DCE Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares two major non-interventionist groups and examines how they used religion to shape the debate over the US entry into World War II. The two groups represented two different wings of the non-interventionist movement. The debate, which occurred primarily from 1939 to 1941, was led on the non-interventionist side by the (relatively) conservative American First Committee, and the more progressive Keep America Out of War Committee. Using archival material from the Hoover Institution and the Swarthmore Peace Collection, along with other predominantly secondary sources, the thesis traces how the two organizations attempted to mobilize the major American religious blocs of the period to support their cause. The analysis shows that the AFC treated religion as a resource, as it did in other parts of civil society. The AFC integrated general Protestant culture in their organization, while specifically targeting Catholics for outreach, while struggling but not ignoring the Jewish community. The KAOWC drew on progressive Protestant and Jewish networks from before the period to attempt an interfaith coalition, while struggling to reach out to Catholic and Black Protestant churches. The thesis argues that differences in organizational structures, constituencies, and cultural orientation produced distinct religious strategies. Methodologically, the project uses comparative analysis and archival case studies to connect religious strategies to political campaigns.

Abstract
The Caribbean has long served as a pivotal crossroads in transnational flows of both legal and illicit goods, people, and ideas. Haiti and The Bahamas, in particular, occupy critical positions as border nations that influence the dynamics of migration and drug trafficking into the United States. This thesis explores the dual role of these nations in facilitating, resisting, and being shaped by the movement of displaced migrants and narcotics. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including a review of secondary data, government reports, and migration statistics, this study analyzes how geographical position, governance challenges, international intervention, and bilateral agreements with the United States have shaped patterns of migration and smuggling through these states. The findings suggest that Haiti’s chronic political instability and humanitarian crises have made it a major source of displaced migrants, while The Bahamas has functioned as both a host and transit point, often struggling with the burden of accommodating irregular migrants. Simultaneously, both nations have been identified by United States (U.S.) and international reports as critical nodes in the regional narcotics trade. These dynamics reveal that U.S. border security cannot be understood in isolation but must account for the broader transnational landscape of the Caribbean. This thesis contributes to scholarship on transnational security, migration studies, and Caribbean politics by offering a comparative case study of Haiti and The Bahamas. It concludes by recommending integrated U.S. Caribbean policy frameworks that emphasize humanitarian protection alongside narcotics interdiction, highlighting the importance of shared responsibility in addressing the complexities of migration and drug flows.

This thesis examines The Federalist and analyzes the credit it deserves for helping secure ratification of the Constitution. The thesis also looks to other sources that may have had more of an impact in the ratification decisions made by the various state ratifying conventions that ultimately secured ratification of the Constitution. To truly understand the original public meaning of the Constitution, scholars or judges must look more broadly at the individual debates in each of the thirteen state ratifying conventions. Ultimately, this thesis confirms that courts and scholars should not rely primarily on The Federalist as the definitive understanding of what those who ratified the Constitution believed and understood.

This thesis examines how public policies toward the poor evolved in Renaissance Florence under two distinct political regimes: the fifteenth-century oligarchic republic and the sixteenth-century princely state of Cosimo I de’ Medici. Combining political philosophy, moral thought, and empirical analysis, it investigates whether forms of government shaped assistance to the poor and whether political and moral ideas translated into concrete public interventions, particularly during moments of crisis. By comparing republican and princely governance within the same urban context, the study addresses a gap in Renaissance historiography, which has traditionally privileged republican ideology while paying less attention to non-republican states and to the relationship between ideas and social policy. The first part reconstructs the intellectual frameworks through which poverty was understood. Chapter II shows that Renaissance political thought treated assistance to the poor less as a policy objective than as an indicator of legitimacy. Republican writers invoked poverty to validate claims of justice and civic harmony, while tolerating sharp exclusions from political participation and material improvement. Princely writers, by contrast, framed concern for the poor within a language of mutua caritas, or reciprocity, and presented protection of the vulnerable as evidence of benevolent authority, preserving elements of medieval political theology while recasting them in moral and humanist terms. Chapter III demonstrates that fifteenth-century moral philosophy, shaped by Christian doctrine and humanist ethics, legitimated wealth and disciplined the poor, treating poverty as a condition to be managed rather than remedied. A decisive rupture occurred with Juan Luis Vives in the early sixteenth century, who reframed poverty as a human-made condition requiring organized state intervention, regardless of constitutional form. The final part tests these intellectual frameworks against empirical evidence. Chapter IV combines quantitative data on wages, prices, and wealth distribution with archival analysis of public policies during the famines of 1411 and 1557. It shows that most Florentines lived at or near subsistence level and that the condition of the working poor deteriorated over time. Although both regimes made efforts to alleviate poverty, such interventions were typically confined to moments of crisis, such as periods of famine. Within this shared pattern, their responses nevertheless differed in timing, moral framing, and administrative ambition. The oligarchic republic acted reactively under fiscal and institutional constraints, whereas Cosimo I articulated a more systematic and moralized approach to regulation. The thesis concludes that regime type mattered less in determining whether the poor were assisted than in shaping how assistance was justified and administered, revealing the limits of Renaissance political thought in translating ethical concern into sustained social policy.

