European History Commons^™

The Connection Between Zermatt And Vail: How A Swiss Alpine Village Influenced The Creation Of A Colorado Village And Ski Resort In The Rocky Mountains, Thomas Quinn Marabello

Swiss American Historical Society Review

When one hears the places “Zermatt” and “Vail” we tend to think of skiing. Both are known worldwide for great skiing and beautiful mountains. While Zermatt has existed for centuries, Vail only became permanently inhabited by people after World War II. Zermatt did not become a well known place until the nineteenth century when adventurers sought to climb the Matterhorn, and then it became a popular tourist destination. However, Zermatt influenced the creation of the village of Vail, thanks to a man named Peter Seibert who spent time there and wanted to create a European Alpine style ski village in …

New Swiss Ambassador To The U.S.

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The new Swiss Ambassador to the U.S., Dr. Ralf Heckner, presented his credentials to President Joseph R. Biden during a ceremony at The White House on September 20, 2024. A native of Davos, Ambassador Heckner served as ambassador to India and Bhutan before coming to Washington, DC. He also served as Deputy Head of the United Nations and Other International Organizations, and has a PhD in history from the University of Fribourg.

Anabaptism 500th Anniversary In 2025

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The year 2025 marks the 500th anniversary of the beginnings of Anabaptism. It all began on January 21, 1525, when a small group of Christians in Zurich renounced baptism for infants and experienced voluntary baptism as adults. Throughout the year, we will include trivia questions, opportunities, new scholarship and resources that will be commemorating this milestone, in the SAHS Review and on our LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

Swiss Mountain Guides In The Canadian Rockies, Richard Hacken

Swiss American Historical Society Review

With the Golden Age of Alpinism (ca. 1850-1890) having drawn the world’s attention to the necessity of trained and experienced Swiss mountain guides, the services of such guides were in high demand, and not just in Switzerland. Climbing as a summer sport began to take hold in Europe in the 1860s. English alpinists, along with their Swiss local guides, began checking the mountains of the Swiss Alps off their list.

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

From Sonvilier To Canada To Illinois: A Remarkable Swiss Emigration Story, Jeanette Bowman Borich

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Author and genealogist Laurence Overmire stated, “History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.”¹ His words resonate as we consider the 1821 Swiss emigration to the Red River Settlement (in today’s Manitoba, Canada) followed by their subsequent emigration to the Galena, Illinois, area. Three recently published books on the history of Galena’s earliest days as a city² make no mention of the Swiss Red River families as early pioneers.³ A fourth book,⁴ Le Canada et les Suisses by E. H. Bovay, also relatively recently written, tells a different story. Genealogical research about one’s ancestors and …

Soirée Suisse 2024, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Soirée Suisse stands out as one of the most unique and highly anticipated events in Washington, D.C. It takes place at a wonderful time of year when the summer heat begins to surrender to the cool breezes of autumn.

Making Sense Of Anarchism: Science, Nature, And The Local In The Utopias Of Ricardo Mella And Pierre Quiroule, Philip J. Wu

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This article uses a detailed analysis of ideas about nature and science in the utopian works of Spanish anarchist Ricardo Mella and Argentine anarchist Pierre Quiroule, separated by roughly twenty-five years and over five thousand miles, to explore what is often called the “localization” of anarchist ideology. Rather than search for differences in their ideas that stem from some sort of quintessential Argentine or Spanish—or on a more granular level porteño or barcelonés—identity, I examine how these two authors took ideas from a shared anarchist imaginary and connected them to local events to make them relevant to themselves and …

Suburbanization As A Post-Industrial Essentiality: Revisiting Sweden's Miljonprogrammet, Colin Wood

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Definitively speaking, suburbanization does not equate to post-industrialism in the same limelight as would urbanization and industrialism. However, anomalous cases, such as the one being discussed in this paper, tangentially interlink on a socioeconomic basis. In 1965, Sweden began construction of the Miljonprogrammet (Million Programme), where over the next ten years, over one million domiciles were built in a suburban setting leading to a mass diaspora of ‘slum living’ Swedish industrial workers. The nation’s renowned welfare state, built on a collaborative system between public and private sectors as well as federal and municipal actors, overlooked housing in its social …

