This dissertation examines the five battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force designated as the American Legion. Authorized in Canada between 1915 and 1917, these units were formed to recruit volunteers from the United States to serve in the Canadian Overseas Contingent during the First World War. This work reviews the organization of Canada’s militia and the history of Anglo-American relations before examining the Canadian war effort, the formation of the American Legion, the background of its men, and the diplomatic, political, and constitutional questions that it raised. Much of the research focuses on the internal documents of its individual battalions (the 97th, 211th, 212th, 213th and 237th) and the papers of Reverend Charles Bullock now housed at the Public Archives of Canada. Documentation for the diplomatic furor the American Legion caused comes largely through the published diplomatic documents, British Foreign Office records held at the Public Record Office at Kew, and United States Department of State files at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The most useful sources for American Legion correspondence are the Beaverbrook papers held at the House of Lords Record Office, the papers of Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Laird Borden, and those of the Governor-General, the Duke of Connaught found in the Public Archives of Canada. During its brief existence the American Legion precipitated diplomatic and political problems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Dominion of Canada. Among the issues raised by the controversy surrounding the American Legion were: the relationship between the dominion government in Canada and the British government; the structural problems of imperial communications; the rise of a Canadian national identity and the desire for greater autonomy; and, the nature of citizenship and expatriation. This dissertation is also a long overdue account of the thousands of United States citizens who left their homes and families to join the American Legion in order to fight another country’s war.

This study is an investigation of the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 to make a peace in the Duchy of Teschen Silesia 1919-1920. It is concerned with the principle of self-determination as it was applied to Central Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Moreover, this investigation seeks to explain the fixing of boundary lines in the Duchy of Teschen in the light of the diplomacy of the Allied Powers on the one hand and Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other. This study is an attempt to portray the overall difficulty involved in making a peace in idealistic terms.

Although a great deal has been written on the Paris Peace Conference, only in recent years have the necessary German documents been available for an analysis of the conference, not only from the Allied viewpoint but also from the German side. One of the great problems faced by the Allied statesmen in 1919 was the territorial conflict between Germany and Poland. The final boundary decisions were much criticized then and in subsequent years, and in 1939 they became the excuse for another world war. In the 1960's, over twenty years after the boundaries established at Versailles ceased to exist, they continued to be subjects of controversy. To understand the nature of this problem, it is necessary to study the factors which influenced the delineation of the German-Polish boundary in 1919. From the conflict of national interests there emerged a compromise boundary which satisfied almost no one. After this boundary was destroyed by another world war, the victors were again faced with the complex task of reconciling conflicting strategic and economic necessities with the principle of self-determination. This time no agreement was possible, and the problem remained a significant factor in German-Polish and East-West relations. The methods by which the statesmen of 1919 arrived at a settlement are pertinent to the unsolved problem of today.

The legacies of World War I in British culture are often explained by terms such as disillusionment and futility or by the understanding that the war shattered nineteenth century ideas of progress. These were not, however, the images of the war offered by the nation’s public and state sponsored secondary schools during the interwar years. By examining the categories of commemoration and curriculum, this study explores how British educational institutions mobilized the memory of the war in order to avoid cynicism and promote traditional forms of national, class, and gender identity. The first two chapters focus on how school memorials grew out of wartime communication within extended school communities in a way that privileged a heroic and traditional language of “high diction,” a concept developed by Paul Fussell. The following two chapters explore the ways in which discussions of how and why to teach history created a rhetoric of non-revolutionary citizenship and shaped portrayals of the war itself in a variety of British textbooks. Both processes elevated ideas including national and imperial patriotism, sportsmanship, self-sacrifice, personal and international leadership, and a continued faith in progress. This was initially accomplished by the exclusion of other possible narratives of the war, but the success of this interwar educational narrative was, in turn, undermined by subsequent economic and political events.

From 1919 to 1920 the United States carried out a massive campaign against radicals, arresting and deporting thousands of radical immigrants in a matter of months, raiding and shutting down anarchist printing shops, and preventing anarchists from sending both periodicals and personal communications through the mail. This period is widely known as the First Red Scare, and is framed as a reaction to recent anarchist terrorism, syndicalist unionizing, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Though the 1919-20 First Red Scare was certainly unprecedented in its scope, it was made possible through a longer campaign against radicals, throughout which the US government constructed legal, ideological, and institutional apparatuses to combat radicalism and terrorism. This project explores the longer conflict between the US government and anarchists, focusing on the period between 1900 and 1920. It argues that the government sought to suppress radicalism not just due to anarchist terrorism or class antagonism, but also due to a broader ideology of antiradicalism that framed anarchist counterculture and connected ideas like free love and internationalism as a threat to the nation-state and to traditional American values. In trying to suppress radical counterculture years before the First Red Scare, the US government built its capacity for federal policing. And, by tying the battle against anarchist terrorism to a broader project of suppressing any idea considered to be radical or nontraditional, the US government controlled the kinds of ideas and people allowed within American borders through force, demarcating political limits to American nationality and citizenship.

