Classics Commons^™

The Men Who Could Speak Japanese: The Navy Japanese Language School At Boulder, Colorado (1942-1946) And The Legacy Of World War Ii Japanese-Language Officers, Katherine White

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

On their last day of class at the US Navy Japanese Language School (USNJLS or JLS), Captain Roger Pineau and his fellow classmates waited in a room on the second floor of the University of Colorado library. They had spent the last eleven months immersed in a rigorous study of the Japanese language, and today their teachers had promised a sample of what they would experience as Japanese-language officers in the Pacific War. The six students sat intently as their conversation sensei (teacher) entered the classroom, removed a Japanese newspaper from his briefcase, placed his pocket watch on the table, …

"Take Every Good": A Study Of The Hidden Trends In The Latter--Day Saint Indian Placement Program, Annie Penrod Walker

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The Latter-day Saint Indian Placement Program unofficially started in 1947 when a seventeen-year-old Navajo girl named Helen John was harvesting sugar beets with her family in Richfield, Utah. Helen had been attending school on the Navajo reservation in Arizona for years, but that summer her father told her that once they returned to the reservation she would have to stay home and work, allowing her younger siblings to have a turn at school. Upset and disappointed, Helen ran off in tears and was overheard by Amy Avery, the wife of the farmer Helen's family was working for. Helen revealed her …

An Enduring Force: The Photography Of Laura Gilpin Among The Twentieth-Century Navajo, Carlyle Schmollinger

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

While some artisits travel the world in search of inspiration, Laura

Gilpin found hers in the arid, desert landscape of the southwestern United States. Gilpin had an affinity for the Navajo. In 1968, eleven years before her death, she published the first edition of her seminal work, The Enduring Navajo. A feat in its own right, the collection of photographs and accompanying text was the product of many years spent among the peoples located in the Southwest region of the United States. In the epilogue to her book, Gilpin boldly proclaims her love of the Navajo when talking about the …

"The End Is Near": Pop Culture Adaptations Of Premillennial Themes, Kelsey Samuelsen

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

March 1997: Thirty-nine people poison themselves, committing suicide in order to board an alien space ship allegedly trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet. December 2009: A fa iled cure for cancer sparks a pandemic which immediately kills most of the population and leaves the rest ravaged and cannibalistic. January 2000: The turn of the century threatens to crash the world's computers, wreaking havoc on civilized society. These scenarios, a mixture of fabricated and factual, represent the variety of apocalyptic myths in American culture. The popularity of end-of-the-world themes has risen in recent years. Numerous depictions of such events in well-known books, films, …

"Damn The Tyrant's Cause!": Primary Source Analysis Of The Morris Family Letters From 1829 To 1846, Lark Plessinger

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

From 1829 to 1846, members of the Morris family wrote a series of letters to their brother Jonathan Morris, who remained in Chorley, England, regarding their experiences immigrating to America. This set of letters only includes the correspondence addressed to Jonathan, but it still provides valuable insights about this transitional, frontier period of American history as witnessed by the Morris family. By analyzing the different concerns voiced in these letters, the social, economic, and political world of those who immigrated to nineteenth-century Ohio comes to life.

Contradictions Among The People: Mao Zedong And The Aims Of The Hundred Flowers Policy, Cameron C. Nielsen

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

As the year 1956 dawned, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was at a crossroads. After a mere six years in power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had successfully consolidated its control of mainland China, stabilized and reformed the economy, won the hearts of the peasants through land redistribution, fought the United States to a standstill in Korea, and silenced dissent through re-education campaigns. However, questions began to arise over where to go from there. To the surprise of many, at this moment of the Party's uncertainty, Mao Zedong began to push for greater openness to critical voices. Known as …

Masonic Motifs In Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, Bradley Kime

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In Roald Dahl's classic story, Charlie Bucket is one of five lucky children allowed to tour Willy Wonka's mysterious chocolate factory. The tour is designed to test the character and integrity of each child. Ultimately only Charlie proves his virtue and commitment to keeping the secrets of the factory, while the tour itself reveals the character flaws of the other four children. Charlie's reward is to learn all of Wonka's "most precious candy-making secrets" and to eventually preserve and operate the factory as the candy-maker's heir.

Reed Smoot And The League Of Nations: Duty To Church And Party, Brandon Hellewell

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Senator Reed Smoot (R-UT) lived his life with two great devotions, the Republican Party and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1919, he held high positions in both. At that time, and in his seventeenth year as a senator, Smoot served as a member of the Senate Finance Committee. He also served as an Apostle of the LDS Church. These two parts of Smoot's life created tensions at several junctures, including 1919 when the Republican Party and LDS Church took opposing sides in the battle over United States membership in the League of Nations. The Church supported …

Changes In German Holocaust Memorials, Stephanie Bergeson

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Since World War II, Holocaust memorials have been built in many countries for a variety of reasons. Many memorials have been erected as places to remember and mourn the loss of those who were its victims. Some are built mainly to raise difficu lt but important moral and ethical questions in a world of increasing globalization and relativism. Others have been built to distance a country's association with the Holocaust and the Nazi government. Still others, as was the case with early Holocaust memorials in West Germany, were built in an attempt to forget or bury the past.