Sugar, Spice, And Everything Nice: Sweets As A Communicator Of Power And Wealth In Early Modern Spain, Liam Rafaty

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

What makes a luxury good so valued among the elite? How is luxury defined? This paper examines sugar and the value placed on sweet treats in early 17th-century Spain when sugar was a prized, expensive good among the elite. The 1611 cookbook by royal chef Francisco Martínez Montiño draws attention to this through the popularity of sweet goods, the portion sizes of the recipes, and the emphasis on sweet treats being served at gatherings, and the 1747 recipe book written by the head pastry chef for the Spanish crown Juan de la Mata provides an interesting contrast as sugar’s availability …

Khrushchevka: A Historical And Economic Analysis Of Russian Housing, Privatization, And Urban Renewal In Putin’S Russia, Victoria A. Faulkner

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The Moscow Urban Renewal Initiative (Инициатива обновления городов Москвы, 2017-) is the joint project of President Vladimir Putin (1999-2008, 2012-) and Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin (2010-) to remove dilapidated housing structures in Moscow. Since 2017, the programme has already displaced about 20,000 Muscovites, with plans to displace 1.5 million more by its completion goal of 2032. These displacements have revealed significant economic deficiencies in the post-Soviet market economy of the Russian Federation. Delays in the programme due to the COVID-19 pandemic have only escalated issues further – as has the War on Ukraine. Understanding the importance of the Moscow Urban …

The Anatomy Of Resistance: Jewish Life, Struggle, And Revolt In The Vilna And Warsaw Ghettos, Theodore A. Evison

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, marking the start of WWII. In the following months, the Nazis established an inconceivable array of ghettos meant to concentrate the Jewish population and facilitate their deportation to killing centers across continental Europe. Of the over 1,000 ghettos set up throughout Nazi-occupied territory, this paper focuses on two, Vilna and Warsaw. Despite the hellish conditions imposed on the Jews in the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos—conditions rivaled only by the killing centers that awaited most of their inhabitants—an important phenomenon took form: the Jews of the ghettos resisted. How, it must be contended, …

Myth, Murder, And Mayhem: Discerning The ‘Other’ In Our Flag Means Death, Sara Brown

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Although the television series Our Flag Means Death presents on the surface as a romantic comedy, it is enhanced by mythic elements that infuse the narrative with a clear sense of the fantastic. Here, the pirates exist in a Secondary World that openly draws upon the Primary (both in terms of historiography and legend); hence 18th-century piracy and British colonialism can interact seamlessly with human-to-animal-transformations (paying homage to the Greek myth of Ceyx and Alcyone) without seeming either disconcerting or anomalous – all co-exist comfortably in Faerie. OFMD both inverts and deconstructs mythopoeia; the Primary World myths of the Gentleman …

Restitution Of Jewish Property In Northern Transylvania During The Early Postwar Years, Stefan Cristian Ionescu

History Faculty Articles and Research

The restitution of Jewish property in the multiethnic region of Northern Transylvania faced numerous challenges during the first post-Holocaust years as a result of the complicated wartime history, postwar demographics, legal status, interethnic dynamics, and occasional violence. Having the lowest rate of survival among all Jewish communities in Romania, most of the region’s Jews died during the deportation and did not return to their native places to claim their properties. This impacted the extent of restitution of individual private property. Some of the Aryanized property was restituted to the Jewish survivors or their heirs because the wartime beneficiaries fled the …

The Growing Rift Between Holocaust Scholars Over Israel/Palestine, Shira Klein

History Faculty Articles and Research

"A chasm has formed between Holocaust scholars concerning Israel/Palestine, deepening immeasurably since 7 October 2023. Unlike previous controversies in the field, the divide is not just historical or methodological; it revolves around academics’ role in the world today, particularly the public stand they choose to take on Palestine/Israel and Zionism. Two main camps have formed. Put reductively, one camp defends Israel, while the other defends Palestinians, although differences between individual scholars within each camp make for more of a spectrum than a clear-cut divide. How, despite a diversity of ideas and foci within each camp, did two academic-political antipodes solidify …

