Senior Honors Theses (History Department Honors Program)
To achieve honors in history, qualified students in the major must complete a two-semester sequence of courses, culminating in the preparation of a substantial and original thesis of approximately 75 pages. The thesis is based upon sustained, individual research in archival and other primary sources. Developed in consultation with the departmental honors director(s) and supervised by a faculty advisor with expertise in their chosen area, theses consider a wide variety of topics – from the ancient to contemporary eras, and from all parts of the world – and employ diverse methodological approaches. Most honors students receive funding from the History Department, as well as from other University sources, to complete their research, and participate in a system of peer review throughout the writing process.
Department of History Honors Program students can submit their thesis using this submission form. Please note that you may be prompted to log in or create a new ScholarlyCommons account before attempting to submit.
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Publication Treaty-Making, British Colonialism, and Indigenous Subjugation: A Comparative Study of New South Wales and Aotearoa New Zealand(2024) Wang, AnjieUntil this day, the Indigenous community experienced the legacy of colonization. Yet, current research on British settler colonialism lacks an emphasis on how the treaty-making process consolidated the oppressive colonial power dynamics. By comparing the treatymaking approaches of the British Empire in New South Wales, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, my thesis explores how the absence and presence of treaties shaped complex and evolving relationships between Indigenous groups and colonial powers. It investigates the inconsistency of the British treaty making approach in settler-colonial territories by examining the abandonment of treaty-making in Australia in the 1780s and the reinstatement of treaty-making diplomacy in Aotearoa New Zealand between the 1830s to 1840. By narrating both the Indigenous and colonial perspectives on a transnational scale, it compares how first encounter and geopolitical factors contributed to a shift in colonial diplomatic strategies and the evolution of colonial expansion. It will also examine the legacy of the colonial era by comparing land and assimilation policies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Overall, it demonstrates that in the short term, the absence and presence of treatymaking subjugated Indigenous sovereignty and land rights both in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. However, treaty-making impacted the long-term reconciliation and decolonization framework. This research will contribute to a better understanding of the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism on Indigenous communities in Oceania and potentially assist policymakers in developing reconciliation strategies.Publication Battle for Legitimacy: Understanding the Korean Community Dynamics Through the Korean American Association of Greater Philadelphia(2024) Song, HyunwooIt has been nearly 60 years since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 that started the immigration boom of Koreans to the United States. At the peak of this boom, 30,000 Korean immigrants came into the United States every year, which resulted in 1.9 million Korean Americans living in the United States today. Philadelphia is no exception. Since the 1960s, there has been an active Korean American community represented by the Korean American Association of Greater Philadelphia (KAAGP). This thesis adds to the growing field of Korean American studies by introducing a historian’s perspective on a field that has been dominated by anthropological and sociological studies. This thesis shows the challenges the Korean associations face to their legitimacy to represent the Korean community and how they retain it. Utilizing the internal documents of the KAAGP, the thesis shows three distinct periods of the organization’s history and how it fits into the history of the Korean community in Philadelphia. Following the development of the association, the thesis shows that the rhetorical device adopted by the association changes from a national and patriotic tone focused on the Korean identity to a practical one that focuses on the daily lives in the United States. This shift in ideological background for legitimacy manifests itself in the type of project the association undertakes, but also the challenges it faces as well. While the initial community was built on the shared culture and identity of being Koreans in the United States, this shifts as the necessity to gain access to the United States political system increases. At a time when Korean immigrants had limited access to electoral politics, the Korean community used the KAAGP to gain official recognition from the South Korean and American governments. This official recognition was practical for the community as it meant they had a direct line of communication to officials that were previously unavailable. It also showed their growing understanding of the importance of political representation in the United States. The work attempts to understand how the KAAGP retains its legitimacy to represent the Korean community over the years, but also to collect and document the primary sources of the Korean community.Publication A Province Divided: Land, Labor, and Water During the 1947 Partition of Punjab, India(2024) Xu, PlumThis thesis critically examines memoranda and presentations made to the Punjab Boundary Commission, seeking to highlight claims over material and natural resources as means of reinterpreting the conditions underlying the catastrophic partition of British India in 1947. Partition historiography almost universally centers narratives on the apparent