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Item Open Access “100 Dollars and Other Valuable Considerations”(2022-04-20) Reneau, OliviaLand and homeownership are topics of much debate, concern, and intervention in modern Black political thought. Discussion of Black land loss, while longitudinal in scope, often places the origins of Black land ownership in the early 1900s. In this paper, I challenge this notion, first placing the origin of Black land ownership in the antebellum period and examining Black land ownership for the following century. To do so, I constructed the narratives of six Black-owned parcels from their acquisition to their status in 1950. My first chapter offers a brief exploration of the history of Black ownership between 1850 and 1950. In my second chapter, I examine the circumstances of the deprivation of that land, inclusive of the political, economic, and white-supremacist tools used to do so. In my third chapter, I consider conceptions of Black land from prominent Black authors like W.E.B. DuBois to the presence of land in abolitionist politics. Then, I offer the complete histories of six formerly Black-owned parcels of land from 1850 to 1950 and the presence of tools of preservation and deprivation of Black ownership in these parcels. I conclude with a brief analysis of the five parcels, an acknowledgment of the limitations of this work, and a discussion of the significance of this work on Black vital records research. By the end of the period, only two parcels were possessed by Black individuals, and only one of those was a direct connection through shared lineage. The chains of title created during this research indicate that wills and end-of-life legal planning best-ensured property were successfully passed from one Black owner to the next, a mechanism that heavily favored families in wealthy, free, Black communities.Item Open Access A Constitutional Crisis: The Kentucky Court of Appeals Schism, 1824-1826(2010-04-23) Nudelman, SarahThis thesis examines Kentucky’s tumultuous political history from 1824 to 1826. Prompted by power struggles between the legislature and judiciary, a court schism ensued. Dueling judicial bodies, the “Old Court” versus the “New Court,” each claimed to be the rightful Court of Appeals. In answering why a schism occurred and how it was resolved, I identify and analyze the underlying critical yet subtle constitutional issues. When Kentucky’s debtor relief laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1823, the legislative majority and its constituents were outraged. Although statesmen initially appeared politically-motivated, the debate mushroomed into a critique of their democratic form of government and what powers the state constitution sanctioned to each branch. Words led to action. In 1824, the legislature enacted a law to disband and replace the original court. However, the “former” judges refused to resign causing two tribunals to exist concurrently. A new constitutional question emerged: Did the legislature have the authority to dissolve the highest state court? Two political parties formed espousing opposite viewpoints and supporting the corresponding “legitimate” court. Over the next two years, the parties addressed “the people,” the true ruler of the republic, about this issue. Both parties utilized the constitution as an authoritative force, but presented arguments based on competing notions about republicanism, popular sovereignty, the written constitution, separation of powers, and judicial review. The thesis distills these positions to discern the political ideologies fueling the controversy. Ultimately, the factions, legislature, and contending courts entrusted “the people”—provided with facts and an awareness of democratic ideals—to resolve the controversy. Kentuckians utilized the annual state elections to voice popular will. In 1826, the legislature reflected the citizens’ wishes by repealing the law that disbanded the original Court of Appeals. This ended the schism and clarified the scope of judicial jurisdiction. Kentuckians reconciled discrepancies within the text and interpretations of the state constitution, the written will of “the people.” In the process, conceptions of popular sovereignty shifted. This scholarship provides a unique case study of popular constitutionalism, in which all three branches of government simultaneously appealed to the voters’ constitutional powers.Item Open Access A Diplomatic Sequel to the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870): United States President Rutherford B. Hayes' 1878 Arbitration for Paraguay and Argentina(2022-04-20) Connors, Austin W.Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893), the 19th United States (U.S) President, served as arbiter in 1878 for Paraguay and Argentina when the countries’ governments disputed a portion of the South American Grand Chaco after the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870). To present their claims to Hayes, Paraguayan and Argentine diplomats submitted thousands of pages of argumentative evidence. For Paraguay’s leaders, a successful arbitration was a desirable victory for the nation-state, which was devastated from the war. For Argentina’s leaders, the arbitration was a chance to aggrandize its physical size with territory also claimed by Paraguay but was only justified after Brazil, its wartime ally but post-war competitor, had successfully annexed land from Paraguay in 1872. As the first to use internal U.S State Department sources, the thesis lays out the origin and mechanics of the Hayes Arbitration while advancing an explanation as why the award favored Paraguay. In doing so, it explains why Hayes is a national hero in Paraguay, despite