The Western historiography of Stalin and Stalinism produced in the period 1925 to the present day is a strikingly varied body of work in which the nature of Stalin, his regime and his role within his regime have been and continue to be the subject of debate. This characteristic is all the more striking when we consider that from the earliest years of the period under study there has been a general understanding of the nature of the Stalinist regime, and of the policies and leader which have come to define it. This thesis analyses the principal influences on research which have led to this body of work acquiring such a varied nature, and which have led to an at times profoundly divided Western, and more specifically Anglo-American, scholarship. It argues that the combined impact of three key formative influences on research in the West over the period of study, and their interaction with each other, reveal recurring themes across the whole historiography, while also accounting for the variety of interpretations in evidence. The first impact identified is the lack of accessibility to sources during the Soviet period, which posed a constant and real obstacle to those in the West writing on Stalin and Stalinism, and the impact of the removal of this obstacle in the post-Soviet era. The second is the influence of wider historiographical trends on this body of work, such as the emergence of social history. Finally the thesis argues that evolving Western attitudes to Stalin and Stalinism over this period have played a key role in constructions of Stalin and his regime, demonstrating an on-going historical process of the othering of Russia by the West. The extent and nature of this othering in turn provide a central line of enquiry of the thesis. Tightly intertwined with all three impacts has been the changing global political context over the period in question which provides the evolving and influential contextual backdrop to this study, and which has given this body of work a deeply political and personal character.

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Kurdish ulema, a religious class with a strong influence on Kurdish social life, have developed various forms of religious nationalism. This study offers a possible reading of the accounts of Kurdish ulema during the Turkish Republican period, as a neglected form of Kurdish nationalism. I illustrate how they defined the Kurdish nation in the name of religion, supplied religious metaphors and symbols central to the representation of the Kurdish nation, and even produced an alternative to secular nationalism by sharing the underlying grammar of modern nationalism. This calls into question the concept of Kurdish nationalism as something uniform and secular. Such accounts of religious nationalism were largely suppressed in modern Kurdish history writing under Marxist influences. Since the 1940s, this historiography often marginalized the narratives of Kurdish ulema by setting them apart from Kurdish national struggle. This project provides the first in-depth analysis of the role of Kurdish ulema in the story of the development of Kurdish nationalism during the Turkish Republican period (1920s-1990s). My analysis challenges the dichotomy in the Kurdish nationalist historiography that Islamic and Kurdish identities are exclusive of one another. Kurdish ulema combined their Islamic identity with a strong sense of Kurdish national consciousness. Some envisioned the Kurdish nation’s liberation in education, some in joining secular national movements, some in conformity with Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood and some in political Islamic resistance. I emphasize that Kurds, whether secular or religious, formed a united front against Kurdish regional underdevelopment, exclusivist state policies, and exploitative sheikhs as late as the late 1960s. There has been an overlap between opposing Kurdish groups and the division between them was not primordial. These initially similar concerns, however, were gradually shaped by different popular ideologies of their day: nationalism, Marxism, and Islamism, in Turkey and around the world.

