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Description
Tobias Smollett was an eighteenth-century surgeon, writer, novelist, and editor. He was a Scotsman who sought his fortune in south Briton. Throughout his life and career he experienced many of the cultural and political influences that helped to shape the British identity. His youth as a Lowland Scot, student and apprentice, and naval surgeon enabled him to embrace this new identity. His involvement in nearly every aspect of the publishing process in London enabled him to shape, define, and encourage this identity. His legacy, through his works and his life story, illustrates the different ways in which the United Kingdom and its inhabitants have been perceived throughout the centuries. As a prominent man of his time and an enduring literary figure to this day, Smollett offers an ideal prism through which to view the formation of the British identity.
ContributorsKeough, Megan (Author) / Warnicke, Retha (Thesis advisor) / Szuter, Christine (Committee member) / Wright, Kent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In 1809 the Memoirs of Prince Eugene, of Savoy<\italic> was published in Vienna. The book was written by Charles-Joseph de Ligne, a Flemish prince who lived seventy years after Eugene of Savoy, the general who commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire in the War of the Spanish Succession. Eugene's military career spanned fifty years and five wars, yet he is less known than his English counterpart, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The memoirs were only attributed to Eugene for a short period and then tossed aside as the creative musings of a cultured prince who left quite the written legacy. Though attributed to the prince, a contemporary reader would not have thought that the manuscript had been penned by Eugene. The memoirs were heavily inspired by a biography by Eléazar Mauvillon, which was published only six years after Eugene's death. Few of Eugene's own letters survived his death, and he never wrote the memoirs of his own campaigns. Marlborough, by contrast, was a prolific letter writer, and the two generals spent some of the major campaigns of the war together with the result that Eugene has featured in much of the research done on Marlborough as a secondary character. Charles-Joseph de Ligne desired to be as good a writer as he was a soldier. His legacy included his own memoirs, which reflected the desire to be as successful as Eugene and to raise Eugene to the proper level of acknowledgement in military history. This thesis explores the historical memory of Eugene as perpetuated by Ligne's literary creation as well as the historical context in which Eugene rose to fame for his military genius and proves the historical accuracy of Ligne's mystification of Mauvillon's biography.
ContributorsHarowitz, Bethany (Author) / Wright, Johnson K. (Thesis advisor) / Espinosa, Aurelio (Committee member) / Warnicke, Retha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
"Navigation, Trade, and Consumption in Seventeenth Century Oxfordshire" investigates how the inhabitants of Oxfordshire transitioned from an agricultural to a consumer community during the Jacobean and post-Restoration eras. In agrarian England, this reconfigured landscape was most clearly embodied in the struggle over the access to available land. Focusing on the gentleman farmer's understanding of the fiscal benefits of enclosure and land acquisition, I argue that the growth in agricultural markets within Oxfordshire led to a growing prosperity, which was most clearly articulated in the community's rise as viable luxury goods consumers. By juxtaposing probate documents, inventories, pamphlets, and diaries from the market towns of Burford, Chipping Norton, and Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, this study examines the process by which these late sixteenth and early seventeenth century agricultural communities began to embrace the consumption of luxury goods, and, most importantly, purely market-based understanding of agrarian life.
ContributorsO'Connell, Joseph (Author) / Warnicke, Retha (Thesis advisor) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis is based on the responses of Soviet Displaced Persons collected by the Harvard Study on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), an oral history conducted in Munich and New York from 1950 to 1951 in which former Soviet citizens were interviewed. They were primarily interviewed about daily life within the Soviet Union. A total of 331 displaced persons were interviewed over the course of the study, with most individuals receiving multiple interview sessions. These sessions were divided broadly as A and B sections. The A-section, which the majority of interviewees received and was viewed by the compilers as a broad sociological inquiry, was divided into subsections focusing on Soviet work, government, family, education, communication, philosophy of life, and ideology. The B-sections were used for deeper anthropological inquiries and are potentially more controversial due to the use of Rorschach tests and situational responses. Fewer respondents were continued on to the B interviews which contained a variety of subsections, though most respondents were only asked questions from one or two sections of the greater whole. A portion of the B section interviews do provide valuable insight to my thesis for their focus on the Displaced Person status of the interviewees. The project consisted of 764 separate interviews of the 331 respondents. The interviewers for the HPSSS were primarily graduate students, ranging from history, sociology, psychology and economics departments, with varying degrees of fluency in Russian and Ukrainian. Some of the interviewers went on to become leading experts in Soviet Studies in the years to follow. Others stopped publishing, following the major publication of the HPSSS in the late 1950s, which may indicate a move to the private sector or employment within the federal government rather than academics. While not possible to include within my analysis, the major publications of the study also included the insights garnered from nearly ten thousand written questionnaires of DPs that were tabulated and discarded prior to publication.
ContributorsWilder, Ian (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
What is known about the lives, and especially the private lives, of English women in the early modern era is not at all satisfactory in terms of sources, scope, or understanding. Because the act of writing and reading was already exclusive to the upper classes, what sources do survive are not representative of the majority of the female population, leading to more speculation on behalf of historians. The sources which do survive, by and large focus on the role of religion and spirituality in a woman's life, since it was the most acceptable reason for an early modern woman to be writing about. However, I hoped to prove how women were interested in more than just self-improvement through religious devotion, thereby demonstrating that early modern English women were as complex and rich in personality and interests as a modern woman might consider herself to be. After a brief introduction and explanation of the research process, this project then begins to individually analyze the three women who were chosen for study based on their mutual practice of keeping a diary during their lives in early modern England. These women were Elizabeth Freke, Lady Sarah Cowper, and Mary, Countess Cowper, all of whom operated within the feminine social hierarchy during this period, but each of whom demonstrated a particular interest beyond that of marriage and family, including economics, religion, and politics. I believe that each woman analyzed proved how unique and varied the lives of early modern English women were through their writings.
