History Commons^™

“Now, What’S One Story I Wanted To Tell You?”: Oral History Exhibition Archives At The Chicago History Museum At The Turn Of The 21st Century, Arianne Nguyen

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Starting in the 1970s, American history museums have undergone a shift away from seeing themselves collections-focused historical societies acting as “temples to the past.” In the face of broader political challenges—civil rights, increasingly multicultural urban audiences, and the “culture wars” of the 1980s, public historians have sought to reclaim their institutions’ relevance by seeking to share their authority and mission with those “publics” they serve.

While secondary literature on public history has generally agreed that museums pulled off this shift—and museums themselves have touted successful exhibits and outreach—this essay uses a specific case study to complicate the narrative. The Chicago …

The Black American Revolution: The American Revolution As Experienced By African Americans, Amy Kurian

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper focuses on how the American Revolution mobilized the enslaved and free black population in a way that constitutes a "Black American Revolution." In particular, the enslaved population engaged in multiple efforts for freedom, ranging from fighting in the Revolutionary War to writing petitions to state legislatures. First, I present how the "slavery metaphor" propagated by white Loyalists indicates the inherent differences in how the white and black populations experienced the Revolution. There is an overall discussion of the various methods the enslaved used in their attempts to gain freedom: military service, slave petitions, freedom suits, and escape. I …

Conflict, Resistance, And Resolve: Uncovering Lost Narratives In Japanese-American Internment, Hannah De Oliveira

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

By the end of 1942, the U.S. army and the national government had forcibly removed 120,000 Japanese descended individuals from their homes on the West Coast, confining them to ten internment camps across the nation. In an effort to construct a more accurate representation of the mindset of internees in the wartime era, my thesis hones in on conflict and division within camp life. I emphasize the heterogeneity of Japanese-American voices and push back against the oversimplification of the different internee subgroups: the Japan-born immigrants (“Issei”), U.S.-born citizens (“Nisei”), and Japan-educated Nisei who returned home before the war (“Kibei”). Throughout …

Han-Nationalism Throughout The Ages, Weiying Wu

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Beginning in the 1980s, a trend of traditional studies known as “guo xue,” (国学) meaning national studies, proliferated in the wake of socioeconomic changes in China. In particular, it encompassed the revival of Confucianism, giving rise to related activity such as the establishment of “national studies institutes” (国学院) and “Han study centers”. Yet despite its popularity, the legitimacy of “national studies” came under the critical scrutiny of historians who argue that that contemporary “national studies” have either consciously or subconsciously co-opted Han traditions and practices over other ethnic cultures that made up the social fabric of past and present China, …

The Limits Of Solidarity: Leftist Jewish Israeli Activism For Palestine In The 1960’S And 2010’S, Ryann M. Hubbart

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

What does it mean for Jewish Israelis to engage in Palestinian solidarity? How do they navigate their positions of privilege in their activism? To explore these questions, I begin with a historical trajectory of the rise and fall of leftist Jewish Israeli activist organizations in response to global and local developments. I focus on two periods and their organizations: The Israeli Socialist Organization in the 1960’s and 1970’s and Ta’ayush and Physicians for Human Rights Israel in the 2010’s. In both cases the individuals in question are a very small minority of Israelis. From there I analyze these organizations and …

Malintzin: La Mujer Americana, Alma D. Elías Nájera

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Malintzin was a controversial Indigenous woman whose contributions to the Aztec conquest raised questions about what it meant to be a traitor with a limited agency. This essay recontextualizes Malintzin’s demonized identity and challenges masculinist sociocultural curations of gender, history, and knowledge production by infusing feminist theory into the cultural imaginaries of gender and racial stratification. By reintroducing Malintzin as a feminist emblematic figure trying to regain selfhood within an exploitative White cisheteropatriarchal society, her existence gives voice to those silenced by the violence of colonization, Manhood, and gender oppression. To do this, the author takes up the work of …

Why Africa? Towards A Materialist Understanding Of Racism And The African Slave Trade, Giacomo F. Green

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Common historical interpretations of the Atlantic slave system often lose the position Africa within the political-economic haze of the era, either producing confused accounts or eliding the question of causality altogether. I argue that this tendency stems from the corrosive effects of the historian’s position as an observer from the present, and that to understand why Africa was the prime location for the source of human slaves, one needs to take a materialist approach to the problem of origins. Only through careful examination of empire, the plantation complex, and the genesis of the Atlantic working classes can one arrive at …

Panic At The Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture And The Struggle To Desegregate, Susannah L. Broun

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.

Reevaluating The Pension System: The Struggles Of Black Widows Following The Civil War, Samantha E. Carney

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Following the Civil War, the United States government invested heavily in the U.S. Pension Bureau: a government agency that distributed monetary aid to wounded veterans. This paper discusses the impact of race and gender with regards to pensions in black communities, as evidenced by the pension files of the 34^th Regiment of the South Carolina United States Colored Troops. In particular, it addresses the lack of education and documentation amongst black widows which was largely due to their enslavement, in concert with the inherent racist and sexist prejudice of white Special Examiners hired by the Pension Bureau. This combination …

“Unspoken Understanding”: The Evolution Of Chinese American Adoption Communities, Annie Abruzzo

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

While scholarly work on adoption, transnational adoption, and specifically international adoption from China has been robust, it has tended to focus on studying parents and parenting. This paper analyzes the resources used by both parents and children to discuss race, culture, and adoption, and seeks to understand the effects of these parenting strategies on Chinese American adoptees, who have begun to reach young adulthood in the last ten years. Examination of the recent growth of adoptee communities reveals that a shared and complex adoptee identity is a more powerful nexus than shared Chineseness.

Shikata Ga Nai: Statelessness And Sacrifice For Japanese-American Volunteers During The Second World War, Kenzo E. Okazaki

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Through a Philosophical analysis of the nature of Internment Camps as well as oral histories of veterans who volunteered to serve in the US military from the camps, this paper will argue that the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was an event that the Supreme Court and surrounding legal discourse placed outside of legal jurisdiction. Those within the camps were thus condemned to a life lacking political qualification and juridical personhood. Faced with the dangers of this condition, interned Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. Army consciously laid claim to the American political community through the sacrifice of …