Europe

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History Department Honors Program Baccalaureate Theses on Europe.

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The Empire's New Classrooms: Subversive Education and the Polish Identity in the Russian Partition of Poland
(Vanderbilt University, 2025-05) Bisiak, Karolina; Greble, Emily
Constituencies of Political Authoritarianism: Struggle, Survival, and Separatism in the Donets Coal Basin (1989-2014)
(Vanderbilt University, 2021-05-03) Dominic Cruz Bastillos
Since the start of the War in the Donbas in 2014, the miners of the Donetsk Coal Basin have suffered immensely due to economic and political destabilization, mine flooding, mine closures, intermittent shelling, mounting wage arrears, outdated technology, and generally hazardous conditions. Yet this struggle for survival is not a recent or unfamiliar phenomenon. The Donbas colliers have been fighting their own impending redundancy for decades. Due to massive subsidies, latent privatization, bloated labor forces, and general unprofitability, the Donbas mines have been treated as a barrier to progress and a siphon for state funds in post-independence Ukraine, a relic of the old Soviet system that refuses to acquiesce to the economic reform programs of an increasingly Europe-oriented Ukrainian nation-state. But even more than a story of survival, the tragedy of the Donbas coal miners is a story of the failure of collective action and their willing subsumption into authoritarian structures on the heels of repression. If the Donbas coal miners were the prototypical heroes of Soviet labor in 1989, then today, in 2021, they are scattered, divided, and cowed by the yoke of the same pro-Russian separatist elements whom they either supported or failed to resist in 2014. This thesis traces the evolution of the Donbas colliers as collective actors, analyzing their transformation from independent grassroots organizers to a constituency of authoritarianism. The miners’ drastic economic circumstances presaged and hastened the emergence of exploitative, yet symbiotic political relationships with authoritarians who professed support for the coal industry. In the absence of meaningful political alternatives, the Donbas miners have been one of the most important constituencies that has supported authoritarianism and allowed separatism to establish a foothold in Ukraine. This support has been built on the decades-long desire to stave off economic redundancy and revive the Donbas coal mining industry. This thesis includes an attached avtoreferat in Russian. Данная дипломная работа включает автореферат на русском языке.
Using the Living as Proxies in the Politics of the Dead: U.S. Grave Exhumation in the Soviet Zone of Germany, 1945-1953
(Vanderbilt University, 2020-04-20) Olson, Jacquelyn G.
The Path to War: Internal Motivation and Societal Influences in the First Crusade, 1095-1099
(Vanderbilt University, 2019-04-24) Morehead, Victoria; Caferro, William
On the 27th of November 1095, a large crowd watched and listened to the head of their Church. Prior to this moment, hundreds of Frankish nobles and ecclesiastical officials had gathered at the Council of Clermont in Auvergne, located in modern-day southern France. The ecumenical council was coming to a close after several days, and the crowd was waiting to hear a sermon from the pope who had called them together. When Pope Urban II addressed his audience, his sermon on maintaining peace as good “shepherds” swiftly turned into a speech on the threat of a great oppressive enemy. Far from their homes in Europe, the Muslim Seljuk Turks had invaded and captured territory from the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern vestiges of Christianity. With the city of Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land at peril, the duty to defend the holy Christian domains rested on this crowd’s shoulders. The audience had different reactions to the speech. Some were moved to tears, others trembled at the thought of the journey, and the rest discussed the words of the pope amongst themselves. Despite their doubts and concern, however, the audience heeded the message. Starting from the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban’s call to arms would soon spread across Europe and incite thousands of clergy, nobles, and peasants to embark on what would become the First Crusade (1095-1099).