ContributorsVetterl, Victoria Lee (Author) / Warnicke, Retha (Thesis director) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
ContributorsScribner, Quinton Donald (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
ContributorsScribner, Quinton Donald (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Queen Margaret of Anjou has been vilified throughout history and was even defamed by Shakespeare as a "she-wolf" in his history of Henry VI part III. This revisionist biographical study begins by redefining a "she-wolf's" connote from that of rapacious predator to a protector as seen in original myth for Rome's foundation. By studying her childhood and reign it analyzes her identity as a "she-wolf" and regent sovereign on behalf of her mentally ill husband, Henry VI and their young son, Edward of Westminster. Contrary to previous historiography, this analysis emphasizes how Margaret was apprenticed by the she-wolves of her grandmother and mother during their regent sovereignty in the absence of a husband or son. It then continues to analyze events such as her intercessory role in the Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450, her eighty-two letters and other forms of de facto rule that Margaret implemented. Despite her imminent loss in a hyper-masculinized, political culture during the War of the Roses this accredits the successes of Margaret's tenure as queen overlooked by historians. Furthermore, this study addresses the attacks from Margaret's contemporary sources and how her historiography has evolved with the continuation of such attacks. This influence has even spilled into literature and film as the success of Game of Thrones has popularized Margaret's defamed archetype in the fictional character Cersei Lannister. The purpose of this study is to address not only the faults of Margaret's narrative, but to address the importance for historians to create women as the protagonist of their own story and not their male counterparts. This concludes then with a greater question of how to study the nature of regency in a medieval government with the concern of queens as regents.
ContributorsAtchinson, Sarah Waneta (Author) / Barnes, Andrew (Thesis director) / Warnicke, Retha (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Between 1941 and 1953, thousands of Lithuanians were deported by the Soviet Union as far from their homeland as the northern reaches of Siberia. While many perished as they contended with hunger, thirst, illness, harsh weather, ill-suited clothing, and poor housing, several survived, returned, and recounted their experiences. Returned adult deportees often recall solidarity among Lithuanians, interactions with locals and authorities, and efforts to maintain agency and continue cultural traditions. Children remember going to school, relying on their parents, and returning to Lithuania. Deportees and others involved in recording their memoirs wrote them in Lithuanian or translated them into English for different purposes and with different intended audiences. The ways in which deportees describe their experiences and what they omit from their stories have shaped Lithuania’s national identity when it reemerged as the Soviet Union fell following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Lithuania redeclared its independence in 1990. The years in which memoirs were published also likely influence their contents. Despite the horrors of deportation, returnees describe positive aspects of the experience. Many deportees portray themselves as struggling for survival, but not as helpless victims. Relatively rare mention of conflict among Lithuanian deportees and identification of non-Lithuanian deportees’ ethnicities suggest the importance of Lithuanians striving together for a common goal: survival and return to Lithuania. The creation of museums focused on deportation, incorporation of memoirs in school curricula, observation of a Day of Mourning and Hope, and portrayal of deportations in works of literature and film demonstrate their lasting impact and significance.
ContributorsDaulys, Gintare K. (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis director) / Cichopek-Gajraj, Anna (Committee member) / Watts College of Public Service & Community Solut (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This dissertation explores how rank-and-file political prisoners navigated life after release and how they translated their experiences in the Gulag and after into memoirs, letters, and art. I argue that these autobiographical narratives formed the basis of an alternate history of the Soviet Union. This alternate history informed the cultural memory of the Gulag in the Komi Republic, which coalesced over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s into an infrastructure of memory. This alternate history was mobilized by the formation of the Soviet Union’s first civic organizations, such as the Memorial Society, that emerged in the late 1980s. However, Gulag returnees not only joined post-Soviet civil society, they also formed a nascent civil society after their release in the 1950s. The social networks and informal associations that Gulag returnees relied upon to reintegrate back into Soviet society after release, also played an essential role in the memory project of coming to terms with the Stalinist past after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As one of the first and most populous epicenters of the Gulag archipelago located in the Far North, from 1929-1958 Komi saw hundreds of thousands of prisoners, in addition to hundreds of thousands more who were exiled to the region from all over the Soviet Union. While some left the region after they were released, many were not able to leave or chose not to when given the choice. Regardless of where they lived when the Soviet Union collapsed, many former prisoners sent their autobiographies to branches of the Memorial Society and local history museums in Komi. For many, this was the very first time they had shared their stories with anyone. While Komi is unique in many ways, it is emblematic of processes that unfolded throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the Twentieth Century. This project expands our understanding of how civil societies form under conditions of authoritarian rule and illuminates the ways in which survivors and societies come to terms with difficult pasts.
As one of the first and most populous epicenters of the Gulag archipelago located in the Far North, from 1929-1958 Komi saw hundreds of thousands of prisoners, in addition to hundreds of thousands more who were exiled to the region from all over the Soviet Union. While some left the region after they were released, many were not able to leave or chose not to when given the choice. Regardless of where they lived when the Soviet Union collapsed, many former prisoners sent their autobiographies to branches of the Memorial Society and local history museums in Komi. For many, this was the very first time they had shared their stories with anyone. While Komi is unique in many ways, it is emblematic of processes that unfolded throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the Twentieth Century. This project expands our understanding of how civil societies form under conditions of authoritarian rule and illuminates the ways in which survivors and societies come to terms with difficult pasts.
ContributorsKirk, Tyler Colby (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Von Hagen, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Holian, Anna (Committee member) / Barenberg, Alan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019