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Full-Text Articles in Political History

Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, And The Shaping Of U.S. Citizenship, 1843-1945, Johnathan Thayer Sep 2018

Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, And The Shaping Of U.S. Citizenship, 1843-1945, Johnathan Thayer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that merchant seamen, because of their inherent transience, diversity, and the unique nature of their work, occupied a marginal position in U.S. society, and that that marginalization produced a series of confrontations with shoreside people, communities, institutions, and the state, most specifically over the nature and definition of citizenship. This argument is developed through examination of a series of encounters and negotiations that merchant seamen provoked from the piers, back alleys, and boardinghouses of the nation’s “sailortowns” from the 1830s through World War II, including: 1) nineteenth century maritime ministry projects in the Port of New York …


“A Christian World Order:” Protestants, Democracy And Christian Aid To Germany, 1945-1961, Ky N. Woltering May 2018

“A Christian World Order:” Protestants, Democracy And Christian Aid To Germany, 1945-1961, Ky N. Woltering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the relationship between the German and American Protestantism from 1945-1961. I argue that in response to the threat of Nazism and communism, mainline ecumenical American Protestants aimed to create a universalist “Christian World Order” based on liberal democracy and Christian ethics. Only this new order, they argued, could supersede nationalist and materialist agendas and restore world peace. By rhetorically depicting Nazi and Communist "totalitarianism" as anti-Christian, a construction I refer to as the Christian-Totalitarian Dichotomy, these Protestants drove German conservatives away from Nazism and toward Western liberal democracy through association with Christianity. They accomplished this through two …