This dissertation analyzes historical and archaeological evidence of culture change and the effects of state and imperial expansion on local communities to show that early Chinese cultural history is enriched when commoners are taken into account. I do this by focusing on heretofore unexamined evidence in the middle Han river valley of north-central Hubei province in early China during the 8th century BCE to the 1strd century CE. I argue that this was a particularly important region because it was an important crossroads where multiple polities interacted in the period between the fall of the Western Zhou state and the rise of China’s first empires, the Qin and the Han. Traditional historiography attributes culture change during this period and in this region to the imposition of a holistic set of customs by elites representing state or imperial power on newly conquered lands. The sources used and analyses employed are disproportionately derived from elite contexts. As a result, current historical narratives privilege elite views of culture and society. By contrast, my dissertation employs a methodology that utilizes newly excavated archaeological data to enrich extant narratives of the early cultural history of this region. I do this in two ways. First, I interweave archaeological evidence of ordinary peoples’ cultural practices into the dominant political and social histories of the era. Second, I focus on the middle Han river area as a geographical crossroads that was as culturally complex as frontier regions, a perspective rarely taken in traditional studies of early China. Chapter 1 lays out the three-tiered theoretical and methodological framework of the dissertation. I first outline theories of culture change in ancient colonial encounters, derived from anthropological discourse, and that can be utilized to understand my novel data. I then describe how archaeologists utilize material evidence of past funerary rituals, which form the bulk of my data, to study culture change. Finally, I talk about the quantitative methods through which I render the archaeological data intelligible to interpretation. In Chapter 2, I engage with the third and narrowest tier of my methodology by using assemblage theory as the basis for archaeological periodization of funerary ceramics at Bianying cemetery. This method takes as its premise the idea that the appearance of new ceramic types and the disappearance of others, signify moments of change due either to incoming practices or internal development, when the social and cultural affiliations of the community of mourners came under question, thus, allowing for the assertion and negotiation of emergent cultural identities. In Chapter 3, I use exploratory data analyses to identify meaningful patterns in the seven chronological periods identified in Chapter 2. In interpreting these patterns, I explain how, within the realm of funerary ritual, the introduction of new cultural practices into Xiangyang engendered the formation of hybrid culture at Bianying, and how the active agency of the local population was expressed through this process. In Chapter 4, I employ these previous analyses in returning to the level of culture change in order to build a more robust model of cultural hybridity in early imperial China. To do this, I analyze the more rural and idiosyncratic cemetery of Wangpo, located four kilometers north of Bianying. I use the evidence of hybridized burial practices at Wangpo to show how my model destabilizes accepted analytical categories and, thereby, allows new narratives of early imperial history in China to emerge, narratives that bring the discipline into dialogue with the study of other regions of the ancient world. In Chapter 5, I construct a new history of cultural formation in Xiangyang. I do this by interweaving the archaeological narrative outlined in chapters 2 through 4 with textual evidence drawn from bronze inscriptions, excavated texts, and transmitted historical records. I reconcile contradictions between the archaeological and textual records by tacking back and forth between these two categories of source materials, treating both as different facets of the same story. In doing so, I present a holistic narrative of elite political designs on Xiangyang and its effects on locals, arguing that both groups mutually constructed one another in forming what we now know to be early imperial China. This work has important implications for further research by demonstrating the value of making more nuanced use of newly excavated material to reinvigorate the genre of regional history in China.

Scholars have long been attentive to the cultural legacy of Valois Burgundy a site of remarkable artistic and literary productivity in the mostly desolate cultural landscape of fifteenth-century France. It is only recently, however, that critics have begun to interrogate Burgundian courtly literature with an eye to its narrative complexity and rhetorical and discursive density, and to the political and cultural concerns encoded within it. This study emulates and supports these efforts by undertaking a close reading of a remarkable Burgundian chronicle one which depicts and defends a rare experiment in one of the most ideologically resonant enterprises of the day. The text, contained in Jean de Wavrins vast historical compilation, the Anciennes Chroniques dAngleterre, describes a crusading expedition to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and various points on the Danube in 1444-46. Led by Jeans nephew Waleran, the seigneur de Wavrin, the expedition was largely a failure. The author(s) of the chronicle therefore had a great deal to answer for; yet as the contours of their text reveal, their interests extended well beyond chivalric apologetics. This study analyzes the fascinating narrative tensions which unsettle the expedition narrative, and which offer a window into its varied (and often contending) rhetorical objectives. It considers, for instance, the tense interplay between two treatments of Walerans chivalry: one of which relies on epic and romance themes to depict him as a heroic warrior, and one which reveals his deliberate (and strategic) manipulations of those codes to preserve and burnish his reputation. It also explores the ways in which epic references to earlier crusades and anti-Islamic conflicts, invoked in a manner that tends to ennoble Walerans expedition, are truncated and subverted by strategic concerns over the problems of chivalric temerity and the power and sophistication of Ottoman forces. Together, the study concludes, these findings speak to the discursive complexity of the Burgundian court: a place where courtier-knights fashioned themselves strategically, using the very codes which some scholars have associated with premodern/medieval corporatism, and where warriors carefully negotiated the discursive margins of the courtly cult of prowess in order to articulate pragmatic advice based on lived experience. / History

Thesis (tesi di laurea)--Università di Firenze, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Lebenslauf. "Quellen und literatur": p. v-xiii.