Under the Merovingian Dynasty (481 AD-751 AD) in early medieval France, royal political assemblies were used to fulfill a wide variety of functions of state. More importantly, however, they served as the primary venue for interaction between the king and the noble class he ruled over. Throughout the period, kings and nobles used assemblies to shift the balance of power in their own favor. Sometimes, by using regencies of young kings for instance, aristocrats managed to gain power over their rulers. Others, kings managed to shift the balance back and reassert their full authority. The Merovingian kingdoms moved through cycles of waxing and waning levels of centralization. When a king died with multiple potential heirs, the kingdom was often split into three or four separate political units. At these moments, the kingdoms were divided and decentralized. When a king’s brothers and his heirs died, however, the kingdom reconsolidated into a single unit, requiring greater centralization to govern. In these moments of centralization, the power struggles of assemblies offered more permanent gains, which the aristocratic class exploited to gradually increase their relative status, until the distribution of power reached a point where the forbears of the great king Charlemagne managed to replace the Merovingians and become kings themselves. The effects of assemblies on Merovingian government and kingship allowed and led to the birth of the Carolingian dynasty. More even than this, the very fact that the Carolingian's used assembly politics to attain power affected how they in turn governed, thus shaping the history of Europe for centuries to come. Using close readings of narrative, legal, and formulary evidence, I argue both that Merovingian assemblies functioned as an outlet for royal-aristocratic competition, as well as the increased impact this competition had during centralized moments in Merovingian history. 

This paper seeks to demonstrate the role played by faulty (often intentionally faulty) historical memory on the development of the British constitutional narrative in the late Middle Ages. This narrative, which has been characterized as the de facto constitution, was defined in the English Bill of Rights in 1689 in terms of a struggle between royal, particularly Norman, tyranny and a revival of a limited, representative monarchy imagined to have existed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The overwhelming majority of scholarship on the development of the unwritten constitution has focused on pin-pointing the moment in history when the constitution began to exist in political reality. This scholarly agenda began in the wake of the Glorious Revolution as an attempt to justify and understand the events of 1688, and has been steeped in political bias. This paper reexamines the two historical periods most often identified with the foundations of constitutionality: the reigns of Edward IV (r.1461-1470, 1471-1483) and Henry VII (1485-1509). A reassessment of these reigns finds little evidence of the long-alleged constitutional revolution; rather, it is clear that contemporary propaganda and historical practices played an important role in formulating a precedential pattern erected on creating a shaky foundation on which the constitutional precent rests.

This project is an examination of the Chevalière d'Éon (1728-1810) and the body of academic work that has been written about her. While her life is well-documented, her remarkable gender transition in 1777 has largely been viewed as a mere curiosity or at best a political maneuver. The growing field of transgender history, however, provides a new analytical framework with which to examine her story. Drawing on a wealth of secondary sources for historiographical analysis as well as contemporary letters, memoirs, and articles, the paper looks at d'Éon's feminism, her political career, and her personal life to put forward the argument that her gender was a matter of self-determination rather than external motivation, a notion that becomes clearer when her narrative is viewed as that of a transgender person navigating her gender nonconformity in a time when constructions of gender were quite different. The research presented shows that by branching out of modern narrow definitions of transsexuality and instead considering a broader range of experiences under the transgender umbrella, historians can use gender nonconformity in the past both to analyze contemporary constructions of gender and to help establish a historical transgender continuity rather than describing it as a modern movement without a presence in the past.

In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, residents of the Middle East struggled to position themselves between their traditional lives in their birthplaces and a future dominated by European influences.  Our study uses digital visualizations to locate similarities between two very different narratives. Alexander Svoboda was born in 1878 to a family of Central European origin, which had lived in Baghdad for two generations. In 1897, he and his parents made an overland trip from Baghdad to Cairo and thence by ship to Europe. During his travels Alexander kept an almost-daily journal, in which, despite his multi-cultural background, he expressed astonishment over European trappings of cities he visited on his way. On the other hand, the famed Egyptian writer Yahya Haqqi’s novel, The Saint’s Lamp, featured a Cairene man named Ismail. Ismail was brought up in a religious atmosphere. Following his father’s wishes, he set off on a journey to England in order to study medicine. While staying in England, he acquired a European way of thinking.  Although their backgrounds differed widely, both Alexander and Ismail experienced the same drastic conversion of perspective while staying in Europe. They came to regard European culture as superior to their own, which caused them to feel a sense of deprivation upon on their return to their homelands after years of life in Europe. We will use the digital tool ArcGis to create a story map that will focus on the places of Europe, North Africa and Middle East which the authors visited. For each location, we will include relevant excerpts and summaries from our primary narrative resources. We also are also organizing the historical events that Joseph mentioned in his diary and are comparing them to other traditional historical sources.

