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Looting and Restitution During World War II: a Comparison Between the Soviet Union Trophy Commission and the Western Allies Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Commission
From the earliest civilizations, victorious armies would loot defeated cities or nations. the practice evolved into art theft as a symbol of power. Cultural superiority confirmed a country or empire’s regime. Throughout history, the Greeks and Romans cultivated, Napoleon Bonaparte refined, and Adolf Hitler perfected the practice of plunder. As the tides of Second World War began to shift in favor of the Allied Powers, special commissions, established to locate the Germans’ hoards of treasure, discovered Nazi art repositories filled with art objects looted from throughout Europe. the Soviet Union Trophy Commission and the Western Allies Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Commission competed to discover Nazi war loot. the two organizations not only approached the subject of plunder as a treasure hunt, but the ideology motivating both commissions made uncovering the depositories first, a priority. the Soviet trophy brigades’ mission was to dismantle all items of financial worth and ship them eastward to help rebuild a devastated Soviet economy. the Soviet Union wished for the re-compensation of cultural valuables destroyed by the Nazis’ purification practices regarding “inferior” Slavic art and architecture; however, the defeated German nation did not have the ability to reimburse the Soviet State. the trophy brigades implemented …
Date:
May 2012
Creator:
Zelman, Laura Holsomback
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Military-diplomatic Adventurism: Communist China's Foreign Policy in the Early Stage of the Korean War (1950-1951)
The thesis studies the relations of Communist China's foreign policy and its military offensives in the battlefield in Korean Peninsula in late 1950 and early 1951, an important topic that has yet received little academic attention. As original research, this thesis cites extensively from newly declassified Soviet and Chinese archives, as well as American and UN sources. This paper finds that an adventurism dominated the thinking and decision-making of Communist leaders in Beijing and Moscow, who seriously underestimated the military capabilities and diplomatic leverages of the US-led West. The origin of this adventurism, this paper argues, lays in the CCP's civil war experience with their Nationalist adversaries, which featured a preference of mobile warfare over positional warfare, and an opportunist attitude on cease-fire. This adventurism ended only when Communist front line came to the verge of collapse in June 1951.
Date:
August 2013
Creator:
Zhong, Wenrui
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Americans who did not wait: the American Legion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1915-1917
This study examines the five American Legion battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force formed in 1915 specifically to recruit American volunteers for the Canadian overseas contingent of the First World War. This study reviews the organization of Canada's militia and Anglo-American relations before examining the formation of the American Legion, the background of its men, and the diplomatic repercussions it sparked. This study is based largely on material in the Public Archives of Canada including war records and the personal papers of several participants. During its brief existence, the American Legion precipitated constitutional, diplomatic, and political problems. The issues the American Legion raised were mostly solved by America's entry in the war. The episode hastened the maturity of Canada as a nation.
Date:
May 1996
Creator:
Smylie, Eric
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Great Britain, the Council of Foreign Ministers, and the Origins of the Cold War, 1947
Scholars assert that the Cold War began at one of several different points. Material recently available at the National Archives yields a view different from those already presented. From these records, and material from the Foreign Relations Series, Parliamentary Debates, and United States Government documents, a new picture emerges. This study focuses on the British occupation of Germany and on the Council of Foreign Ministers' Moscow Conference of 1947. The failure of this conference preceded the adoption of the Marshall Plan and a stronger Western policy toward the Soviet Union. Thus, the Moscow Conference emphasized the disintegrating relations between East and West which resulted in the Cold War.
Date:
December 1988
Creator:
Kronwall, Mary Elizabeth
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Effect of the Assimilation of the La Reunion Colonists on the Development of Dallas and Dallas County
This study examines the impact of the citizens of the La Reunion colony on the development of Dallas and Dallas County. The French, Belgian, and Swiss families that formed the utopian colony broughta blend of European culture and education to the Texas frontier in 1853. The founding of La Reunion and a record of its short existence is covered briefly in the first two chapters. The major part of the research, however, deals with the colonists who remained in Dallas County after the colony failed in 1856. Chapters three and four make use of city, county, and state records along with personal collections from the Dallas Historical Society Archives and the Dallas Public Library to examine the colonists effect on the government and business community. Chapter five explores the cultural development of the area through city and county records and personal collections.
