Heather Metcalfe Doctoral Abstract, Ph.D. program, 2009 Department of History, University of Toronto “It’s All About War: Canadian Opinion and the Canadian Approach to International Relations, 1935-1939.” Canadians in the 1930s did not appear eager to focus on foreign affairs. The social and economic difficulties caused by the dislocation of the Great Depression meant that international developments often seemed remote and irrelevant. However, despite this focus on domestic issues, many Canadians were concerned with the trend of international events. As a result, the debate regarding the appropriate Canadian response remained an ongoing, if underlying, factor. In addition, the political issues raised by Canadian foreign policy, particularly through the Canadian involvement in the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations, meant the issue could not simply be ignored. During the later part of the decade, as the possibility of international conflict became ever more likely, increasing numbers of Canadians turned their attention to Canada’s international role. They also turned their attention to what this debate meant in terms of the Canadian sense of identity. These individuals were concerned as well with the response of Canadian public opinion to involvement overseas. This question, of the nature and susceptibility of Canadian public opinion to attempts to direct it, remains an intriguing one. The nature of this response remained open to question, and was the subject of significant debate among Canadian intellectuals, politicians and public figures. In response, a number of individuals and groups, including members of the Canadian press, attempted to influence Canadian public opinion. Many also pressured the Canadian government, led by William Lyon Mackenzie King’s administration, to play a more active role in shaping public opinion. Canadian intellectuals, for instance, influenced by contemporary writings on public opinion, seemed convinced of their natural role as ‘shapers’ of public opinion, particularly in a time of domestic and international crisis. These assumptions, and the ways in which Canadian public opinion both responded to, and rejected these attempts at direction, provide an interesting window into the question of public opinion, particularly in regards to international events. The debate regarding the Canadian response to the crises of the late 1930s can thus aid in gaining a greater appreciation of how public opinion shifts in response to outside challenges and the attempts to influence its course.

Heather Metcalfe Doctoral Abstract, Ph.D. program, 2009 Department of History, University of Toronto “It’s All About War: Canadian Opinion and the Canadian Approach to International Relations, 1935-1939.” Canadians in the 1930s did not appear eager to focus on foreign affairs. The social and economic difficulties caused by the dislocation of the Great Depression meant that international developments often seemed remote and irrelevant. However, despite this focus on domestic issues, many Canadians were concerned with the trend of international events. As a result, the debate regarding the appropriate Canadian response remained an ongoing, if underlying, factor. In addition, the political issues raised by Canadian foreign policy, particularly through the Canadian involvement in the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations, meant the issue could not simply be ignored. During the later part of the decade, as the possibility of international conflict became ever more likely, increasing numbers of Canadians turned their attention to Canada’s international role. They also turned their attention to what this debate meant in terms of the Canadian sense of identity. These individuals were concerned as well with the response of Canadian public opinion to involvement overseas. This question, of the nature and susceptibility of Canadian public opinion to attempts to direct it, remains an intriguing one. The nature of this response remained open to question, and was the subject of significant debate among Canadian intellectuals, politicians and public figures. In response, a number of individuals and groups, including members of the Canadian press, attempted to influence Canadian public opinion. Many also pressured the Canadian government, led by William Lyon Mackenzie King’s administration, to play a more active role in shaping public opinion. Canadian intellectuals, for instance, influenced by contemporary writings on public opinion, seemed convinced of their natural role as ‘shapers’ of public opinion, particularly in a time of domestic and international crisis. These assumptions, and the ways in which Canadian public opinion both responded to, and rejected these attempts at direction, provide an interesting window into the question of public opinion, particularly in regards to international events. The debate regarding the Canadian response to the crises of the late 1930s can thus aid in gaining a greater appreciation of how public opinion shifts in response to outside challenges and the attempts to influence its course.

