From the late 14th through the 15th century, the German Hanse was a major player in economic, political, and military conflict –areas traditionally associated with state actors –throughout northern Europe, despite being a decentralized, non-sovereign, non-territorial entity. The Hanse was a late medieval/early modern trade organization, the driving purpose of which, from its founding and throughout its development, was to provide for the mutual protection of its member cities’ merchants in the course of their business and ensure and expand their rights and privileges in foreign ports; to protect their merchants against the predations of both pirates and kings. It is thus one of the great historical ironies that the Hanse became a source of piracy and mercantile harassment rivaling those of the sovereign states of Northern Europe. The Hanse’s relations with England throughout the late 14th and 15th century, especially in the decades surrounding the English dynastic struggle of the Wars of the Roses and concurrent Anglo-Hanseatic War, exemplify the Hanse’s role as a state-like actor in international conflict. Current scholarship on the Hanse focuses on cliometric trade analysis and linear narrative history, but I emphasize the unique nature of the Hanse and how it determined their actions on the international stage, critically reading Parliamentary records, royal appeals, and major secondary sources in light of my analysis of the Hanse’s foundational documents. I explore the motivations of the Hanse in its conflicts with England and determine that the Hanse’s use of piracy and the harassment of English merchants represented a natural continuation of their founding principles. My research addresses questions of the motivations and internal dynamics of one of the most successful and longest-lasting international trade leagues to-date as it interacted with more traditional state-entities in diplomatic and economic contexts.  

In twelfth-century northern England, the historical imagination was dominated by the region’s most powerful and most popular saint.  The bishops of Durham drew on St. Cuthbert’s renowned history and well-established authority to underline their own spiritual legitimacy. Involvement with the saint’s cult was not limited to the ecclesiastical elite or the monks of the cathedral convent. Throughout the twelfth century, lay interest in the religious life dramatically increased, and saints’ cults were a popular focus of lay religious energy. Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti virtutibus, complied in the 1160s and 70s, provides a richly detailed glimpse of this period when the saint’s miracle working powers were claimed by religious and laity alike. Much scholarly attention has already been paid to the increasing prevalence of pilgrimage to Cuthbert’s shrine in the twelfth century. Pilgrims who visited Durham generally sought miraculous cures, and as we would expect there is a higher proportion of stories about healing miracles in the Libellus than in earlier Cuthbertine hagiography. But pilgrims were not the only laity who became involved in St. Cuthbert’s cult in the twelfth century. In addition to stories of miraculous healing, Reginald’s Libellus contains accounts of the saint arbitrating the conflicts of lay inhabitants of the bishopric of Durham. My research examines these often overlooked “miracles of justice” in order to provide a fuller picture of lay interaction with St. Cuthbert in twelfth-century Durham. I analyze miracle stories involving freeing from false imprisonment, protection of lay interests, and punishment of immoral behavior in order to explore how and why members of every social strata increasingly claimed the patronage of the saint in order to mediate secular conflict. What emerges is a clearer portrait of a distinctive local political and social culture underlined by communal association with St. Cuthbert.

This paper examines cooperation between the United Steelworkers and the Mexican ‘Mineros’ Union, a relationship that began in the early 2000s and evolved into a close alliance after 2006. The alliance moved beyond the limitations of prior attempts at international labor solidarity that were constrained by a focus on symbolic gestures, a lack of connection with workers and domination by the Global North. I argue that confronting the corporate private sector through labor organizing is central to contesting the economic and social landscape of NAFTA-era North America. The two unions understand this potential and have proposed integration into a single body, though this brings a new set of challenges. I give a critical overview of the pitfalls of union mergers, particularly issues of member alienation, organizational identity and local autonomy. Flexibilized supply chains, the informalization of work and other corporate schemes have compounded these impediments to building strong unions. This essay contends that joint action, particularly organizing drives and corporate campaigns, effectively fights this erosion of working standards and engenders transnational solidarity as a culture within union membership, thereby facilitating integration. This strategy combines communication between leaders with the tangible mobilization of workers, forming the authentic and multi-layered relations of mutuality needed to rebuild worker power in a neoliberal age. High-profile debates over free trade and globalization sparked an explosion in academic literature in the 1990s that theoretically mapped out a ‘new labor internationalism,’ but the literature’s case studies failed to live up to its expansive proposals. Drawing on union agreements, newsletters and interviews with officials, this paper gives a deeper example of new labor internationalism in which the Steelworkers and Mineros are creatively continuing the long tradition of industrial unionism as a transformative social force that bridges multiple physical and social borders.

