Between 1938 and 1940 approximately 18,000 Jews from Central Europe went to the Chinese city of Shanghai to escape Nazi persecution. While almost every nation in the world refused to accept these desperate refugees, thousands found refuge in Japanese occupied Shanghai, which was an open port and one could immigrate there with no visa or passport. In an incredibly short period of time the refugees were able to develop a vibrant Jewish community. Relying primarily on the testimony of former refugees, this thesis seeks to address three main questions: What did exile in Shanghai feel like for the refugees? How did they handle and react to the circumstances of their new surroundings? In what ways did their common exile unite the group and bring about changes in personal identity?

In 1919 Anton Nyström became the first person in Sweden to publish a comprehensive defense of homosexuality. He believed that its classification as a mental illness was erroneous and that Sweden's law against homosexual sex was both irrational and cruel. Nyström was a physician whose work in the medical area dealt primarily with dermatology, psychiatry and human sexuality; however he was also a prolific historian, who took a staunchly anti-Christian view in his analysis of how Christianity affected European culture, especially in the area of sexual morality. In fact, much of Nyström's medical texts dealing with human sexuality consisted of anti-Christian cultural and historical commentary. The object of this "C-uppsats" is to analyze Nyström's pamphlet, Om Homosexualitet och Hermafroditi: Belysning af Missförstådda Existenser and illustrate how its defensive structure was consistent with the pattern used by the author in his other books and articles on human sexuality. Specifically, that irrational and neurotic Christian beliefs caused both mental and physical suffering and were the source of deleterious forms of morality. Additionally, this paper will also show that the solution Nyström had for the problem of negative and erroneous attitudes towards homosexuality was to replace the sodomitic view of homosexuality with one based upon a more rational and naturalistic belief system, the basis of which could be found in the pre-Christian cultures of Europe, most especially in Greece. This new conception was to be constructed primarily out of historical example and cultural analyses. For Nyström, history writing was used both as a weapon to fight the source of negative attitudes towards homosexuality, as well as a tool that could be used to build a positive cultural model which would be beneficial for homosexuals.

This study analyzes East German representations of Hungary in cultural texts to investigate the emergence of a German socialist identity in the 1950s and 1960s. I further contend that post-1945 self- and collective identity in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was complex and formulated by official, intellectual, and mass perceptions. By examining East German iconography of Hungary it becomes clear that socialist identity in the early years of the dictatorship relied on traditional expressions of society as well as ideology. Hungary provided East Germans with a practical model for socialist friendship. Though the GDR was a state that ostensibly celebrated multiculturalism, East German texts presented the People’s Republic of Hungary almost as another Germany with a shared heritage and culture. They articulated this palatable image of Hungary through the lens of ideology (Marxist-Leninist internationalism) and through traditional cultural definitions. This study concludes that East Germans used a composite of socialist ideas and folk customs to draw parallels with Hungary and create a distinct character that was both German and socialist.