My research focused on the question: What can be learned about 19th century Middle Eastern and European medical practices from the personal diaries of Joseph Mattias Svoboda, a European resident in Iraq from 18?? to 1908? Joseph Mattias Svoboda’s diaries document a very detailed account of daily life and information in the Basra and Baghdad regions of modern day Iraq. Joseph himself suffered from a chronic gastro-intestinal disease and frequently wrote about the medication prescribed to him by doctors and self-selected which he then self-administered. I used this information as a basis to piece together common medical practices and medications utilized in the 19th century. Using digital transcriptions of the diaries, my fellow interns and I used data-mining techniques to extract references to medicines, dosages, and usages. Then, using contemporary European newspapers, medical journals, advertisements, and historical records I traced these medicines and their ingredients back to their origin. I examined modern research on these medicines’ ingredients to look at the effect these medicines had on the body compared to the expected results of the time period. I found the medicinal practices of the time, especially in relation to patent medicines generally stem from Europe with many medications being produced and sold there. This allowed me to identify some of the ingredients and usages. However, some of the ingredients and medications were not native to Europe, indicating a larger trade system and medical practices from around the globe influencing medicine in Iraq. Future projects stemming from my research could look into the influence of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American herbalism and indigenous practices on 19th century medical practices and medicine trade. Regardless, I hope my work encourages others to explore beyond the Eurocentric narrative of developing medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Baki Project began with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In the years following written language in Turkey shifted from Ottoman Arabic script to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet. This language transformation occurred rapidly, and consequently some texts were transcribed incorrectly or called for subjective editorial decisions. These discrepancies resulted in inaccurate and incongruent transcriptions, which have been detrimental to the preservation of Ottoman history and culture. Transcription is a primitive and tedious task, as most transcribers perform their work manually, using pen and paper or simple text editing programs. No digital tools exist exclusively for Turkish manuscript transcription, so researchers do a considerable amount of work by hand just to verify the integrity of these documents. Digital tools created to facilitate this process could dramatically reduce overhead needed to study Turkish literature. The Baki Project is introducing a solution that will mitigate the faith gap between manuscripts written in the original Arabic script and those in Latin-based Turkish. A Reverse Transcription Tool is currently in development that will allow transcribers to dynamically verify the integrity of these manuscripts by facilitating the comparison of the original Ottoman text with the modern Latin Turkish output. The Reversible Transcription Tool will create a collaborative method for expediting the transcription process and simplifying a researcher’s workflow by providing the necessary element of standardization missing from Ottoman Literature transcriptions. The tool aims to maintain the authenticity of primary source texts in order to preserve the integrity of Ottoman tradition and literature.

Although steam technology opened new avenues of prosperity and pride for the British Empire, the Qing government witnessed the violent impact of the steam engine, when for example, the Nemesis steamship sailed into the port of Canton and killed thousands of Chinese soldiers throughout the course of the Opium Wars. Yet, Chinese narratives tend to reflect optimistic attitutes toward steam technology. So why did British narratives emphasize Chinese suffering more than Chinese narratives? Using the steam engine and opium as technological case studies, this research investigates the ways suffering was associated with each technology and how British and Chinese religious beliefs influenced the technological narrative during the First and Second Opium Wars (1840-1842, 1856-1860). Using methodological frameworks derived by historians and philosophers of technology and contextual research from Science, Technology, and Society scholars, Asian Studies scholars, and Religious scholars, this project offers an interdisciplinary perspective on technological narrative during the Opium Wars. These case studies encourage conscientious reflection on technological values across cultures.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 preceded the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. Multiracial Japanese families posed a problem to the segregation order. War officials attempted to further segregate the population through the Mixed Marriage policy. This policy allowed some multiracial Japanese families to leave Japanese mass incarceration camps. My project argues this policy was both a foreshadowing and facilitation of postwar integration; enabling rather than discontinuing the process of race and empire. The majority of sources were acquired through scanning, email, photocopying, microfilm, and phone interviews. Research initially began with understanding the Mixed marriage policy as a result of the prewar segregation along gendered and racialized lines. It soon became clear that the treatment of multiracial Japanese families under American occupation was both a result and continuity of the prewar racial logic. The Mixed Marriage policy was an attempt to reconcile the question: Who did the U.S. government and the Japanese American community consider Japanese? Japanese Americans emigrated with the transpacific identity of both Japanese and American. In contrast, the U.S. government rejected the possibility of dual identities by arguing that racial identity was based on biology alone. The existence of mixed race individuals in Japanese mass incarceration camps upset the U.S.’s racial logic that emphasized segregator biology over the possibility of cultural assimilation. The Mixed Marriage policy built upon segregation policies to determine who could integrate into the American identity. Those who passed the appeal process of the Mixed Marriage policy were welcomed back into the categories of Japanese and American. These individuals became symbols for the U.S. government to project an image of benevolence and racial tolerance in the post-war empire. The Mixed Marriage policy helps historians understand how integration is dependent on the categories created by segregation.