The early days of the French Revolution witnessed a sudden expansion of the popular press under conditions of complete freedom, and as national issues and party controversies developed, newspapers took up the cudgel of partisan strife. Mirabeau, Brissot, and Condorcet brought politics and journalism into the closest union. By October, 1789, three political groups clearly stood out in the National Assembly: the aristocrats, the moderates or "monarchiens", and the so-called patriots. [...]

This thesis examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). More specifically, this study focuses on the American Jewish response to the text, examining how the controversy itself provoked a watershed of change in conceptions and understandings of the Holocaust, and by extension, notions of Jewish identity and discourse in the modern world. This study will consider the importance of viewing the controversy as a conversation rather than simply a rigid dichotomy. In failing to see how each side communicated with the other, scholars sometimes themselves reinforce the rigidity of this division, either by emphasizing only the difference between each side or by defending one position over another. Viewing this controversy as a conversation will also allow this study to examine not only how pre-existing perspectives clashed in the debate, but also how these perspectives were in turn changed by this encounter. The controversy did not simply present opposing views, but built up new views on history and identity as a result. This thesis will end on an investigation of Arendt’s own reaction to the controversy: though she herself provoked the debate, she considered it to have failed in generating a ‘real’ controversy. Arendt believed the Eichmann controversy failed not because her critics misinterpreted her book, but because the debate produced a monolithic response, inhibiting the possibility and endless plurality of opinion Arendt considered hallmarks of effective public discourse.This thesis concludes that the controversy was indeed a ‘real’ one, for both sides openly articulated the necessity of openness, plurality and disagreement in public debates. In the end, this thesis hopes to rewrite the story of the controversy in order to revive its lessons about public discourse rather than repeating historiographical approaches that, in focusing on the ways in which the controversy failed to break down a dichotomy of interpretation, only serving to maintain the static and unproductive logic of the debate. In a word, this thesis defends a new telling of the history of this controversy, one that identifies and learns from the manner in which each side of the debate engaged the other: both ultimately defended the virtue of political contestation and provoked a flood of new questions in scholarship. In short, this study will examine the social reality of an idea.

<p>My dissertation project on colonialism and immigration in Canadian history explores the complex intersections of discourses of race, nation, and empire. With an emphasis on the role of visual and popular culture, I locate Canada within transnational discussions about citizenship and civilization. Like emerging states in the "Anglophone colonial world", Canadians helped erect and maintain a "global color line", by passing racist immigration laws that discriminated between "white" and "non-white" migrants. Canadian "racial nationalists" used visual culture to justify immigration restriction and create identity and belonging, even as Canadian identity simultaneously trumpeted tolerance and enlightenment. In turn, anti-racists invoked national exceptionalist mythologies to opposed race-based immigration restriction. Looking back at a global era of nation-building, I locate Canada as an emerging nation-state in which Anglo-Canadians faced the challenge of creating a national identity within a racist global empire, and alongside a powerful Republic that was also virulently racist, but from which Canadians desperately wanted to distinguish themselves. Heated debates about race and national belonging also unearthed cleavages between "white" people in Canada, the United States, and within the British Empire, including distinctions of gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as competing and political and ethical sensibilities. Situated at the intersection of transnational and national history, my project explores how this complex case of nation-formation spawned subtle and dynamic racial discourses, an understanding of which will advance our understanding of race and racism in the twentieth century.</p> / Dissertation

The reign of Elizabeth I of England is one of the most celebrated reigns in history and is renowned for the renaissance of the arts, theater, and culture. Authors, playwrights, and artists venerated her in their art in what became known as the Cult of Gloriana. At her accession, however, her position was far from secure. Many considered her illegitimate and she was a female entering a male-dominated world. In addition, Elizabeth inherited a religiously divided nation. In response to this, Elizabeth and her councilors initiated a propaganda campaign that created an image of Elizabeth as a wise, just, and well-beloved ruler. This dissertation will examine the growing use of pageantry utilized by sixteenth-century rulers, the legacy of the English queens who preceded Elizabeth, Elizabeths coronation procession, the evolution of the royal court, the performance of plays and masques at court, and the queens annual progresses to show how Elizabeth, her council, and her subjects used pageantry and spectacle to communicate with each other on the important issues of the day.

This paper explores how encounters with European empire shaped American missionary and travel writing about the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I break with the way that scholars in the humanities, and historians of Americans in the Middle East in particular, talk about intercultural contact. Most just narrate exchanges between Americans and their Others, ignoring the context that made those interactions possible. Post-spatial turn scholars have contextualized cultural exchanges in spaces like Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone. However, they usually focus on hetero interactions within those zones-- those between the visitor and the Other. But American travelers visited places inhabited by people who they identified with-- like European imperialists-- as well as Others. The imperial power relationships within those places shaped Americans' experiences. I queer Pratt's contact zone and examine how homo interactions-- between visitors and people they identified with-- mediated contact. Imperial threesomes produced Americans' experiences in areas dominated by European empires. Exchanging a binary model of encounter for a triangular one, I explore the ways that imperial power relations shaped American Protestants' pilgrimages and missions in the Middle East.

