<p> In late 1877, John Fryer Thomas Keane set out on a journey few Christian Europeans had attempted&mdash;completing the <i>h&dotbelow;ajj,</i> or pilgrimage, to Mecca. While some Europeans had undertaken this pilgrimage as Muslims, Keane donned the guise of an Indian Muslim instead of converting to Islam outright. From the <i>h&dotbelow;ajj</i> of Italian Ludovico di Varthema in the early sixteenth century to the nineteenth century travels of Englishmen Sir Richard F. Burton and John Lewis Burkhardt, a select few Westerners embarked upon <i>h&dotbelow;ajj</i> disguised as Muslims in order to reveal the nature of this restricted Islamic ritual practice. After completion of his <i>h&dotbelow;ajj</i>, Keane detailed his journey in a two-volume set. Given his youth and general lack of experience, Keane stands out as a unique, and understudied, traveler among England&rsquo;s nineteenth century disguised <i>h&dotbelow;ajjis.</i> He represented a new form of non-Muslim <i>h&dotbelow;ajji,</i> that of the tourist, who performed the pilgrimage, not out of any academic or imperial needs or wants, but for their own personal enlightenment, adventure, or gain. His <i>h&dotbelow;ajj</i> also demonstrates the growing global interconnectedness of the late nineteenth century. In this thesis, I outline how studying Keane affects our understanding of late nineteenth century Western exploration in Arabia.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

D-Day is an event that has seated itself in collective memory, particularly America, as a seminal moment of the Second World War, and of the 20th century. Often the Allied landings in Upper Normandy are conceptualized as a watershed moment of the Second World War, signaling the eventual, unavoidable defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet, the reality of the situation was far more complicated, as the success of OVERLORD was followed by months of grueling fighting in the Norman bocage. Weeks after the successful landings, the war began to resemble the slow, attritional warfare that had defined the First World War. While the Allies possessed a monumental advantage both in terms of manpower and material, the Germans managed to contain them to a small geographic area, preventing the Allies from bring this advantage to bear. As such, D-Day—though certainly the most well-known aspect of the Normandy campaign—was not the only vitally important operation. In fact, Operation COBRA, the Allied breakout operation, proved to be an inflection point of operations in Normandy. Though it is largely overshadowed by OVERLORD, COBRA proved to be one of the most important military operations in western Europe, allowing the Allies to exploit their massive advantages in material and manpower through a war of maneuver. Operation COBRA is the focus of this analysis, but not in a traditional sense. While COBRA has been largely marginalized, receiving scant attention in general histories of the Second World War, a small but comprehensive historiography on the subject does exists. This body of historical work constitutes a discourse, detailing a changing understanding of COBRA within the Second World War. The focus of this analysis seeks to shift the current paradigm about Operation COBRA, analyzing its legacy in military thought following the Second World War—namely COBRA’s legacy and role in the development of the U.S. Army’s Cold War-era AirLand Battle doctrine. The primary objective of this study is to develop a link between Operation COBRA’s legacy and the development of AirLand Battle doctrine, demonstrating its place in modern military thought. The analysis is developed through four major components. The first section provides a brief overview of Operation COBRA, itself, and seeks to impart readers with a sense of why COBRA was, at the time, mostly unprecedented. The second section, a historiography of COBRA, provides insight to historians’ changing understanding and framing of Operation COBRA. The third section provides a broad overview of AirLand Battle doctrine while also analogizing Operation COBRA and the U.S. Army’s Cold War doctrine. In this way the third section proposes a link between COBRA and AirLand Battle doctrine. Finally, the fourth section attempts to solidify this link by analyzing several decades of papers written at the Army Command and General Staff College, demonstrating a reoccurring discourse that continually linked COBRA to AirLand Battle doctrine. Ultimately, this analysis seeks to bridge the discursive space that exists between historical and modern military thought, as both are necessary for the formation of innovative military doctrine.

World History Since 1500: An Open and Free Textbook is designed to cover world history from 1500 to the present in 15 chapters. The OER-supported textbook can be downloaded as a pdf or viewed online. The textbook serves to weave insights from many perspectives into stories and narratives that will help students develop a framework to organize and connect ideas, geographical locations, and timelines allowing them to think critically and broadly about the world around them. In addition to helping students master the sequence and scope of world history from 1500, the textbook helps develop empathy for people who live and lived in different parts of the world and during different historical times leading to the creation of empathic and knowledgeable global citizens who are aware of and concerned about the world around them. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-oer/1012/thumbnail.jpg

"This study has been undertaken to determine if the World Landmark Books are of the high quality claimed by the publishing house and if therefore they are worthy of inclusion in the libraries serving the twelve-to-fourteen-year-old groups. Since it is planned as a companion study to U. S. Landmarks, An Analysis and Evaluation, a paper done in 1957 by Mrs. Ethel Mestayer Huff, the same general outline and procedure will be followed. This will make possible the comparison and future unification of these two studies, should it seem desirable"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Agnes Gregory, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59).

No description available.

