In the United States, rapid military mobilization for the world wars marked a turning point in the national need to manage and evaluate manpower. To orchestrate manpower needs for the military, industry, and those relating to familial obligations, Woodrow Wilson's administration created the Selective Service System during the First World War. In categorizing men, local Selective Service boards utilized rapid physical and psychological diagnostic techniques and applied their assessments to current military branch induction standards to pronounce candidates as militarily fit or unfit. From World War I to World War II, the Selective Service System expanded as a bureaucracy but did not adequately address induction issues surrounding rapidly changing standards, racism, and inconsistent testing procedures. These persistent problems with Selective Service prevented the system from becoming truly consistent, fair, or effective. As a result of Selective Service System, War Department, and military branch standards, military rejection and prematurely military discharge rates increased in World War II. Additionally, though Selective Service did not accurately predict who would or would not serve effectively, rejected and prematurely discharged men faced harsh discrimination on the American home front during World War II.

Access to nuclear technology and growing concern over the spread of nuclear weapons triggered an international debate in the 1960s that led to the creation of the Nonproliferation Treaty. Ratified in 1970, NPT was designed to prevent the horizontal spread of nuclear weapons and limit destructive uses of nuclear energy. At the same time, it also normalized the arsenals of existing nuclear states and encouraged exchanges of nuclear information, technology, and materials for peaceful purposes. Nonproliferation policy relies on a theory of the development process that identifies a nuclear frontier to locate evidence of nuclear capabilities. Absent from the proliferation model, however, are cases of covert nuclear weapons programs. For almost 50 years, it has been generally accepted that Israel is a nuclear weapon state, yet Israeli officials have never confirmed nor denied the possession of nuclear weapons. Israel has not signed NPT and has not appeared to conduct a nuclear test, in effect absolving the nuclear program's main reactor from international inspections. Uncertainty surrounding the Israeli program stems from a tradition of deliberate secrecy and deception that constitutes a national policy of opacity. This study argues that opacity has armed Israel with the privilege of nuclear immunity, exempting its …

This work examines particular attributes of the purgatorial phenomena from pre-Christian history of the Indo-European world to the Early Modern Period of England. An attempt has been made to identify and concentrate attention upon examples which provide the most significant and penetrating look into this evolution. For example, a portion of this paper attempts to determine just how widespread purgatorial customs were throughout England and the various types of community that supported these beliefs pre and post Reformation. By comparing life before and after the reigns of Henry and Edward a conclusion is reached that reveals the Protestant Reformation in England stripped the laity of a fundamental instrument they needed to support their religiosity and custom. This becomes evident in further years as some of those same customs and rituals that had been considered anathema by Protestants, slowly crept back into the liturgy of the new religion. Strong evidence of this is provided, with a strong emphasis placed upon late seventeenth and early eighteenth century death eulogies, with a section of this paper being devoted to the phenomena of the Sin-Eater.

The black church and Prince Hall Freemasonry both played important roles in the black experience in America. Freemasonry and the black church; one secular, the other spiritual, played equally important, interrelated roles in the way the black community addressed social, political, and economic problems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the British North American colonies interpreted Parliament's success in removing arbitrary governmental practices and establishing a balanced government as a victory for local representative government. Within these colonies, merchants secured their influence in local government in order to protect their profits and trade networks. The New England merchants that resettled in Nova Scotia in the 1750s successfully established a local government founded upon their rights as British subjects. The attempt by the British government to centralize the imperial administration in 1763 and the perceived threat of reintroducing arbitrary rule by Parliament was a direct threat to the colonial governmental system. Although Nova Scotia chose loyalism in 1775-1776, this decision did not stem from isolation or a differing political philosophy. In fact, it was their cultural and political similarities that led Nova Scotia and New England to separate paths in 1776. Nova Scotia merchants controlling the Assembly were able to confront and defeat attempts that threatened their influence in local politics and on the local economy. With the threat to their authority defeated and new markets opening for the colony, the Nova Scotia merchant class was able to preserve the status quo in local government.

This dissertation asserts the British primacy in the deliberations of the League of Nations Council between the two world wars of the twentieth century. It maintains that it was British imperial policy rather than any other consideration that ultimately carried the day in these deliberations. Given, as examples of this paramountcy, are the discussions around the finalization of the borders of the new republic of Turkey, which was created following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. These discussions focused on three areas, the Mosul Vilayet or the Turco-Iraqi frontier, the Maritza Delta, or the Turco-Greek frontier, and the Sanjak of Alexandretta or the Turco-Syrian frontier.

I analyze the behavior of Jews imprisoned in the Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau extermination camps in order to illustrate a systematic process of deception and psychological conditioning, which the Nazis employed during World War II to preclude Jewish resistance to the Final Solution. In Chapter I, I present resistance historiography as it has developed since the end of the war. In Chapter II, I delineate my own argument on Jewish behavior during the Final Solution, limiting my definition of resistance and the applicability of my thesis to behavior in the extermination camp, or closed, environment. In Chapters III, IV, and V, I present a detailed narrative of the Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau revolts using secondary sources and selected survivor testimony. Finally, in Chapter VI, I isolate select parts of the previous narratives and apply my argument to demonstrate its validity as an explanation for Jewish behavior.