Date:
December 1986
Creator:
Sandell, Velma Irene
System:
The UNT Digital Library
“Campaigns Replete with Instruction”: Garnet Wolseley’s Civil War Observations and Their Effect on British Senior Staff College Training Prior to the Great War
This thesis addresses the importance of the American Civil War to nineteenth-century European military education, and its influence on British staff officer training prior to World War I. It focuses on Garnet Wolseley, a Civil War observer who eventually became Commander in Chief of the Forces of the British Army. In that position, he continued to write about the war he had observed a quarter-century earlier, and was instrumental in according the Civil War a key role in officer training. Indeed, he placed Stonewall Jackson historian G.F.R. Henderson in a key military professorship. The thesis examines Wolseley’s career and writings, as well as the extent to which the Civil War was studied at the Senior Staff College, in Camberly, after Wolseley’s influence had waned. Analysis of the curriculum from the College archives demonstrates that study of the Civil War diminished rapidly in the ten years prior to World War I.
Date:
August 2011
Creator:
Cohen, Bruce D.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
A Descriptive Account of United States Government Documents Pertaining to the History of United States Diplomatic Relations with Mexico, 1821-1846
This paper provides a thematic approach to three major United States government document series relating to topics of early United States diplomatic relations with Mexico; treaty negotiations, the Santa 'Fe trade, the Texas question, and claims. The document series examined are .the United States presidential papers, United States Congressional documents , and the National Archives Record Group 59, diplomatic dispatches from United State Ministers to Mexico. Historians must make an evaluation of all: documentary evidence available for an accurate assessment of historical events. Inadequate analysis of these major United States document series has limited this necessary assessment in the area of United States Mexican diplomatic relations, 1821-1846.
Date:
May 1976
Creator:
Kelly, Melody S.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Persistence of Castilian Law in Frontier Texas: the Legal Status of Women
Castilian law developed during the Reconquest of Spain. Women received certain legal rights to persuade them to move to the villages on the expanding frontier. These legal rights were codified in Las Siete Partidas, the monumental work of Castilian law, compiled in the thirteenth century. Under Queen Isabella, Castilian law became the law of all Spain. As Spain discovered, explored, and colonized the New World, Castilian law spread. The Recopilacidn de Los Leyes de Las Indias complied the laws for all the colonies. Texas, as the last area in North America settled by Spain, retained Castilian law. Case law from the Bexar Archives proves this for the Villa of San Fernando(present-day San Antonio). Castilian laws and customs persisted even on the Texas frontier.
Date:
May 1996
Creator:
Stuntz, Jean A.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Jewish Hidden Children in Belgium during the Holocaust: A Comparative Study of Their Hiding Places at Christian Establishments, Private Families, and Jewish Orphanages
This thesis compares the different trauma received at the three major hiding places for Jewish children in Belgium during the Holocaust: Christian establishments, private families, and Jewish orphanages. Jewish children hidden at Christian establishments received mainly religious trauma and nutritional, sanitary, and medical neglect. Hiding with private families caused separation trauma and extreme hiding situations. Children staying at Jewish orphanages lived with a continuous fear of being deported, because these institutions were under constant supervision of the German occupiers. No Jewish child survived their hiding experience without receiving some major trauma that would affect them for the rest of their life. This thesis is based on video interviews at Shoah Visual History Foundation and Blum Archives, as well as autobiographies published by hidden children.
