers, and burned their villages, over the course of three weeks in August to September of 1894. In the fourth chapter, I examine how the violence of Sasun was interpreted differently, for example, by the investigations of missionaries and consuls, and by the censorship regime of Abdülhamid II. The main goal here is to show that the Ottoman State relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report written by Zeki Paşa. Zeki Paşa’s report became the measure of ‘truth’ within the Ottoman State. To retain a monopoly of legitimate narrative, the Ottoman State utilized various forms of censorship – from banning newspapers from abroad, to forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman Press, and from preventing peasants from the area from travelling, and eventually banning all journalists from abroad. At the same time, news of the massacres spread through word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire. When news of the violence finally reached London through missionary networks in mid-November, it ignited a much larger debate about the British Government’s support (now understood by many as complicity) for the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II. In the fifth chapter, I show how, within a year of the violence, two broad stories had coalesced. According to some, it was in Sasun where the Ottoman State first committed an organized massacre against its Armenian populace. According to other accounts, it was in Sasun where Armenian radicals first organized a full-fledged rebellion against the Ottoman State. Although these two stories were often interpreted in a myriad of different ways in Istanbul, London and Boston, the main ideas have been maintained until today in the fields of Ottoman Studies and Armenian Studies.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 12, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Joseph Grabill (chair), Lawrence McBride, James Stanlaw. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 445-457) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: O.L. Davis, Jr. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

<p> Between 1889 and 1914, American mining engineers drew on their experience in mining in the American West into management positions with prominent mining finance firms in the British Empire. The careers of three engineers, Hennen Jennings, John Hays Hammond, and Herbert Hoover, demonstrate their influence on British gold mining investment and on the imperial system. The professional biographies of these engineers demonstrate their racialized labor practices, access to technology and capital, ideas about management, and willingness to interfere in the politics and economies of sovereign nations for the interests of the mining finance industry, notably the Transvaal Republic and late Qing China. In their actions in the colonies, they employed the latest mining technologies to extract gold from low grade ores, imposed labor conditions on the basis of race (including the legal foundations of Apartheid in South Africa), and directed investment capital toward profitable mining in support of the monetary gold standard and shareholder dividends. Along with hundreds of other mining engineers, they oversaw a world-historical expansion of the world&rsquo;s gold supply through the expansion of gold mining on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal Republic and in Western Australia, effectively doubling the world&rsquo;s supply of gold in two decades. </p><p> These engineers were agents of transnational extractive capitalism and the British and American empires. As an integral component of their careers, they operated in the core of empire: major centers of investment such as London and New York, the media and publishing worlds, and even world&rsquo;s fairs. They communicated their professional activities and technical developments through the <i>Engineering and Mining Journal,</i> the premier mining publication of the era. They promoted world&rsquo;s fairs, ensuring that mining was prominently featured as an aspect of civilization at these expositions. They also acted as public intellectuals, speaking and publishing on topics of empire, well beyond the purview of the mine. Based on archival research, contemporary technical journals and media accounts, and autobiographical documents, this dissertation analyzes the influence of American Mining Engineers, both good and bad, in shaping the British Empire and the modern world system before the outbreak of World War 1.</p><p>

abstract: ABSTRACT This collection of poetry focuses on the experiences of a soldier who served six years in the Army National Guard and eleven months in Iraq. The collection is primarily divided into six sections (though each is not separated explicitly) and each section generally involves activities such as training for Iraq, deploying to Iraq, and returning home. In these poems, the speaker recalls different scenes from his experiences: encountering roadside bombs; performing guard duty; burning feces in a can; and living on small military base while at war. The main goal is to provide the reader with an in-depth, sincere, and unfiltered look at the life of a soldier in the military, and of course, in Iraq. The work relies on mostly free verse form with some of the work utilizing the sonnet form and couplets. The poems were greatly influenced by the work of Modernist Poets including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. This entire collection, which often does fall into that long trail of the war-poem genre, was influenced greatly by the following notable poets who went to war or served in the military: Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Jarrell, and Bruce Weigl. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2012

This study is an examination of how two popular magazines, National Geographic and Life magazine, and one educational journal, Social Education, perform the work of representation in general, and representing China more specifically. Drawing on postcolonial theorists (Blaut, 1993; Said, 1978; Tchen, 1999; wa Thiong'o, 1986; Willinsky, 1998), the perspectives employed throughout this study explore how representations can work to fix meaning and extend difference through imperialist structures and an orientalist lens. In addition, theories of photographic representation work alongside postcolonial perspectives to draw out the constructed nature of representation, and how representation - through language and/or image - can work to capture and secure the meaning of difference and perpetuate division. National Geographic, Life, and Social Education are pedagogical in different ways, yet all three used language and image to bring China into view for the Western reader. Conceptualized as sources of cultural pedagogy, these journals employed specific pedagogical practices, which reinforced imperialist structures of Western dominance over the non-Western world. Notably, National Geographic's travelogue, Life's photo-essay, and Social Education's educational resources, worked to teach/instruct their readers, primarily middle class Americans, about China.

<p> In this thesis, I use the cities of Yamoussoukro, Cote d'Ivoire; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and Montreal, Canada as case studies to analyze the connection between architecture, nationalism, and the influence of colonialism. Each of these cities was directly influenced by French urban development as these cities were reshaped in order to change the people, history, or culture of specific geographies. As these countries gained independence from France they used architecture as a way to express national identity to local populations in order to collectivize them, as well as a way to express this "unified" identity to the international community. This is rooted in the urban policies of the European colonizers which focused on teaching indigenous populations European morality, aesthetics, and rational use of space, but also in the creation of maps, drawings, and other material to express the colonial identity of these territories.</p>

abstract: ABSTRACT Historians of Anglo-American diplomacy in the nineteenth century tend to focus on the beginning of the century, when tensions ran high, or the end, when the United States and Britain sowed the seeds that would grow into one of the most fruitful alliances of the twentieth century. This dissertation bridges the gap between the century's bookends. It employs world history methodology, giving close attention to how each nation's domestic politics and global priorities played a vital role in shaping bilateral relations. In this manner, it explains how two nations that repeatedly approached the brink of war actually shared remarkably similar visions of peace, free trade, and neutral rights throughout the world. A careful consideration of the shifting priorities of the British Empire demonstrates that London approached trans-Atlantic relations as merely one part of a worldwide strategy to preserve its prestige and economic ascendancy. Meanwhile, naval inferiority, sectional tensions, and cultural affinity ensured that American belligerence never crossed the threshold from bluster to military action. By examining a handful of diplomatic crises originating far from the centers of power in London and Washington, this study argues that disputes between the United States and Britain arose from disagreements regarding the proper means to achieve common ends. During nearly half a century between the Monroe Doctrine and the Treaty of Washington, the two countries reached a mutual understanding regarding the best ways to communicate, cooperate, and pursue common economic and geopolitical goals. Giving this period its due attention as the link between post-Revolutionary reconciliation and pre-World War I alliance promotes a more comprehensive understanding of Anglo-American rapprochement in the nineteenth century. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2014