Search

“Editing Mussolini: Il Duce’s American Biographies on Paper and on Screen, 1922-1936” uses an unexplored corpus of non-fiction texts (including Benito Mussolini’s own English-language editorials and American newsreels), along with published biographies, to argue that, between 1922 and 1936, American media established Mussolini as a political celebrity. In this interdisciplinary study, I position the American response to the Fascist dictator in relationship with prevailing cultural trends regarding biographical narration, personality studies, and oratorical performance. I explain Mussolini’s acclaim by considering it in the context of exemplary biographical experiences and personality traits of representative men of the American financial and political spheres. Il Duce’s biographical tales broadcast the attractive image of an efficient leader and a political model, a modernizer and an essential actor in world politics. Through the analysis of connections between the media and their financial backers, I further suggest that institutions such as J.P. Morgan favored Mussolini’s positive portrayal to profit from their involvement in Italian economy.

F.W. Harvey’s poetry was more popular during the First World War than many – if not most – of those whom we celebrate as ‘the war poets’ today. He is unique among the poets of that war for his insight into the life of the British POW in Germany, and for the influence of his work in the first of the British trench journals, the 5th Gloucester Gazette. Yet, he has received little national attention since his death in 1957, and scholarly work on his life is lacking, largely owing to a deficit of publicly-available primary sources and original material regarding his life and works. This has resulted in a failure to place him properly within the literary canon of the First World War. The recent discovery of Harvey’s papers allows us to examine his life and his contemporary cultural impact, and more fully to evaluate the value of his work and what it tells us about the First World War experience. Using Harvey’s papers, this biographical study will reconstruct the historical details of his life as they relate to the First World War. Concurrently, it will develop our understanding of his war-related work. This will demonstrate Harvey’s influence during the war, first as a trench poet, then as the poetic voice of the British POW. It will also examine how Harvey’s work continued to be affected by the war in the years after the armistice. The result will be a greater appreciation of the life and importance of a First World War poet whose voice was in danger of being lost to time.

The present thesis seeks to show the influences to my artwork and describe the body of work found in my thesis exhibition, In Context. The role of family and childhood are discussed and related to the work. The feminist writers bell hooks, Jane Tompkins, and Hélène Cixous are cited as influential to the initial exploration of my content. Artists discussed include Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Annette Messager, and Robert Rauschenberg. It is further shown how poetry and prose evolve as the catalyst for content for my work and how this enforces my belief that only through examining the personal can we reveal the universal human condition.

This thesis presents a scholarly biographical study of the life of Andrew Hyslop (1903 1982). Hyslop was a school teacher and headmaster in New South Wales who enlisted in the Second Australian Imperial Force in mid-1940. He was captured in Singapore as part of the 8th Division AIF, held in Changi and served on the Thai-Burma railway as part of F Force in 1943. Hyslop survived captivity and returned to Australia in late 1945. He continued his career as an educator in NSW and served on the Executive of the NSW Teachers' Federation during the 1950s one of the union's most divisive periods. Hyslop retired from education in 1965 and reconnected with his military service through the 2/30th Battalion Association. The focal point of this research is Hyslop s private papers, an unusually informative lode of evidence, which provide the foundations of an analysis of his military experience in the context of his life and career. Through a close examination of Hyslop s career as an educator, the thesis argues that his professional experience and identity were powerful factors shaping both his military experience and the nature of his readjustment to civilian life after 1945. In this sense, the study encompasses particular aspects of military, social and cultural history as well as the history of education in New South Wales. This study contributes to contemporary historiographical debates about the nature of captivity in the Pacific during the Second World War, the consequences of military service in Australia following the conflict and Australian education history. It makes a case for scholarly biography and microhistory as important frameworks through which the lives of ex-prisoners of war can be understood by demonstrating the nuanced manner in which Hyslop's pre- and post-war lives intersected with his experiences as a soldier and prisoner. 