Date:
December 2006
Creator:
Decoster, Charlotte
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Continuity of Caste: Free People of Color in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, 1804-1820
Because of its trademark racial diversity, historians have often presented New Orleans as a place transformed by incorporation into the American South following 1804. Assertions that a comparatively relaxed, racially ambiguous Spanish slaveholding regime was converted into a two-caste system of dedicated racial segregation by the advent of American assumption have been posited by scholars like Frank Tannenbaum, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and a host of others. Citing dependence on patronage, concubinage, and the decline in slave manumissions during the antebellum period, such studies have employed descriptions of the city’s prominent free people of color to suggest that the daily lives of non-whites in New Orleans experienced uniform restriction following 1804, and that the Crescent City’s transformation from Atlantic society with slaves to rigid slave society forced free people of color out of the heart of the city, known as the Vieux Carré, and into “black neighborhoods” on the margins of town. Despite the popularity of such generalized themes in the historiography, however, the extant sources housed in New Orleans’s valuable archival repositories can be used to support a vastly divergent narrative. By focusing on individual free people of color, or libres, rather than the non-white community as a whole, this …
Date:
May 2012
Creator:
Foreman, Nicholas
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Walling Family of Nineteenth-Century Texas: An Examination of Movement and Opportunity on the Texas Frontier
The Walling Family of Nineteenth-Century Texas recounts the actions of the first four generations of the John Walling family. Through a heavily quantitative study, the study focuses on the patterns of movement, service, and seizing opportunity demonstrated by the family as they took full advantage of the benefits of frontier expansion in the Old South and particularly Texas. In doing so, it chronicles the role of a relatively unknown family in many of the most defining events of the nineteenth-century Texas experience such as the Texas Revolution, Mexican War, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Close of the Frontier. Based on extensive research in census, tax, election, land, military, family paper, newspaper, and existing genealogical records; the study documents the contributions of family members to the settlement of more than forty counties while, at the same time, noting its less positive behaviors such as its open hostility to American Indians, and significant slave ownership. This study seeks to extend the work of other quantitative studies that looked at movement and political influence in the Old South, Texas, and specific communities to the microcosm of a single extended family. As a result, it should be of use to those wanting a greater …
Date:
December 2016
Creator:
Cure, Stephen
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Marine Defense Battalions, October 1939 - December 1942: their Contributions in the Early Phases of World War II
This thesis explores the activities of the U.S. Marine defense battalions from October 1939 to December 1942. More specifically, it explains why Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC) decided to continue the defense battalions as separate entities when, by mid-1943, it needed additional men to replace its combat losses and to create new divisions. In this process HQMC disbanded other special units, such as the raider battalions, parachute battalions, barrage balloon squadrons, and the glider squadrons. It retained, however, the defense battalions because of their versatility and utility as demonstrated during the various operations they conducted in Iceland and the Central and South Pacific. In these locations defense battalions performed as: (a) island garrisons, (b) antiaircraft artillery units, and (c) landing forces. Their success in carrying out these missions led to their retention as separate entities throughout World War II.
Date:
December 1996
Creator:
Maynard, Stephen Ronald
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Educational Opportunities Available for Women in Antebellum Texas
The matter of formal education for women in the antebellum South raises many questions, especially for the frontier state of Texas. Were there schools for young women in antebellum Texas? If so, did these schools emphasize academic or ornamental subjects? Did only women from wealthy families attend? This study answered these questions by examining educational opportunities in five antebellum Texas counties. Utilizing newspapers, probate records, tax records, and the federal census, it identified schools for girls in all of the counties and found that those schools offered academic as well as ornamental subjects. Almost all of the girls who attended those schools came from privileged families. Schools were available for young women in antebellum Texas, but generally only those from wealthy families were able to attend.
Date:
August 2006
Creator:
Cochrane, Michelle L.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
By Air Power Alone: America's Strategic Air War in China, 1941-1945
During World War II, the Army Air Force waged three strategic air offensives in and from China against Japan. At first, the Flying Tigers and 10th Air Force constituted the whole of American aid to China, but the effort soon expanded. Supported by Chiang Kai-shek, Claire Chennault and his 14th Air Force waged an anti-shipping campaign, to which the Japanese Imperial Army responded with Operation Ichigo and against which Joseph Stilwell accurately warned. 20th Bomber Command used B-29s to wage Operation Matterhorn, failed, and later conducted PACAID missions. 14th Air Force then waged a counterproductive transportation campaign as The Pacific War, also known as the Greater East Asian War, ended. Events in the China-Burma-India and China Theaters provide lessons in logistics, targeting, training, and air-ground cooperation that are applicable in the post-Cold War era.
