This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are corrupted by capitalism to diminish the human body into a interchangeable, unhuman cog; fully understood as Bataille’s “thing.” The anti-elegy, distorted by capitalism, creates the possibilities necessary for Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” which protests humanity’s objectification under capitalism while creating the ultimate anti-elegy for the anti-elegy.

Slated as an economic outlet for Germany, the Baghdad Railway was designed to funnel political influence into the strategically viable regions of the Near East. The Railway was also designed to enrich Germany's coffers with natural resources with natural resources and trade with the Ottomans, their subjects, and their port cities... Over time, the Railway became the only significant route for Germany to reach its "place in the sun," and what began as an international enterprise escalated into a bid for diplomatic influence in the waning Ottoman Empire.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis examines a group of German intellectuals and politicians who, during World War I, formulated and proposed a democratic ideology based on their interpretation of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and integrated his ideas with those of Karl Marx, the father of modern socialism. Their theory was an attempt to legitimize democracy in Germany at a time when democratic reforms came to the forefront of German politics. These thinkers advocated a non-revolutionary foundation for social democracy by emphasizing the role of human reason and agency in the process of democratization. Because they had abandoned the need for revolution, which most early nineteenth-century socialists believed was socialism’s ‘final goal,’ these thinkers were known as revisionists. The revisionists’ primary medium through which they espoused their views of social democracy was the journal Sozialistische Monatshefte, which ran from 1893 until 1933. The timeframe on which this argument focuses is the last two years of World War I, when Germany’s failure achieve a victor’s peace opened new avenues for the center-left of the political spectrum to achieve democratic reform. The revisionists sought to carry forward the process of democratization, and by doing so, reconnected with the ideas of the Enlightenment.

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This thesis studies events that preceded America's entries into the First and Second World Wars to discover similarities and dissimilarities. Comparing America's entries into the World Wars provides an insight into major events that influenced future ones and changed America. Research was conducted from primary sources of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In addition, secondary sources were used that study the events preceding America's entries into World War I and World War II. Research was also conducted on public opinion. In World War I, German actions angered Wilson and segments of the American public, persuading Wilson to ask for a declaration of war. While German aggression shaped American opinion in World War II, Japanese action forced the United States to enter the war. In both cases, the tone of aggression that molded the foreign policy of Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt and shaped American public opinion originated from Germany.

Many historians refer to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as the first genocide of the twentieth century. In the context of the first global war, the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were systematically persecuted and many eliminated while the world watched. Yet today, American memory and conception of the Armenian Genocide is remarkably different from similar historical events such as the Holocaust. The Armenian Genocide and America's reaction to it is a forgotten event in American memory. In an attempt to better understand this process of forgetting, this thesis analyzes the Washington Post's news coverage of the Armenian Genocide. By cataloguing, categorizing, and analysizing this news coverage, this thesis suggests Americans had sufficient information about the events and national reaction to it to form a memory. Therefore, the reasons for twenty-first century collective loss of memory in the minds of Americans must be traced to other sources.

This thesis is a translation of and critical introduction to a seventeen-month excerpt of the World War I diaries of German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. These diaries present a unique insight into Kollwitz’s life during the war and the process behind her art. The source text for this translation are entries from August 1, 1916, to December 31, 1917, as printed in the 2012 edition of the diaries prepared by the artist’s granddaughter, Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz, and first published in full in 1989. The thesis also translates Bohnke-Kollwitz’s introduction to the published volume and her footnotes on the selected entries. The critical introduction to the translation discusses this excerpt in the historical context of World War I, addressing the relationship between the patriotic “spirit of 1914” and the cultural constraints on grieving mothers to largely mourn in silence, as Kollwitz did for her own fallen son Peter. This situates Kollwitz among intellectuals and intellectual women in Germany at the time, and follows Kollwitz’s transition from an initial pro-war stance to eventual anti-war activism as documented in the diaries. The introduction then discusses my translation strategy, which draws on functionalist theories of translation to develop an approach that foregrounds Kollwitz’s own voice as a writer and the nature of the text as a private document. This approach aligns with the intended function of this translation, which particularly values the diaries for their intimacy and for the insight they can give us onto Kollwitz’s inner experience during a tumultuous historical time.