For historians of twentieth-century British affairs, the decade of the 1930s is very significant. It was marked not only by a devastating economic crisis at the outset, but also by the rise of fascism in Europe and the onset of the Second World War at its close. These issues were problematic in themselves, but Britain’s response to them was complicated still further by the deep divisions between the Left and the Right over socialism and over the Soviet Union. The presence of the USSR in the East and its influence in Britain loomed over the internal debates that took place, affecting British responses to difficult situations in drastic and far-reaching ways. People of both anti-Soviet and pro-Soviet persuasions were forced to account for events that did not tally with their most strongly held beliefs, hopes or fears. This dissertation explores the ways in which British people of a variety of political leanings publicly processed and coped with the role of the Soviet Union in these debates. Using a range of sources including contemporary newspapers, books and pamphlets, I will trace the evolution of attitudes to the Soviet Union from 1929, the first year of the economic crisis, up until 1943, the high point of the Anglo-Soviet wartime alliance. My analysis will show how people with fundamentally different belief systems mirrored each other in their responses to intellectual challenges, and how interactions between different groups sustained or exaggerated each group’s response to the Soviet Union. I will also critique the analyses of some historians who have limited the parameters of their studies to take in only single groups or single events, and in so doing have become unfairly critical of individuals who struggled to process a large number of difficult and confusing events.

This thesis examines the historical problem of determining the relationship between a government's perception of public opinion and the decisions it takes. We introduce evidence for the social habits of the Cabinet in order to suggest new formulations of 'élite' and 'mass' public opinion. We argue that parliamentary opinion was generally more important in decision-making for the Cabinet, except at moments of extreme crisis when a conception of 'mass' opinion became equally significant. These characterization of mass opinion were drawn from a set of stereotypes about public opinion which academic and political theorization had produced. It is argued that this theorization was stimulated by ongoing debates about mass communication, the importance of the ordinary man in democracy and the outbreak of the first world war during the inter-war period. The thesis begins with an introduction to the methodological problems involved, followed by one chapter on theorization about public opinion in the inter-war period. Three diplomatic crises are considered in the case study chapters: the withdrawal of Germany from the Disarmament Conference in 1933, the German reoccuption of the Rhineland in 1936 and the threat of invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938. Two further chapters examine the role of public opinion in protests to Germany about the treatment of the Jews in 1933 and in 1938. It is argued that perceptions of public opinion played a much more important role in decision-making than has hiterto been thought. The most significant argument posits that perceptions of public opinion were equally as important as military considerations in the decision to refuse the Godesberg terms in 1938. More generally, the way in which politicians used public opinion rhetorically is described and the limits of the usefulness of the term for historians are suggested.

The thesis submitted deals with the topic of marriages in Interwar Japan through an analysis of the women's magazines (fujin zasshi) issued between 1920-1941. The women's role change brought about a gradual shift from a traditional ie-family structure to a new type of a partially atomized two-generation family. Consequently, the roles of man and women in a family have been revised since then. In relation to the modern thoughts incoming from the West, the Japanese started to perceive new ways of getting married, such as the liberal marriage (jiyū kekkon) or the love marriage (ren'ai kekkon), which have broken the old conventions of the traditional go-between marriage (miai kekkon). The purpose of this study is to show the views and opinions of men and women on marriage, establishing the family, spouse relationships, etc. by analyzing the women's magazines and to ansewer the reasearch questions. The analysis is based not only on the regular magazine articles, but also on the editorial interviews (zadankai) and counseling columns (mi no ue sōdan). At first, I introduce the women's magazines, their brief history, purpose and characteristic features. The following chapter discusses the historical background of the women's position from the social point of view, rather than political, and then mentions...

Thesis In the Light of Kabbalah: Jewish Mystique in Polish Literature in the Interwar Period deals with different models of reflection of Jewish religious and mystical tradition in the Polish interwar literature (on the example of three authors representing different ways of perceiving their own Jewish roots as well as the processing of themes based on the tradition of Jewish mysticism). Aleksander Wat, originally a futurist, was critical of the Jewish religious tradition - but still cannot his own "Jewishness" escape; prose writer Bruno Schulz offers an unique vision of cosmogony and eschatology reminiscent of - besides other things - selected concepts of Kabbalah; Bolesław Leśmianʼs relationship to this tradition is the looses, but on the other hand his method of working with motives which can interpreted in the context of the Jewish religious tradition is very original. Literary work of all three - as the heirs to the "people of the Book" - is marked by a specific relationship to language and the written word. In addition to this theme we deal with e.g. the Golem motive, the idea of the creation of the world or the idea of God. These analytical chapters are preceded by a theoretical and methodological introduction based on the traditions of literary hermeneutics, but also on selected concepts of...