Warring Worldviews on the Field of Honor in late Medieval Spain
(Vanderbilt University, 2019-04-24) Spence, Frank; Caferro, William
Around the start of the fifteenth century, Gutierre Díez de Games, standard bearer of the Castilian knight Don Pero Niño, wrote in his biographical chronicle of Niño about “How our Lord Jesus Christ desired for victors in battle to be honored, and he himself honored them with the palm [of victory] that he blessed.” Díez de Games referenced biblical warriors like Joshua and David fighting for the faith as well as notables of the more recent past like Charlemagne and Charles Martel as examples for contemporary knights. He further stated that “knights should place great value in fame and the honor of victory when the son of God gave such honor to the[se] victors” Though Díez de Games presented a clearly biased approach to reading the Bible, a more fervent religious justification of the warlike lifestyle of knights can scarcely be imagined. Díez de Games claimed God’s blessing of knightly activities. Our author was no Pope Urban II declaring an opportunity for warriors to remit their sins by going on crusade against enemies of the faith. Instead, while he emphasized the value of fighting against enemies of the faith, in the same breath he exalted fighting “for the honor of [one’s] king and kingdom,” a far more secular objective.
The Muddled Middle Ground: Capturing the Grey Spaces between Collaboration and Resistance on the German Occupied Channel Islands, 1940-1945
(Vanderbilt University, 2019-04-29) Smith, Samantha C.; Bess, Michael
The Channel Islands have been dogged with accusations of collaboration while other historians have rushed to their defense and sought to contextualize the Islanders actions in ways that emphasized their resistance. However, these two labels of collaboration and resistance are too rigid and continue to silo Islander actions and their legacy. They fail to capture the totality of the Channel Islanders’ lived experiences under Occupation. In this thesis, I argue that the conceptual structure of this dichotomy misses deep nuances of the events as they unfolded. While some events fit the polar extremes, the vast majority falls in the grey areas in between. This thesis elucidates that muddled middle ground.
“In Short, I am a West Indian": Planters, Performance, Anxiety, and Abolition in Georgian Britain
(2018) Rohall, Cameron; Molineux, Catherine
Kathleen Wilson writes that the domestic elite of Georgian Britain sought a psychological "disavowal" of the West Indian planting class because elite flaws were reflected in the perceived degeneracy and excess of the planters, which aroused growing concern in the metropole. Though we cannot speak of an organized elite campaign in any sense, certain members of elite classes created and disseminated representations of West Indian planters that focused on perceived differences, especially as concerned the nexus of Caribbean climate, disease, and racial mixing. This public imagination, manifest in a set of tropes, codes, and expectations, entered British culture, and was firmly entrenched by 1771, as evidenced by Richard Cumberland's The West Indian. West Indian planters entered into this negotiation of identity in self-defense, promoting depictions of West Indian life that denied fundamental difference from Britain and rejected charges of miscegenation and the negative effects of Caribbean climate. In response to domestic perceptions of the threat posed by mixed-race individuals, West Indians hardened legal divides between the races, demonstrating to a metropolitan audience their ability to manage the confusing racial environment that had developed by the 1760s. Nonetheless, planters were unable to alter domestic perceptions in a significant way. As a result, abolitionists, emerging in force in the 1780s, deployed the existing cultural codes surrounding the planter in their own attacks on planter life in the West Indies. Though abolitionists broke new ground in attacking the brutality of slavery, planters featured centrally in their texts and in visual media that supported abolition. The planters portrayed in these documents were fundamentally legible to a British audience because of the existing understandings surrounding the West Indian planter. Such modes of representation, enacted largely by sectors of the British elite in the first part of the eighteenth century, are thus partly responsible for the successful abolitionist assault on planter character. This new understanding of the cultural dynamics of British abolitionism offers an explanation to the "curious" decline in planter social standing that Trevor Burnard dates to the 1780s: planter character had already been traduced by a negative code of representation in the decades leading up to abolition. Abolitionists then altered and redeployed this code to their own ends.
