History Commons^™

The Roaring Lion Of Berlin: The Life, Thought, And Influence Of Eugen Dühring, Arden Roy

Undergraduate Research Symposium

The life and influence of 19th-century German polymath Eugen Dühring remain but a mere footnote in the history of ideas, being primarily relegated to the status of little more than a theoretical rival to Marxism in the German socialist movement and the occasional object of Freidrich Nietzsche's rhetorical flogging. Despite the current consensus on the subject, Eugen Dühring was a scholar of vast, remarkable learnedness, contributing greatly to philosophy, economics, and the natural sciences. The aim of this talk will be to clear the fog surrounding the life and work of the controversial blind scholar and give an account of …

Printing Devotion: Sufi Books And Their Transregional Networks In An Age Of Print, Mariam Elashmawy

Theses and Dissertations

The production of printed books in the Muslim world is a story that encompasses an array of actors, spanning centuries, and taking place in remote, yet connected locales. This thesis provides an intellectual history of Ṣūfī print production of Islamicate mystical works in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries by examining three overlapping genres: poetry, Ṣūfī histories (hagiography), and litanies (aḥzāb). Texts such as the Dīwān of devotional poetry by Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1234), the litany of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258), Ḥizb al-baḥr, and Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, a history of the Naqshbandiyya order by Fakhr …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Enlightenment As Global History: The Reception Of Confucianism In Eighteenth-Century France, Rachel Yang

Honors Projects

While the Enlightenment was once seen as a unique product of Western intellectual heritage, recent scholars have started to challenge this Eurocentric notion with the concept of a “global Enlightenment” by considering how it was shaped by cross-cultural encounters. To contribute to this body of scholarship, I trace the reception history of Confucianism in eighteenth-century France and examine how Chinese philosophy played a part in shaping and stimulating Enlightenment discourse. My research starts with the Jesuit missionaries who served as the intellectual intermediaries between China and Europe. Through a close reading of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, a Latin translation of …

Thoughts Of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity And Identity In Bangladesh, Humayun Kabir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a history and conducts an analysis of Bangladeshi political thought with the aim to better understand the thought-world and political subjectivities in Bangladesh. The dissertation argues that political thought in Bangladesh has been profoundly structured by colonial and other encounters with modernity and by concerns about constructing a national identity. Negotiations between the incomplete and continuous projects of modernization and identity formation have produced certain anxieties about becoming that permeates political consciousness and ideas in the country. Though such anxieties of becoming are also shared by other postcolonial countries, the specific, though not necessarily exclusive, character of …

Un Buenos Aires Ibérico: Cultura Impresa Y Modernidades Divergentes En El Exilio (1936-1959), Pablo Garcia Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Un Buenos Aires ibérico: Cultura impresa y modernidades divergentes en el exilio (1936-1959) –Iberian Buenos Aires: Print Culture and Diverging Modernity in Exile (1939-1959)–, analyzes print culture as a site of interaction between the intellectuals and artists exiled from the Spanish Civil War and the Argentinian Cultural Field. This doctoral research uses previously unpublished materials –with texts written in Spanish, Galician and Catalan, ranging from journalism and private correspondence to literary prose and drama; as well as graphic design, illustration and canvases– to engage with current conversations and debates in both the humanities and the …

Western Classics In Modern Japan (German), Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

A presentation paper (invited guest lecture) delivered at the Institute of Ancient History at Marburg University, Germany, July 12, 2016.

The Modernity Of Tradition: Abraham Shalom Yahuda On Freud's "Moses And Monotheism", Ilan M. Benattar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on an extensive critique of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939) written by a Jerusalem-born Iraqi-Jewish scholar of Semitics named Abraham Shalom Yahuda. I posit that Yahuda’s argument in his piece entitled “Sigmund Freud on Moses and his Torah” (Zigmund Freud ‘al Moshe ve Torato) rests on his analysis of three particular discourses—temporality, rationality and subjectivity—and the way these manifest themselves in Freud’s work. In his biting critique of the way said themes come to the fore in Moses and Monotheism, Yahuda should also be seen as challenging the homogenizing project of Modernity insofar …

Filología Reflexiva: Hacia Una Pedagogía “Evaluadora”. Reflexión Y Evaluación Del Campo Filológico Español (1936-1968), Jose Antonio Losada Montero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral thesis offers an original and valuable contribution to the study of the genealogy of the literary canon between 1939 and 1968. During Francisco Franco´s dictatorship, Spanish Universities underwent a series of important changes in its academic and management configuration and in the way Spanish elites envisioned Higher Education inside the regime. This research focuses in the role that Spanish scholars, inside Hispanic and Modern Language Departments, played in this renegotiation of a new and crucial sociopolitical mission for College Education. By focusing on the period between 1939 and 1968, a moment of sociopolitical instability and conservative literary and …

Jewish Apocalypticism: An Historiography, Natalie Latteri

Theology & Religious Studies

Chapter 3 of 'A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse' in the series Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition, Volume: 64