Johann Georg Hamann And The Liberal Project, Jesse D. Ansley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the political thought of Johann Georg Hamann, his relationship to liberalism, and the importance to modern concerns for consensus formation and intercultural dialogue. This contributes to the line of literature sparked by Isaiah Berlin debating the political legacy of Hamann and its relation to the development of modern politics. Berlin labels Hamann an anti-rationalist whose current developed into the ideology of the Nazi party. My work supports the countervailing arguments that Hamann’s work is importantly different from the Romantics he inspired and even more so from the Nazis. By examining two complete works and a number of …

Introduction To The Historical Gazatteer Of The Crimea (Hgc) Repository, Mark Polczynski, Michael Polczynski

HGC - Historical Gazetteer of Crimea

Introduction Henryk Jankowski’s historical-etymological dictionary of pre-Russian habitation names in Crimea1 contains toponyms of approximately 1,300 unique habitations that existed in this region prior to Russian annexation in 1783. The Historical Gazetteer of Crimea (HGC) is an open-access georeferenced gazetteer of historical places derived from Jankowski’s work. The HGC includes 135 habitations, 43 districts, 6 provinces, and 17 rivers shown on Jankowski’s map accompanying his book HGC materials are available through a Marquette University repository. Here we provide an overview of the HGC and the associated repository, starting with a review of the information sources used to create the gazetteer, …

La Historia Externa Del Español Hasta La Reconquista, Alicia Westmoreland

World Languages and Cultures Senior Capstones

This paper talks about the romance language, Spanish, which evolved from Vulgar Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire. Influenced by the Visigoths, Moors, and the Christian Reconquista, its linguistic development reflects centuries of cultural exchange. The Moors introduced Arabic vocabulary, while the Reconquista reinforced Castilian dominance. Despite external influences, Spanish retains a phonetic system closely linked to Latin. This essay examines Spanish’s historical linguistics, highlighting how conquests, migrations, and societal shifts shaped its evolution.

Magic In Medicine, Jacob Mudd

Cohort 2024-2025

Jacob Mudd is a sophomore Creative Writing and Visual and Sound Media double major with a minor in English. His project is inspired by Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, looking at the role magic played in medicine in the late medieval early Renaissance periods. It includes a creative grimoire that contains a variety of medieval illnesses and their magical cures and is accompanied by a paper that looks at answering the question of whether it would be moral to use magic in medicine from the perspective of someone living during that time.

Archival Collection Used: MSS 0029 Herbert Kraft manuscript …

What We Talk About When We Talk About Race: Racial Discourses, Nationalism And Identity In Nineteenth Century Ireland, Timothy Werlinger

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The 19th century witnessed the rise of race and racism as a dominant framework of worldwide identity politics. These politics shaped the various social hierarchies and nationalist contexts across Europe and the world. Racial constructs adopted cultural, economic, and political components and did not rely exclusively on biological determinism. This had the effect of reinforcing or hardening boundaries between groups. This dissertation examines how racial identity was negotiated within an Irish context. It does this by considering social, scientific and nationalist discourses that engaged race as a device of inclusion and exclusion. By examining how racialized language permeated the Irish …

Duae Cypriani Soarez Praefationes Ad Opus De Arte Rhetorica Libri Tres Commentariis Rhetoricis Instructae, Marcus Porto

Theses and Dissertations--Modern and Classical Languages, Literature and Cultures

De Arte Rhetorica Libri Tres (1562) written by Cyprian Soarez (1524-1593), priest and teacher of the Society of Jesus, was the standard rhetorical manual in the Ratio Studiorum and thus was used for over two centuries in Jesuit colleges throughout the world. Concerned that young students of Latin were not yet ready for the major rhetorical texts of antiquity, such as Cicero’s and Quintilian’s, Soarez wrote this manual as a digest of ancient rhetoric to the beginner. This thesis uses the rhetorical precepts found in Cyprian’s work to analyze the work’s own two prefaces. Thus, it aims at providing …

[Review Of The Book Querns And Mills In Mediterranean Antiquity. Tradition And Innovation During The First Millennium Bc, By N. Alonso, T. J. Anderson, L. Jaccottey]., Jared T. Benton

Art Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] Querns and Mills in Mediterranean Antiquity (hereafter QMMA) is the publication of an EAA (European Association of Archaeologists) session on querns held in Barcelona in 2018. The purpose of the session—and by extension the volume—was to fill a gap by studying the smaller, hand-operated millstones, which have received less attention than their larger Roman-era and medieval counterparts. A second aim was to begin a conversation about standardizing the study of millstones, and particularly querns, in terminology and methodology.