Date:
May 2001
Creator:
Jahnke, Todd Eric
System:
The UNT Digital Library
A History of the Pennsylvania Militia through 1783
This study is an effort to trace the growth and value of the Pennsylvania militia through its various structural arrangements and military actions.
Date:
August 1972
Creator:
DeWeese, Theodore D.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Manipulating Fear: The Texas State Government and the Second Red Scare, 1947-1954
Between 1947 and 1954, the Texas State Legislature enacted a series of eight highly restrictive anti-communist laws. Designed to protect political, military, and economic structures in the state from communist infiltration, the laws banned communists from participating the political process, required registration of all communists who entered the state and eventually outlawed the Communist Party. Drawn from perceptions about Cold War events, such as the Truman Doctrine and the Korean War, and an expanding economy inside of Texas, members of the state legislature perceived that communism represented a threat to their state. However, when presented with the opportunity to put the laws into action during the 1953 Port Arthur Labor Strike, the state government failed to bring any charges against those who they labeled as communists. Instead of actually curtailing the limited communist presence inside of the state, members of the state government instead used the laws to leverage political control throughout the state by attacking labor, liberals in education and government, and racial minorities with accusations of communism.
Date:
May 2019
Creator:
Bonewell, Shaffer Allen
System:
The UNT Digital Library
George S. Patton Jr. and the Lost Cause Legacy
Historians have done their duty in commemorating an individual who was, as Sidney Hook’s Hero in History would describe, an “event making-man.” A myriad of works focused on understanding the martial effort behind George S. Patton Jr. from his ancestral lineage rooted in military tradition to his triumph during the Second World War. What is yet to be understood about Patton, however, is the role that the Civil War played in his transformation into one of America’s iconic generals. For Patton, the Lost Cause legacy, one that idealized the image of the Confederate soldier in terms of personal honor, courage, and duty, became the seed for his preoccupation for glory.
Date:
August 2014
Creator:
Rodriguez, Ismael
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Civil Liberties and National Unity: Reaction to the Sedition Act in the Southern States, 1798
The traditional narrative of political party development in the United States of America during the latter half of the 1790s ascribes the decline in popularity of the Federalist Party in the Election of 1800 to that party's passage of controversial legislation, specifically the Sedition Act of 1798, prior to the election. Between the passage of the Sedition Act and the Election of 1800, however, the midterm elections of 1798-1799 transpired and resulted in a significant increase in Federalist popularity in four states – North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. This study seeks to ascertain why these four states increased their support for the Federalist Party in 1798-1799, despite the passage of the Sedition Act by the Federalist Party. By examining newspapers and election results, this study analyzes the reaction of these four states to the passage of the Sedition Act and finds that generally, these states did not react strongly against the Sedition Act in the immediate aftermath of its passage. Instead, all four states urged national unity and emphasized the need to support the national government because the United States faced the threat of war with France. This study employs a state-by-state formula to determine each state's individual …
Date:
December 2017
Creator:
Robinson, Sarah Elizabeth
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Patton's Iron Cavalry - The Impact of the Mechanized Cavalry on the U.S. Third Army
The American military experience in the European Theater of Operations during the Second World War is one of the most heavily documented topics in modern historiography. However, within this plethora of scholarship, very little has been written on the contributions of the United States Cavalry to this era. The six mechanized cavalry groups assigned to the Third Army served in a variety of roles, conducting screens, counter-reconnaissance, as well as a number of other associated security missions for their parent corps and the Army. Although unheralded, these groups made substantial and war-altering impacts for the Third Army.