This thesis addresses the connection between Analytic Cubist paintings and popular music culture in pre-World War I Paris. In particular, it focuses on popular music, performance, song lyrics, music iconography and its connected poster advertising as each relates to the Analytic Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso. During the last years of the nineteenth century, the world of fine art came into close contact with the realm of popular entertainment, in particular institutions such as the cabaret, cafe'-concert and the music-hall. A revival of this performance which occurred around 1910, not only impacted the everyday world, but also the Cubist artists whose work reflected this renewed interest. Popular music culture provided a vocabulary of devices that were taken by the Cubists and reinterpreted to a more complex, less popular cultural ends. This is reflected in the derivation of visual elements which are essential to Analytic Cubist paintings. Some of these "borrowed" devices can be traced to techniques typically used in popular music poster advertisements. For example, elements common to posters such as the representation of illusionistically drawn objects and the use of words as well as the juxtaposition of imagery and letters can be found in Analytic Cubist work. Similar to posters, popular music also makes its way into Cubist painting. In addition to the well-documented example of Picasso's use of the "Ma Jolie" refrain from Harry Fragson's hit song Derniere Chanson, other instances of subject matter as well as attributes (sous entendre and repetitive lyrics) of popular song can be found in Cubist painting. Elements of popular-music culture, linked through performance, posters and song lyrics are in fact essential visual components of the vocabulary of Analytic paintings.

A work of creative fiction in the form of a short novel, Asleep in the Arms of God is a limited-omniscient and omniscient narrative describing the experiences of a man named Wafer Roberts, born in Jack County, Texas, in 1900. The novel spans the years from 1900 to 1925, and moves from the Keechi Valley of North Texas, to Fort Worth and then France during World War One, and back again to the Keechi Valley. The dissertation opens with a preface, which examines the form of the novel, and regional and other aspects of this particular work, especially as they relate to the postmodern concern with fragmentation and conditional identity. Wafer confronts in the novel aspects of his own questionable history, which echo the larger concern with exploitative practices including racism, patriarchy, overplanting and overgrazing, and pollution, which contribute to and climax in the postmodern fragmentation. The novel attempts to make a critique of the exploitative rage of Western civilization.

The Germans of Geilenkirchen-Hengesburg region of Germany were convinced by relative and friend, Father Peter Leonard Thevis, of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, to emigrate to the United States for a number of reasons: political, religious, and economic. After establishing themselves on land previously used for grazing cattle, the Germans soon discovered rice could easily be cultivated in large amounts. Along with their success as rice farmers in Roberts Cove, Louisiana, these Germans soon involved themselves in politics and engaged one another and the surrounding community in numerous court cases. These court cases, overlooked by previous historians, demonstrate that the Germans of Roberts Cove had begun to assimilate, prior to World War I and the passage of anti-German legislation.

During World War I, dogs held a contradictory place in American society. These animals functioned simultaneously as patriots, pets, and pests. This essay surveys the ways in which dogs either contributed to the war effort or seemed to subvert it through their uselessness as companion animals and their predation as feral ones. Ultimately, even worsening conditions on the homefront could not cause the American public as a whole to consider surrendering its affection for these animals, including the worthless ones. In the face of impending legislation that threatened to eliminate man’s best friend as a war measure, the American people successfully defended the dog, while citizens in several of the other warring nations could not afford to do so. American admiration for the patriot, combined with affection for the pet, outweighed anxiety over the pest.

Thesis advisor: Kevin Kenny / This dissertation examines the development of ethnic consciousness in Boston's Irish and Jewish communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on several interrelated areas of analysis: religion, public service, ethnic nationalism, and popular culture. As the city's leading non-Protestant groups, Irish and Jews challenged ideas of Yankee superiority, arguing they could retain their ethnic culture and still be respected, patriotic citizens. Both groups consisted of a small middle class of businessmen and professionals and a large immigrant working class. From these factions emerged the competing voices of individuals who sought to find the best way to promote the compatibility of their religion, culture, and ethnic nationalist aspirations with American loyalties. After decades of trying to achieve full acceptance, Irish and Jews saw World War I as the ultimate test of ethnic patriotism; instead of conforming to a prescribed notion of Anglo-Protestant citizenship, they insisted on the centrality of their religion and culture to civic identity. Yet while their war service brought confidence in their rights as ethnic Americans, it did not bring total acceptance. By the 1920s, the Irish controlled local public life, but assumed a defensive posture toward the Yankee elite; Jews, meanwhile, were optimistic regarding interfaith cooperation, despite increasing antisemitism. This study expands on and moves beyond present studies of immigrant acculturation by adding a new comparative dimension. It examines the contested expressions of ethnic patriotism based on class, gender, and generation within two ethnic communities, demonstrating how ethnic groups utilized similar strategies to project a positive public image and articulate their place in society. It also shows the intersection of local, national, and international concerns in the development of ethnic consciousness. Irish and Jews created hybrid ethnic cultures rooted in religion, cultural practices, and mass consumerism that would survive for decades in the city's entrenched ethnic neighborhoods. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.