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open access

Desertion and Defection in Roman Republican Warfare

Description: Despite their many successes, Roman leaders continually struggled with indiscipline in their own ranks as they battled Rome's opponents. Desertion and defection were steps that soldiers often undertook to avoid their obligated service. Previous scholarship has largely overlooked this aspect of Roman warfare. This dissertation analyzes why Roman soldiers began turning to desertion and defection throughout the Republican period. Such cases were generally rare in early Rome, but the expanding … more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Stampher, Matthew Joseph

The Balkan Imbroglio: The Diplomatic, Military, and Political Origins of the Macedonian Campaign of World War I

Description: The Macedonian Campaign of World War I (October 1915-November 1918) traditionally remains one of the understudied theatres of the historiography of the conflict. Despite its vital importance in the outcome of the war, it is still considered as a mere sideshow compared to the Western Front and the Gallipoli Campaign. This dissertation presents a much-needed re-evaluation of the Macedonian Campaign's diplomatic and political origins within the war's early context. In doing so, this study first co… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Broucke, Kevin R.

Benevolent Assimilation: The Evolution of United States Army Civil Affairs Operations in the Philippines from 1898 to 1945

Description: The history of the United States' occupation and administration of the Philippines is a premiere example of the evolution of the American military's civil administrative approach as it evolved from simple Army security in 1898, through an evolving ‘whole-of-government' method, to what was practically the full military administration of the country by March 1945. The second liberation and subsequent administration of the Philippines by the United States Army was unique, not simply because of the… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Musick, David C.

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant during World War II

Description: During the Second World War the United States mobilized its industrial capacity to become the great "Arsenal of Democracy," as vehicles, ships, and small arms flowed out of American factories. Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment was the mobilization of the aviation industry, which grew rapidly after the war began in Europe. In 1940 the United States produced 24,600,000 pounds of airframe. By 1943 this figure had grown exponentially, with 760,926,600 airframe pounds produced. This was ac… more
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Date: August 2020
Creator: Furgerson, Terrance, 1960-
open access

Democracy of Death: US Army Graves Registration and Its Burial of the World War I Dead

Description: The United States entered World War I without a policy governing the burial of its overseas dead. Armed only with institutional knowledge from the Spanish-American War twenty years prior, the Army struggled to create a policy amidst social turmoil in the United States and political tension between France and the United States.
Date: August 2020
Creator: Hatzinger, Kyle

Eagles Overhead: The History of US Air Force Airborne Forward Air Controllers, from the Muese-Argonne to Mosul

Description: Eagles Overhead provides a critical history of US Air Force Forward Air Controllers and examines their role, status, and performance in the Air Force's history. It begins by examining the US's initial adoption of air power, and American participation in aerial combat during World War I and traces the FACs' contributions to every US Air Force air campaign from the Marne in 1918 to Mosul in 2017. However, since 2001 FACs' contributions have been sporadic. Eagles Overhead asks why, despite the cri… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Dietz, J. Matthew

Fire Eater in the Borderlands: The Political Life of Guy Morrison Bryan, 1847-1891

Description: From 1847 to 1891, Guy Morrison Bryan was a prominent Texas politician who influenced many of the policies and events that shaped the state. Raised in his Uncle Stephen F. Austin's shadow, he was a Texas nationalist who felt responsible for promoting the interests of his state, its earliest settlers, and his family. During his nineteen years in the Texas Legislature and two years in the United States House of Representatives, he safeguarded land grants, supported internal improvements and educa… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Kelley, Ariel Leticia
open access

The Forging of a Nation: Cultural and Political Scottish Unity in the Time of Robert the Bruce

Description: While Scotland was politically unified before the First Scottish War of Independence (1296-1328), it was only nominally so. Scotland shared a rich cultural unity amongst the clans, and it was only through the invasion from England, and the war that followed, that Scotland found a true political unity under King Robert the Bruce. This thesis argues that Scotland had a shared cultural identity, including the way it waged war, and how it came to be united under one king who brought a sense of na… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Lowrey, Brian
open access

The Making of a Princeps: Imperial Virtues in Monumental Propaganda

Description: This thesis demonstrates key imperial virtues communicated on Roman Imperial triumphal monuments. A closer examination of monuments located in Rome reveals the presentation of personality traits such as military valor, piety, and mercy through symbolism, nature scenes, and personifications of abstract qualities. Each monument is dedicated to an emperor and exemplifies his virtues. The representation of imperial virtues conveys an emperor's worth to the public by communicating his better qualiti… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Wetzel, Julia L

'The Marshall System' in World War II, Myth and Reality: Six American Commanders Who Failed

Description: This is an analysis of the U.S. Army's personnel decisions in the Second World War. Specifically, it considers the U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall's appointment of generals to combat command, and his reasons for relieving some generals while leaving others in place after underperformance. Many historians and contemporaries of Marshall, including General Omar N. Bradley, have commented on Marshall's ability to select brilliant, capable general officers for combat command in the war… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Carlson, Cody King
open access

Military Religio: Caesar's Religiosity Vindicated by Warfare

Description: Gaius Julius Caesar remains one of the most studied characters of antiquity. His personality, political career, and military campaigns have garnered numerous scholarly treatments, as have his alleged aspirations to monarchy and divinity. However, comparatively little detailed work has been done to examine his own personal religiosity and even less attention has been paid to his religion in the context of his military conquests. I argue that Caesar has wrongly been deemed irreligious or skeptica… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Adkins, Austin L

Uncle Sam Does Not Want You: Military Rejection and Discharge during the World Wars