The Intellectual Life Of Lyman Beecher : An Intersection Of Calvinism And The Enlightenment, Daniel Ralph Spanjer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Lyman Beecher was born in rural Connecticut in 1775. Although he grew up working on a backwater farm, he rose to prominence in New England as a reformer and Congregationalist revivalist. He pastored four different churches in four different states, served in and create eleven different state and national reform societies. He founded two theological journals in Boston and served as the president of Lane Seminary, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Through a frenetic career of teaching, preaching, and organizing, Beecher maintained a very consistent worldview. Understanding that worldview sheds light on both his teaching and his social activism. It also reveals …

Building Canadian National Identity Within The State And Through Ice Hockey: A Political Analysis Of The Donation Of The Stanley Cup, 1888-1893, Jordan Goldstein

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Stanley Cup elicits strong emotions related to Canadian national identity despite its association as a professional ice hockey trophy. This strong link between the Cup and Canadian national identity emerged in its creation and donation. Lord Stanley, in addition to his love of ice hockey, donated the Cup partly as a political action. The cup stood as a physical symbol to unite the disparate Canadian population around a new national sport. Given Lord Stanley’s position as Governor General (1888-1893) this donation carried political authority. The purpose of this study is to investigate the donation of the Stanley Cup as …

A Conquering Race: The Birth Of Social Darwinism In Pre-War Germany, Andrew T. Murphree

Andrew T Murphree

Popular opinion suggests that certain political and military leaders throughout history are the primary agents for change in civilization; however, such a conclusion represents a serious oversight regarding the powerful potential of emerging worldviews to dictate epochal moments throughout mankind. Certainly, dynamic figures rise to prominence to lead movements of conservatism, progression, and moderation, but the conduit of ideas serves as the essential catalytic force that ignites and sustains these patterns. The Great War of the twentieth century was a complex global conflict of immense proportions, unlike anything the world had ever known. Historians perhaps express the greatest perplexity in …

Aaron Swartz’S Legacy, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

“Aaron Swartz’s Legacy,” Academe: Magazine of the American Association of University Professors 95(1): 19-23. Special issue on the “New Public Intellectual.” http://www.aaup.org/article/aaron-swartz%E2%80%99s-legacy#.UtZGm2RDtmk

Inimitability Versus Translatability: The Structure Of Literary Meaning In Arabo-Persian Poetics, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Allegory And The Critique Of Sovereignty: Ismail Kadare’S Political Theologies, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Reading Ruins Against The Grain: Istanbul, Derbent, Postcoloniality, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

The Geography Of Comparative Literature, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

“The Geography of Comparative Literature,” Journal of Literary Theory 5.2 (2011): 167–186 (examines the disciplinary history of Comparative Literature in the Arab and Persian world in relation to Europe; reviewed in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.07.2011, No. 160, S. N5).

“Truth Systematised" : The Changing Debate Over Slavery And Abolition, 1761-1916, Robert P. Forbes

Torrington Articles

No abstract provided.

Universal Identities And Local Realities: Young Poland's (Mis)Readings Of Synge, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problems Young Poland experienced in understanding the work of John Millington Synge were informed by precisely the same kind of behaviors that Daniel Corkery described in his argument for a truly native Irish national literature in the 1930s. Overcome by a strong sense of self, Poles were not fully able to appreciate the complexities and nuances of Synge's work and by extension, the Irish-Ireland movement. In the end, then, Young Poland was incapable of really understanding the Irish, and so the best they could do was to associate with them. As a result, Poles may have been able to …

How Newness Enters The World: The Methodology Of Sheldon Pollock, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’S Place In 19th-Century Intellectual History, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic …

The Impact Of Irish Ireland On Young Poland, 1890-1918, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

John. A. Merchant examines the impact of a contemporary cultural movement, Irish Ireland, on its Polish counterpart, Young Poland. He traces the reception of Irish literature in the form of translations of works by W. B. Yeats and John Millington Synge in Poland through translations by Jan Kasprowicz, Zenon "Miriam" Przesmycki and others as well as through a variety of cultural commentaries by Polish critics and by means of stage productions of Irish plays by theater directors, such as Tadeusz Pawlikowski.

Culture And State In Late Choson Korea (Book Review), Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Haboush, JaHyun Kim and Martina Deuchler, eds. Culture and State in Late Choson Korea. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.

ISBN 0-674-17982-X.

Working Toward A "Shared Authority" In The Discipline And Content Of Public Hlstory: A Case Study, Ruth E. Bryan

Ruth E. Bryan

This paper explores the meaning of “public history” using Michael Frisch’s concept of a “shared authority” (A Shared Authority, 1990) through a case study of the reviews of two edited and published oral histories, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (ed. Hollinger F. Barnard, 1985) and All is Never Said: The Narrative of Odette Harper Hines (ed. Judith Rollins, 1995). The result is that although history can be produced by historians with the public and about the public, public history cannot be truly an authoritative history (making explicit connections between facts, narrative, and the purpose of …

A New Concept Of "History": A Dialogue Between Reinhart Koselleck And Chela Sandoval, Ruth E. Bryan

Ruth E. Bryan

This paper explore the meaning and conception of “history” as used by Chela Sandoval in her article “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World” (1991) and Reinhart Koselleck in his book of essays, Futures Past (1985). For both writers, "history” is based in the relationship of past experience to future expectations. However, for Koselleck, “history” contains the expectation of positive progress. Thus, in his conception, all people have the same general experience (a conception of the past), therefore we all conceptualize history in the same way, therefore we are all equally happy …