The aim of this master’s thesis in history of ideas is to investigate the idea circulation in the Swedish Green Party’s meetings with mass media 1980–1982. The study is based upon a series of theoretical premises. It is presumed that cultural expressions, such as speech, media use and visual representation, can be understood through studying how people think about society’s history, contemporary development and conceivable futures. Since ideas about society’s ongoing development also are presumed to be intertwined with social and cultural positions and practices, and may be expressed differently given different social and cultural circumstances, it is relevant to investigate on the one hand the Green Party’s political vision, and on the other hand how the formulation and reception of ideas took place between them and journalists.     The Green Party’s communication to the Swedish public is studied through on the one hand their own media channels, and on the other hand a selection of events where they were covered in mass media, communicating to the public via journalists. The study shows that the Green Party expected society’s ongoing development to lead to an environmental and human disaster, if not their vision of a democratic society, built on small-scale production, came true. These two conceivable futures were used to motivate political action in their present time. History, on the other hand, was used to criticize the present society built on economical growth and hierarchies. In the Green Party’s visionary society, mankind would embrace a natural lifestyle and thereby reunite with her, in growth society, lost democratic, accountable and creative nature. These ideas were related to societal processes, events and circulating ideas at the time. To get their messages across to the broad Swedish public, the Green Party arranged a press conference. Partly adapting to journalistic working methods for covering politics, the Green Party staged their alternative, small-scale ideology materially, musically and visually. The Green Party’s mass media appearance, along with their growth in membership numbers, made mass media coverage about them increase. In a parliamentary uncertain and politically hostile time, the party’s presented parliamentary strategies and political proposals awoke journalistic speculation. However, journalists’ news telling about the Green Party’s politics circulated, in different ways, around their parliamentary goal, prospects and future obligations. Thereby conceivable futures, as formulated by journalists, gave meaning to the Green Party’s formation, development and politics. These ideas were expressed in journalistic media use and interview praxis. Since around two decades, journalists were reporting more independently and confrontational on politics than previously.  Covering the Green Party, photographers, camera men and writers created meanings by using mediums, which sometimes were transferred between media forms, to support news narratives. Consequently, a political party trying to change a political lifestyle and exercise reached the Swedish public through mass media as a party mainly competing for parliamentary representation. These results contribute to ongoing research on how, and on what premises, political voices have reached the public through mass media throughout modern history.

This dissertation examines how the modern dinosaur—fully mounted, freestanding assemblages of vertebrate fossils such as we are accustomed to seeing at the natural history museum—came into being during the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing especially on the United States. But it is not just, or even primarily a history of vertebrate paleontology. Rather, I use dinosaurs as an opportunity to explore how science was embedded in broader changes that were happening at the time. In particular, I am interested in tracing how the culture of modern capitalism—the ideals, norms, and practices that governed matters of value and exchange—manifested itself in the way fossils were collected, studied, and put on display. During the second half of the 19th century, America experienced an extended period of remarkable economic growth. By the eve of WWI, it had emerged as the world’s largest producer of goods and services. At the same time, paleontologists were unearthing the fossil remains of marvelous creatures the likes of which no one had ever dreamed in the American west. The discovery of dinosaurs like Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Triceratops prompted the nation’s wealthy elite to begin cultivating an intense interest in vertebrate paleontology. In part, this is because dinosaurs meshed well with a conventional narrative that celebrated American exceptionalism. Dinosaurs from the United States were widely heralded as having been larger, fiercer, and more abundant than their European counterparts. Not only that, but their origins in the deep past meant that dinosaurs were associated with evolutionary theory, including the conventional notion that struggle was at the root of progress. Finally, it did not hurt that America’s best fossils hailed from places like Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. This is precisely where most of the raw materials consumed by factories could also be found. As they coalesced into a coherent social class, American capitalists began to patronize a number of elite cultural institutions. Just as Gilded Age entrepreneurs invested considerable resources in the acquisition of artworks, so too did they invest in natural history. However, whereas the acquisition of artworks functioned as a display of refined aesthetic sensibilities, the collection of natural history specimens primarily represented another form of social distinction, one that combined epistemic virtues like objectivity with older notions of good stewardship and civic munificence. Capitalists who had grown rich off of the exploitation of America’s natural resources turned to dinosaur paleontology as a form of cultural resource extraction. / History of Science

This study is about graduate students’ discourse practices in a classroom text-based synchronous computer-mediated discussion (SCMD). Cultural historical activity theory (in short, Activity Theory) is the primary theoretical lens through which the data are analyzed. Engeström’s (1987) Activity System model among the various theoretical positions or perspectives of activity theorists has guided the overall process of the study, especially having the researcher focus on the identification and description of the model’s six key elements: subject, object, tool, community, rule, and division of labor. Several emerging themes were identified. An activity system in SCMD is situated in multiple dimensions of context: physical/biological, cultural/institutional, social/ emotional, and cognitive/intellectual dimensions; instead of a single utterance, a topical pair needs to be investigated as a unit of analysis in SCMD research; a collective unit of actions emerges through the discourse activity; and, finally, an ecological view is needed to understand an activity system as a whole. Based on these emerging themes, I conclude with a modified model of the activity system in the situation of dialogical transactions such as SCMD. / text

