Seizing Civilization uses the Shanghai Museum as a case study to examine an extraordinary process of art appropriation that persisted from 1949 to 1996 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). At the heart of this story is the museum's destruction of the preexisting art market, its wholesale seizure of privately-owned antiquities, and its sale of these objects on the international market. My findings show that museum employees used these events to create public art collections in the PRC. The Shanghai Museum pioneered the techniques that Chinese museums use to transform craft objects, as well as select ancient paintings, ceramics, and bronzes, into canonized cultural relics. I argue that the application of these techniques explains the erasure of provenance at Chinese Museums, and demonstrate how state cultural institutions render acquisition ledgers, private collecting records, and connoisseurship disputes invisible. I examine cultural relics' transformation into Chinese cultural heritage in five chapters. I first demonstrate how museum employees appropriated private collections during nation-building campaigns such as the nationalization of industries (1956). Second, I investigate changes to the Chinese art historical canon, placing them in the context of art market takeovers, the wholesale acquisition of ethnic minority artifacts, as well as municipal programs in salvage archaeology. Then, in two chapters, I reveal the Shanghai Museum's active participation in antiquities confiscation and divestment during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), which enriched public art collections on a previously unprecedented scale. I conclude with an examination of the mass restitution of expropriated property in the 1980s and 90s, which underpinned the museum’s dual function as both a preservationist institution, as well as a political and commercial enterprise. The antiquities and events I analyze not only explain the ascendency of a dominant narrative about Chinese civilization, but also reveal the limits, contradictions, and challenges of PRC national patrimony. / History

This is a transnational history of the early republic that focuses on religious actors. The early American foreign mission movement was an outward-looking expression of the benevolent network of the early republic. Building on transatlantic connections that predated the American Revolution, it represented American evangelicals’ attempt to transform the “heathen world” into part of God’s kingdom. Using ABCFM missions to in India, the Cherokee Nation, and Liberia as case studies, this dissertation examines the relationship between the church and imperial politics. In the 1800s, Americans, who had focused their evangelism on Native Americans, joined British evangelicals in the work of world mission. In the first decades of their work, they saw the potential of imperial expansion as a conduit for evangelization. In practice, evangelicals found great faults with imperial governments. Everywhere, missionaries struggled to determine how linked the projects of Christianizing and “civilizing” ought to be. With regard to gender norms in particular, missionaries found the introduction of “civilization” to be an essential part of their work. The question of slavery ultimately led to a shift in mission policy. By the mid-1840s, the Board insisted that it was a single-issue organization whose sole purpose was the conversion of the world. In so doing, the Board shifted away from the early 19th century model of foreign missions as bearers of “civilization” to a mid-19th century model of a separation between missions and politics. / History

A Nazi news editor declared in 1934 that there were indefinable "magic connections" between news and politics. This dissertation demystifies those links between communications and society. An untold story of news networks lies behind the media sources that we mine constantly as historians. In particular, news agencies, the essential bottleneck of news supply, remain obscured behind the newspapers printing their reports. This study explores why news agencies became the intuitive modern form of news collection and dissemination and how they functioned as a central locus for tussles over the creation of news from events, the limits of government or business control over news, and the role of technology in revising communications infrastructures. 1905 to 1945 represented the zenith of German faith in news agencies’ ability to overturn the existing world order. Along with industrialists and academics, politicians and bureaucrats thought that news agencies could change not only Germany’s role in global communications, but politics, economics, and society too. Coupled with technical advances in wireless telegraphy, news agencies seemed the best means to improve Germany’s international reputation, boost foreign trade, and create societal cohesion at home. News agencies seemed the key to controlling public opinion as well as to creating global news networks conducive to Germany. This news agency consensus united German elites of all political stripes in the belief that news agencies provided an ideal outlet to solve political, social, and economic problems. While such schemes did not always succeed, German news agencies often altered the modern infrastructure of global communications. They briefly achieved media dominance on the oceans, challenged Reuters’ and Agence Havas’ control of European news, and became a leading supplier of news to South America and East Asia in the Nazi period. This work illustrates the interdependence of communications and history by integrating approaches from business history, communications studies, sociology, book history, and the history of technology. It shows the spread and success of German news at a moment when news agencies played a central and underappreciated role in the negotiation of a new relationship between politics, economics, and society in first half of the twentieth century. / History

This dissertation describes and analyzes the financial boom that made Russia the largest net international debtor in the world by 1914, as well as the Bolshevik default of 1918 -- one of the biggest in international financial history. For the Bolsheviks the default was a highly significant attack on "finance capital." Yet few historians have paid much attention to the financial history of the Russian Revolution. This study focuses in particular on the decision-making of the small but influential group of financiers and government officials who acted as the "gatekeepers" of international finance, channeling international capital to Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. / History

This dissertation tells the story of what happened to Jungar refugees on the Qing empire's Kazakh frontier in the years immediately following the collapse of the Jungar confederation, 1759-1773. Narratives of violence have dominated the historiography on the fall of the Jungars. Nearly every history of the Jungars' demise highlights the Qing's violent massacres against the Jungar people, with several works even asserting these massacres were tantamount to "genocide." Based on a large corpus of previously unstudied Manchu documents, this dissertation moves beyond historical narratives that view the Jungar collapse solely through the lens of Qing violence by highlighting the important historical role that Jungar refugees played in the years following the disintegration of the Jungar state. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation traces the ferment of private ressentiment, public protest and political response to the Asian opium trade from the "Second Opium War (1856-60) to the first, multilateral anti-drug summit in human history, the International Opium Commission in Shanghai (1909). Rather than isolating single anti-opium movements and drug control policies by administration, the focus is on moments and dynamics of ideological proliferation, social mobilization and political lobbying across the borders of societies in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Europe and North America. / History

This dissertation began with a question: what does it mean to say or grasp "the economy"? This dissertation examines it examines on-the-ground trading, mining, and money lending between Russian and Qing subjects in Qing Mongolian territories and southeastern Siberia, primarily, though not exclusively, during the years 1860 - 1911. This dissertation uses archival records from Mongolia, the Russian Federation, and the People's Republic of China, in addition to travel accounts, economic surveys, gazetteers, and periodicals. Combining Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Russian primary sources, it provides a trans-imperial examination of both how quotidian trade was carried out as well as the broader intellectual and political contexts that shaped the parameters of economic life. A bourgeoning labor market developed in Mongolia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The legalization of Russian trade provided new labor opportunities for Mongolians and Russian alike, particularly in working in transportation, wool washing, and mining. In addition to the transportation industry examines cases of gold-mining, Russian-Mongolian debt, and Buddhist monasteries' roles in facilitating trade.

<p>On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures. </p><p>The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.</p> / Dissertation

abstract: ABSTRACT Learning world history has the potential to develop adolescents into thoughtful, active citizens. This is especially true when students are taught in ways that engage them with complex issues and help them make connections between what they learn and their personal goals and experiences. However, instructional time in social studies is limited because of the current emphasis on standardized achievement testing in other content areas. Furthermore, in the specific field of world history, the scope of material covered, coupled with debate over what should be taught, has made it difficult to present a curriculum that is meaningful and relevant to students. As a result, the study of world history may be seen as tangential or incoherent. The purpose of this action research study was to introduce an innovation aimed at helping students think deeply and find personal relevance in the study of world history. Specifically, visual imagery and reflective journaling were used to help students to become proficient in historical thinking and to fully engage in the study of world history. The study was developed according to a mixed-methods design: the quantitative data collection tools were pre- and posttests and a student survey, and the qualitative data collection tools included discussion transcripts, reflective journals, student-created presentations, and observations. Results showed that the use of images and reflective journaling enabled students to develop some critical thinking skills, such as making claims, supporting claims with evidence, and considering divergent perspectives. Furthermore, students' awareness of their connections to the world around them increased, as did student performance on tests about historical events and concepts. Unfortunately, students did not reach proficiency in factual knowledge on post-tests in the class, despite these increases. However, this study highlights the benefits of explicitly connecting students to historical thinking through the use of images and journaling that allow students to explore their own thoughts and deductions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Leadership and Innovation 2015

Historians have enhanced our understanding of United States foreign policy in Asia, Latin, and Central America. My dissertation contributes to this literature by exploring U.S. foreign relations in the Caribbean by taking a close look at Haiti. While both nations achieved independence during the Age of Revolutions, by the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915–1934. In investigating the history of U.S. and Haitian diplomacy, one figure appeared repeatedly in my archival research and fieldwork in both nations, Charlemagne Peralte. During the U.S. intervention, Peralte rose as a leader of a Haitian guerrilla group known as the cacos who positioned themselves as nationalists fighting for Haiti's sovereignty. Under Peralte's direction, the cacos battled the occupying forces and also promoted their cause as a global call for democracy. Though Peralte died in 1919, his significance to Haitians assumed epic proportions as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata of Mexico, Augusto Sandino of Nicaragua, and Che Guevera in Cuba. Haitians on the island and across the Americas in the Diaspora revive Peralte's history and meaning throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing on unexplored primary sources, marines' records, and oral histories, etc, my study seeks to move Charlemagne Peralte from the margins to the center in historiography surrounding 'bandits,' rebels, and national leaders. The work first traces U.S. and Haitian relations from their revolutions to the various events leading to the occupation in 1915. It then captures the tenor of the early occupation years by analyzing the various modes of resistance that erupted because of the intervention. Embedded in this protest against imperialism were Peralte and the actions of the cacos. The dissertation also reflects on the post-occupation years from 1948 to 1986 to examine the nations' foreign relations. Finally, the work documents the apotheosis of the cacos leader to examine the meaning behind the ongoing historical preservations of Peralte in Haiti and amongst the Haitian Diaspora community in the U.S. and Canada. The study documents how Peralte's story, and the historical remembrances of him, shed light on U.S. and Haitian diplomacy from the 19th through the 20th centuries.