By the late 1520s, Henry VIII’s lack of a legitimate male heir had led to a succession crisis in England. Eventually this culminated into a procession of legal and scholarly battles broadly referred to as "The Great Matter", which was the quest for the annulment of Henry VIII's first marriage. Criticisms over these proceedings by historians often decontextualize the events of the Great Matter. Moreover, the Great Matter is often portrayed as a vanity project; one that was wholly unnecessary because Henry VIII had a legitimate daughter from his first marriage. There are many flaws with this presentation of history. For one, it ignores most of the historic precedent up to the point of Henry VIII's reign for how female leadership was received, and what that reception could lead to– namely rebellion, usurpation, forced abdication, civil war, and instability. I argue that, rather than a vanity project, the Great Matter was absolutely understandable within the context of the time and place it occurred. I also argue that, rather than the near and distant future proving Henry’s anxiety over the reception of female leadership as unwarranted; such anxiety demonstrated a remarkable sense of awareness and an extraordinary prescience. My research includes the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and a collection of other various primary source quotes relevant to the matter of female succession in the sixteenth century, and the Great Matter in particular. These were analyzed through a social and cultural lens, and also analyzed through contextualization and comparison to later relevant events.

This project looks to understand the role of women in the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to understand why this manifestation has been categorized as the largest right-wing movement in the history of the United States. I argue that the addition of women as active participants in Klan activity, unlike the first rise during Reconstruction which was a strictly fraternal society, transformed the movement from a domestic terrorist organization into a political club with immense social influence on the white Protestant population in America. Primary sources used to build this argument came from Klan documents such as pamphlets and newsletters as well as local and national newspapers from across the U.S between 1918-1927. Women in this time period were emboldened to participate in politics after their victory with the suffrage movement, and those who employed racist and nativist ideology easily transitioned into the white supremacy of the Klan, who desperately sought to recruit blocs of voters. Using coded language such as "100% American" to describe themselves, the Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) utilized issues such as poor education, alcoholism, and immigration as a silk screen to vilify their ever-growing list of "enemies" (a tool used to recruit membership from a larger base) among them Catholics, Jews, Bolsheviks, blacks, labor unions in the North, and immigrants. The addition of women allowed the Klan to become an organization that supported nuclear family structure and encouraged all to be involved, including children, which served to develop “Klan culture” to recruit and retain members by building community. While Klanswomen were different from their male counterparts, they worked within social networks that maintained consistent growth, starting chapters in almost every state and amassing political and social influence on a local and national level.

Beginning in the 1880s, tens of thousands of impoverished Italians immigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina to create a better life. Upon arrival, they found themselves freshly socially alienated. Hybridity theory helps us understand this phenomenon demonstrated through cocoliche, the contact language spoken by the new arrivals. The period of mass migration lasted until the 1930s when Italy’s political turmoil calmed and struggling economy began to recover. The combination of southern Italian culture and Argentina’s produced lasting cultural changes and a transitory dialect that I classify as a contact language. Hybridity theory, which hinges on representing the voices of the subaltern, allows a reinterpretation of power that helps us understand the migrants’ unusual position in history as low class, white Europeans whose migration to the Global South ended not only in social stigma and continued poverty but also the dialect-speaking, comical, Southern Italian character Cocoliche. Cocoliche as a language has been studied by linguists in both Italy and Latin American southern cone countries. Cocoliche as a character has been analyzed as an element of Argentine theater. But despite these focuses little research has been done on the social and economic statuses of the Europeans who uniquely migrated to the Southern Cone and how their dialect reveals the oxymoron of their identity- that they held simultaneous and contradictory positions as privileged and yet destitute people.

Twenty-seven years ago, the movie Indochina debuted and brought up interesting questions about the direction and future of France's colonies. Almost three decades later, the continuing presence of France's colonies and influx of immigrants to France from countries known formerly as Indochina also raise questions about the effects of colonialism, especially pertaining to immigrant identities both past and present. This essay examines the lasting legacy of French colonization on the Vietnamese diaspora through both a literary analysis of Linda Lê's novel Les Trois Parques, which offers an observed history of Vietnamese restaurant workers and scholars and their agency regarding the fight against colonization, as well as a sociological exploration of a study conducted on the success of international students' integration into French universities. Additionally, the paper seeks to illustrate the significance of cultural amnesia —the assimilation into a new culture by rejecting one's former identity — as well as the benefits and motivations that may have guided first-generation immigrants to do so instead of rebelling and continuing their cultural traditions. 