Kreisky, Israel, And Jewish Identity., Matthew P. Berg

2025 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Justice And Restitution In Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives And Communities, 1944-1950, Stefan Cristian Ionescu

History Faculty Books and Book Chapters

On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short term restitution. However, from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations which dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and many businesses were lost …

Blackness And Nineteenth-Century Art In The Atlantic World, Rachel Hooper

Curatorial Publications

No abstract provided.

Metamorphosis And Fairy Tale Tropes In Christa Wolf’S Patterns Of Childhood, B. E. Lara

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a sociohistorical analysis of East German writer Christa Wolf’s use of fairy tale tropes in her novel Patterns of Childhood, first published in German in 1976 in East Germany as Kindheitsmuster. Wolf uses fairy tale tropes to explore themes that she could not write about openly under East German censorship, which prohibited East German authors from exposing their culpability for prior acts committed under the Nazi Regime. Furthermore, Wolf introduces metamorphosis to explore the intrinsic evil and subsequent guilt of her child protagonist, and she uses the child’s capacity for evil to illustrate the German people’s similar …

The Martyrdom Of Nadezhda Kurchenko: Soviet Hero Cults And The Spiritual Turn In Late Socialism, Steven E. Harris

History and American Studies Articles

This article argues that the spiritual turn in Soviet atheism under Brezhnev provided a meaningful solution to the problems of producing heroes when self-sacrificing martyrs were losing their appeal. To support this claim, I examine the story of Nadezhda Kurchenko, a nineteen-year-old flight attendant killed by two hijackers on an Aeroflot plane in October 1970. This article traces the heroic and spiritual dynamics of Kurchenko’s martyrdom through her funeral, hagiographies, iconic photograph, and sacred spaces. The spiritual turn enabled the authors of her story to free it from the shadows of wartime youth martyrs and ground it in the conservative …

The Key Revolutionary Element: The Development Of Russia’S Military And The Vitality Of The Russian Soldier To Revolution, Max C. Jones

Tenor of Our Times

This paper looks at the substantial role the Russian Military played in the events leading up to and during the February Revolution in 1917 in Russia. It looks at the military history of Russia prior to the February Revolution (from Peter the Great-Nicholas II) and how certain decisions and events in that timespan created a military that was completely unprepared for the total war of WWI. The paper takes closer looks at the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War/1905 Revolution, in which significant changes in the military occurred but, as is seen in the outcome of WWI, were not enough …

Engines Of Division: The Trabant, Economic Lag, And Cultural Fragmentation In A Unified Germany, Maria Carolina Auerbach

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the Trabant, East Germany’s iconic yet inefficient automobile, as a critical lens through which to explore the enduring socio-economic and cultural disparities between East and West Germany in the aftermath of reunification. By tracing the Trabant’s trajectory from its inception within the GDR’s command economy to its rapid obsolescence in the face of Western market forces, this study reveals how the vehicle served as both a product and a symbol of East Germany’s industrial ethos, resilience, and identity. The Trabant, once a ubiquitous artifact of socialist life, embodied the constraints of a resource-scarce economy but also cultivated …

A Multiple Perspective Analysis On Urban Poverty In Developing Nations: A Case Study On Nigeria, Colonial Implications, And Modern-Day Outcomes, Julian Rivera-Williams

CMC Senior Theses

This paper will dissect urbanization and poverty in Nigeria as a case study of the challenges of underdevelopment and the lingering effects of colonialism in Africa. To draw a complete understanding of challenges faced by developing nations facing systemic underdevelopment, high poverty, and low productivity– nations like Nigeria, my research will uncover colonial impacts and post-colonial policies that initiated urban poverty and underdevelopment outcomes we see today. The purpose of my thesis is to encompass existing fragmented academia on the causes and consequences of underdevelopment and connect historical implications to current impacts of global development today including the influence of …