For a few months in 1942, the island of Madagascar stood at the center of the attention of Britain, France, the United States and the Axis powers. Understanding the Allied operation to take hold of Madagascar to prevent its takeover by Japan can help identify the strategic importance of the island. However, research on the political and social implications of this event on the native population who lived under the Vichy French colonial rule at that time is limited. The main objective of this study was to explore the consequences of the Battle of Madagascar on the local population. More precisely, it was to find out in what ways did the political, economic and social impacts of the operation and the occupation by British troops imapct the affirmation of an independence movement. Data from primary sources located in the French and British national archives were analyzed to look for the signs of a resurging self-determination movement. The analysis of French and British police and intelligence reports revealed several key points. First, there was no organized, institutional resistance during the war, although the nationalist leaders secretely sought support from the British authorities. Second, the British intervention in 1942 to remove the Vichy leadership and replace it with the Fighting France government in 1943 didn’t liberate the Malagasy subjects from colonial exploitation. Third, the Vichy period’s hardened colonial practices (1940-1942) were the decisive factors which led to the progressive formation of a large-scale opposition especially after World War II, although the British invasion created a dynamic that led to the formation of a more institutionalized resistance. The findings suggest that the British and French policies during the 1942-1946 period, by dismissing the demands of the Malagasy for more autonomy, planted the seeds of a violent postwar period which would culminate during the revolt of 1947.

Abstract

This thesis examines the founding of Liberia and investigates how the founding project attempted to reconcile advocating Enlightenment philosophical ideals with systematic racism. The purpose of this study is to fill in historical gaps in the self-determination narrative that freed slaves decided among themselves to sail from America to the West Coast of Africa in 1822 to begin a colony for freed American slaves. The more complex reality is that the United States government, as well as American educational institutions and religious leaders, had struggled for years with the “problem” of free Black people within a slaveholding republic. At a time when slavery was legal in the United States, white American politicians, religious leaders, and educational institutions coalesced around the convenient idea of supporting the removal of free Black Americans from the United States and relocating them to Africa. My research suggests that the Africa colonization movement was neither purely altruistic nor strictly imperial; rather, it drew on a European intellectual and scientific tradition that supported white racial superiority, Protestant missionary zeal, and emerging scientific theories of white superiority. Colonization of Africa offered a solution that appeared consistent with Enlightenment principles of liberty and self-government while preserving racial hierarchy within the United States. The departure of the ship Elizabeth in 1819, carrying the first Black American emigrants bound for Africa, marked the beginning of this experiment. Their subsequent

struggle for survival has remained largely untold by historians. Most of the eighty-eight died before reaching the Grand Bassa region of West Africa in 1822. Land was taken from indigenous Africans and carved out as a place where surviving emigrants could settle. The colony was managed by the U.S.-based American Colonization Society for many years. The Republic of Liberia did not declare its independence until 1847—twenty-five years after the emigrants’ arrival in the Grand Bassa region. After two years of turmoil, the desperate group arrived 150 miles south of Sierra Leone, where the colony of Liberia began. By studying the religious and political circumstances that led to their departure, their inhospitable sojourn along the coast of Africa, and their struggle for survival upon reaching the promised land, scholars can better understand the interplay of irreconcilable forces at play—Enlightenment philosophical ideals and white supremacy ideology. In 1781, Thomas Jefferson outlined a colonization solution to the problem of non-slave Black people in America, acknowledging: “When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”1 The plight and perseverance of the passengers aboard the Elizabeth reflects the discrimination and racial struggles Black people were forced to endure at a time when American enlightenment thinkers were proclaiming that all men were created equal.

