Religious and religio-political controversies were an ever-present feature of both medieval and early modern English life; however, the audiences for such discourse had traditionally been limited. With the increasing availability of print in the seventeenth century, members of both the clergy and laity found themselves able to engage in religious disputes in new ways; in particular, they could attempt to build support for their position by appealing to a diverse public through print. Participation in this nascent arena of public religious discourse allowed authors who held minority positions to openly present their views and, perhaps, to gain enough popular support that opponents would alter existing policies. Taking the examples of two case studies from the mid-seventeenth century, both related to the issue of exclusion from the sacrament of communion, it is clear that authors placed a great importance on harnessing print and public discourse in order to effectively promote their goals for the progress of religion on both sides of the Atlantic.

The first section of this thesis describes the development of nationally-minded revolutionary sentiment in Vormärz Germany. Using British and American diplomatic envoy reports from the German states, the paper clarifies and enunciates the development of nationalist revolutionary feeling in Germany from the perspective of contemporary observers. It argues that the desire for national revolution spread over time among ever widening groups of people, creating conditions for that sentiment to be expressed intermittently through acts of disobedience or violence. <p>The second section analyzes four German films about Frederick II released between 1933 and 1945. The paper treats the films as part of a continuous historiographical, literary, and filmic discourse about Frederick, and compares their aesthetic and narrative strategies and how these affected the films effectiveness as propaganda. The papers most significant argument is that certain films incorporated aesthetic strategies from Weimar cinema in order to emphasize propagandistic content.

Throughout the course of American history, a tension has existed between domestic politics and American foreign policy. American foreign policymakers often see domestic opponents as a far more relevant threat to their livelihoods than foreign nations and as a consequence, foreign policymakers frequently make decisions based upon domestic opinion and governmental and bureaucratic pressures. Domestic politics can impact foreign policy making in other ways as well. As America acts in the world, it considers the ways in which its domestic situation affects its global standing. At no time in U.S. history was this interplay more clear than during the Cold War. While Cold War proxy conflicts raged on from Vietnam to Guatemala and from Chile to Angola, rancor and conflict took pace much close to home, on the streets of American cities, as America's racial crisis grew heated and sometimes violent. What impact, if any, did America's Cold War foreign policy have on the course of the American civil rights movement at home? This paper seeks to answer that question and others through an examination of the liberal Christian journals Christianity and Crisis and Christian Century, which demonstrate the degree to which black religious leaders understood this interplay and attempted to evoke it in their arguments in support of racial justice.

This dissertation project⁠ examines the impact of one particular insurgent slave group, the Black Auxiliary Troops of King Carlos IV, during the early years of the Haitian revolution.⁠ Led by free black generals Jean-François Papillon and Georges Biassou, members of this group accepted aid from Spain in order to continue their fight against the French colonists on Saint Domingue.⁠ A series of political and military circumstances led to their exile, and they ended up in various ports in Spanish America. These Black Auxiliaries managed to navigate the spaces in-between, and tracing their history allows us to better understand the ways in which subaltern groups can use political and military instability to advance their position. I argue that the Auxiliaries experience in the Saint Domingue rebellion, negotiating with the French and Spanish officials, turned them into diplomats, well versed in the legal and civil structures of the Spanish empire. I analyze the Auxiliaries experience in trying to maintain a cohesive unit while in exile by deploying their military service to Spain. In particular I argue that the Auxiliaries exercised a degree of autonomy and negotiating power over their own lives and played an active role in fixing contested imperial boundaries.

In this paper, I examine the press of Rio de Janeiro in August and September 1922 to argue that Brazils centennial celebrations represented a novel, yet culturally conservative, attempt by Brazilian and Portuguese political elites to frame the young nations heritage in a European light by focusing exclusively on the Portuguese past. The centennial can therefore be held up in contrast to more daring conceptualizations of Brazilian national identity that were emerging around the same time, most notably during São Paulos Modern Art Week.

In this paper, I argue that Brazilian abolitionists dialogued with French ideas regarding slavery and its imminent demise to a much greater degree than has previously been acknowledged by historians, and that French support for the Brazilian cause was as crucial as the more celebrated British role in the eventual success of the abolitionist movement. I build upon previous research regarding a little known polemic between the Brazilian abolitionist José do Patrocínio and the French doctor Louis Couty. Also featured in the paper is in-depth analysis of two French periodicals, Le Revue du Monde Latin and Le Revue Sud-Américaine, along with important primary source works by the Brazilian Frederico José de Santa-Anna Nery and the French intellectual L. Michaux-Bellaire.

Between 1853 and 1856, the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party became a powerful political force in Louisiana despite the states unique religious and political makeup. This thesis studies the rise of the party in three regions of the state: New Orleans, the Sugar Parishes, and North Louisiana and the Florida Parishes to show that the party gained popularity in the state differently in different regions. In New Orleans, the party rejected anti-Catholicism and adopted a stance against political corruption. In the Sugar Parishes, the Know-Nothings were merely a continuation of the Whig Party under a new name. In North Louisiana and in the Florida Parishes, the Know-Nothings supported anti-Catholicism and opposed the political power of New Orleans. In each region, proponents saw the Know-Nothing party as a means to advance their own agendas.

