History, 1926-2024

This thesis explores the complex, interpersonal social dynamics of African American soldiers in France during the First World War. The interactions between African American soldiers and French civilians, French soldiers, and African colonial troops during WWI provided a distinct contrast to the pervasive racism and legalized “Jim Crow” segregation that African Americans faced in America. These eye-opening experiences influenced and challenged their perceptions of racial identity and citizenship, allowing them to imagine a future beyond the confines of the prejudiced American South. Although the war itself resulted in massive casualties for both the Allied and Central Powers and is one deadliest human conflicts on record, it also symbolized a transformative rebirth of optimism and opportunity for the African American community despite the continual enforcement of institutionalized segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, serving as the foundation for the outset of the early Civil Rights Movement, the concept of the “New Negro” identity, and the Harlem Rennaissance of the 1920s. The historical documents of various WWI African American soldiers, scholars, and reporters offer insight into the lived experiences of both the French and American sides of the war, allowing for a comprehensive analysis of the social background often understated by historians and WWI enthusiasts alike. This essay explores the interactions of African American soldiers during WWI and explains their importance for the broader implications of post-war racial identity of black Americans, Pan-African activism, and the concept of citizenship.

This thesis explores the development of bilingual/bicultural educational programming and policy in New Jersey from the 1960s to the 1990s. Over the latter half of the twentieth century, community organizers, educators, and policymakers leveraged this issue of bilingualism in New Jersey public schools using distinct group mobilization strategies to advance their own pedagogical, ideological, and political objectives to varying degrees of success. Recurring in these negotiations was the question of the appropriate inclusion, if any, of biculturalism in bilingual education. Their enduring clashes were often carried out at the expense of the social, cultural, linguistic, and academic needs of the limited English proficient student, many of which came from Caribbean, Central, South American, and/or Spanish-speaking backgrounds. This statewide struggle over the development and implementation of bilingual/bicultural educational programs asserted the threat culturally-embedded native language use in schools posed to English language hegemony in the United States. It contributed to the intensification of the national 1990s English-Only movement and its long cultivation of permeating institutional objectives towards Americanization within the state. Concurrently, however, it affirmed the power of the native language to preserve a strong sense of self, to reinforce connections to family and community, and to foster a sense of cultural pride in resistance to pressures of assimilation for the high concentration of limited English proficient students living in New Jersey. Collectively, this work critically assesses conflicting conceptions of the appropriate components to and objectives of bilingual education, enhances the understanding of native language use as a not only culturally, but also politically rich issue, and presents an ongoing, nationally pertinent contest over bilingualism and biculturalism from a novel, New Jersey-specific perspective.

This project concerns the writings of Ladislaus Sunthaym and his role in the Habsburg court. His writings were part of a wider project to elevate the House of Habsburg by tying it to as many famous and holy people as possible. Though not himself a humanist, Sunthaym befriended and collaborated with many other humanists involved in this project such as Conrad Celtis and Johannes Trithemius. Sunthaym was a well-respected genealogist who compiled family trees and accounts of many dynasties, from the Babenbergs to the Habsburgs to the Bohemian kings to the Sforza of Milan. At Maximilian I's request, he was among the first of the court historians to trace the Habsburgs to the early medieval kings and dukes of Burgundy. Seen in the broader context of its day, this was an important ideological step in cementing the Habsburg claim to Burgundy, which had been the object of various wars and uprisings throughout the 1480s. Sunthaym's work represents the first sketches of a pan-European Habsburg ideology.