This research project explores the relationship between various business activities of Ezra Meeker, an early white settler of the Pacific Northwest, to illuminate how his identity was shaped by nineteenth-century American business culture. Since Meeker faced both financial and personal failures in his hop and his Klondike business enterprises, both of which were connected through the issues of prohibition, he felt pressured, at least in part due to his business context, to produce a legacy of success. Making extensive use of archival and printed sources, this paper shows how Meeker looked to his pioneer past as the time when he was the most successful, and then used his public memorialization of the Oregon Trail to restore and burnish his own legacy. This project argues that it is only by gaining a deeper understanding of Meeker's business pursuits that we can truly understand his nationally-recognized work of preserving the past. By examinging various responses to Meeker's efforts to reshape his image, this project analyzes Meeker's success in changing his identity and the broader implications thereof. In this way, the paper also sheds light on crucial aspects of American identity, including westward expansion and myths of the West, which people like Meeker and his compatriot Buffalo Bill preserved and perpetuated. This identity is vital to understand since many Americans' perceptions of themselves and their country, as well as their patriotic belief in it, have been built on this understanding of our nation's past.

This research explores 19th century Middle Eastern and European quarantine practices through the personal diaries of Joseph Mattias Svoboda, written in Iraq from 1862 to 1908. Joseph Mattias Svoboda’s diaries document a detailed account of daily life and information in the Basra and Baghdad regions of modern day Iraq. Joseph himself was from a prominent European family and worked for an English steamship company, traveling across Iraq during a time when cholera was prevalent and occasionally reached epidemic proportions. I used Joseph Svoboda’s notes as a basis to piece together common quarantine practices and procedures utilized in the 19th century by the Ottoman Empire. Using digital transcriptions of the diaries, I used data-mining techniques to extract references to cholera outbreaks, quarantine procedures, and numbers of people afflicted by disease before and after quarantines were put in place. Then, using contemporary European newspapers, medical journals, and historical records, I compared the Ottoman procedures to European quarantine practices. I examined the efficacy of quarantine procedures in both regions depending on the size of each given cholera outbreak. Ultimately, these early forms of public health governance may have influenced global trade patterns. Future projects stemming from this research could look into the influence of European public health practices on Ottoman medical thought, or the comparative role of physicians in the Ottoman Empire and in 19th century Europe. Regardless, hopefully this research encourages others to explore beyond the Eurocentric narrative of developing public health in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The nineteenth century saw the British empire rapidly expand around the globe, with the British military facing conflicts in Spain, Crimea, India, Central Asia, and across the African continent. This rapid expansion culminated in the largest of Britain’s many nineteenth century colonial conflicts: the South African War (1899-1902), otherwise referred to as the Second Anglo-Boer War. While Britain had been engaging in military conflicts nearly continuously throughout much of the nineteenth century around the globe, its intelligence apparatus was, at both the strategic and the tactical levels, largely ad hoc and underfunded. Because of this, those in the British military tasked with gathering intelligence regularly relied upon nonmilitary people for intelligence. My research seeks to analyze the structure of British tactical intelligence networks during the South African War, focusing specifically on the British military’s often unacknowledged reliance on people it deemed outside of itself, such as volunteers, prisoners, journalists, and black South Africans to gather and communicate military intelligence. Drawing on primary sources such as newspapers, diaries, parliamentary testimony, and memoirs, I have crafted a view of British tactical intelligence networks during the conflict which focuses on the biases and prejudices which influenced their development and structure, as they simultaneously reified and questioned the dominant racist and sexist hierarchies of the time. I argue that the diverse composition of British tactical intelligence networks in South Africa demonstrates that these networks were intersectional spaces, where politics of race, sex, and knowledge determined the methods by which intelligence was gathered, communicated, and analyzed throughout the war. In contextualizing the tactical intelligence networks of the South African War as intersectional spaces, I seek to demonstrate that the study of intelligence networks in wars of imperial expansion affords a unique opportunity to analyze the relationship between colonial armies and the peoples they fight amongst.