<p> Using a memory archaeology paradigm, this dissertation explored from 2010 to 2012 the ways people used place-based narratives to create and maintain the sacredness of four historic battlefields in Montana: Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument; Nez Perce National Historical Park- Bear Paw Battlefield; Nez Perce National Historical Park- Big Hole National Battlefield; and Rosebud Battlefield State Park. This research implemented a mixed-methods approach of four data sources: historical research about on-site interpretation and land management of the battlefields; participant observations conducted during height of tourism season for each battlefield; 1,056 questionnaires administered to park visitors; and 32 semi-structured interviews with park personnel. Before formulating hypotheses to test, a preliminary literature review was conducted on three battlefields (Culloden, Fallen Timbers, and Isandlwana) for any observable patterns concerning the research domain. </p><p> This dissertation tested two hypotheses to explain potential patterns at the four battlefields in Montana related to on-site interpretation of primary sources, the sacred perception of battlefields, and the maintenance and expression of place-based cultural heritages and historical knowledge. The first hypothesis examined whether park visitors and personnel perceived these American Indian battlefields as nationally significant or if other heritage values associated with the place-based interpretation of the sacred landscapes were more important. Although park visitors and personnel overall perceived the battlefields as nationally important, they also strongly expressed other heritage values. The second hypothesis examined whether battlefield visitors who made pilgrimages to attend or participate in official on-site commemorations had stronger place-based connections for cultural heritage or historical knowledge reasons than other visitors. Overall, these commemoration pilgrims had stronger connections to the battlefields than other park visitors. </p><p> Closer comparisons of the four battlefields demonstrated that they had both similar patterns and unique aspects of why people maintained these landscapes as sacred places.</p>

Scholars describe fin-de-siècle Paris as a city of dualities, and examine its past as a series of crises or a tale of burgeoning optimism and opportunity. Historians of women and gender have noted the limitations of this dualistic approach, and have explored new avenues of interpretation. Specifically, they have shown how the combination of positive and negative impulses created a dynamic space in which women could re-imagine and re-articulate themselves. While this approach illuminates the possibilities that existed for women in a complex urban landscape, it also indicates that fin-de-siècle Paris was a contested city, one fraught with challenges for women living in the French capital. If the mingling of crises and belle époque culture had stimulating results for women’s emergence into urban spaces, it had confusing and conflicting effects as well. My thesis shows how fin-de-siècle Paris was a contradictory city for women artists, at a time when both opportunities and constraints in their profession were at a premium. I examine the ways in which several notable women in the arts – painters Gwen John, Suzanne Valadon, and Romaine Brooks, sculptor Camille Claudel, and writer Rachilde – traversed this unsettling path, and evaluated their experiences through artistic representations of private life. Far from portraying the traditional sphere of domesticity, however, which was considered an important form of artistic expression among women at this time, I argue that their depictions of intimate spaces, bodies, children, and female selfhood, were complex and often ambiguous, and part of a larger attempt to grapple with the shifting nature of identity, both as women, and as professionals. John and Claudel created interiors that were signs of independence and artistic innovation, but also reflections of hardship; Valadon and Brooks invested images of the female and child’s body with strength and power, but also with pain and suffering; and Rachilde developed heroines who were unsuccessful in their attempts to create a unique sense of self. Taken together, these representations demonstrate that women artists did not easily articulate a vision of modern female identity at the turn of twentieth century, but rather, highlighted the inconsistencies of this experience. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2008-11-28 10:48:28.537

