Library: History

The Federal Writers' Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, collected interviews from over 3500 ex-slaves throughout the United States, including 365 former South Carolina slaves. These narratives are an invaluable resource to those interested in resistance by the last generation of South Carolinians held in bondage. This thesis tells us about the separate worlds inhabited by the Palmetto State's slaves and their owners, and describes, often in the slaves' own words, the resistance precipitated by the friction between these worlds.

This study presents interviews with American Indian/ Alaska Native alumni who received some or all of their elementary and high school education at the Chemawa Indian Boarding School in Salem, Oregon between 1917 and 1985. A brief summary of Indian history, in particular Indian education, is presented as the context for many of the changes that occurred at Chemawa during its first one hundred years. The purpose of this study is to examine Chemawa alumni recollections of Chemawa within an imposed educational system. My research process included library and archival research, academic...

This thesis traces the historiography of antebellum reform from its origins in Gilbert Barnes's rebellion from the materialist reductionism of the Progressives to the end of the twentieth century. The focus is the ideas of the historians at the center of the historiography, not a summary of every work in the field. The works of Gilbert Barnes, Alice Felt Tyler, Whitney Cross, C. S. Griffin, Donald Mathews, Paul Johnson, Ronald Walters, George Thomas, Robert Abzug, Steven Mintz, and John Quist, among many others, are discussed. In particular, the thesis examines the social control interpretatio...

This study analyses the legal condition of women in Catalonia, Spain, in the early modern ages, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by way of the study of primary legal sources. The legal discourse was conceived as being different for men and women: women were treated as a specific social category, were judicially discriminated against and were given inferior legal personality. Following the moral discourse of the time, jurists classified women as honest and dishonest, and tried to establish a physical and legal barrier to divide the good from the bad. As a result, wo...

During the revolutionary period the Soviets came into political and cultural conflict with Russia’s Muslims. Despite indications that the majority of Muslims desired political unification based on their Islamic heritage, the Party divided them into separate “nationalities” along narrow ethnic lines, incorporated most into the RSFSR, and attempted to uproot traditional Islamic institutions and customs under the aegis of class war. Resistance took the form of pan-Muslim nationalism, a reformist political conception with roots in the Near East. This conflict not only aborted the export of revol...

This thesis, examining the Treatise of Garcia of Toledo, explores the connection between the legend of Cockaigne and its connection with the powerful monastic foundation of Cluny. The Treatise was written as a condemnation of Cluniac influence in 11th and 12th century Spain.

This thesis argues that there is a popular culture of space exploration characteristic of a wider Russia; its roots lie in pagan times and it grew through Orthodox Christianity and Soviet Communism to the twenty-first century, where it is actively promoted by Russia and neighbouring nations. The key influences stem from Nikolai Fedorov, Kontsantin Tsiolkovsky, Friedrich Tsander and Yuri Gagarin. The narrative of the twentieth-century Soviet space programme is considered from this perspective and the cultural importance of Tsiolkovsky to this programme is acknowledged. This is an alternative...

This thesis reconstructs Reformed—and later, Presbyterian—thought by analysing the influences on the formation, changes in conception, and purposes of Scotland’s covenants from the emergence of covenantalism at the initial Reformation in 1557 to the Glorious Revolution of 1689—90. To achieve this, it has relied primarily on covenant documents and sermons. It has challenged the idea that Presbyterians comprised a homogeneous and fixed group in opposition to the crown’s ostensibly Episcopalian policies. Rather, this thesis argues that Presbyterian thought was transitory and was influenced by par...