Date:
May 2011
Creator:
Nance, William Stuart
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Missionary Millennium: The American West; North and West Africa in the Christian Imagination
During the 1890s in the United States, Midwestern YMCA missionaries challenged the nexus of power between Northeastern Protestant denominations, industrialists, politicians, and the Association's International Committee. Under Kansas YMCA secretary George Fisher, this movement shook the Northeastern alliance's underpinnings, eventually establishing the Gospel Missionary Union. The YMCA and the GMU mutually defined foreign and domestic missionary work discursively. Whereas Fisher's pre-millennial movement promoted world conversion generally, the YMCA primarily reached out to college students in the United States and abroad. Moreover, the GMU challenged social and gender roles among Moroccan Berbers. Fisher's movements have not been historically analyzed since 1975. Missionary Millennium is a reanalysis and critical reading of religious fictions about GMU missionaries, following the organization to its current incarnation as Avant Ministries.
Date:
August 2009
Creator:
Garrett, Bryan A.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Lone Star Insanity: Efforts to Treat the Mentally Ill in Texas, 1861-1929
During the mid-nineteenth century, the citizens of Texas were forced to keep their mentally disturbed family members at home which caused stress on the caregivers and the further debilitation of the afflicted. To remedy this situation, mental health experts and Texas politicians began to create a system of healing known as state asylums. The purpose of this study is to determine how Texas mental health care came into being, the research and theories behind the prevention and treatment programs that asylum physicians employed to overcome mental illness, in addition to the victories and shortcomings of the system. Through this work, it will be shown that during the 1850s until the 1920s institutions faced difficulty in achieving success from many adverse conditions including, but not limited to, overcrowding, large geographical conditions, poor health practices, faulty construction, insufficient funding, ineffective prevention and treatment methods, disorganization, cases of patient abuse, incompetent employees, prejudice, and legal improprieties. As a result, by 1930, these asylums were merely places to detain the mentally ill in order to rid them from society. This thesis will also confirm that while both Texas politicians and mental health experts desired to address and overcome mental illness in Texas, they were …
Date:
December 2015
Creator:
Boyd, Dalton T.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Persistence of Antebellum Planter Families in Postbellum East Texas
The effect of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the southern planter elite remains a topic of interest to historians. Did the war ruin the planter class? Or, did they maintain economic, geographic, or social persistence? This study focuses on the persistence from 1850 to 1880 of five East Texas large planter families who owned one hundred or more slaves in 1860. An analysis of data primarily from county, state, and federal records formthe basis of this study. Four families persisted as wealthy influential members of their postbellum communities. One family remained geographically persistent but not wealthy. The experiences of these families suggest that large East Texas planter families found it possible to persist in spite of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Date:
May 1998
Creator:
Newland, Linda Sue
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Famine Fighters: American Veterans, the American Relief Administration, and the 1921 Russian Famine
This study argues that the American Relief Administration (ARA) operationally and culturally was defined by the character and experiences of First World War American military veterans. The historiography of the American Relief Administration in the last half-century has painted the ARA as a purely civilian organization greatly detached from the military sphere. By examining the military veterans of the ARA scholars can more accurately assess the image of the ARA, including what motivated their personnel and determined their relief mission conduct. Additionally, this study will properly explain how the ARA as an organization mutually benefited and suffered from its connection to the U.S. military throughout its European missions, in particular, the 1921 Russian famine relief expedition.
Date:
December 2019
Creator:
Huebner, Andrew Brooks
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Czechoslovakia's Fortifications: Their Development and Impact on Czech and German Confrontation
During the 1930s, the Republic of Czechoslovakia endeavored to construct a system of modern fortifications along its frontiers to protect the Republic from German and Hungarian aggression and from external Versailles revisionism. Czechoslovakia's fortifications have been greatly misrepresented through comparison with the Maginot Line. By utilizing extant German military reports, this thesis demonstrates that Czechoslovakia's fortifications were incomplete and were much weaker than the Maginot Line at the time of the Munich Crisis in 1938. The German threat of war against Czechoslovakia was very real in 1938 and Germany would have penetrated most of the fortifications and defeated Czechoslovakia quickly had a German-Czech war occurred in 1938.
Date:
May 1989
Creator:
Walvoord, Kreg A. (Kreg Anthony)
System:
The UNT Digital Library