his perceived mediocrity in the U.S, as his award was pivotal for the recovery of the morale of the weak nation-state in the aftermath of the devastating war.Item Open Access Item Open Access "A New England in All But Name"(2022-04-20) Rork, Kerry“Settler colonialism” emerged as an analytical tool in the twentieth century as scholars attempted to both understand and reckon with the history of colonization. It describes a distinct means of conquest that relies on the replacement of a native population with a settler group in the form of the elimination or displacement of a people and/or a culture. This thesis explores the traditional settler colonial framework within the context of Trinity College, Dublin. Founded in 1592, Trinity College functioned to control the Irish population and solidify the settler group who will later be known as the “Anglo-Irish.” Yet, just as Ireland was ambiguous, Trinity College was ambiguous, as both sit uncomfortably within the framework of settler colonialism. For the purposes of this work, I rely on three historical periods: Trinity’s foundation, Trinity and the long eighteenth century, and finally, Trinity in the twentieth century. In the first chapter, I examine Trinity College’s founding goals of simultaneously assimilating Gaelic Irish and ensuring that the New English remain within Ireland. Chapter Two focuses on the period of globalization and revolution of the long eighteenth century. I explore the methods by which Trinity College and its scholars challenged and modified revolutionary ideas within the Irish context. And, finally, in Chapter Three, I show how Trinity College administration and scholars manipulated and mobilized Trinity’s history to defend their place as a settler colonial institution within the new Irish Free State. These three periods provide a means of understanding the framework of settler colonialism within Ireland and its outcomes in the formation of the “Anglo- Irish.” I rely on the work of Trinity College scholars and administration, legislation within Ireland, and documentation of Trinity College’s history. Trinity College’s interactions throughout its history provide a glimpse of the Irish colonial tension. Settler colonialism requires institutions that we may not think of as colonial, like universities. Yet such institutions and the people within them often operate as distinct and even oppositional agents. This work helps to provide a means of assessing and reexamining the institutional and intellectual role within the framework of settler colonialism within Ireland. Doing so becomes critical, especially as many of these institutions now must reckon with their legacies in the postcolonial world.Item Open Access "A New Genesis": The "Silent Vigil" at Duke University, April 5th-12th, 1968(2016-06-14) Segal, Theodore DavidItem Open Access "A Right to be Safely Born": The Quest for Health Justice for American Mothers and Children, 1890-1965(2014) Goldman, Eden AbigailBetween 1890 and 1965, the ideology of government responsibility for maternal and child health represented a continuous and central goal that fueled programs and institutional networks of progressive and liberal social policy advocates. Beginning in the settlement houses of the 1890s, a cadre of female bureaucrats, social reformers, and their political allies developed an array of federally based programs. Conservative stakeholders--among them anti-feminists, representatives of the medical industry, anti-communists, and white supremacists--strenuously opposed this vision of health justice, arguing that health was a personal responsibility in which government should play no part. Despite the achievements of government-based progressive reformers in instituting their vision in urban settlement houses, under the Sheppard-Towner Act of the mid-1920s and during the years of the New Deal and World War II, the Cold War's approach to domestic social policy after 1947 clamped down on their vision. After this conservative turn against social democratic solutions to welfare needs, these progressive advocates shifted their attention to the international health rights movement and to community-based maternal and child health activities.
My dissertation introduces the concept of health justice as an interpretive lens to trace the history of health policy progressives and their institutional networks. On the one hand, health justice reflects the communitarian premise that the health of all members of society is essential for the common good. On the other hand, health justice implies that health and health care are individual rights that government ought to protect. While communitarian arguments were often on the tip of the tongues of social reformers, a passionate belief in citizenship-based rights and redistributive and humanitarian ideas of social justice undergirded their policy ideas and became a more explicitly stated position during the New Deal and World War II. This justice-based approach to maternal and child health policy was consistently undermined by the prevailing counter-ideologies of individual responsibility for health, local control of public services, racial segregation in health services, and the commodification of health care.
My work relies on primary evidence collected from the personal papers of key protagonists, the administrative records of the Children's Bureau housed at the National Archives, oral histories, and the presidential papers of Harry S. Truman. Published primary materials have been culled from memoirs, professional public health and medical journals, as well as the popular press. I also draw from a body of historical and political science scholarship of the past twenty-five years to contextualize the narrative.