This thesis examines the cultural and symbolic formation of Appalachian Spring, situating the ballet within a broader framework of American civil religion and postcolonial theory. It traces how the collaborative work of Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, and Isamu Noguchi transformed national myths, religious idioms, and historical trauma into a high-modernist aesthetic via a mediating field of abstraction. Drawing on the ballet's early scripts, related political oratory, and contemporary literature, the study shows how marginalized figures—particularly Indigenous and African American presences—were progressively abstracted or muted in the construction of a unified national narrative. Engaging theories of hybridity and the "third space," the thesis investigates how Appalachian Spring negotiates the tension between democratic ideals and histories of dispossession, functioning as a paradigmatic site where civil religious logic is simultaneously realized and tested. It concludes by demonstrating that abstraction served as the primary cultural mechanism by which these discordant histories were condensed into archetypal figural and ritual containers, allowing affective historical pressure to persist below the threshold of explicit recognition—thereby symbolically reconstituting mid-twentieth-century American identity and collective memory in performance.

The Roman Catholic Church has long been one of the most prominent and influential institutions in Ireland. From 1914 to 1918, it was approaching its apex of power when Ireland was still governed by the British Empire. However, few historians in Ireland or elsewhere have ever written extensively about the Catholic Church in Ireland during World War I. In 1914, most of the Irish people were still desirous of Home Rule and membership in the British Empire but with a relationship with Britain like that of Canada or Australia rather than like India or Kenya. By the end of the First World War, most Irish had moved towards independence and the establishment of an Irish republic. Given the prominence of the Catholic Church in Irish life, the purpose of this thesis is to analyze the evolution of the Catholic Church in Ireland and its public stances during the rapidly changing political and social environment from 1914 to the end of the First World War in 1918. I chose this period specifically because 1914 was the start of the First World War and the Irish relationship with Britain was much less hostile than it would be in the coming years. With the Easter Rising in less than two years and an Irish War for Independence beginning only a few years after that, Ireland was entering one of its most consequential historical epochs. As such a prominent institution, the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Irish is critical to understanding the period as well as its influence on politics. I have explored dozens of articles from prominent newspapers in both Ireland the United Kingdom to determine the Catholic Church’s role in the evolution of Ireland from a land that was in favor of continued membership in the British Empire though with Home Rule status into a land that was moving in the direction of republicanism and independence from the United Kingdom. This was especially true when it came to topics such as partition and conscription. When Ireland gained its independence in 1922, the Catholic Church was seen by the Irish public as not just a religious institution but as an integral part of the Irish political landscape and Irish society. This view was solidified during the critical early years of the development of the Republic of Ireland which this thesis will cover.

In 1928 and 1954, the life of Swedish gold miner John Samuelson (October 7, 1873–unknown) was mythologized by pulp fiction writer Erle Stanley Gardner in a story entitled “Rain Magic” and in the first chapter of his book Neighborhood Frontiers. His work corrupted contemporary historical accounts of Samuelson, Americanized him, and perpetuated quintessential American myths such as rugged individualism, the frontier, the American Dream, the Protestant work ethic, and American heroism and chasteness. It also illustrated that small myths are inherently nationalistic because they reinforce grand national myths which subsequently strengthen cultural norms within the collective memory. This paper recognizes that connection while highlighting how that intersection influenced the production of subsequent histories by investigating the life of John Samuelson through myth to establish a factual history. In a sense, this paper serves as a historical court of last resort for Samuelson who has no descendants to champion his memory or contradict contemporary accounts of his life. This work acquits him from the sentence of historical marginalization and produces a meaningful historical account superseding all previous work and is the most complete history of Samuelson to date. A study of Samuelson illustrates that myth and history will always intertwine, infuse themselves into culture, and effectively act as nationalizing agents.

The first bubonic plague outbreak, the “Plague of Justinian,” has been subject to scrutiny to determine how it impacted the cultural, political, and economic trajectory of the Byzantine Empire. Central to this debate is the question of the plague’s minimal mention in non-literary sources, particularly the “Novels,” a series of laws released by Emperor Justinian throughout his reign. In recent years, the emperor’s relative silence on the matter has been cited as evidence that the plague was not significant enough to merit a robust imperial response. While the Novels make virtually no explicit reference to plague, this paper identifies a shift in legal language during the early years of the pandemic wherein the emperor offered a series of allusions likening himself to a physician practicing his craft. These allusions are forceful in their comparative quality, declaring an equivalency of lawmaking and healing. It is the position of this paper that the emperor used his legislation as a vehicle to modify his public image, embodying the mindset of a physician to underline his virtuous philanthropy and offset criticism throughout the plague. Compared especially to his successors, Justinian’s language was uniquely deployed and represents an understudied political effect of the pandemic.