La présente étude vise à réexaminer l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) sous le signe du néoclassicisme du XXe siècle. À travers une approche d’histoire littéraire et culturelle, sont analysés les écarts ou rapprochements qu’elle a opérés par rapport aux courants littéraires et artistiques de son temps, notamment ceux de l’Entre-deux-guerres. La première partie cherche à mettre au jour l’enjeu et la modalité de son rapport à l’Antiquité, en examinant, outre ses textespubliés, les documents inédits conservés aux archives à l’Université Harvard et à Petite Plaisance : le cahier dans lequel son père a copié des poèmes choisis ; le recueil Les Dieux ne sont pas morts (1922) et le tapuscrit de poèmes, « Album de vers anciens » (1917-1965) ; l’exemplaire de De Profundis sur lequel elle a laissé des traces de sa lecture. La deuxième partie retrace, en observant les textes publiés par l’auteur dans plusieurs revues ainsi que la correspondance, surtout dans les années trente et dans des écrits postérieurs sur cette période, l’itinéraire d’une jeune romancière qui n’est pas ignorante des courants majeurs — ceux qui se développent autour de la NRF, du courant dit du « retour à l’ordre » et de la découverte d’une nouvelle image de la Grèce — mais maintient un écart subtil entre eux et sa propre production. La troisième partie propose, à travers la caractérisation de son esthétique néoclassique, de définir Marguerite Yourcenar comme une figure de l’antimoderne et du dandy. / This study proposes to reexamine the works of Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), focussing on the relation to the 20th century’s neoclassicism. By means of literary- and cultural-history approaches, it analyzes the gaps or connections between her and the literary or artistic currents in the Interwar period. The first part clarifies how the author moulded her view of ancient Greece and Rome, which affected her works. It examines published and unpublished documents conserved in Harvard University and in Petite Plaisance: the notebook in which her father copied the poems chosen by him; the collection of poems by Yourcenar, The Gods didn’t die (1922), and its related typed texts “Album of ancient poems” (1917-1965); the book De Profundis of Oscar Wilde which includes her reading notes. The second part traces the trajectory of the young novelist, which shows that she was not indifferent to the major currents; the NRF, the return to the order and the discovery of the new image of Greece. We examine especially her writings published in several magazines and her letters written in the thirties as well as her works concerning this period. The third part proposes to regard Yourcenar as an anti-modernist and a dandy, by clarifying her neoclassical aesthetics.

The thesis focuses on the creation and functioning of the State statistical office and its contribution to the statistical science and theory development. The main goal of the thesis is to make the readers acquainted with the first period of the czechoslovak state statistics and enable them to get a thorough look into the institution's publication activities. In this concept the thesis is divided into three parts. In the first one the "modus operandi" of the statistical office itself is described, the second part comes up with the State statistical office's most influential personalities' biografical data. The third part brings the description and analysis ot books, magasines and other pieces publication. At the conclusion of the third section the key works of the statistical theory are analysed. The enclosure of the thesis implies the attachment with published laws and regulations of the Czechoslovak republic, which are directly tied to the statistical office's activities, and also the list of pieces published int the two key editions of the publication system. The contribution of the thesis is in the complex insight on the topic of the czechoslovak statistics in the interwar period. By now only some fragments have been compiled and described.

This thesis deals with the issue of the German minority in the interwar Czechoslovakia as a factor of foreign policy of Germany. The aim is to analyse how German foreign policy misused this minority to expand his power. It will be also demonstrated which consequences this policy brought and how it affected the Czech-German relations to the present.

Abstract The main sources has been found recently of the works of the greats architects Max Tintner and Zikmund Kerekes, II. w.w. survivors, architects who extablished their lives after II. w.w. in Israel. Also new information has been occurred in reconnection with architect André Steiner who spent his life in Atlanta, USA. Archives materials about unknown work made by Otto Eisler was also found. The main intention of the PhD thesis is to collect those unsorted materials and information of mentioned architects and to create comparison of their architectural works.