Item Open Access A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850-1940(2012) Bishara, Fahad AhmadThis dissertation is a legal history of debt and economic life in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It draws on materials from Bahrain, Muscat, Bombay, Zanzibar and London to examine how members of an ocean-wide commercial society constructed relationships of economic mutualism with one another by mobilizing debt and credit. It further explores how they expressed their debt relationships through legal idioms, and how they mobilized commercial and legal instruments to adapt to the emergence of modern capitalism in the region.
At the same time, it looks at the concomitant development of an Indian Ocean-wide empire of law centered at Bombay, and explores how this Indian Ocean contractual culture encountered an Anglo-Indian legal regime that conceived of legal documents in a radically different way. By mobilizing written deeds in imaginative ways, and by strategically accessing British courts, Indian Ocean merchants were able to shape the contours of this growing legal regime.
Most broadly, the dissertation argues that law and courts became increasingly central to economic life in the Indian Ocean, and that economic actors in the region employed a wide range of different legal strategies in adapting to a changing world of commerce. In the Indian Ocean, as elsewhere, the histories of commerce and law were inextricably intertwined.
Item Open Access "A Weapon as Powerful as the Vote": Street Protest and Electoral Politics in Caracas, Venezuela before Hugo Chavez(2009) Velasco, AlejandroOn 23 January 1958, Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted in a "democratic revolution" whose emblematic images featured a vast public housing project built by the dictator in the heart of in downtown Caracas, next to the Presidential Palace, Ministry of Defense, and Congress. Officially named "2 December" to memorialize the coup that consolidated his rule, the neighborhood and its residents suffered harshly was renamed the "23 January" (23 de enero) in honor of the 1958 revolution. This study investigates the relationship between this parish and the Venezuelan democratic system that would, over the following decades, be praised for its stability and was believed to have made the urban popular sectors dependent on party and state. This study disrupts such an interpretation by exploring how oppositional politics, forms of street protest, and voting combined to produce evolving understandings of political participation and legitimate contestation.
Three key moments anchor the story told in this dissertation: the transition to electoral democracy during the 1958 revolution and its aftermath; the late 1970s and early 1980s period of structural crisis that lead to dramatic seizures of public vehicles; and the 1989 Caracazo massacre in which Venezuela's newly elected President shocked the nation by ending the country's largest urban protest with a massacre that killed hundreds. The dissertation ends with reflections on the continuity of in political and protest behavior in el 23 under former military rebel Hugo Chávez who was elected to the presidency in 1998. While the urban popular sectors' are depicted by some as having been awoken to national politics under Chavez, this study establishes powerful continuities going back to 1958 in this stronghold of Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution."
A comprehensive and systematic canvas of thirty years' of newspaper and periodical sources on el 23 provides a firm foundation for the narrative. It also draws on primary sources from the Banco Obrero, the US National Archives, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, while making extensive use of polling data and electoral statistics from 1958 to 1989. This archival work allowed for the success of extensive oral histories and ethnographic observation carried out in the 23 de enero over ten months between 2004 and 2005.
Item Open Access Actions and Receptions of the Knights Templar from 1118-1192(2019-04-15) Wu, NeilIn 1118, a quasi-monastic military order known as the Knights Templar was founded in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Church leaders saw this organization as an opportunity to inspire the religiosity of the crusading movement. In 1129, their aspirations were expressed through the Latin Rule of the Knights Templar, a document that regulated the Templars’ conduct. The Latin Rule’s rigid guidelines prescribed a lifestyle that combined elements of monasticism and knighthood. However, the Templars were quick to form their own interpretations of purpose. Rather than living under strict adherence to the original mandates of the Latin Rule, what resulted was an organization that excelled in battle and utilized its military abilities to pursue their own financial and political agendas in the Holy Land. Many contemporaries took note of the Templars’ choice of actions and of their apparent priorities. The contemporary reception was organized into two different camps. The first camp believed that the Templars served a necessary purpose in military matters, despite recognition that the order had harnessed a considerable amount of economic resources and political influence along the way. The other camp maintained a narrative in which the Knights Templar had grown greedy and corrupted, and that due to this degradation, they had outgrown their usefulness.Item Open Access All in the Same Boat: Fighting for Capital in Gadsden, Alabama, 1900-Present(2020) Wood, BradFollowing World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama
belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At
midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more
conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they
had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic
Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence
remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the
South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of
industry in the county operates unorganized.
A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was
once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to
study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the
famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even
more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the
most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give
even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with
police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism
represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had
also been something like a union town.
The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to
terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down
and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds
about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not
the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It
was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists
who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when
Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against
people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class
city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.
