No description available.

In 43 CE, Britain became part of the Roman Empire and was systematically conquered for nearly half a century. The province had valuable natural resources to plunder, but the decision to invade was based upon more than its material wealth. Prestige through warfare was paramount in Roman society, and that is just what Claudius sought to achieve when he launched his invasion of the island. The Romans pushed all the way into Caledonia before stopping and securing the frontier with the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. Britain had become just another component in the colossal machine that was the Roman Empire.

A collection of poems focused primarily on rural America and the South, the creative writing thesis also includes material concerned with the history of Mexico, particularly Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The introduction combines a personal essay with critical material discussing and defining the idea of the Southern writer.

Thesis advisor: Sarah Beckjord / En la tradición mexicana, la figura de La Malinche ha llegado a representar un paradigma importante para explorar el legado de la conquista. A fines del siglo XX, Kimberle López señaló el surgimiento de un nuevo tipo de narrativa de la conquista, una que se esforzaba por revisar las narrativas antiguas para que éstas pudieran mejor explicar las realidades y la identidad de los latinoamericanos contemporáneos. Como tal, la desilusión y las injusticias de la opresión han surgido como temas principales en la literatura histórica de la época posmoderna. Debido a este empeño, se están recuperando las identidades que antes sufrían el efecto de ser olvidadas por una tradición histórica que se negaba a reconocer su valor en la representación del pasado. Si se encuentra uno de los primeros retratos de La Malinche en la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España de Bernal Díaz del Castillo, los comentarios críticos de Octavio Paz y Carlos Fuentes evidencian la presencia de una dicotomía problemática con respecto a la representación de esta figura. Además, la publicación de Malinche por Laura Esquivel ha sacado a la luz el trauma de la conquista y, por consiguiente, ha cuestionado las mismísimas estructuras e ideas que sofocaban las voces de la gente, como Malinalli, que se quedaban en las márgenes de la historia. Imaginando una nueva versión de la conquista a través de los ojos de su protagonista, esta autora logra ampliar la narrativa del pasado para que la participación de todos, especialmente las mujeres, sea una realidad. Al expandir los límites de la representación del pasado mediante la libertad imaginativa de la literatura, hemos podido llevar una suerte de justicia, sea ésta poética, a las personas cuyas identidades que se perdieron en la lucha para el poder. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures Honors Program. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

The period following the Mongol conquest of vast areas of Eurasia in the thirteenth century, the so-called Pax Mongolica, witnessed the emergence of a new visual language in Persian art and architecture. Various Islamic and non-Islamic visual traditions that permeated the whole body of the arts of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iran played a pivotal role in the formation of the hybrid style characterizing the art and architecture of the Ilkhanid period (1256-1335 AD). Along with the reconstruction of the cities that had been extensively destroyed during the Mongol attack on Iran, the Ilkhans (Mongol rulers) founded a number of new settlements. Both literary and archaeological evidence testifies that the foundation and development of urban centers was one of the primary objectives of the Ilkhans throughout their rule over Iran. Putting emphasis on Ilkhanid urban architecture, this project focuses on two major cities in the northwest of Iran (Ghazaniyya and Sultaniyya) in order to show how the architectural and urban features of the cities were determined through the complex interaction of local and global forces. Challenging the stereotypes that looked at the steppe people as destroyers of civilizations in earlier scholarship, this study argues that the Ilkhanid city as a physical entity manifests the dialogue between Perso-Islamic sedentary concepts and Mongolian nomadic traditions. / Graduate / 2020-08-23

The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.

The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.

No description available.

The Portuguese conquest and colonization of Brazil was mediated by the Tupi-Guarani societies that inhabited the Atlantic coast in a discontinuous pattern from the estuary of the River Plate to the mouth of the Amazon. In fact, the extension of Portuguese occupation coincides with the limits of expansion of these Tupi-Guarani societies in most regions, suggesting a historical relation with deep potential implications. This work studies the conquest and construction of the Portuguese colonial frontier in the Lower Amazon and its estuary at the beginning of the XVIIth century, aiming to unveil the nature of the relations between Portuguese and Amerindian societies. The starting point is the hypothesis that the presence of Tupinamba societies from the Brazilian northeast, and of many other groups linked with them through language and culture, helped the Portuguese cause in their dispute for the control of the southern Amazon shores with other European competitors trading in the region. However, this very same dependency on the Tupinamba also acted as a brake on the Portuguese conquest as it headed north. This is supposed by the fact that almost no Tupi-Guarani traces have been recorded on the northern shore of the Amazon. After analyzing native American dynamics in Brazil and Guayana, this work presents a detailed study of the battles and skirmishes fought by opposed European interests, and their natives allies, in the Amazon from 1616 to 1632. The last part is devoted to the analysis of the process of cultural construction on the colonial frontier, through conquest mechanisms that were also deployed on other colonial American frontiers. Among these mechanisms I emphasise the implementation of a set of institutions and the construction of a negative and savage native alterity through narratives that have been reproduced by the regional historiography.

Of the many themes in the history of China, an important one is the persistence and effectiveness with which the Chinese managed to rule their huge country and keep it unified. Many explanations for this have been given, such as the diffusion of Confucian ideology, and the integrative powers of the civil service examination system. However, there was one phenomenon which influenced the longevity of the Chinese empire which has not received as much attention as it deserves, that is, Chinese theories of different types of local government. To be sure, there have been some studies on this topic. But the studies which have appeared have basically dealt with the institutional aspects of local government. Few, if any, have explored this topic through a case study of the thought of one crucial historical individual. This thesis does not offer a synoptic examination of seventeenth-century local governments, but tries to achieve a better understanding of it through the study of the thought of Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682), a key figure during the transitional period of early modern China. Ku was chosen not only because of the historical significance of his time and his crucial importance during his lifetime, but also because his thought about the problems of local power was the centerpiece of his political theorizing. The thesis begins with an introduction which presents the general setting of seventeenth century China and the historiographical issues which it raises. This is followed by a chapter discussing Ku's family background and the great events in which he was involved during his formative years, and their effects upon him. The next three chapters are concerned with Ku's theoretical assessments of the development of different kinds of local power structures, and the.relevance of such local power structures as he saw it to the dilemmas of China at the time of the Manchu conquest, which Ku Yen-wu hated. In these chapters, I shall examine Ku Yen-wu's views of the ideal and the real roles in the social order of such pivotal figures as the yamen clerks (hsli-li), and the local licentiates (sheng-yuan). More important, I shall attempt to elaborate Ku's basic anxieties about, and his solution to, the problems of the defense of China, which he related to the strengthening of the localities. In other words, the focus of this study is on the interaction between Ku Yen-wu himself and the rapidly changing China of the Manchu conquest. I will argue that many of the proto-bourgeois ideas which have been attributed to Ku were actually Confucian reactions to the corrupted social customs, an increasingly despotic central government, and the foreign conquest of China, rather than the pioneering declarations of the arrival of an era of "sprouting" capitalism which some scholars, both foreign and Chinese, have seen them to have been. The significance of Ku in the history of China is discussed in the last chapter. This thesis attempts to specify some of the specific social features which a great scholar like Ku Yen-wu thought should be associated with a system of strong local power in seventeenth-century China. I hope this study will provide a better insight into the thought of Ku Yen-wu and the society in which he lived. I hope also to suggest briefly how Chinese actions and reactions towards the Western challenge since the middle of the nineteenth century may have owed something to the thought of Ku Yen-wu. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate