History Commons^™

Making Discrimination Legal: A Comparison Of The Penal Laws In Ireland And The Nuremberg Laws And Other Laws In Nazi Germany, Gage Overton

Honors College Theses

The Penal Laws and the Nuremberg Laws were sets of legal codes which stripped away basic rights and civil liberties from Irish Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s respectively. My research into these laws has allowed me to discover that the methods used by the English Crown and the Nazi German state to separate the groups targeted by their laws, as well as the circumstances which led to their implementation, were eerily similar, nearly identical. Besides this, they ultimately used this strategy as a way to justify the elimination of the …

Let Me Be Myself, Brandon Stettenbenz

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Let Me Be Myself is a collection of short stories, essays, oral history, and poems that deals with generational trauma, history, traveling, family, war, oppression, and healing. This project serves to inform, evoke understanding, lend perspective, and inspire others. It aims to help others understand the trauma of being born from a Holocaust surviving family, and its impact on somebody in modern day society. It explores the story of a first, second, and third generation Holocaust refugee. It connects a timeline of eighty years of trauma through violence and oppression, and a pursuit to find healing from Nazi Germany.

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory In The Age Of Social Media, Erica Fagen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study …

‘Where Do We Go From Here?’: Discourse In Louisiana Surrounding The Foundation Of The State Of Israel, May 1948, Devan Gelle

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A study of ten Louisiana newspapers during May 15-31,1948 revealed a period in which articles varied in their coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and wider international relations. Discourse about Arabs and Israelis which became evident in newspapers in later years had emerged but was not fully developed. This coverage revealed a silence about the Holocaust and a subtext about the United Nations.

"No Room For Denial"?: Historical Memory And The 1995 Genocide At Srebrenica, Julia Masur

History Theses

The title of this research project comes from a documentary by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) called “Srebrenica Genocide: No Room for Denial”, that commemorated the 20^th anniversary of the genocide of Bosniak Muslims.The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has called the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, “the single worst atrocity committed in the former Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990s and the worst massacre that occurred in Europe since the months after World War II.”^[1] Based on evidence from exhumations of mass graves, demographics studies, interception of …

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Battle For The Minds: Use Of Propaganda Films In Stalinist Russia And Nazi Germany, David Rosenblum

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Since the end of the Second World War, scholars and experts have examined the use of cinema in spreading totalitarian propaganda. Nazi Germany, in particular, has caught the most attention. However, most of these studies focus exclusively on one nation, and relatively few studies have tried to directly compare the cinematic propaganda of different countries. This study aims to directly compare cinematic propaganda of Stalinist-era Russia and Nazi Germany and find out who utilized the medium of film more effectively. To accomplish this, this study will examine and directly compare several critical components, such as industry structure and artistic merits, …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

“We Were Just Trying To, You Know, Survive”: Coming Of Age As A Displaced Person And Narrative, Eli Megibben

Undergraduate Theses

“Home” is a personal construct that shapes who we are. It is not a physical place, but rather an experience tied to a place. How are people to respond, then, when the socio-political institutions that rule the land that they call home say “you’re not allowed to exist because of who you are and where you come from”? In this project, I investigate the effects that physical displacement (by way of war and violent conflict) have on an individual’s identity through the analysis of narratives composed by individuals who were displaced by the Holocaust, the Bosnian war, and the current …

A Question Of G-D: Jewish Theology And Memoirs Of The Holocaust, Rebecca Mcclellan

Honors College Theses

The Holocaust, the systematic murder of the European Jews by the Germans, had massive impacts on the religious beliefs of those Jews who survived it. Nazi authorities and their accomplices stripped Jews away from their homes, their families, and everything they knew. Forced to work under inhumane conditions, many came to question the God they had followed and the religion they had practiced. This thesis investigates the memoirs of five Jewish survivors to analyze the impact the Holocaust had on their faith.

Das Ss-Helferinnenkorps: Drei Phasen, Drei Frauen, Hayden Mueller

Senior Theses and Projects

Since the end of World War II, scholarship on the Third Reich has focused predominantly on men. Recent developments in the field have brought women into view, but their roles, motivations, and contributions remain under-researched. The SS-Helferinnenkorps, created for the dual purpose of relieving male communications staff for service on the front and establishing a vetted group of women embodying Himmler’s weibliche Ideal, has remained largely overlooked, and the little serious scholarship available presents the organization as a separate unit. To fill gaps in the research as well as bring about an understanding of the SS-Helferinnenkorps in the context of …

Museum Websites And Restitution: Rediscovering Holocaust-Era Objects In The Digital Age, Gabriella Bloom

MA Theses

Under the Third Reich, Europe experienced one of the most far-reaching examples of plunder of cultural property in modern history. While the Allies succeeded in returning many objects and artworks towards the end of the war and initially following it, many objects remained missing and hidden. The late 1990s led to a resurgence of interest in Holocaust-Era looting, resulting in a rise of cases and litigation over previously plundered objects. As many looted artworks materialized in United States museums, museums began further researching their collections’ provenance and inputting this information online. Today, most major museums have a section of their …

Training Friends And Overseas Relief: The Friends Ambulance Unit And The Friends Relief Service, 1939 To 1948, Nerissa Kalee Aksamit

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This transnational case study investigates the establishment and development of training programs by two British faith-based voluntary relief organizations, the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and the Friends Relief Service (FRS), during the Second World War and explores the implementation of learned skills by members of those organizations working during the immediate postwar period in the British Occupation Zone in Germany. It contributes new perspectives to scholarship on humanitarianism as it highlights both the continuities and ruptures in the approaches to and practices of humanitarian aid. It identifies the Quaker traditions that shaped the work of the FAU and FRS—particularly the …

On The Edge Of Inclusion: A Look At The Shifting Of Representation In Museum Display And Archival Cataloging, Natalie Ray

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project, entitled "On The Edge of Inclusion: A Look at the Shifting of Representation in Museum Display and Archival Cataloging" by Natalie Ray delves into how the growing trend of social justice has raised new questions about how to better represent marginalized populations and how museum work has followed this pursuit. The digital age continues to impact the dynamism of exhibiting. Accurate representation becomes more imperative now that representative texts are able to reach more people than ever before. This increasing access coupled with the expanding interest in social justice and cultural reconciliation renders it necessary for curators and …

On Writing And Righting History: The Stakes Of Holocaust Interpretation And Remembrance In Poland And The United States, Noa Gutow-Ellis

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the ways in which American Jews - and Americans more generally, by way of the Americanization of the Holocaust - have come to think about and understand Poland and how Poland has subsequently rejected their narratives. Historically, American Jewish cultural works have placed Poland as a geographic space, nation, and people at the center of stories of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and World War II. In its quest to right and correct historical misunderstandings, this project looks at the ways Poland has worked to completely revise the historical narrative.

Through tracing historiographies of separateness between Jewish …

The Americanization Of The Holocaust: Reconsidered Through Judaic Studies, Brie Green-Rebackoff

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This article explores how the Americanization of the Holocaust is in part responsible for the paradigm that the mention of the Holocaust is vital for a Jewish writer of postwar fiction to be taken seriously. In keeping with the need for people to find meaning in catastrophe, to derive humanity from inhumanity and order out of chaos, Jewish literature's apparent 'success' or international reach often depends on reflecting on the Holocaust as an empowering movement that pushed survivors and other Jews to feel a sense of unity and inclusiveness. By using the Holocaust to generate interest in audiences as opposed …