Item Open Access “All War Arrangements are but Schools in Patience”: The North Carolina Council of Defense and the Associational State, 1917-1919(2022) Finney, Nathan KThis dissertation explores the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the North Carolina Council of Defense during the First World War. Its story, while particular to a single state and its people, also illuminates and explains the dynamic and compelling regional and national events that drove a massive wartime mobilization. The North Carolina Council of Defense is also an entry point into understanding the decisions and pathways seen in the American mobilization, helping to illuminate how and why the mobilization occurred in the ways that it did. Perhaps most importantly, the story of this state Council provides insight into the nature of American governance during wartime. Positioned between the national government and the people of North Carolina, the Council mediated the activities of public, private, and individual efforts in support of mobilization activities. Because of this intermediary positioning, it was instrumental in expanding state capacity and capability for military and resource mobilization, and therefore supporting an increase in the nation’s ability to mobilize for the war. However, the Council’s intermediary role also allowed those managing the state mobilization to prevent any significant challenge to the state’s white supremacist and patriarchal socio-political system, despite the dynamic changes wrought by the need to mobilize the nation for war.
Item Open Access American Perceptions of Sino-Soviet Relations: 1944 - 1963(2018-04-13) Song, YifanFor the first half of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China were perceived by many within the U.S. government to be a monolithic communist bloc. However, the development of the Sino-Soviet Split proved monolithic communism false. Why then did the U.S. take so long to realize the mounting differences and problems between China and the Soviet Union? My thesis explores the American perceptions of Sino-Soviet relations and what drove these perceptions in the period between 1944 and 1963. My research shows that U.S. perceptions of relations between Soviet Communists and Chinese Communists were fairly open and diverse prior to 1950. A series of events in 1949/50 then caused perceptions to become rigid and monolithic. These events included the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, the rise of McCarthyism, the adoption of a militant Cold War grand strategy as embodied in NSC-68, and the Chinese intervention in the Korean War. The rigidity in perceptions of the Sino-Soviet relationship between 1950 and 1956 especially in the higher echelon of policymakers was a setback for U.S foreign policy, but some degree of pluralism in perceptions was preserved in the lower ranks of the intelligence community. Following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of early 1956, which marked a definitive ideological split between the Soviet Union and China, U.S. perceptions of Sino-Soviet relations began shedding its paralyzing rigidity. Between 1956 and 1963, the intelligence community became increasingly cognizant of Sino-Soviet problems and sources of potential conflict, but were still slow to explicitly state that a Sino-Soviet Split has occurred. Not until 1962-3 did the CIA make this explicit.Item Open Access An Army of the Willing: Fayette'Nam, Soldier Dissent, and the Untold Story of the All-Volunteer Force(2015) Currin, ScovillUsing Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina, as a local case study, this dissertation examines the GI dissent movement during the Vietnam War and its profound impact on the ending of the draft and establishment of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973. I propose that the US military consciously and methodically shifted from a conscripted force to the All-Volunteer Force as a safeguard to ensure that dissent never arose again in the ranks as it had during the Vietnam War. This story speaks to profound questions regarding state power that are essential to making sense of our recent history. What becomes of state and military legitimacy when the soldier refuses to sanction or participate in the brutality of warfare? And perhaps more importantly, what happens to the foreign policy of a major power when soldiers no longer protest, and thereby hold in check, questionable military interventions? My dissertation strives to answer those questions by reintroducing the dissenting soldier into the narrative of the All-Volunteer Force.
Item Open Access Anticipating Freedom: Slave Rebellion, Amelioration, and Emancipation in Barbados, 1816-1838(2022) Williams, KristinaAnticipating Freedom explores the numerous ways enslaved and freedpeople shaped the politics and policies of gradual emancipation in the British Empire, using Barbados as a case study. It binds antislavery debates, legislative reforms, and slave resistance into one conceptual frame to reveal the processes that informed the British Parliament’s decision to pass the Emancipation Act of 1833, thereby conditionally freeing thousands of enslaved men, women, and children across the British Caribbean. As a major sugar-producing colony for the British Empire, Barbados offers a unique context for studying emancipation in the Atlantic World. At first glance, the prospect of freedom seemed impossible due to the planters' utter dependence on slave labor. Still, emancipation in Barbados was achieved through the unyielding determination of enslaved people to resist their captivity and the antislavery legislation initiated by abolitionists in the British Parliament. Hence the project is arranged both chronologically and thematically. It begins with Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816 — the only large-scale slave insurrection in the history of Barbados — and its impact on British Parliamentary reforms designed to lessen some of the coercive aspects of slavery during the 1820s. Then, I examine the rise of slave resistance in the months leading up to Emancipation Day and their effect on the Emancipation Act of 1833. My dissertation concludes with a discussion on the implementation of conditional freedom known as ‘Apprenticeship’ in 1834 and the factors that led to its premature demise in 1838. Anticipating Freedom argues that the covert and explicit means through which men and women of African descent resisted enslavement influenced the British Parliament’s decision to implement an intermediate period between slavery and absolute freedom in Barbados. This revelation is significant because it broadens our understanding of what factors were taken into consideration during the antislavery debates between the abolitionists, planters, Members of Parliament, and Barbados legislators. Moreover, by prioritizing the wants, needs, and desires of enslaved and freedpeople in Barbados, we step away from romantic notions often associated with emancipation to focus on the quotidian realities of a society no longer ruled by slave labor.