Description: 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 curre… more
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Date: August 2019
Creator: Smith Chamberlain, Tiffany Leigh
open access

Weaponized Nature: How the Environment Saved the Allies at Bastogne, December 16-23, 1944

Description: Many histories written by professional historians discuss the Battle of the Bulge; however, none of them incorporate the growing field of environmental history as a lens of analysis. This paper aims to address that hole in the scholarship by evaluating the impact that environmental factors exerted on the American army's ability to fight in and around Bastogne and St. Vith, Belgium during the first week of the battle. Had it not been for the environmental factors and the Americans' ability to … more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Reader, Darrell Ray

Weapons of Mass Deception: Opacity and the Israeli Nuclear Program

Description: 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. Non… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2019
Creator: Beattie, Kathleen E
open access

Bread, Bullets, and Brotherhood: Masculine Ideologies in the Mid-Century Black Freedom Struggle, 1950-1975

Description: This thesis examines the ways that African Americans in the mid-twentieth century thought about and practiced masculinity. Important contemporary events such as the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam War influenced the ways that black Americans sought not only to construct masculine identities, but to use these identities to achieve a higher social purpose. The thesis argues that while mainstream American society had specific prescriptions for how men should behave, black Americans were … more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Harvey, Matt
open access

African American Soldiers in the Philippine War: An Examination of the Contributions of Buffalo Soldiers during the Spanish American War and Its Aftermath, 1898-1902

Description: During the Philippine War, 1899 – 1902, America attempted to quell an uprising from the Filipino people. Four regular army regiments of black soldiers, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry served in this conflict. Alongside the regular army regiments, two volunteer regiments of black soldiers, the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth, also served. During and after the war these regiments received little attention from the press, public, or even historians. These… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Redgraves, Christopher M.
open access

Intelligence and the Uprising in East Germany 1953: An Example of Political Intelligence

Description: In 1950, the leader of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Walter Ulbricht, began a policy of connecting foreign threats with domestic policy failures as if the two were the same, and as if he was not responsible for either. This absolved him of blame for those failures and allowed Ulbricht to define his internal enemies as agents of the western powers. He used the state's secret police force, known as the Stasi, to provide the information that supported his claims of western obstruc… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Collins, Steven Morris
open access

Quia Emptores, Subinfeudation, and the Decline of Feudalism in Medieval England: Feudalism, it is Your Count that Votes

Description: The focus of this thesis is threefold. First, Edward I enacted the Statute of Westminster III, Quia Emptores in 1290, at the insistence of his leading barons. Secondly, there were precedents for the king of England doing something against his will. Finally, there were unintended consequences once parliament passed this statute. The passage of the statute effectively outlawed subinfeudation in all fee simple estates. It also detailed how land was able to be transferred from one possessor to ano… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Garofalo, Michael D.
open access

Ready to Run: Fort Worth's Mexicans in Search of Representation, 1960-2000

Description: This dissertation analyzes Fort Worth's Mexican community from 1960 to 2000 while considering the idea of citizenship through representation in education and politics. After establishing an introductory chapter that places the research in context with traditional Chicano scholarship while utilizing prominent ideas and theories that exist within Modern Imperial studies, the ensuing chapter looks into the rise of Fort Worth's Mexican population over the last four decades of the twentieth century.… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Martínez, Peter Charles
open access

A Woman's Place is at Work: The Rise of Women's Paid Labor in Five Texas Cities, 1900-1940

Description: This thesis is a quantitative analysis of women working for pay aged sixteen and older in five mid-size Texas cities from 1900 to 1940. It examines wage-earning women primarily in terms of race, age, marital status, and occupation at each census year and how those key factors changed over time. This study investigates what, if any, trends occurred in the types of occupations open to women and the roles of race, age, and marital status in women working for pay in the first forty years of the 20t… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Scott, Codee
open access

Imagining the Empire: Germany Through the Eyes of Early Modern English Travellers

Description: This thesis is a study of early modern English travel narratives and the ways they presented the German states and their people to the public through the medium of print. It is based on an analysis of forty seven published travel narratives written by men and women who toured Germany and wrote about their experiences. The study situates these writings in the context of the growing sense of national identity in early modern Europe and offers an assessment of how these travel narratives contribu… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Micheals, Isaac
open access

Married in a Frisky Mode: Clandestine and Irregular Marriages in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Description: The practice of irregular and clandestine marriage ran rampant throughout Britain for centuries, but when the upper class felt they needed to reassert their social supremacy, marriage was one arena in which they sought to do so. The restrictions placed on irregular marriages were specifically aimed at protecting the elite and maintaining a separation between themselves and the lower echelon of society. The political, social, and economic importance of marriage motivated its regulation, as the c… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Smith, Summer
open access

Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and Their Body Servants

Description: Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and their Body Servants is an examination of the relationship between Texas Confederates and the slaves they brought with them during and after the American Civil War. The five chapter study seeks to make sense of the complex relationships shared by some Confederate masters and their black body servants in order to better understand the place of "black Confederates" in Civil War memory. This thesis begins with an examination of what kind of Texans brought b… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Elliott, Brian
open access

The Captain of the People in Renaissance Florence

Description: The Renaissance Florentine Captain of the People began as a court, which defended the common people or popolo from the magnates and tried crimes such as assault, murder and fraud. This study reveals how factionalism, economic stress and the rise of citizen magistrate courts eroded the jurisdiction and ended the Court of the Captain. The creation of the Captain in 1250 occurred during the external fight for dominance between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope and the struggle between the Guelfs… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Hamilton, Desirae
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