Following the Norman invasion of England in 1066, King William I instituted a new system of royal forests throughout England. Intended as royal hunting preserves, these areas were vast in extent, and a distinct system of law restricting land usage and hunting rights applied within their bounds. While information on baronial reactions to this change is readily available, the attitudes of commoners and the lesser gentry are more obscure. I argue that the primary audience of the ballads of the famed English outlaw Robin Hood was non-noble, and examines their earliest editions – and the activities of historical outlaws in the 15th century – in the context of both forest law and the appearance of a non-noble “middle class” concurrent with the tales’ apparent origins. Beginning with the origins of forest law and its departures from Anglo-Saxon precedent, I focus on the symbolic significance of the deer-hunt as a royal or noble privilege and the way deer-poachers, fictional and historical, both mocked and mimicked noble hunting rituals – a tendency inexplicable by the mere need for food. Most Robin Hood scholars seek either to identify the tales’ primary audience, or to identify a “historical” Robin Hood; those few that address forest law do not seek to tie these tales’ popularity to the resentment of noble privilege rife at the time of their inception. Robin Hood’s portrayal as a paragon of justice, coupled with his direct defiance of forest law, reveals a complex view of the matter: the stories’ hero defies laws that are specifically royal while upholding the status quo values of his time, up to and including the concept of kingship itself. Resentment is focused against the attempted royal monopoly of a symbolically-charged resource, rather than against the hierarchical structure of society as a whole.

Since WWII there has not been a major intra-European war, with the very large exception of the 1992-1995 wars of Yugoslav Succession. These wars were a conflict between the different ethnicities of the republics of former Yugoslavia: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The Serbs are widely viewed as the “aggressors” of this conflict, with their leader Slobodan Milošević responsible for inciting nationalism. However, importantly I argue that nationalism was already in place before Milošević rose to power. While most of the current scholarship focuses on the timeline of political developments, my paper moves beyond the political events to look at the cultural transformation of that nationalism from 1980-86 and the importance of nationalistic fervor.  I argue that after 1980, socio-economic and political circumstances reacted with historical revisionism and a resurgence of WWII memories by a group of Serbian intellectuals to produce this new form of nationalism that the Serbian state has been “victimized”.  This "victimized" feeling is crucial to understand the later events of the Yugoslav wars under Milošević.  This transformation is evident in the individual works produced by these Intellectuals culminating in 1986 SANU Memorandum, a dynamic list of grievances that Serbian Intellectuals had with the Yugoslav state. Because of this feeling of “victimization,” the Serbs felt that their group identity was being threatened by their “subordinate” position within the Yugoslav state.

Between 1875 and 1918, the German Social Democratic Party grew from an isolated and persecuted sect to become one of the largest, most well-organized, and most prestigious socialist parties in the world. The party's theoretical foundation was Marxism. Its leaders, intellectuals, and many of its rank-and-file members espoused a doctrine that prophesied the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the global transformation of society through socialism. However, on August 4, 1914, the party's representatives in the Reichstag  stood side by side with their conservative and liberal opponents in voting to provide funding for the war that had recently broken out in Europe. Furthermore, in defiance of the party's ideology and tradition of intransigence, a number of influential writers and intellectuals within the party had begun to articulate theories that attempted to harmonize German imperialism and Marxism. Contrary to the principles of the international solidarity of the working class, these thinkers argued that the acquisition of overseas colonies was essential to secure Germany's continued prosperity and the well-being of German workers. Many equated the so-called noble and civilizing values of German culture with socialism. The triumph of German imperialism thus laid the foundation for the coming socialist order. My research concerns a critical reading of primary source documents from prominent socialist newspapers and treatises of the period in light of the relevant secondary source literature to reconstruct the party's transformation from intransigence to imperialism. I seek to analyze these theories of socialist imperialism within the context of the party's growth and bureaucratization, the rise of powerful trade unions, and the emergence of theories that challenged orthodox Marxism. Ultimately, these theories of socialist imperialism discredited the party following the war with the disastrous consequence of making its leaders and members unprepared to contest the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

In the aftermath of the 1916 Everett Massacre, the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), the City of Everett, and local newspapers struggled to control the story of this armed confrontation, and the ensuing trial of I.W.W. member Thomas Tracy. There has been a great deal written about the Massacre and trial, but limited research on the attempts of labor, political parties, industrialists, and the local community to control the story. To research this topic, I have examined a number of books, along with the Seattle Daily Times, the Everett Daily Herald, and various regional labor publications. I have also to conducted archival research in various documentary sites, as well as conducting informal interviews with archivists, and people in Everett. I argue that the rhetoric used by the attorneys at the trial, the I. W. W. literature, along with coverage in the local periodicals, provides an example of the larger battle waged for the control of the production of stories and historical memories. This paper uses the depictions of the massacre by various groups to raise broader questions about how memory is produced, and the lengths to which people will go to further their cause, and to have their views elevated to the story of history.