Item Open Access 'Any Name That Has Power': The Black Panthers of Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 1948-1977(2013) Angelo, AnneMarieThe US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue.
This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.
Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.
This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.
Item Embargo Automating Violence: A History of United States Drone Warfare, 1900-1970(2022) McKinnon, Garrett DaleDrones may appear a recent technology whose future may have just barely started. But drone technology’s development and the rationales for their adoption extend back over a century ago to weapons called “pilotless airplanes” during World War I. Historians have examined the deployment of drones in military campaigns, the history of drones as technical systems, science fiction as a cultural inspiration for engineers, and the institutional machinations required to fund new war machines. Philosophers and jurists debate the ethics and legality of conducting violence through remote control. Peace activists, whistleblowing drone operators, and interfaith coalitions have formed a burgeoning anti-machine war movement. Yet, amongst the dynamic discussions surrounding drones, the fantasies and anxieties that animated the technology’s adoption during the twentieth century remain largely unexamined.
My dissertation offers a cultural history of U.S. drone warfare during the twentieth century. Cultural discourses and practices proved key to the policy formations, military planning, and political economy of the American way of war’s increasing turn to mechanization. I present the military use of drones as a key, yet understudied, part of the larger history of U.S. machine warfare that relied on superior productive power to overwhelm enemies with technological means. Airpower became central to U.S. war-making during the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Drones, in turn, developed into an ever-more important “asset” in the U.S. aerial arsenal before reaching a central place in present day pursuits of war.
Drone technology’s ascent owes less to its utility in war than to the cultural projections and fears that surrounded pilots in air war. Technical bugs often rendered drones less than mechanically stellar. Despite functional flaws, replacing pilot with machine in war became attractive precisely because human agents consistently seemed limited instruments of war in popular and policy discourse. Soldiers always died in war. Many became security risks when captured and tortured for information. Some turned against the war they were supposed to fight. Grieving families politicized their personal loss. War made U.S. audiences anxious their men were not “man enough” to achieve victory. Remote-controllable drones seemed to solve these problems, by sparing American lives, by rendering war less visible, and by removing men deemed incapable of war from the site of combat, thereby ‘depoliticizing’ war and saving armed conflict as an instrument of policy.
The history of drone adoption is not a teleological story of linear technological progression, but rather a narrative of fits and starts, with differing actors operating in differing contexts imagining war machines to accomplish differing goals. Current claims to a “humane” form of war through “surgical strike” capabilities and effective surveillance do not sum up the history of the drone. The drone has long been used as a means of mass destruction including chemical war, nuclear war, and multitudes of missile strikes.