animosity between Hindus and Muslims or the movements of the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League. This thesis, however, turns its attention toward actors neglected by the scholarship. It examines the Punjab Unionist Party, as well as the representatives of minority ethno-religious organizations that presented before the Punjab Boundary Commission. This thesis seeks to illuminate concerns about land, labor, and water expressed during the proceedings of the Commission, as well as interpret the conspicuous absence of the Unionist Party from these proceedings. Furthermore, it will interrogate the institutional role of the Boundary Commission in fomenting the violence that followed Partition taking effect. Commission archival records form a critical base of sources, wherein submitted memoranda and hearing transcripts outline the arguments of various representative organizations over the division of Punjab. This thesis concludes that the Unionists found themselves deliberately excluded from appearing before the Commission. This exclusion appears to be motivated by the Unionists’ cross-communal political mobilization, which failed to fit within Partition’s stated aim of creating a physical ethno-religious division of India. Additionally, the arguments of organizations that did manage to reach the Commission persistently return to concerns over handling of land, labor, and water—a political paradigm the Unionists embodied—but these concerns were necessarily buried beneath the rhetoric of ethno-religious division. Ultimately, Punjabis found themselves subject to the machinations of wider nationalist organizations and a colonial state whose socio-political framework ran fundamentally counter to the province’s own predominant social structures. While the late colonial administration coated the Boundary Commission in the veneer of an attentive judicial body, the proceedings’ eventual outcomes for Punjabis proved to be exclusion and disempowerment.Publication Workers, Farmers, and Social Philosophers: The Rise of Socialist Activity in Colonial Punjab and North America, 1906-1926(2024) Malhotra, Sanya DharMy project attempts to historically trace how socialist and revolutionary forms of politics arose in colonial Punjab from the period 1906-1926. The wave of migrant Punjabi laborers to the Pacific West Coast at the turn of the 20th century is crucial to analyzing the socioeconomic origins of diasporic nationalist politics. Agrarian unrest, collective labor coalitions, and Sikh values contributed to the poetic and martyr-centric ethos of the proto-socialist party Ghadar. The analysis of the formation and development of the Ghadar Party relies on historical work done at the Bancroft Library archives, specifically the South Asians in North America, 1899-1974 collection. As opposed to the prominent historiography situating the Ghadar party into the trend of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism, a more critical evaluation of the sources demonstrates how local conditions and mentalities shaped the production, reception, and distribution of Ghadar literature and activity. The radical methods utilized by the Ghadar Party to contest imperial barriers, citizenship, and the role of labor in society differentiated them from the contemporary pan-Indian political coalitions. These methods included socialist experimentation between intellectuals and workers and the militarization of organized action. A potential sphere for future research is the cultural integration and evolution of the Ghadar’s legacy in Punjab’s post-colonial political life.Publication Naked Natives: British Perceptions of Indigenous Nakedness and Sartorial Exchange in 17th Century North America(2024) Khan, UmmeThis thesis explores the encounter between English colonists and Native Americans through the lens of “nakedness” and sartorial interaction in the 17th century. This thesis examines the spectrum of portrayals created by the English of indigenous bodies and adornment, identifying the variances and contradictions in how the English developed their understanding of the Other. Sartorial interactions extended beyond the gaze as English colonists and Native groups engaged in cycles of trade. This thesis traces the development of sartorial exchange after the early period of encounter into an era marked by war. Conflicts discussed include the Anglo-Powhatan wars, Pequot War, and King Philip’s/Metacom’s War. Gifting and stripping are highlighted as forms of sartorial interaction during wartime. Stripping, in particular, emerged as the bodies of soldiers, interpreters, and captives navigated the North American landscape of battlefields. This thesis attempts to question the levels of cultural cross-dressing and sartorial diplomacy that resulted from these interactions, analyzing how clothing and appearance were connected to colonial power dynamics in this period.Publication Léon Bloy: Martyr or Madman?(2023-12) Shah, Miriam Supriya SamuelThis thesis is a study of French writer and polemicist Léon Bloy’s (1846-1917) influence, focusing on the allure of his circle of devotees, and its dynamics of friendship and conversion. I wish to explore the question of what made Léon Bloy’s contradictory character — by turns furious and gracious, polemical and amicable, decadent and austere — so attractive, and why the circle that developed around him proved so formative for an extraordinary collection of converts, among whom numbered one of the twentieth century’s most famous philosophers, Jacques Maritain. I argue that Bloy set himself apart by squaring the contemplative spirit of the monastic ideal with the dialectical spirit of the Socratic forum. He recognized that writing and art require silence, solitude, and sacrificial devotion, but also that Catholicism exhorts that “man liveth not by self alone but in his brother’s face,” and that spirituality must be buoyed