The process of European political unification that began in the mid-twentieth century has taken for granted a certain idea. This is that Europe is composed of ethnonational units. My research shows that some of the central, though largely unexplored intellectual roots of the European Union challenged this idea. German-speaking Jews from the Habsburg Empire, in the period between the 1880s and the Second World War, formulated an idea of Europe that was intended to cut across enthnonational distinctions. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German nationalism had been the gateway for Central European Jews to membership in a European civilization defined by liberal Enlightenment values. Yet the crisis of liberalism at the close of the nineteenth century saw liberal national movements turn into exclusive, ethnonational ones. The cosmopolitan, Enlightenment idea of Europe gave way to an idea of Europe whose membership was confined to sovereign ethnonational components. The multinational Austrian dynastic state and its Jews had little to gain from this development: Jews were not only unwelcome in the ethnically-defined nation state, but by extension, in all of Europe. I show that in response to the national disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, Austrian Jewish liberals, pacifists, Zionists, Diaspora nationalists, and Austro-Marxists formulated a strikingly similar cluster of European ideas. All conceived of Europe as a cultural and intellectual community constituted on the basis of a decentralized, multinational polity in which national affiliation(s) or lack thereof would be defined by individual choice. Though they offered divergent immediate solutions to antisemitism, their shared dilemma and common intellectual and cultural resources united them in imagining Europe as the long-term solution to the Jewish predicament.

During the American Civil War, President Lincoln and his Administration suspended the right to a jury trial by suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus and using military commissions to try civilians. This study first explores the suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus. It then discusses 262 military commission cases, selected for comparative study. These cases took place between 1861 and 1866. The purpose of this study is to bring to light a little-known aspect of the Civil War, the use of military commissions to try civilians, for use as a tool in future studies, and show that the suspension of the right to a jury trial in the past connects to current issues involving suspended civil liberties.

Japanese GLBT appear to have always held a place in national media. From the the Edo period to the modern age, the Japanese people have constantly been exposed to different types of GLBT society, whether or not they realized it at the time. In this paper, I explore the representations of lesbians and transgenders during the Edo period (1600 to 1860) and in the modern and post-modern era (1868 to the present). I look at ukiyo-e from the Edo period and then Western-style theatre and newspaper stories from the modern era to grasp how lesbians have been portrayed through the years. Then I look at onnagata of Kabuki and modern-day new half in order to show how the concept of a transgender has changed over time in the media. Just how has the Japanese perspective changed after the mass introduction of Western culture and ideals during the Meiji period?

In the High and Late Middle Ages, Christians accused Jews of shedding Christian blood, and sometimes even their own, for ritual purposes. This project is interested in how Jewish and Christian perceptions of blood may have led to the formation of such myths. I begin my analysis by discussing the ways in which medieval Jews and Christians interacted with one another, thereby providing the opportunity for Christians to observe and interpret the behaviors of their Jewish neighbors. Furthermore, Judaism and Christianitys shared history and typological language would have facilitated an awareness of one anothers traditions. This paper, therefore, aims to demonstrate how interactions and common roots would have helped to shape Christian readings of Jewish practice. I argue that in observing and interpreting Jewish behavior towards blood, Christians applied their own concerns and values to make Jews active vehicles for Christian exegesis. Blood accusations stemmed from an awareness, observation, and interpretation of Jewish practices as filtered through the lenses of the medieval Christian Weltanschauung. In some cases, Christians even misinterpreted Jewish practices. To argue my thesis, I pair one type of bloodshed familiar to medieval Christians with one type of blood accusation made against Jews. The pairs are: the Crusades and ritual murder, menstruation and male menstruation, circumcision and ritual cannibalism, and the paschal lamb sacrifice and Host desecration. Each pair will be a case study in how Christians may have understood, or perhaps misunderstood, Jewish practice from a Christian perspective and how such a phenomenon contributed to the formation of blood accusations.

From the 1880s through the 1940s tens of thousands of anarchists were active in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them first- and second-generation immigrants. But most were not yet devotees of the anarchist cause when they arrived on American shores. Instead, a clear link existed between migration and the embrace of anarchist ideology. This study asks how and whythousands of migrants became anarchists, and how their embrace of an anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan ideology shaped their identities, experiences and actions. Utilizing anarchist publications, government surveillance files, and archival materials, it focuses on Eastern European Jews and Italiansthe two largest segments of the anarchist movement by the turn of the centuryand the development of anarchism among these groups in three important centers of American anarchism: New Yorks Lower East Side, Paterson, New Jersey, and San Francisco. It then follows the changing fortunes of the movement in the face of war, the Russian Revolution, the First Red Scare, and the birth of communism and fascism, and ends with an examination of immigrant American anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, and that conflicts dramatic impact on the movement in the United States. This study argues that it was American conditions that usually made immigrants into anarchists, rather than European ones, inextricably linking the histories of migration and American anarchism. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of post-migration radicalization defies categorization within most historiographical paradigms of European immigration that focus on the construction of hyphenated American identities or hybrid transnational ones. Anarchists chose an alternative: they embraced an ideology that opposed both Americanization and Old World nationalisms, severing their attachments to their states of origin while willfully resisting assimilation into their host society. They formulated a radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity that embraced diversity, rejected hierarchies, and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. This cosmopolitanism was ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of competing nationalisms ranging from Americanism to fascism to Zionism, but it stands as an important example of a transnational collective identity delinked from nationalism, the nation-state and racial hierarchies.