Horatio Lord Nelson, Britain's most famous naval figure, revolutionized what victory meant to the British Royal Navy and the British populace at the turn of the nineteenth century. But his legacy continued after his death in 1805, and a century after his untimely passing Nelson meant as much or more to Britain than he did during his lifetime. This thesis utilizes primary sources from the British Royal Navy and the general British public to explore what the cultural memory of Horatio Nelson's life and achievements meant to Britain throughout the Edwardian era and to the dawn of the First World War. An introductory literature review provides a thorough explanation of how Nelson's legacy has been perceived by past historians and how this legacy will be examined throughout the thesis. The manner in which Nelson was viewed by both his naval contemporaries and the general British public during his lifetime is then surveyed, with a specific focus on the outpouring of national grief that followed Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. A major portion of the thesis explores how Nelson's legacy developed throughout the century following his death. Separate studies of Nelson's professional memory among his Royal Navy successors and his cultural memory in British society as it became ever more focused on naval concerns follow; these take the thesis chronologically up through the final decades of the nineteenth century and are then combined in a discussion of the degree to which Nelson's legacy permeated all Britons, regardless of profession, in the early years of the twentieth century. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the impact Nelson's legacy had on Britain during the early months of the First World War and a broader analysis of how the cultural and professional memory of Horatio Nelson's naval achievements in 1805 created an atmosphere in which a naval victory decisive enough to satisfy all aspects of British society was impossible in 1914.

<p>What accounts for the rise of defense intellectuals in the early Cold War? Why did these academics reject university life to accept positions in the foreign policy establishment? Why were so many of German origin? "The Night Watchman" answers these questions through a contextual biography of the German exile Hans Speier, a foreign policy expert who in the 1940s and 1950s consulted for the State Department and executive branch, and helped found the RAND Corporation, Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the program in international communication at MIT's Center for International Studies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, witnessing ordinary Germans vote enthusiastically for Adolf Hitler engendered a skepticism of democracy in Speier and a cohort of social democratic intellectuals. Once Hitler assumed power in 1933, Speier and his colleagues were forced to flee Central Europe for the United States. In America, a number of these left wing exiles banded together with U.S. progressives to argue that if democracy was to survive as a viable political form in a world beset with "totalitarian" threats, intellectual experts, not ordinary people, must become the shapers of foreign policy. Only intellectuals, Speier and others argued, could ensure that the United States committed its vast resources to the defeat of totalitarianism.</p><p>World War II provided Speier and his academic cohort with the opportunity to transform their ideas into reality. Called upon by government officials who required the services of intellectuals familiar with the German language and culture, hundreds of social scientists joined the Office of War Information, Office of Strategic Services, and other new organizations of the wartime government. After the war, this first generation of defense intellectuals, uninterested in returning to the relative tranquility of academia, allied with government and military officials to create a network of state and corporate institutions that reproduced the wartime experience on a permanent basis. Speier himself became chief of RAND's Social Science Division and a consultant responsible for advising the Ford Foundation on where to direct its resources. In the latter capacity, he counseled the foundation to fund institutions that provided a home to intellectuals concerned with refining the methods of social science to improve policy-relevant knowledge.</p><p>Speier's interwar experiences with Nazism and postwar understanding of Joseph Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and West Berlin led him to conclude that all totalitarian societies, be they fascist or communist, were run by elites who did not wish to reach détente with the United States. For this reason, Speier declared, U.S. decision-makers should treat all Soviet diplomatic overtures as feints designed to trick the western alliance into weakening its international standing. He further argued that because totalitarian states were autocracies in which the public had no say in foreign affairs, the United States should not use propaganda to win ordinary people living in the Soviet Union to its side, but should instead employ methods of psychological warfare to disrupt the personal and professional networks of Soviet elites. Speier's position at RAND and his relationship with the State Department provided him with opportunities to disseminate his opinions throughout the foreign policy establishment. By virtue of his central location in this institutional matrix, Speier influenced a number of key U.S. foreign policies, including the inflexible negotiating position adopted by U.S. delegates at the Korean War armistice talks; the tactics of U.S. psychological warfare directed against East Germany and the Soviet Union; and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Open Skies" proposal at the 1955 Geneva Summit.</p><p>By the 1960s, Speier had helped institutionalize both a system in which intellectuals had direct access to foreign policymakers and a policy culture that privileged expertise. His trajectory demonstrates that the Cold War national security state, broadly defined to include governmental, nongovernmental, and university-associated research centers, was not solely a proximate reaction to the perceived Soviet threat, as historians have argued, but was also the realization of a decades-old, expert-centered political vision formed in response to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.</p> / Dissertation