This thesis sets out to examine the proposition that Air Marshal Sir George Jones time as Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) of the Royal Australian Air force (RAAF) was both beneficial and detrimental to the Service but the benefits gained from his time in office outweighed the detriment. Sir George Jones served as CAS for nearly ten years (1942 - 1952). This was the longest continuous appointment of a CAS to date. Jones was CAS for most of the Second World War and it was during that time that the two events for which he is most remembered occurred, viz the controversy surrounding his appointment and his ongoing conflict with the RAAF Operational Commander (W.D. Bostock). In order to assess his impact on the RAAF, this thesis describes events and incidents that occurred while Jones was CAS. To compile this work, data was drawn from numerous sources including: interviews with family members and ex-RAAF personnel; official records maintained by the National Archives of Australia (NAA), the RAAF Historical Section and the RAAF Museum; Jones personal papers held by family members and the Australian War Memorial; and the papers of other RAAF officers and politicians held by the RAAF Museum and the National Library of Australia (NLA). Jones wrote a brief autobiography, which (together with other secondary sources) was used to fill in the gaps. This research shows that Jones time as CAS was far more eventful and filled with more conflict than he alludes to in his autobiography. He had no say in his appointment as CAS but his personality did not allow him to make the best of the situation with Bostock. Contrary to the views expressed in earlier works, Jones appointment was not a mistake but a deliberate move by the Minister for Air. The conclusion reached is that Jones time in office was beneficial to the RAAF. He presided over its growth to being the world s fourth largest air force at the end of the Second World War. He oversaw its post war demobilisation and was responsible for planning the Service s structure to meet the Australian Government s needs during the early years of the Cold War.

This dissertation examines the lives, works, and careers of Peter Andreevich Slovtsov (1767-1843) and Ivan Timofeevich Kalashnikov (1797-1863). Known today largely for their roles as Siberian “firsts”—Slovtsov as Siberia’s first native-born historian, Kalashnikov as Siberia’s first native-born novelist—their names often appear in discussions of the origins of Siberian regionalism, a movement of the later nineteenth century that decried Siberia’s “colonial” treatment by the tsarist state and called for greater autonomy for the region. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including two decades of correspondence between the two men—this study shows that Slovtsov and Kalashnikov, far from being disgruntled critics of the tsarist state, were its proud agents. They identified with their service careers, I suggest, because they believed that autocratic rule was the best system for Russia and because serving the tsarist state provided what they saw as their greatest opportunity to participate in a progressive, world-historical saga of enlightenment. Their understanding of this saga and its Russian reverberations gave form and content to their senses of self. An exploration of Slovtsov and Kalashnikov’s complex lives through the long paper trail that makes them accessible today offers revealing perspectives on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Russia—in particular on topics of service, selfhood, bureaucratic culture, education, and the intersection of public and private life—as well as on the history of Siberia and its place in the empire. Kalashnikov and Slovtsov lived during the apogee of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period commonly described as a time of growing dissension between “the state” and “educated society.” But their lives offer a useful reminder that that “the state” and “educated society” were often one and the same. Slovtsov and Kalashnikov saw the tsarist state as a powerful agent of progressive change and argued passionately, both in their published works as well as in their private correspondence, in favor of an imperial narrative of enlightenment. They saw Siberia as a place made whole, improved, and, indeed, made “Russia” by imperial rule.

This thesis seeks to provide a political context for the philosophical work of the third earl of Shaftesbury. A biographical framework is adopted which details Shaftesbury's political interests, both inside and outside parliament. In attempting to trace the links between his political life and his philosophical ideas particular attention is given to Shaftesbury's debt to his tutor, Locke, as well as to the importance of his visits to the Netherlands. Shaftesbury's connections with radical whig politicians at the end of the seventeenth century are also investigated: they are an indication of his interest in practical political issues. The main argument of the thesis is that Shaftesbury's published work is fully comprehensible only if this political context is taken into account. By concentrating solely on his importance in the history of moral or aesthetic philosophy scholars have effectively removed the political cutting-edge from Shaftesbury's work. It was precisely because Shaftesbury was aware of the political implications of his moral and aesthetic philosophy that he was such a controversial social critic in his own day. The originality of the thesis lies in the presentation of a more complete biography of Shaftesbury than has previously been attempted. Although the Shaftesbury papers in London are the major source for the thesis, other material has been consulted, including manuscripts in the Netherlands, which gives a fuller picture of the circles in which he moved. Shaftesbury was not an important politician, but his strong political concerns need to be emphasised before his thought can be understood: politics and philosophy were continuous for him.

This dissertation aims at providing a fresh evaluation of the military career of Nicolas Charles Oudinot, using extensive archival sources, as well as previously overlooked family papers. A new study is justified because his two previous biographies, both published in the middle of the nineteenth century, are apologetic and often inaccurate.

The purpose of this treatise is to place military and dance music genres found in the music manuscript books of the Hitchcock Collection of flute music housed in the Warren D. Allen Music Library at Florida State University and the Hitchcock Papers in the Music Division of the Library of Congress within the context of Ethan Allen Hitchcock's life (1798-1870) in order to correlate his activities as military officer and flutist to the social structures of his professional and private life.