Mutinies tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the revolutionary era. While sans-culottes across Europe laid siege to the nobility and slaves put the torch to plantation islands overseas, out on the oceans naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck, formed committees, elected delegates, and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. Never before or since have there been as many mutinies on both sides of the front, as well as among many of the neutral powers, as during the French Revolutionary Wars. This dissertation, based on research in British, Danish, Dutch, French, Swedish, and US archives, traces the development of the mutinous Atlantic from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to its crescendo in 1797.

More than 40,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Amazonia between the late seventeenth century and the 1840s. By the second half of the nineteenth century their cultural and economic adaptation to the region had become very visible: the slaves acquired knowledge of Amazonian agriculture, learned the opportunities for collecting forest and river products, and forged bonds of kin and culture. When slavery was abolished in 1888, the freedmen took advantage of the gradual impoverishment of plantation areas to appropriate plots of land that had belonged to their former masters, creating numerous peasant communities. This implied not only re-configuring residential, work, and leisure spaces, but also crafting new narratives of owning and belonging to the land. Outside of plantations, groups of escaped slaves proliferated along the Amazons tributary rivers. Like their enslaved counterparts, by the second half of the nineteenth century the runaways gradually abandoned the hard life of marronage. They maintained relations with itinerant merchants, missionaries, and political patrons to gain stability and establish themselves as autonomous rural producers. In the early 1900s local elites sought to buy the lands where the maroon-descendants lived in order to subject them to coerced labor. Some black peasants accommodated to the new situation but others resisted it by employing varied individual, collective, and confrontational strategies, which included participating in multi-racial protests against land privatization. Local modes of production and trade in Amazonia impinged upon the history of Afro-descendants in complex and contradictory ways. While under slavery the regional economy facilitated the conversion of slaves into peasants and the viability of marronage, in the early- to mid-twentieth century local elites perfected new ways of curbing peasant autonomy. In turn, black peasants tried to maintain themselves as autonomous producers, asserting their right not only to reside on the land and to cultivate it, but also to gather its resources freely.

This thesis explores the ways communities of ex-slaves and free blacks in Appalachian Tennessee mobilized to build schools in the five years after the Civil War. Historians have long asserted that black schools were central institutions in the movement by Southern blacks to create an autonomous culture following the Civil War. And scholars have traditionally used the creation of cultural institutions (such as schools) to demonstrate the collective efforts by freedpeople in their pursuit of common aspirations. But the question remains what the school-building process can tell historians about how freedpeople understood themselves and their communities within local, regional, state, and national contexts. The school-building process is here used as a lens into the power structure of black communities and their relationships with the Freedmen‟s Bureau, northern aid groups and missionary societies, native white Radicals, and themselves. Appalachian freedpeople did indeed find strength in their commitments to kith and kin, in the creation of civil self-help groups, and in religious fervor, and they used such obligations to erect schoolhouses and hire teachers independent of any external aid. Just as often, however, rampant poverty and limited resources required that they appeal to external aid groups for assistance. The paternalism of northern aid groups clashed with the self-determinism of freedpeople and prevented either side from dictating the terms of their relationship to the other. The resulting school-building negotiations underscored their attempts to find mutually accommodating solutions. While some of these extended conversations engendered ready solutions, in other instances conflicting black agendas and competing definitions of black self-determinism factionalized black communities. School-building was ultimately a highly politicized exercise in which freedpeople constructed grassroots political allegiances that often reflected their larger political ideology.

The life and narrative of Sarah Wakefield, an Anglo migrant who spent six weeks as a captive of the Santee Dakotas during the US-Dakota Conflict, show one woman's experience navigating the changing racial dynamics of the nineteenth-century Minnesota frontier. Using recent conceptualizations of “the frontier” as either a middle ground or woods, this thesis reconsiders Wakefield as a prisoner, not of Indians or her own conscience but of her region‟s ossifying racial divisions. Wakefield's initial attempts at intercultural communication, which included feeding starving Dakotas who knocked on her door, were consistent with Anglo notions about womanhood and Indian-white relations. But when war forced Wakefield into captivity and heightened racial tensions in Minnesota, Wakefield‟s decision to seek protection as the “wife” of an Indian male jumped the boundaries of what the white community would tolerate. Wakefield wrote her captivity narrative after she had returned to her Anglo community, her Indian protector had died by public execution, and the United States government had removed most other Dakotas from the state. While on the surface Wakefield‟s work appears to be courageously pro-Indian, it was in fact an attempt to reconcile herself with other white Minnesotans by proving her adherence to popular notions of racial difference and female propriety. Rather than the defender of cultural pluralism that previous scholars have made her out to be, Wakefield was a pragmatist whose quest for community ultimately overshadowed her willingness to bridge the cultural divide. Her story suggests the limits of intercultural exchange on the frontier and the process by which ideas about race both created and intensified these barriers.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was a central figure in the FDR administration in more than just fiscal matters. Morgenthau also worked from the 1930’s onward in several arenas to aid the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. My research updates and revises the existing historiography by revealing this activism was the logical culmination of years of interest in the fates of Jewish refugees. Furthermore, this activism was affected by several factors beyond Morgenthau’s own control. The administrative style of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, relationships between Morgenthau and other members of the cabinet, and influential undercurrents within the cabinet all limited Morgenthau’s options for rescue and helped determine the outcomes of his actions on behalf of refugees. While Morgenthau has often been a neglected character in the history books, this thesis places him at the center. In doing so, I argue that his involvement both came earlier than most historians assert, and was influenced by factors that have not been previously analyzed as they apply to Morgenthau’s particular historical situation.