World War II

This dissertation, “Grassroots Ecumenism: Christianity and Decolonization in France and Algeria, 1940-1965” is the first major study of how French Protestant and Catholic engagement in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) reshaped Christianity in the modern world and inf…

This dissertation examines the postwar activism of both black and white southern veterans in Georgia and the South. As part of the growing effort to understand the complexities and contradictions of the Second World War's impact on the region, this study offers the first in-dept…

On the surface, the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), World War II (1939–45), and the Algerian War (1954–62) seem to have little in common. Ninety years and vast differences of scale, duration, and context separate the three. Moreover, in the first two wars, France fought against th…

Conventional interpretations regarding the role of the Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War have concentrated almost exclusively on the propaganda output of the organisation. The role of the intelligence sections working for and within the organisation have be…

This study aims to investigate in depth two incidents that have been widely presented in literature as examples of the humanitarian and compassionate Turkish Republic lending her helping hand to Jewish people who had fallen into difficult, even life threatening, conditions under…

The rulers of the four principalities on Java represented an important political force in pribumi (indigenous Indonesian) politics. Therefore, during World War Two, the Japanese occupying authorities, as the prewar the Dutch colonial rulers had done, maintained them in their pos…

This thesis is a study of the ways in which historical portrayals of World War II are used to promote national identity construction in America. The first chapter will detail the promotion of American exceptionalism by the 2008 game “Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway” and the way…

During World War II the British Royal Air Force undertook a campaign of area bombing of German cities, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The debate over the ethics of this policy began at the time and has continued to the present. Area bombing clearly vi…

The unprecedented waves of strikes which erupted in British Africa during the war era were dramatic proof that the shadow cast by the Second World War extended far beyond the actual theatres of combat and also demonstrated the state's limited capacity to engineer the colonial ec…

This dissertation examines the impact of World War II and German occupation on individual lives, social communities, and the Soviet state in Belorussia. A seemingly remote and marginal space, this Soviet republic and European borderland in fact encapsulated the extremes of twent…

This dissertation explores the effect of political performance on Jewish-American cultural identity during the World War II era. With the rise of Hitler, many previously secular and assimilated Jewish theatre and film artists embraced their ethnic heritage and used their work as…

This study examines how various gendered forces--social, cultural, and other--combined to shape a new national identity in France following the Second World War. During the war, the Vichy regime, a quasi-fascist government, was in power. After the war, it was important for Frenc…

This dissertation tells the story of Sarajevo during the Second World War. Beginning with a sketch of the city on the eve of war—when Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Serbs, and Jews lived and worked together—it traces how these communities interacted with one another through variou…

This dissertation examines the roles of American women in the development of America's gendered ideas about Asia in the period between the 1870s and WWII. It investigates the gender politics that operated in the discourses about Japan and China in three areas of cultural product…

This dissertation examines the evolution, scope, and significance of the colonial discourse in the German-occupied Netherlands, as advanced by Dutch resisters writing in the country's extensive and influential clandestine press during the years of 1940-1945. In a testament to po…

French colonialism in North Africa dramatically impacted the conduct of American diplomatic and military policies between 1940 and 1943. Viewing French occupation of North Africa as lacking legitimacy, the U.S. perceived the Muslim population as an easy target for German propaga…

This dissertation presents the findings of a comparative oral history study of twenty-seven learner experiences of education in two complex emergencies—World War II and post-1979 Afghanistan. Built around an oral history methodology, the study contributes to the developing resea…

This dissertation examines the lives of Tunisian veterans who fought for the French during the First and Second World Wars. My thesis breaks new ground in that it attempts to place the story of Tunisian veterans in the wider global context of the World Wars and decolonization. E…

Since the World War II era, the United States Army has been heavily involved in nation-building. Although these represent the majority of the missions that were executed in the last sixty years, the army still primarily focuses on planning, organizing and training to fight conve…

This study is concerned with the artistic rewriting, in French and by writers and filmmakers of West African origins, of the massacre of Thiaroye (Senegal), the1944 mutiny of African soldiers severely repressed by the French army. The corpus is formed by the following works: a p…