This thesis provides a fresh assessment of the 1921 Railways Act by examining its origins, nature and significance, with special reference to the perspectives of railway officials and others directly involved after 1908, across a period encompassing the cataclysmic experience of the Great War. At a time of growing concern about domestic political stability and the British economy's international competitiveness, the railway industry entered a new phase. Its commercial outlook became increasingly uncertain. The network was mature and losing local traffic to flexible new transport technologies. Gross revenues continued to grow, but were outpaced by costs. Money markets demanded higher returns, making capital expenditure problematic. Inevitably, the industry's huge capital debt and parliament's perceived role in helping to generate it, along with the railway industry's commercial drives and management practices, came under intense scrutiny. Working within a rigid regulatory regime, last amended in 1894, and burdened by nineteenth century statutory obligations and perceptions, companies strove to maintain margins by cooperative agreements and other means that led to a deteriorating relationship with customers. Moreover, the railway industry's labour force, seeking equality with capital, became more militant, as evidenced by the 1911 national strike. Within this context, the Asquith Government finally accepted the shortcomings of the existing regulatory framework, and in 1913 established a Royal Commission, chaired by Lord Loreburn, to reappraise the industry's relationship with the state, even its nationalisation. However, the outbreak of war stopped the commission's work prematurely. The Great War brought the railway companies under government control for an unexpectedly long duration. By its end there was wide agreement that their condition, caused by wartime operations without concern for commercial considerations, prevented their immediate return to their proprietors. The resettlement process, between 1919 and 1921, created an opportunity for reform denied in 1914, and particularly for Sir Eric Geddes to influence the outcome through his 1920 White Paper, which relied on improving the industry's efficiency to validate its radical changes. The Act's dual intent, resettlement and reform, was highly constrained by the intractable nature of the industry's pre-war commercial weaknesses, and the economic circumstances and national mood of the post-war period.

Between 1800 and 1850, the United States built a continental empire that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. As scholars have come to realize over the past three decades, this expansion was not a peaceful movement of American settlers into virgin wilderness. Instead, it involved the conquest and subjugation of diverse peoples in Louisiana, Florida and the northern provinces of Mexico, and forced the United States to interact aggressively with the European empires of Great Britain, France, Spain, and eventually Mexico. My work helps to explain how Americans in the early republic reconciled this militant expansion with their professed democratic and republican values. By studying the rhetoric of American expansion, I found their justifications rooted in the unexpected person of Napoleon Bonaparte. Americans often saw similarities between continental expansion in the old and new worlds. Both the United States and Bonapartes France started as republics, and both actively expanded beyond their borders during the first decades of the nineteenth-century. Even after the expansion of Bonapartes France was halted prematurely after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, Americans continued to use him debate the merits of an imperial republic. In other words, they asked if a nation could retain its republican principles and still engage in continental conquest. In the early era of American expansionbetween about 1800 and 1820, Napoleon served as a bogeyman, a negative example, which first expansionists and then anti-expansionists both used to justify their positions. But by the 1820s, as more sympathetic material flooded American print culture, his image changed. By the end of the Mexican American War in 1848, Bonaparte had been elevated into the perfect prototype for Americans to follow in their quest for continental domination. Bonaparte had largely become a positive symbol of military and national greatness.

<p>Scholars have made the argument that during the eighteenth century alchemy came increasingly to be seen as a fraudulent science or a science for charlatans, while chemistry retained its intellectual prestige. Around the same time "alchemy" and "chemistry" began their divergence, the legitimacy of science came increasingly to depend on public demonstrations. The term <i>chymistry</i> has become accepted amongst scholars of the field when discussing this etymologically complicated period when the terms alchemy and chemistry were both used by contemporaries to describe the field of knowledge without the distinctions that are placed on the terms today. </p> <p>This study examines 1,029 articles in thirteen early learned journals published in English, French, Italian, and Latin in Europe from 1665 to 1743. They included articles detailing experiments, observations, and medical practices performed with <i>chymistry</i>. As a whole, these sources grant us the ability to trace the evolution of scientific communication and to measure the newly forming social interest in science.</p> <p>Examining <i>chymistry</i> through early learned journals allows us to examine this change through a medium which catered to a community of European readers interested in the topic of <i>chymistry</i>. I argue in this thesis that secondary textual analysis of these articles reveals that the journals reflect the slow but steady evolutionary change of the chimeric field of <i>chymistry</i>. While alchemical understanding persisted, the journals do demonstrate a gradual shift toward a more modern chemistry had begun by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The large body of sources comprised of the early learned journals allows the historian both to review discussions focused on <i>chymistry</i> authored at the time of the well-documented divergence of alchemy and chemistry in the late seventeenth century, and to understand better how new forms of media developed to serve and shape public interest in science. Analyses of these articles reveal not only the books and articles readers expected would best help them to understand <i>chymistry</i> but also the language, specific <i>chymistry</i> terminology, and experiments done by <i>chymists</i> that can help us trace the different fates of "alchemy" and "chemistry" within early modern <i>chymistry</i>.</p>