Cultural History Commons^™

A Legion Of Legacy: Tyrolean Militarism, Catholicism, And The Heimwehr Movement, Jason Engle

Dissertations

This study of the origins of the Heimwehr (Home Guard) movement offers insight into the conditions under which such groups gained their following. As such, its story is a valuable one that shows a society groping with the problem of a complex, multi-faceted identity that was, at the same time, wracked with substantial economic privation and politically polarized. The paramilitary Heimwehr movement that began in 1920 was the creation of Austria’s conservative provincial governments. It was intended to preserve the existing social and political order—that of the hegemonic social groups of the Habsburg Monarchy—against the growing threat of Marxist revolution, …

Italian Fellas In Olive Drab: Exploring The Experiences Of Italian-American Servicemen In Sicily And Italy, 1943-1945, Guido Rossi

Master's Theses

Despite constituting the largest ethnic group in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, the experiences of Italian-Americans have received scant attention by historians. In particular, the stories of the U.S. citizens of Italian descent or Italian-born but naturalized Americans who served in Italy, have received almost none. These soldiers, sailors, airmen, and coastguardmen who could often speak Italian, had grown up in Italian-American families and neighborhoods, and still had relatives in Italy, were asked to go fight in their country of origin. During the Allied advance, these men found themselves in close contact with a destitute Italian population …

No Foreign Despots On Southern Soil: The American Party In Alabama And South Carolina, 1850-1857, Robert N. Farrell

Master's Theses

During the 1850s in the South, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, rallied southerners culturally and politically around nativism, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic ideology. This thesis studies nativism in the Deep South and challenges existing scholarship by Tyler Anbinder and William Darrell Overdyke. Anbinder claims that southern Know Nothings held little in common with their northern counterparts and exhibited only regional characteristics. Overdyke maintains that the American Party in the Deep South participated in the national organization, but he argues that nativism appeared only as an incidental component.

An analysis of private papers, speeches, and newspapers …