One of the central challenges in modern British historiography is the reconciliation of narratives about the nature and meaning of the British Empire with older themes of class and hierarchy. The historiographical shift to empire and away from class since the 1980s and 1990s coincided with a fundamental shift in Britain's social structure and composition, which itself demands historical explanation. The history of the British honours system - an institution that has blended ideas of class hierarchy with meritocracy and service - can reveal much about social change in twentieth century Britain and its empire. Using a mixture of official and unofficial sources and organized chronologically, my dissertation charts the history of the honours system from the creation of the Order of the British Empire in 1917 to a major set of reforms at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Honours were an active tool of policy and social distinction. Government decisions about who should receive honours and what honours they should receive reveal the importance of different kinds of service and the social class of the individual to be honored. Applied across the whole empire, the system had a double edge: it produced loyalty and kept different social groups in their place. The ever-presence of the institution means that it gives us a consistent benchmark across the twentieth century for what kinds of service was seen as most in need of recognition at different times by the state. The creation of the Order of the British Empire in 1917 opened up the honours system to non-elites, women and a much larger proportion of imperial subjects for the first time, and vastly expanded the number of people who received honours. I argue that change in the honours system during the twentieth century was not a simple matter of linear `democratization', as it is usually portrayed in the British media and by the modern British monarchy and government. Instead, it reflected different priorities at different times. In the empire, the state used honours to buy loyalty from subjects in exchange for social and cultural distinction; however, its symbolism was also appropriated positively and negatively by different groups to make political claims on or against the imperial state. Changes in who got what honours almost always had a specific purpose, and were often rapid. Initially conceived as a way of rewarding voluntary war work, in peacetime the Order of the British Empire was reworked to become an honour where the majority of awards went to paid central state servants. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in which government experts were well-rewarded with honours, politicians and bureaucrats made an effort to distribute honours more widely around the community. Teachers, health workers and other providers of local services benefitted from this change, as the honours system within Britain expanded almost in direct correlation to its shrinking global influence as the British Empire fragmented. At the end of the century, John Major's Conservative government made a deliberate decision to focus once again on voluntary service to the state. This uncontroversial shift in focus helped to bring together two of the functions of the modern British monarchy: its role since the nineteenth century as the official leader of the voluntary sector, and its function as the authenticator of public recognition through the honours system. This theoretically `classless' reform to the honours system reinforced existing divisions in British society by distinguishing between lower-ranked voluntary work and high-ranked professional, philanthropic and celebrity service. There was no clear-cut distinction between merit and hierarchy in the honours system. As a result, in periods of major social change in twentieth-century Britain, honours had an active role in reshaping social hierarchies in Britain and in parts of the empire/former empire. Honours obfuscated the meaning of distinction in modern Britain through the system's connection to the monarchy and its broad use as a political, imperial and social tool. A complicated and entangled combination of personality, status, merit, peer review and luck determined who received what honours. As a result, Britain's premier system for publicly recognizing service and distinguishing status could never fully differentiate between these two functions. In part this was because those who ran it did not desire to separate hierarchy from distinguished service, and because such separation was effectively impossible within existing frameworks. Citizens, subjects, interest groups and post-colonial governments used honours to challenge political and social structures, but it was difficult to break out of the fundamental framework in which honours gave distinction and status in exchange for a performance of loyalty to the Crown. The only escape was the complete rejection of the system, which was a rare choice except in certain parts of the former empire.

Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources as well as published materials in Arabic and modern Turkish, this dissertation analyzes how the Hijaz and the hajj to Mecca simultaneously became objects of Ottoman modernization, global public health, international law, and inter-imperial competition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that from the early 1880s onward, Ottoman administrators embarked on an ambitious redefinition of the empire’s Arab tribal frontiers. Through modern engineering, technology, medicine, and ethnography, they set out to manage human life and the resources needed to sustain it, transform Bedouins into proper subjects, and gradually replace autonomous political life with more rigorous forms of territorial power. At the same time, with the advent of the steamship colonial regimes identified Mecca as the source of a “twin infection” of sanitary and security threats. Repeated outbreaks of cholera marked steamship-going pilgrimage traffic as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from diasporic networks of anti-colonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. In contrast to scholarship framing biopolitical surveillance over the hajj as a colonial project, I emphasize the interplay between European and Ottoman visions of quarantines, medical inspections, steamship regulations, passports, and border controls. As with other more overtly strategic projects, such as rail and telegraph lines, I argue that the Ottoman state sought to harness the increasing medicalization of the hajj, Hijazi society, and the Arabian environment as part of a broader assemblage of efforts to consolidate its autonomous southern frontiers. Although historians have frequently held up the Hijaz and the pilgrimage to Mecca as natural assets for the invention of Hamidian tradition and legitimacy, they have often failed to recognize or clearly articulate how the very globalizing technologies of steam, print, and telegraphy, which made the dissemination and management of the Sultan-Caliph’s carefully curated image possible, were only just beginning to make the erection of more meaningful structures of Ottoman governmentality, biopolitical security, and territorial sovereignty in the Hijaz possible. And while modern technologies clearly lay at the very heart of the Hamidian impulse to reform, develop, and modernize the empire, concomitantly these very same technologies were also extending British India’s extraterritorial reach into the Hijaz. Thus, as an alternative to the traditional “Pan-Islamic” framing of the late Ottoman Hijaz, this study seeks to identify the assemblages of legal, documentary, technological, scientific, and environmental questions, the “everyday details” and quotidian “mechanics,” which were actually escalating and intensifying Anglo-Ottoman and wider international clashes over the status of the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj. In a sense, this dissertation is also a history of negation, absence, and contradiction. In order to better understand the possibilities and the limits of late Ottoman rule in the Hijaz, I spend much of this study detailing the enormous obstacles to territorial sovereignty and modern governmentality through an investigation of their Janus-faced inversions, autonomy and extraterritoriality. I argue that the autonomous legal status, exceptions, and special privileges enjoyed by both the Sharifate of Mecca and the Hijazi population (Bedouin and urban) laid bare the compromised nature and limits of Ottoman sovereignty and provided both the gateway and the rationale for the extension of the Capitulations and European extraterritorial protection into corners of the Ottoman world and Muslim spiritual affairs, which prior to the late-nineteenth century had been inconceivable.

