This paper argues that a discourse of “commercial colonization” permeated the writings of early European explorers of the Pacific Northwest, which fundamentally shaped how colonizers understood the spaces and peoples with whom they interacted. In doing so, I have examined the writings of several late eighteenth century European and Creole American colonizers of the region, especially Juan Perez, James Cook, and Robert Gray. From this basis, I was able to explicate the content and function of the economic discourse in these colonial texts as well as the colonial process more broadly. The discourse of commercial colonization in this region emphasized reciprocity in all encounters yet consigned Indigenous peoples to inherently inferior status in relation to colonizers and was used to justify colonial violence. My work with these texts shows that when the idealized practice of European commerce was challenged, instead of revising their guiding ideals, colonizers relegated those who challenged their theories to subordination. I illuminate how Cook, Gray, and others portray relationships in transactional terms, motivated by profit above all else. Thus, this paper argues that the tensions in these colonial texts are examples of an emerging Capitalist worldview that links the European colonial project in the Pacific Northwest to modern theories of race, commodification, and exploration, allowing us to better understand the relationships between each

 Contemporary scholarship on the transition of immigrant churches from the language of their country of origin to the one of their new country has often focused on it as a process of concessions undertaken by a reluctant first-generation aiming to keep a partly assimilated third-generation in the church. This functionalist view of religion sees the church primarily as a transmitter of culture, and the immigrant church as a tool for ethnic preservation. By contrast, historians studying ethnic minority groups have warned against treating them as monoliths pursuing a single trajectory towards cultural accommodation. In line with this criticism, I study the Swedish-American church ‘’Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant of America’’ and its transition from using Swedish to English in the 1920s. As with the ''Augustana Church'', which was the largest Swedish-American church in the U.S, The Covenant Church had its theological origins in Lutheran pietism. However, The Covenant came to develop differing views on the role of the church in relationship to Swedish culture, which was reflected in its openness towards the use of English and American theological concepts. My research draws on Swedish-American newspapers, the Nordic Museums collection of information on Scandinavian-American churches that I have assisted in digitalizing this quarter, and secondary literature to show that the Covenant’s adoption of English as its main language instead of Swedish was based on the denomination’s historical and theological background and its perceived duty to spread the gospel beyond the Swedish-American community. This case study illuminates the complex motivations that drive the process of cultural accommodation in immigrant groups, and offers a counternarrative to the portrayal of immigrant churches as helpless victims of assimilation, instead coming to the conclusion that the Covenant members actively and counsciously created a new form of ethnic identity.

This research project relates to my faculty mentor Dr. Michael Honey's involvement in deep south Civil Liberties / Rights organizing from late 1969 until roughly 1976. This activity got him on the radar of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Counter-Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO); a series of covert and, at times, illegal projects aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations and people deemed subversive such as feminist organizations, anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists of the civil rights movement, and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left. Although Dr. Honey was a known subscriber to MLK's non-violence doctrine and his political activities were primarily constrained to participating in marches, fundraising, and distributing pamphlets, this still garnered him a 800 page FBI file. This includes agents illegally wiretapping his home, going through his mail, and writing detailed notes of every civil liberties meeting he attended. What made this situation remarkable was that it was not a unique experience. Mass surveillance on Americans was mundane in the FBI at that time. This research is in support of a full length book project underway by Dr. Honey documenting his experiences through this time, using it as a framework to tell the history of the period. Currently, the main goal of my research is to analyze this 800 page file in addition to several boxes of miscellaneous, period specific, primary documents. This includes decoding FBI serial numbers, cross-referencing known agent handles, and pulling information applicable to the book. In addition to this, I plan to create a table of contents for the file and fit the surveillance record into the timeline I have been organizing of the other documents. This project contributes to the mass of literature on the period by demonstrating how this federal operation effected everyday Americans.

  Throughout his administration from 1998-2002, Colombian president Andrés Pastrana collaborated with the United States in Plan Colombia, a foreign aid program whose stated purpose was to eradicate the drug trade in Colombia through US military assistance and social development programs. Plan Colombia has been predominantly studied through the exploration of the economic reasons that have prompted US officials to acknowledge the Plan as a successful policy, regardless of its exacerbation of violence in Colombia and its failure to eradicate the drug trade. The lack of scholarship on Plan Colombia from the Colombian perspective fosters a narrative of US imperial imposition. Although this narrative is clearly justifiable, it disregards Colombian agency, and it obfuscates the internal racial and social hierarchies that sustained the Plan's implementation. Therefore, to explore the Colombian State’s project behind Plan Colombia, this research analyzed the Plan through a framework of intervention by invitation. Furthermore, it investigated how the Colombian government utilized hegemonic racial and social hierarchies to facilitate said intervention. Through detailed analysis of Pastrana's presidential speeches, I propose that through Plan Colombia his administration conflated a rhetoric of peace with participation in a modern neoliberal extractive economy. Colombia invited US intervention because it needed its aid funds to build the infrastructure and train the labor force necessary to bring Colombia to the fore of neoliberalism, which would consequently resolve the armed conflict. Furthermore, I argue that through such a conflation, his government instrumentalized Colombian social and racial hierarchies to mobilize impoverished campesinos to become the labor force necessary to sustain a licit neoliberal extractive economy that could attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to Colombia's agricultural and mining sectors. Therefore, this research illuminates the rearticulation of 19th century land struggles and racial and social hierarchies that have historically subjected—and continue to subject—campesinos to political violence.

In 2017, Israeli artist Shahak Shapira released his online art installation, “Yolocaust.” In this installation, he downloaded tactless selfies and artsy photographs from people’s public social media accounts which were taken in front of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin. He then replaced the background with real images of the Holocaust - inmates on bunks, corpses stacked in piles, etc. His mission was to call attention to the thoughtless and insensitive photographs that people take in front of this key memorial to the Holocaust. In the age of social media, the internet is littered with tweets, Instagram pictures, Facebook statuses, and Tumblr posts about the Holocaust. It begs the question: has social media chipped away at the authenticity at the core of Holocaust remembrance? In my research, I argue that many aspects of social media have been detrimental to Holocaust memory. It has helped to commercialize and trivialize the Holocaust in a new way; however, this phenomenon is not new. For years, the film industry has “dumbed down” the Holocaust in order to make it easy to digest for the average viewer and has greatly romanticized the event in many instances. My project analyzes the Holocaust in film, as well as in Social media in order to argue trends of commercialization and simplification regarding Holocaust memory did not develop newly in the last 15 years. With more digital technology, how we remember this event has been greatly shifted, often at the expense of historical truth, but not as a rule. This project hopes to warn viewers about the price of conveying Holocaust memory through such digital mediums as social media and film, but concedes that the wide-reaching arm of such sources is not always inherently negative and may be exploited as a memory tool in the future.