The Holocaust is an example of an Encounter with the ‘Other’ in world history. It is plain to see that the Nazis viewed the Jews as “other”, but the converse is also true, and to see the Nazis as the “other” is still common today. However, is Nazism an aberration, an “other”, an outsider to the historical process? And even more than that, are individual Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann “other”? There are primary sources from the time regarding Eichmann’s personality and actions. These primary sources include trial and interrogation transcripts as well as literature about Eichmann from the time. There are also secondary sources to see what scholars think about Eichmann. My paper is organized by the questions I ask about the Eichmann texts and the understandings I form through those documents. Some of these questions might be formed as: Is Nazism an aberration, an “other”, an outsider to the historical process? And even more than that, are individual Nazis “other”? Specifically, who is Adolf Eichmann and what problem does he pose for humanity? What does Eichmann as an individual perpetrator mean for history? Is Eichmann the Other? Or, what do we have in common with “evil” and its banality? My primary hope for researching this topic was to understand, in some small way, human evil. To know about Adolf Eichmann and his evil is not to understand him or excuse him. His personality and character (or lack thereof) remains befuddling to me. In terms of what this paper accomplishes, I I address “otherness” as a concept which alienates perpetrator from victim as well as victim from perpetrator, and (for this essay) the perpetrator as Other for the rest of society.

In the early seventeenth century, French Catholic missionaries arrived in the region of New France now known as Quebec intending to make Christians out of the Amerindian population. Over the next century and a half, the missionaries proceeded to build schools and hospitals and to establish their orders in the colony. Two of the Catholic orders that sent members were the Jesuits and the Ursulines. Both orders concerned themselves with the education and conversion of the Amerindians, mostly the Huron tribe. Through their missionary activities, they formed a nascent community of individuals with shared beliefs and purposes. A number of factors, including their geographic location, their connections to their founding orders back in France, and the particular social environment surrounding them caused the Jesuits and Ursulines to live and work differently from their counterparts in France. These differences caused the missionary community to develop a distinct identity. Using The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents and the correspondence of Ursuline Mother Superior Marie de l’Incarnation, this research project examines the distinct identity missionary communities in New France developed. These sources record the daily activities of the Jesuits and the Ursulines in New France, while also revealing how individuals of each religious order understood their collective mission, which was characterized by interaction and cooperation between the orders. More universally, this project sheds light on how individuals form new communities and the way identities, even institutional identities, adapt to new environments.

Emerging from the political decline of the Islamic “Gunpowder Empires,” the Central Asian Nadir Shah assumed leadership of the former Safavid Empire before winning notable victories over his Ottoman and Mughal counterparts. In this paper, I attempt to grapple with the complex issue of Nadir Shah’s ethnic identity, which has alternately been presented as either Turkic or Persian. As such, I attempt to navigate the trend of nationalist historians to appropriate Nadir Shah into their own nation’s retroactive “national history,” relying not only on the works of such historians, but also those more removed from nationalist perspectives. Using readings spanning from the 18th century until the present day, I note the shifts in Nadir Shah’s ethnic identification across nations and time periods as well as the differing degree to which historians attempted to restrict the king’s identity to a single ethnic group. Highlighting political changes affecting Central Asia during the 18th century and their enablement of Nadir Shah’s navigation of class and race-based hierarchies, I then critique narrow national identifications of Nadir Shah and attempt to highlight nuances within the issue of pre-nation state ethnic identity. In conclusion, I assert that pre-nation-state identity may have been mutable and that Nadir Shah’s identity, rather than sitting on one side of a Turkic-Persian dichotomy, reflects a fluidity of nationality extant in 18th century Central Asia.

During the colonial period in Korea the Japanese tried to squelch Korean identity, enfolding the Korean people within their expanding empire. As Japan’s policies and actions on the peninsula became increasingly oppressive, the Western world naively accepted Japan’s benign explanations. However, not everyone disregarded the warning signs in East Asia. Thomas F. Millard, an American journalist, was struck by the Korean plight and took up the Korean cause for independence in his writings. Millard was not only immersed in the affairs of East Asia, he was passionate about what he wrote. As Japanese historians and politicians worked to distort the Korean voice so that it reflected a supposed need for and acceptance of Japanese assistance, Millard attempted to expose their deception. In response to Japanese domination, Korean nationalism rose. Koreans formed a national identity centered on their shared heritage. Identity needs both internal and external recognition. Though the Korean people never identified as Japanese, during the colonial period the rest of the world saw them as Japanese citizens, not Koreans. In 1948 the United Nations agreed that nationality was a human right. Though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was far from being conceived in the early 1900s some people already believed in the rights that it would solidify; Millard was one of those people. He saw Japan’s actions as criminal, and he wrote about just that. As the Japanese tried to muffle Korea’s voice, Millard became a conduit for that voice. In a present-day world that still wrestles with the vestiges of imperialism, Millard’s work is a testament to the importance of listening to the multitude of voices that continue to sound around the globe.

In many ways, popular understandings of the U.S. Occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924 and its complex consequences are incomplete. This understudied “intervention” has been virtually dismissed in U.S. collective memory, justified as one of many “reasonable” campaigns of the early 20th century necessary to ensure the emerging political and economic hegemony of the United States, and has been subsequently forgotten. As a result of this forgetting, what remains in U.S. collective historical memory is notably lacking a human element, prizing the actions of governments, politicians, and landed elites over the impacts to and responses of everyday people. This study attempts to disrupt the dominant narratives by uncovering some of the ways in which Dominican people resisted the conditions imposed by foreign invasion and occupation, paying particular attention to non-violent forms of resistance. By drawing upon newspaper articles, musical lyrics, and poetry in order to supplement our understanding and to serve as a foundation for critique of existing scholarship, this study also has the potential to demonstrate not only how the Dominican people have historically negotiated with, struggled against, and survived foreign actors, but also how they have transformed the very mechanisms that have sought to “civilize” them.