Contrary to the view of national borders as a product of modernization, the Great Wall was considered to came into being almost two thousand years earlier as a permanent boundary dividing the imperial territories from its northern adversaries. Refuting both views, I illustrate t…
After the mid-twentieth century, the American labor movement began to decline. Across the U.S., Union memberships and the rate of work stoppages decreased. In the hospitality-industry-driven city of Las Vegas, Nevada, however, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 more than doubl…
This is an ethnopolitical study of the majority non-Han, Muslim province of Xinjiang in China’s far northwest during the transition from empire to nationalizing state. After achieving provincial status in 1884, the final decades of Qing rule witnessed fatally weakened attempts b…
Defying our usual image of the late Qing as a victim of internal decline and diplomatic ineffectiveness, the empire exhibited surprising rigor in Kham Tibet in its last decade, suppressing monasteries, removing hereditary chieftains and fashioning localities in the image of Chin…
The prevalent historical reconstruction for the Iron I in the central highlands of Jordan ties the process to the Mādabā Plain region (MPR). Based upon comparative ceramic analysis with sites in the highlands of Cisjordan, the MPR is considered to have witnessed the earliest pre…
Using a combination of oral traditions and written sources, this work reconstructs the history of Owo, a frontier Yoruba kingdom in southwestern Nigeria, from about the 12th century to the 20th century. One of a number of kingdoms springing up in this forest country in the 11th …
This dissertation, a study of trade life in western Siberia in the early modern period, focuses on the careers and practices of merchants groups to whom that Russian state awarded various privileges in early modern and early imperial Russia. These groups were Orthodox Russian me…
This dissertation reconsiders the political and ethno-cultural frontiers of North China, taking as a case study a group that thrived in the Eastern Intermediate Zone (Hebei-Liaoning-Rehe border zone) known as the Qai or Tatabï in Turkic sources, as the Kumak Qai (Kùmò Xī 庫莫奚), a…
Conflicts in Africa are destabilizing the continent, thus hampering any efforts to achieve sustainable development. Post-Cold War conflicts are mainly internal and result in mass migrations of refugees into neighboring states that are underdeveloped and politically unstable. In …
Statement of the Problem: Recent historians have argued that the term "frontier" and the related concepts of frontier societies or zones (as used by scholars of medieval Spain in particular and the Middle Ages in general) are all amorphous and ill-defined concepts, lacking predi…
Unknown to most Western and many Ukrainian historians, the city of Kamianets-Podilsky was one of the larger and more important urban centers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the early modern period. The city's long history as an urban administrative, cultural and eco…
The Nupe, together with some of their neighbours in the interior of West Africa, were embroiled in a widespread socio-political and military crisis during the first half of the 19th century. In certain respects, their condition was similar to the ‘crisis of adaptation’ that some…
This dissertation investigates several paradigmatic relationships between the concepts “home” and “the frontier.” It focuses on four writers of the twentieth century from divergent cultural and literary contexts. Each writer depicts the psychic paradox of feeling homeless in one…
The seventeenth-century Ottoman-Habsburg frontier in Hungary was the scene of constant conflict. The defenses of both empires were based on a line of fortresses. This dissertation addresses how the Ottomans organized and administered their frontier by investigating the military,…
This thesis examines the history of the North Manchuria frontier from 1900 to 1931, which was a crucial period in regional development. Within thirty-one years, about four million Chinese peasants immigrated into the region. The frontier society that took shape exhibited feature…
The conquest of the Khanate of Kazan' was a pivotal event in the development of Muscovy. Moscow gained possession over a previously independent political entity with a multiethnic and multiconfessional populace. The Muscovite political system adapted to the unique circumstances …
Esta investigación utiliza el ritual religioso-universal del catolicismo para analizar la participación de grupos indígenas, mulatos, mestizos, y de las mujeres de la élite, en fiestas religiosas, cofradías y capellanías que tuvieron lugar en el pueblo minero de San Joseph del P…
The Islamic-Byzantine frontier ( al-thughur ) traditionally has been described either as a "no-man's land" or as a closed fortified border dominated by a line of castles. Such perceptions convey a sense of propaganda and hyperbole, as the frontier was neither an empty wilderness…