“ ‘The Best Laid Plans’: French and British Diplomatic Strategy in the Jacobite Rising of 1745”
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-26) Fuselier, Kathyrn; Clay, Lauren
This project analyses the Jacobite Rising of 1745 in an international context. In particular, the thesis looks at French involvement and promises of support for the Jacobites both before and throughout the first months of the ’45. Without a doubt, the French King and Conseil d’état sought to support the Jacobites as a means of achieving a greater goal of challenging Great Britain. While other scholars have made the case that the French Conseil’s disorganization and mismanagement resulted in French inability to provide their promised aid to Prince Charles Stuart and his Jacobite forces in Scotland, this project argues that it was actually the incoherence and inconsistency of messages within the Jacobite movement itself that prevented the French Conseil from understanding Jacobite ambitions and effectively executing French plans to provide military support. Such incoherent messaging had disastrous effects for the ’45 Rising itself, but also had implications for larger French strategy as it pertained to their rivalry with Great Britain.
“Insuring Peace: British Intervention in Northern Ireland After the Belfast Peace Agreement”
(Vanderbilt University, 2017) Bouchard, John; Epstein, James A.
This work examines the political transformations in Northern Ireland after the Belfast Peace Agreement of 1998 ended 30 years of conflict between the country’s Protestant, Unionist and Catholic, Nationalist communities. This analysis fills in what was a missing chapter of the current academic story, the role of the British government in maintaining peace and stability in the years immediately following the signing of the Agreement. Drawing on a perspective from Economics, the work explains how the British government provided something like insurance for the peace process by stepping in to govern each time the Catholic and Protestant parties reached an impasse. This British "insurance" protected peace and prosperity, shielding the Northern Irish from the consequences of increasingly uncompromising political stances, but in the process also unintentionally encouraged individuals to vote for those uncompromising stances—an insurance phenomenon known as "moral hazard." This idea of British insurance helps explain a series of unusual phenomena that followed the Belfast Agreement, including the peaceful rise of radical parties that displaced the more moderate parties that had helped craft the agreement, and the phenomena of increasing prosperity that seemed to counter intuitively track increasing political instability. In the end, the British interventions played a crucial role in eventually bringing together Northern Ireland’s two most radical parties in negotiations that created a more stable peace through the St. Andrew’s Agreement.
Persons and Potential: Education and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-04-27) Gill, Charlotte Dunkley; Epstein, James A.
This project analyzes late eighteenth-century education, family literature, and antislavery political tracts to demonstrate the intersection of education and family and abolitionist rhetoric in Britain. This examination pinpoints the cultural centrality of the family and the connection between a capacity for education and moral edification as crucial components of both the milieu that produced abolitionism on a grass-roots level and within the appeals of political leaders. Such rhetoric had implications for justifications of human personhood and for the language of “civilization” found throughout the abolition movement.
“Year of Discord: French-U.S. Relations, April 1973 – June 1974”
(Vanderbilt University, 2015-04-22) Hope, Mallory; Schwartz, Thomas A.
“Coming ‘Home’: Repatriation in the Bouches-du-Rhône, 1962-1970"
(Vanderbilt University, 2015-04-23) Beaujon, Danielle; Clay, Lauren
The End of the Patent System: How Politicians and Performers Reformed the Victorian Theatre
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04-23) Mallick, Samuel; Epstein, James A.
In Defense of Reputation: The Duel of Honor and Royal Authority in Jacobean England
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04-25) Wilson, Jeremy; Caferro, William
Broad Strokes of Heresy: Religious Dichotomy in Peter of Les Vaux-De-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis
(Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-24) Goodwyn, Tyler; Caferro, William
He that converseth with mariners and sailors’: Articulations of English Maritime Identity in Early Modern Voyages and Travels, 1558-1620
(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04) Maginas, Camille; Sutto, Antionette
Sectarian Violence and the People’s Democracy, 1968-72
(Vanderbilt University, 2011-04) Berry, Annie; Epstein, James A.
A Hotbed for Dissidence: Southeast England in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
(Vanderbilt University, 2011-04) Longstreth, Alex; Caferro, William
The German Understanding of National History in the Hauptstadtdebatte
(Vanderbilt University, 2011-04) Humphreys, Caitlin; Smith, Helmut Walser
Developing International Law through Wartime Diplomacy: Anglo-German Negotiations surrounding Prisoners during World War I
(Vanderbilt University, 2010-04-29) Ross, Lauren; Grunwald, Henning

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