Item Open Access Babel On the Hudson: Community Formation in Dutch Manhattan(2007-05-10T14:54:50Z) Sivertsen, KarenThis dissertation focuses on New Amsterdam, the small port town at the tip of Manhattan Island that became the capital for the Dutch colony of New Netherland. It addresses two of the most entrenched stereotypes regarding New Netherland. One is the popular notion that religion never played an important role in New Netherland, since the colony was built upon commerce and economic considerations. The other is that community life and consciousness was stymied in Manhattan until New Netherland became an English colony. At the root of both stereotypes is the accepted perception that an intense and selfish drive for wealth, financial remuneration and self-advancement was the modus vivendi of New Netherland's settlers and colonial officials. Consequently, they neither gave much thought to religion nor took time to foster a shared sense of community. The central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Dutch Manhattan did develop a dynamic community life. It resulted from the difficulties encountered by both Europeans and Africans in trying to reconstruct in the New World aspects of societies they had left behind, and from the interactions of members of the Atlantic's three racial groups in Dutch Manhattan. The other important aim is to demonstrate the role religion played in the community and in community formation by discussing how religion was utilized to determine one's fitness for community membership and as a tool of colonization. Religion played a key role in the formation of alliances both within and outside the colony, and groups created spaces within the society for individuals to maintain and nurture practices that were not sanctioned by the larger community. This dissertation demonstrates that while the colony had its genesis as a trading venture, religiously infused ideas were at play during the early contact period prior to settlement. Furthermore, once the decision for permanent settlement was made, religion and religious considerations played a prominent role in the internal contestations for control and figured prominently in the process of community formation. Aside from religion, this dissertation also explores the role of trade, contestations for control both within and outside the colony, and war in shaping and redefining the contours of community in Dutch Manhattan.Item Open Access Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Trials in Early Modern Spain, 1525-1675(2016) Rojas, Rochelle EThis dissertation challenges depictions of witchcraft as a sensational or disruptive phenomenon, presenting witch beliefs instead as organically woven into everyday community life, religious beliefs, and village culture. It argues that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal, and rational in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions. Furthermore, this dissertation, the first to work systematically through Spanish secular court witch trials, upends scholars’ views about the dominance of the Spanish Inquisition in witchcraft prosecutions. Through a serial study of secular court records, this dissertation reveals that the local court of Navarra poached dozens of witch trials from the Spanish Inquisition, and independently prosecuted over one hundred accused witches over one hundred-and-fifty years. These overlooked local sources document witch beliefs in far greater detail than Inquisition records and allow the first reconstruction of village-level witch beliefs in Spain. Drawing from historical, anthropological, and literary methods, this dissertation employs a transdisciplinary approach to examine the reports from villagers, parish priests, and jurists, produced under the specific local and older accusatorial judicial procedure. Free of the Inquisitorial filter that has dominated previous studies of Spanish witchcraft, these sources reveal the way villagers—not Inquisitors—conceived of, created, feared, and survived in a world with witches and sorceresses.
Using these local sources, this dissertation illuminates the complex social webs of witchcraft accusations, the pathways of village gossip, and the inner logic of witch beliefs. It reveals the central role of Catholic performativity and the grave consequences of being marked as a mala cristiana, the importance of fama and kin ties, and reveals the rationality of the curious and pervasive presence of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in Navarra’s witch trials. By moving away from the prevalent focus given to the more spectacular witch panics and trials, this work demonstrates the value of local trial records. This dissertation argues that far from irrational or absurd, witchcraft beliefs in early modern Navarra were internally coherent and intellectually informed by an amalgamation of religious, social, and legal forces.
Item Open Access Behind Workhouse Walls: The Public Regulation of Slavery in Charleston, 1730-1850(2015) Smalls, SamanthisMy dissertation examines the presence of enslaved prisoners in local jails and workhouses of antebellum South Carolina from 1730-1850 with a particular focus on the 1790s as a transformative period. Those sites expose the close relationship between governmental authority and the discipline of black people, a relationship that has gone largely unexplored and one that ultimately recasts larger questions about race and criminality, property and ownership, and state formation in the slave South. Much scholarship locates government control over criminal African Americans within penal institutions in a post-emancipation moment and then traces the implications through convict leasing, chain gangs, and penitentiaries in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The presence of enslaved people within jails and workhouses during the antebellum period, however, challenges the assumptions that frame the chronology.
Primary source materials such as legislative documents, court records, newspapers, personal diaries, travel journals, and slave narratives reveal that jails and workhouses not only secured law and order within slave societies but also functioned as tangible symbols of government power to which all people, including the enslaved, were subject. The presence of enslaved people within penal institutions, however, increased over time, a trend that coincided with burgeoning racialized conceptions of criminality and contributed to a larger transformation in racial ideology. And while slave owners and government officials united to uphold white supremacy, they disagreed over government’s role in regulating enslaved people. Lengthy confinements, in particular, became a frequent point of conflict between white slave owners and local government officials. Finally, the dissertation explores how the changes evident in antebellum penal institutions reflected the ways in which the nation wrestled with the growth of government. Indeed, those changes reflected the challenges inherent in the statemaking process as the meanings of liberty and citizenship shifted and changed. As important, they revealed the construction of a new social order in the American South which firmly, and exclusively, placed enslaved people on the lowest rung of the social, political, and legal hierarchy. By considering the intersections of statemaking, property, and criminality, the dissertation roots “the condemnation of blackness” in the practice of enslavement and in the Early National and Antebellum state making projects.