and stirred through rigorous interpersonal discussion of faith and virtue. By combining a depth of mystical spirituality with a determination to be a gadfly in the service of uncomfortable truths no matter the consequences, he assumed the mantle of a biblical prophet, a voice self-consciously crying out in the wilderness, “prepare ye the way of the LORD.”Publication Pragmatic Empire: Ethiopian Administration of the Ogaden Region Under Emperor Menelik II(2024) Kindel, Augustus OttoAmidst the Scramble for Africa, Ethiopia was the one African state to avoid direct Colonialism until 1935. Ethiopia was successful, in part, because it developed its own colonial system to buffer European expansion. While much scholarship has explored how Ethiopia administered its lush lowland territories through commercializing natural resources, this thesis attempts instead to analyze the governance of the arid Ogaden region. Given the nomadic region’s ungovernable nature, this thesis amends existing historiographical approaches to Imperial Ethiopia to argue that the three primary actors in the region — Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, and the indigenous Somali clans — cooperated to regulate the Ogaden. The three parties’ pragmatic approach to trading, raiding, and diplomacy led them to establish administrative structures specific to the political situation of the nomadic territory. First-hand accounts from diplomats and soldiers on the ground show how the actors were able to create a favorable environment for commerce. This exceptional scenario in African colonial history challenges prevailing interpretations of Ethiopian Colonialism and provides insights into how Emperor Menelik II managed nomadic populations in the periphery.Publication "Politics, Politics, Politics!" The Coercive Acts, Political Mobilization, and Legitimacy in New York City, 1774-1775(2024) Hefter, James SamuelCommittees of Correspondence served as the main instruments of united resistance against Britain in the pre-Revolutionary War era. The number of committees catapulted after colonists heard about the Coercive Acts – passed in March of 1774 – which penalized the city of Boston because of the Boston Tea Party. My research examines the developments of legitimacy and political mobilization in the context of the New York City committee system in response to the Coercive Acts. Conservatives and radicals alternated control of the New York City extralegal system from May 1774 to April 1775. During this period, conservatives and radicals alternated control of the committee system. The city experienced tension between political invention and the striving for the appearance of legality and institutional continuity, which established a new political culture. To achieve this seemingly difficult equilibrium, radicals upended traditional government and the initially conservative controlled extralegal system by relying on common New Yorkers, which demonstrates how successful revolutions require the incorporation of people outside conventional methods, such as elections. Radicals turned street demonstrations and broadsides into requisites for how revolutions receive authorization. Moreover, radicals utilized political mobilization, which led to their success in achieving legitimacy for and democratizing the New York City committee system. Grappling with concepts such as political mobilization of common and laboring New Yorkers and the legitimacy of extralegal committees from May 1774 to April 1775, these mere eleven months provide considerable insight into the revolutionary movement and New York’s role during this transformative period.Publication A 'Bootleg Trade': Comstockery, Entrepreneurship, and Criminal Consumption in New York's Contraceptive Industry, 1865-1900(2023-12) McClary, OliviaIn 1873, the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity bill, was enacted by Congress with the aim of suppressing the illicit trade of birth control and instilling notions of Victorian values in American society. This thesis, set in New York, explores the periods both preceding and succeeding this process of delibinization and criminalization, drawing from a diverse array of primary sources—from newspaper advertisements and arrest records to personal correspondence—to argue that contraceptives were extensively bought and sold despite commercial restrictions. Focusing on portraying individual experiences, I will address microhistorical acts of resistance and affirmation, with regard to conservative religiosity, in an attempt to understand how ordinary Americans, both men and women, conceived and participated within New York’s sexualized marketplace of contraceptive wares.Publication Embodied Rights: the Use of Health and Disease Rhetoric in the Late-Nineteenth Century American Woman Suffrage Movement(2023) Worrall, AlexThis thesis engages with the long history of the body in the context of the women’s rights movement, specifically with the role of medicine in the late-nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. I specifically focus on three aspects of the women’s rights movement during this period: bodily autonomy, woman suffrage, and women’s empowerment. This is not to say these three facets of the women’s rights movement were segmented from each other; rather, they were deeply intertwined. However, in researching the works and lives of the women in this thesis, it became clear that these were the three primary distinctions in the means through which women’s rights activists used medicine and health as a tool for pushing their cause. In this thesis, I argue that medicine and health played a key role in the nineteenth-century advancement for women’s rights. Women’s rights activists between 1870 and 1900 imbued their speeches with rhetoric of health and disease, demonstrating the deep connection between medicine, the body, and the concept of political rights.