There has been a recent change in education. Teachers face behavioral challenges inthe classroom that continue to increase. Students no longer show respect for teachers simply because they are the authority in the classroom. The need for change is evident. But the answer to what needs to change was fist articulated in the late eighteen hundreds through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is one of the first thinkers to articulate the effect that civilization had on man’s psyche and speaks to the internalization of his instincts. Further thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung add to the understanding around what is named the unconscious and help readers to understand its importance. The missing link in education then is the failure to recognize and respond appropriately to this aspect of students so that they become whole in themselves and develop into true individuals.

Based upon the political components of Norbert Elias’ civilizing process I further examine Louis XIV’s strategies of maintaining and increasing his power through the use of etiquette and manipulation to influence the court. This process is revealed through the drama around the showing of Tartuffe, the king’s image creation, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes along with the destruction of nobles like the Chevalier de Rohan and the empowering of nobles like Madame de Maintenon. The main purpose of this project is to use the concept of the civilizing process as a means to explain what Louis XIV did to his court and nobility. By looking at the controversy caused by Tartuffe between Moliere, Louis XIV, and the Company of the Holy Sacrament, I explore how it would ultimately come to demonstrate the young king’s authority and centralization of power. Furthermore, the thesis explores how Louis XIV created his image by examining the symbolism within three grand festivals he hosted within Versailles and the daily routines he implemented and built upon at court such as the levee. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes is another demonstration of power by rolling back religious rights and maintaining that the king’s subjects subscribe to Catholicism, a faith deeply entrenched in innate hierarchies and not associated with the king’s foreign enemies. Along with these events I survey how Louis XIV’s disfavor and favor impacted the social and economic standing of particular members of the nobility, and how the king was able to utilize the social structures within Versailles to incentivize behavior he liked and to punish those who did not follow the rules of etiquette. Ultimately, I will use Norbert Elias’ concept of the civilizing process to aid in explaining how Louis XIV centralized the power and state to himself by establishing stricter codes of etiquette and bringing the nobility under his hand.

My research examines the case of Joseph Vacher, one of the most prolific serial murderers in French history, as a micro- historical study to analyze the evolution of criminal theory and application of the insanity defense over the course of the Belle Époque, as French judicial systems and medico-legal experts attempted to cope with the emerging psychiatric distinction between mental illness and personality disorders. Historically, attempts to explain seemingly unmotivated homicides left a narrow margain for mitigating factors, aside from pleas of insanity. The success of such pleas reflected the conviction that these crimes could only result from severe mental incapacity. Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth century, there emerged a new medical perspective, the sadism diagnosis. Those involved in the realm of criminal behavior began to entertain the possibility that certain individuals might commit violent acts in pursuit of pleasure while maintaining full command of their reason.

A study of the personal rule of the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV analyzing his decision making process as an absolutist ruler. A special focus on Louis' foreign policy influences and how he conducted his government including the roles of ministers, ambassadors, the French court and nobility, and councils in the way he made decisions.

My honors thesis, entitled “Conversing with Angels: John Dee and His Quest for Divine Knowledge”, was a study of the Elizabethan scholar John Dee and the angelic conversations he is most known for. I decided to focus my work on the nature of the conversations, as well as looking for an answer to the question of why Dee spent years of his life figuring out how to contact, invoke, and converse with God’s divine beings. After extensive research I found five scholars whose works held six different arguments as to Dee’s motivations for the conversations.
I began my thesis discussing the conversations themselves, starting with Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelly, and the ways in which he was able to contact the angels. I also went into detail about the prayers and psalms Dee used to invoke the angels, as well as the multiple topics discussed throughout the conversations. I found that Dee’s transcriptions of the conversations were written in a form of short hand, and often included his own commentary to go along with what the angels told him. After the general overview of the process that let to the conversations, as well as the conversations themselves, I moved on to discussing the six different arguments from the five scholars: Deborah Harkness, Nicholas Cluelee, Stephen Clucas, György Szönyi, and Stuart Clark.
A quick rundown of each argument is as follows. Deborah Harkness argued that Dee’s conversations found their root in apocalyptic concerns, while Harkness and György Szönyi believed he was trying to bring religious reformation to the world. Stephen Clucas felt Dee was doing everything to bring glory to God, and Nicholas Cluelee claimed Dee was conversing with angels for a purely scholarly reason. Finally, Stuart Clark played devils advocate and argued that Dee was not actually talking to angels, but rather to demons.
After much consideration, taking each of the six interpretations into account, I concluded my thesis by arguing in agreement with György Szönyi and Nicholas Cluelee. I believed, like Szönyi, that Dee was doing all of this work to bring glory to God. But that was most likely only to a lesser extent, for when it comes to Dee’s main reasoning behind the conversations, I argued, like Cluelee, that Dee was a scholar through and through. He had spent his whole life chasing after the idea of omniscience, finally looking to the heavens in hopes that God would share his divine knowledge. Therefore, while Dee might have been conversing with angels for many different reasons, I believe that the main reason was somewhat selfish. He was a scholar with the chance to learn the secrets and knowledge of the divine, there was no other motivation needed.

Newfoundland is an island on the east coast of Canada that is mostly forgotten to the study of history. This paper looks in depth at the fighting between France and England between 1696 and 1713, which in Europe coincided with the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1696, fighting broke out on Newfoundland between England and France because of the Nine Years’ War. Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville, a French officer, commanded the attacks on over twenty English settlements. The attacks lasted less than a year. Attacks would happen again because of the War of the Spanish Succession. France and England would attack each other trying to gain control of the prized commodity of the island, the cod fish. This study looks at how French and English fighting on Newfoundland helped to change the landscape and shaped the way the history of the French and English on the island is portrayed today. Historians tend to look more at the modern history of the island such as: soldiers in World War I and World War II, when Newfoundland became a Canadian province, and the English history of the island. This study argues that, by studying French and English fighting on the island, we can better see the historical significance of Newfoundland.