In this thesis, I discuss the ways that three American Protestants incorporated scientific instruments and scientific language into accounts of their pilgrimages to Palestine. I argue that incorporating science into their writings about this spiritually overdetermined place offered them three major religious benefits. First, the use of science reconciled an important conflict between official Protestant theology and popular Protestant practice by making pilgrimage to the Holy Land an act of Biblical interpretation. Second, it gave these sacred travel writers a precise way of communicating their pilgrimage experiences to readers, thus offering a virtual pilgrimage to American readers who could not afford a steamship vacation in the Eastern Mediterranean and enhancing their own credibility. Finally, it gave these writers a way to protect themselves from threatening associations with the spiritual Others who shared the physical space of Palestine and Syria with them. Then, I argue that their use of scientific thinking changed the place of these lands in their readers' cosmologies and eschatologies.

This dissertation is a case study of Marsabit, Kenya and the history of pastoralists, administrators, missionaries, and others who resided on or near the mountain in the twentieth century. My research emphasizes the changing social and political role of Marsabits resources, the interplay between development policy and Christian missionary theory and practice, and the marginalization of pastoralists in post-colonial Kenya. The application of colonial development policy on Marsabit was inconsistent, but led to the gradual exclusion of pastoralists from the mountains resources in favor of environmental conservation and farming. In the 1970s and 1980s the consequences of this exclusion were heightened by drought and dramatic population growth. Additionally, evangelical missionaries from the Bible Churchmans Missionary Society and the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) who were leery of physical ministries eventually justified and funded their work by using the language of development. Beginning in the 1970s, AIM missionaries increasingly relied on their technical expertise, access to wealth, and integration into the development bureaucracy to justify their work in Northern Kenya.

This dissertation examines the role that children of color played in Brazils transition from slavery into the post-emancipation era. I explore the themes of law, family, gender, race, and labor using tutelage legal documents from Rio de Janeiro between 1871 and 1900. Through tutelage documents, I uncover the conflicts over free children of color that developed between their parents and the State. These micro-histories illustrate the intersections between the gradual, elite movement toward emancipation, beginning with the Free Womb Law of 1871, and the continual struggle of former slaves to negotiate their conditional freedoms. I argue that the purpose, structure, and implementation of tutelary guardianship show how Brazilian society shifted from a system of undefined yet accessible rights to one of defined, yet largely inaccessible rights for people of color and their offspring. By contrasting elements of change and continuity within the lives of Afro-Brazilians, this dissertation contributes to historiographical discussions of slavery, citizenship, and inequality within the Brazilian context.

This paper suggests nonviolence in the United States was a form of moral being with roots in Gandhism and the Christian tradition whose central architect was James M. Lawson, Jr. Commonly described as a leading tactician of nonviolence in the United States, this paper argues Lawsons primary contribution to nonviolence was not tactical but intellectual, the adaptation of Gandhism into a mode of moral being calibrated to the particular political and racial context of the US South. Conceived as a moral method of social engagement, the politics of nonviolence contrasted sharply with the immoral system of racialized violence in the US. In tracing the intellectual lineage of nonviolence through the thinking and writings of Mohandas Gandhi, A.J. Muste, Howard Thurman, and James M. Lawson, this paper argues James Lawsons reinterpretation of these previous religious intellectuals led him to conceive of nonviolence as a moral mode of political being in the modern United States.

This paper attempts to deepen historical understanding of how non-violence became a vital force in modern US politics. It interrogates the indelible association between the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and non-violent action, arguing that Kingian origin narratives of non-violence obscure historical apprehension of the long process of intellectual, tactical, and spiritual experimentation that produced a new kind of weapon in the United States. The history in this manuscript suggests that a legible non-violent praxis was developed in a partnership between A.J. Mustes Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and A. Phillip Randolphs all-black March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in the early 1940s. Despite the yawning divide between each movement on questions of race and war, this collaboration between the MOWM and the FOR launched a dialogical process of intellectual exchange and tactical experimentation that made legible a form of non-violence in US politics. Gandhis Quit India Campaign of 1942 inspired this collaboration, and the movement interpenetration between FOR and MOWM activists during the Gandhian Moment of 1942 hastened the development and diffusion of a non-violent praxis nearly two decades before the sit-in revolution swept across the United States in 1960.