This work argues that youth and student organizations in Senegal and Congo became the primary catalysts for mass social struggles that challenged new national governments between 1958 and 1974. From the mid-1950s, young activists in both countries (along with many trade union leaders) debated emerging African political leaders over what constituted “independence.” These debates sharpened after the control of political institutions was devolved from French to African authorities between 1958 and 1960. As I show, rather than celebrating formal independence, many youth, student, and trade union organizations claimed that new African state leaders were complicit in the ongoing foreign domination of politics, education, and their national economies. Young activists contrasted formal independence with their demands for “real independence,” which included criteria such as the expulsion of French troops, an end to French and missionary influence over the education system, and the nationalization of foreign-owned businesses. In the context of this conflict, a subset of activists in each country became known as “radicals” due to their demands for “real independence” and their call to reorganize the state along Marxist principles. This work is based on archival research in Senegal, Congo, and France, as well as fifty-six interviews with Senegalese and Congolese militants of the period. The new presidents of Senegal and Congo, Léopold Senghor and Fulbert Youlou, both moved to consolidate control of their respective states after 1958. They attempted to isolate rival political organizations and young critics through a combination of repression and cooptation. “Youth Radicalism” explores how student, youth, and trade union organizations defended their autonomy from the new regimes and became centers of political opposition. I show that these organizations sparked urban rebellions in the capital cities of Brazzaville and Dakar, most notably in 1963 and 1968, respectively. In Congo, the protests in 1963 overthrew the government of Fulbert Youlou and allowed radical youth and student activists to declare themselves the leaders of a “revolution.” By building mass youth organizations, they were able to assume positions of authority and to successfully push for elements of “real independence” and “scientific socialism.” In Senegal, the strike in 1968 did not overturn Senghor’s government, but prompted a myriad of labor, educational, and democratic reforms in the years that followed. This work ends by looking at how the independent youth and student organizations of the 1960s were eliminated in both countries in the early 1970s due to internal divisions and state repression. Considering Congo and Senegal in the same study illustrates that youth and student leaders’ political strategies intersected through shared connections within the Francophone world, as well as Third World and Communist networks. The demands raised by young radicals emerged in response to specific local and national political conflicts, but this work argues that they were also fundamentally shaped by their links abroad. Finally, “Youth Radicalism” assesses how young radicals’ ability to create lasting structural change in Senegal and Congo was affected by the common political frameworks that guided their actions.

This project examines the fraught diplomatic and commercial relations between Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) and the Habsburg Spanish empire in the early seventeenth century. Vessels from Japan called at the port of Acapulco in New Spain three times within a decade, the first attempt in world history at a bilateral commercial relationship across the Pacific. In doing so, the ships also challenged the Spanish monopoly over the waterways between Latin America and Asia. Japanese commercial and diplomatic outreach peaked with the Keichō Embassy to Southern Europe (1613–1620), an effort that dispatched Japanese representatives to the court of Philip III in Madrid, but failed in its mission to secure regular contact between New Spain and northeastern Japan. In analyzing these events, I contrast Japan’s pursuit of commercial and diplomatic expansion with Spanish ambivalence and insularity, inverting essentializing narratives defined by Japanese isolation and European engagement. The project also compares the diplomatic models employed by each polity. I argue that Spain’s established imperial vision and the shogunate’s emerging hierarchical model of foreign relations placed each polity at the pinnacle of their respective diplomatic frameworks, handicapping efforts to communicate, build trust, and integrate each into the worldview of the other. Ultimately, a Spanish policy of containment closed off the Americas to Japan; soon after, the Tokugawa divested from its relationship with the Spanish Philippines in the face of alternative commercial partners and ongoing religious tension. The project thus integrates Japanese history into world history and the history of the Pacific, while questioning the notion of a straightforward commitment to expansion among Europe’s early-modern empires.