Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "History"
Now showing items 21-40 of 126
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Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America
(2019-05-17)This dissertation studies consent to perform labor in seventeenth-century England and its American colonies, with a focus on contracts between masters and servants that were formed under violent coercion or legal compulsion. ... -
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 ... -
Cities into Empire: Fukuoka, Pusan, and Japan’s Imperial Urbanization, 1876-1953
(2018-05-13)Cities into Empire argues for the centrality of empire in the urbanization of modern Japan, and for the animating role of cities within the imperial imaginaries of planners, bureaucrats, citizens, and colonial subjects. ... -
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 ... -
Colonial Remainders: France, Algeria, and the Culture of Decolonization (1958-1970)
(2018-05-13)The phenomenon of decolonization profoundly reshaped the twentieth century. Within the span of three decades following the Second World War, the majority of countries formerly colonized by European powers became independent ... -
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 ... -
Constructing the Chinese: Paleoanthropology and Anthropology in the Chinese Frontier, 1920-1950
(2012-12-19)Today’s Chinese ethno-nationalism exploits nativist ancestral claims back to antiquity to legitimize its geo-political occupation of the entire territory of modern China, which includes areas where many non-Han people live. ... -
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 ... -
The Conversion of the World in the Early Republic: Race, Gender, and Imperialism in the Early American Foreign Mission Movement
(2012-12-19)This is a transnational history of the early republic that focuses on religious actors. The early American foreign mission movement was an outward-looking expression of the benevolent network of the early republic. Building ... -
Corporate America: A History of Corporate Statehood Since 1629
(2018-05-10)This dissertation examines the history of “corporate statehood,” or how Americans have understood the corporation as a governmental institution. In contrast to historical accounts of “corporate personhood,” which describe ... -
Courting American Families: The Enforcement of Marital Financial Duties and the Creation of Courts of Domestic Relations, 1880-1930
(2019-09-10)This dissertation examines how judges, legislators, charity reformers, probation officers, litigants, journalists, and other stakeholders shaped laws and institutions governing the enforcement of family support obligations ... -
Coveted Across the Continuum: The Politics of Mexican Migration in Transnational Perspective, 1942-1965.
(2018-09-16)My dissertation reveals the elements of Mexican society—including businesses, politicians, union members, peasants, and others—that opposed Mexican emigration to the US and sought to reroute migratory flows more fruitfully ... -
Crimes of Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Carceral State in New York City, 1920-1978
(2020-05-12)Crimes of Youth traces the changing politics of delinquency and ideology of crime in twentieth-century New York City. Between 1920 and 1978, U.S. officials built a powerful and expansive carceral state focused on disciplining ... -
Crisis Capital: Industrial Massachusetts and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1865-Present
(2016-05-18)“Crisis Capital” offers a local history of global capitalism and a global history of local economic development, exploring how the global movements and political struggles of industry, labor, and capital created, destroyed, ... -
The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, c. 500 – c. 1000
(2016-05-18)Early medieval Europe is not well known for its crowds, unlike Antiquity or the later Middle Ages. After sixth-century demographic and urban decline, crowds were smaller, less spontaneous, and easier to control than in ... -
Culture of Disobedience: Rebellion and Defiance in the Japanese Army, 1860-1931
(2015-05-14)Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet the Japanese Army was arguably ... -
Darkology: The Hidden History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1970
(2016-05-16)Darkology: The Hidden History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1970 develops a critical bibliography and uses material culture to uncover the pervasive world of amateur blackface ... -
Drawing Capital: Depiction, Machine Tools, and the Political Economy of Industrial Knowledge, 1824-1914
(2019-05-16)This dissertation treats transformations in the work processes and trade practices of the engineering industries in Britain, the United States, and German-speaking Europe over the long nineteenth century. Using technical ...