Preface, Joseph Seeley

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The Ancient Chineases Philosopher Confucius once said, "I was not born to wisdom: I loved the past, and sought it earnestly there." Though many students of history would agree with this Eastern sage about the benefits of seeking wisdom in the past, in an era where information is often conveyed in thirty minute episodes and 140-charactcr tweets, the meticulous study of the past preferred by both Confucius and BYU history majors may seem as dated as the figures and events they research.

Front Matter

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Preserving The Uncrawlable: Serving The Server, Andrew Mcdonnell

Library Presentations

Many of the challenges inherent in archiving dynamic web content revolve around the capture and playback of ever-evolving social media sites. However, older dynamic web content that has ceased to evolve continues to elude the tools and conventions most widely available to web archivists. This presentation will share work conducted to preserve an online digital humanities project that defied preservation via Archive-It and other crawler-based web archiving tools. The presentation will, moreover, offer an exploration of alternative options for web archivists struggling to preserve sites dependent on server-side processes for their essential functionality.

Suda On Line is a collaborative digital …

The Learned Gentlemen With The Copies Of Blackstone: Law And Power In Moby-Dick And Blood Meridian?, David Salzillo '24

History & Classics Student Scholarship

David Salzillo ’24, American Studies and History major

From Never Enough To Nothing At All: An Investigation Of Political Commentary In Euripides' Medea, Eleanor Clark

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

When studying the plays of Euripides, scholars have often focused on the playwright’s social commentary while paying less attention to the relationship between the plays’ plots and the political environment in Greece at the time of their production. Furthermore, although many of Euripides’ plays have been identified as referencing contemporary political events, scholars have made no such assertions regarding the Medea. Through an examination of Euripides’ Medea and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, this study seeks to address this gap in scholarship by taking into account the political context at the time which it was written and first produced. …

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Ai-Ghazali's Deliverance From Error And Mormonism, Jade Stocks

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In the Doctrine and Covenants, we are encouraged to "Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom." While this recommendation comes from Mormon scripture, no group or individual has a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge-these "best books" clearly include works by those of other faiths. One of history's most prominent religious writers is Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, who studied and wrote during the uoos on many topics, including the relationship between religion and the various forms of science. In his thesis Deliverance from Error, Al-Ghazali proposes that there are three levels of knowledge, each more concrete than …

Beeman, Richard. Plain, Honest Men: The Making Of The American Constitution, Garrett Nagaishi

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In the twenty-first century America, it is nearly impossible to open a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing talk of "Constitutional rights." But what did the Founding Fathers think about rights? What would Thomas Jefferson or James Madison say about the state of American political affairs today? Beeman's exhaustive analysis of the 1787 Constitutional Convention attempts to answer these questions. Beeman asks the reader to set aside long-held preconceptions of the founding of the United States and journey through the four-month assembly that constructed a nation from the rubble of the American Revolution. This book marks not only …

Memories In Stone: Family History Research In The Western Pyrenees, Paul Woodbury

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

I stood in a small grove of trees, which afforded a respite from the misty rain. Streams of fog crept along the valley walls and covered the village of Aydius in foamy white waves. I admired the engravings decorating the lchante household- the heartfelt expression of a peasant farmer and shepherd. I would never have imagined that my internship and study abroad would culminate here, reading my ancestor's memoirs chiseled in stone. Yet here I was, thousands of miles from home, alone in a foreign country, away from the pristine comfort of the regional archives, reading Joseph lchante's legacy carved …

The Other American Revolution: Catalyzing The Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom, Amberlee Hansen

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The American colonies were on the verge of revolution and the Commonwealth of Virginia was in turmoil, but the John and Elizabeth Semple family in King and Queen County, Virginia, had reason to celebrate. On that day they welcomed the family's youngest son, Robert Baylor Semple, into the world. As his mother lovingly examined his tiny features, myriad thoughts may have run through her mind-thoughts about her child's future in a world that seemed so politically uncertain. There would still be peace in the American colonies for several more years before the political explosion of revolution rocked the colonies, but …

"Many Hearts Yet Beat With The Hurt Of A Wounded Past:" Miss Indian Byu, Lamanite Identities, And The Subversive Potential Of Pageants, Jennifer Duque

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The theme of Brigham Young University's 1972 Indian week, an annual event set apart for Native guest speakers, Lamanite Generation performances, and the Miss Indian BYU pageant, was "New IndianNew Commitments." This might have well been the theme of Mormonism's oft-ambivalent relationship with Native Americans. The "new Indian" that the Mormon leadership celebrated was "modernized," "civilized," and, of course, Mormonized. The Miss Indian BYU pageant provides a compelling site in which to investigate the tension between new and old, the contemporary and the traditional. Although Miss Indian BYU existed within an oppressive neocolonial framework, it is reductive to see the …