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Full-Text Articles in History
Organizing The World: Power Dynamics And “Civilization” In The British Museum, Katherine E. Steir
Organizing The World: Power Dynamics And “Civilization” In The British Museum, Katherine E. Steir
History Honors Projects
The British Museum has a long and complex relationship with the British Colonial project. Applying museum theory to case studies found in the museum, this paper explores the ways in which empire is reconstructed within the British Museum, and also investigates how public gallery spaces can engage with controversial history. In the 21st century the museum struggles to reinvent itself as a universal institution presenting collections from around the world with sensitivity. However, the museum still expresses nostalgia for the imperial past, and presents a specific and homogenous image of the ideal British citizen.
Agencies At War: Marshaling Places, Objects, And Sonorities In The Alta California Missions, Naomi R. Sussman
Agencies At War: Marshaling Places, Objects, And Sonorities In The Alta California Missions, Naomi R. Sussman
History Honors Projects
1769, Spanish Franciscan Junípero Serra initiated the missionization of Alta California. To transform California into a Spanish territory, Franciscan missions evangelized indigenous peoples. While traditional Alta California mission histories emphasize either Franciscan abuses or saintliness, reifying Native American subordination, most contemporary scholarship accentuates mutual hybridization but minimizes colonial power dynamics. Through archival and secondary research, this thesis argues that spatial interplay expressed neither syncretization nor unadulterated domination, but instead competing agencies within a physical and social “contact zone.” In this Alta Californian “contact zone,” material and sonic culture reinforced the continuous struggle for authority in the missions.
"We Are Scattered, Starved, Hunted, Half-Naked, But We Are Not Conquered": Masculinity, Race And Resistance In Bleeding Kansas, Cori Simon
History Honors Projects
This project uses the dual lenses of race and gender to put the perspectives of white men fighting in Bleeding Kansas in conversation with the often silenced voices of African Americans and American Indians. Black abolitionists and soldiers in the territory articulated the conflict as central to the future of the free black community. American Indians participated in this conflict while resisting white conquest of Kansas. With these perspectives, this project argues that conceptions of masculinity, intricately tied to race, played a central role in fueling the border violence and determining the way it is remembered.
The Concrete Modernism Of Oscar Niemeyer And The Paulistano Impulse Toward Cannibalized Urban Design And Performative Identity, Doris Zhao
History Honors Projects
As introduced by the cultural elite of São Paulo, Brazil in 1922, the aesthetics of modernism drove Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx's designs of urban architectural projects in the mid-twentieth century. These architectural performances of a modern paulistano identity, evidenced in Parque Ibirapuera, provide insight into the challenges and ruptures of identify formation and memory for the residents of São Paulo. Using antropofagia as a lens of analysis, the call to cultural cannibalism complicates the processes of self-representation within the city. Historically, paulistanos believed themselves to be the socio-economic and cultural pioneers of the Brazilian nation but tracing the …