This dissertation reconstructs how the West German intellectual and political establishment envisioned the conditions for democratic renewal in the early decades of the Federal Republic of Germany. I examine how theoreticians ...

This dissertation traces the thought and career of Dadabhai Naoroji, arguably the most significant Indian nationalist leader in the pre-Gandhian era. Naoroji (1825-1917) gave the Indian National Congress a tangible political ...

This dissertation examines how the nineteenth-century engagement with medieval Europe changed modern Germany. Drawing from archival and printed primary material, I reconstruct how the Middle Ages gained new explanatory ...

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 ...

This dissertation explores the attempts of Africans, both enslaved and free, to create and maintain families in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. It makes sense of a remarkable array of historical actors: ...

This dissertation argues for the importance of knowledge production for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth ...

“Feeding Kansas” is an analysis of how food and its availability shaped the experiences of settlers and Native Americans in the two decades following the opening of Kansas Territory in 1854. From the outset, food was central ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...