Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "History"
Now showing items 1-20 of 83
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Ameliorating Empire: Slavery and Protection in the British Colonies, 1783-1865
(2014-10-21)This dissertation examines the era of slavery amelioration while situating the significance of this project to reform slavery within the longer history of the British Empire. While scholars of British slavery have long ... -
American Lucifers: Makers and Masters of the Means of Light, 1750-1900
(2014-06-06)This dissertation examines the social history of Atlantic and American free and unfree labor by focusing on the production and consumption of the means of light from the colonial period to the end of the nineteenth century. ... -
Americans on Paper: Identity and Identification in the American Revolution
(2013-10-18)The American Revolution brought with it a crisis of identification. The political divisions that fragmented American society did not distinguish adherents of the two sides in any outward way. Yet the new American governments ... -
"And still the Youth are coming": Youth and popular politics in Ghana, c. 1900-1979
(2015-05-16)This dissertation explores the significance of the youth in the popular politics of 20th-century Ghana. Based on two and half years of archival and field research in Ghana and Britain, the dissertation investigates the ... -
The Asian Origins of Global Narcotics Control, c. 1860-1909
(2014-06-06)This dissertation traces the ferment of private ressentiment, public protest and political response to the Asian opium trade from the "Second Opium War (1856-60) to the first, multilateral anti-drug summit in human history, ... -
At the Origins of Welfare Policy: Law and the Economy in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean (1150-1350)
(2014-10-21)This dissertation is an economic and institutional history of the first comprehensive public health and welfare system in the Western world. Based on previously unexamined archival and archaeological evidence from several ... -
Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200-1450
(2015-08-04)Starting in the mid-thirteenth century, kings, bishops, and local rulers throughout western Europe repeatedly ordered the banishment of foreigners who were lending at interest. The expulsion of these foreigners, mostly ... -
Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution, 1892-1922
(2013-10-14)This dissertation describes and analyzes the financial boom that made Russia the largest net international debtor in the world by 1914, as well as the Bolshevik default of 1918 -- one of the biggest in international financial ... -
Best Interests: Feminists, Social Science, and the Revaluing of Working Mothers in Modern America
(2013-03-06)This dissertation traces the formation, development, and deployment of arguments in favor of maternal employment from the years before World War II through the mid-1990s. Drawing on academic journals, popular periodicals, ... -
Between the Arctic & the Adriatic: Polar Exploration, Science & Empire in the Habsburg Monarchy
(2014-10-21)Exploration was a defining aspect of how European societies encountered and established relations with the wider world. It set the stage for worldwide empires and laid the foundations for understandings of planetary ... -
Between the Pen and the Fields: Books on Farming, Changing Land Regimes, and Urban Agriculture in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean Ca. 1500-1700
(2016-09-23)This dissertation goes “between the pen and the fields” in that it explores the relationship between the Ottoman discourse on farming as reflected in manuscripts, and the material and economic realities of farming shown ... -
Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul
(2016-05-17)This study contributes to the cultural and intellectual history of the early modern Middle East by analyzing how books were produced and circulated, and which audiences existed for various types of books in the Ottoman ... -
Business, Water, and the Global City: Germany, Europe, and China, 1820-1950
(2013-10-18)The dissertation examines the evolving role of Germans under the auspices of European imperialism in modern China's hydraulic management and economic globalization. In the early nineteenth-century, Germans were on the ... -
Calamity’s Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, C. 1775-1834
(2016-08-26)This dissertation examines how practical and conceptual concerns over ensuring the basic needs of colonial subjects shaped the political economy of slavery and empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century ... -
The Cartographic Steppe: Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan's Imperial Borderlands
(2016-09-09)This dissertation traces one of the origins of the autonomous region system in the People’s Republic of China to the Japanese imperial project by focusing on Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. Here, Japanese technocrats demarcated ... -
Changing Climates: Deserts, Desiccation, and the Rise of Climate Engineering, 1870-1950
(2014-10-22)This dissertation examines the impact of the nineteenth-century discussions about climate change and desiccation on large engineering projects in desert regions between 1870 and 1950. It demonstrates that the debate over ... -
A Choice, Not an Echo: Polarization and the Transformation of the American Party System
(2014-06-06)This dissertation offers an intellectual and institutional history of party polarization and ideological realignment in the postwar United States. It treats the construction of an ideologically sorted party system as a ... -
The Civilizing Sea: The Ideological Origins of the French Mediterranean Empire, 1789-1870
(2016-09-13)This dissertation examines the religious, diplomatic, legal, and intellectual history of French imperialism in Italy, Egypt, and Algeria between the 1789 French Revolution and the beginning of the French Third Republic in ... -
The Common Thread: Slavery, Cotton and Atlantic Finance from the Louisiana Purchase to Reconstruction
(2014-02-25)This dissertation focuses on the relationship between cotton, slavery and finance. At its core is a consideration of the Atlantic credit networks that supported the cultivation of cotton across the antebellum South. Planters ... -
The Contest for Human Rights: Soviet Soft Power Through Détente, Reform, and Collapse, 1973-1991
(2016-09-19)This dissertation examines Soviet approaches to human rights as a soft power issue across three periods of challenge and innovation: the mobilization of international human rights criticism in the 1970s; the launch by ...