History Commons^™

The Forgotten Heroes Of Postman’S Park, John Price

Heroism Science

The Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park contains fifty-three memorial tablets, each dedicated to an act of life-risking bravery, undertaken by an otherwise ordinary individual, largely in the course of their everyday life, and within commonplace surroundings. The memorial’s creator, G. F. Watts, was a pivotal figure in the conception and promotion of the idea of ‘everyday’ heroism in Britain. Where he led, others followed. On this basis, the Watts Memorial has come to inform our understanding of how everyday heroism as a concept was constructed. Further research has now identified eighty-four individuals who were intended for commemoration …

The Grizzly, February 20, 2025, Kate Horan, Sidney Belleroche, Renee Washart, Claudia Tracy, Adam Denn, Ashley Adam

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Sigma Gamma Rho: Semester of Service • The UC Tonight Modern Band • BearShare Now Open! • After the Career Fair: Checklist • Bird is the Word! • El Gordo Bros: Adding Flavor to Collegeville • Opinions: Bear-Bones • Ursinus Swimming Set for Championships! • A Wonderful Weekend of Sports: February 15-16th

The Grizzly, February 13, 2025, Kate Horan, Sidney Belleroche, Renee Washart, Nathaniel Nerone, Claudia Tracy, Emily Veasey, Hadley Whitman, Jesse Cherone

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

The Launch of Soulful Creations • Annual UC Career Fair Coming Soon! • CIE Syllabus Change Proposals • Professor Pairs • Behind Their Doors: Meet the New Staff of Ursinus • Valentine's Day: Friend or Foe? • Shattering Limits: Bears Break School Records • Basketball Bears Push Towards Playoffs!

Common Threads In Monsters Across Time And Space, Jade Gladue

CAFE Symposium 2025

Fear is an undeniable human emotion, and monsters have always been a way for human societies to grapple with and explain our fears. In this project, common aspects and groupings of monsters across different indigenous cultures and folklores are discussed and dissected to determine inherent human reactions to fear. The project identifies and analyzes types of monsters and what the hidden meaning behind the existence and endurance of these creatures might be.

Four Nations Hockey, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

The Four Nations Hockey Tournament begins today. The National Hockey League and two television networks are touting this as a matchup as the best-on-best of Hockey. Of course, it is not. It is the best hockey players in the National Hockey League from four countries. The four are Canada, Sweden, Finland, and The United States.

“These Are Not Ordinary Criminals!” The First War Crimes Trial At The People's Tribunal And Its Implications In Post-Holocaust Romania, Stefan Cristian Ionescu

History Faculty Articles and Research

This article examines the neglected war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators that took place at the People's Tribunal in early postwar Romania, focusing especially on the first trial (the “Macici group”). The article shows that in spite of the political interferences by the new pro-communist regime and the USSR, the Macici group trial in particular, and the first war crimes trials in general, were not Stalinist show trials or fake trials and they sentenced real war criminals and accurately captured Romania's participation in the Holocaust. Unlike the Antonescu group trial – that indicted the former pro-Nazi dictator and his closest …

Weeding Out Dishonesty: Rhetoric And Information Literacy For The Age Of Disinformation, Victoria M. Tischio

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

We live in what some call a post-fact world where what is presented as true becomes true and circulates widely. Politicians lie because they have calculated that they gain more than they lose, and media outlets repeat those lies because they profit from them (Adair 2024). Fear and suspicion make individuals vulnerable to these lies (Young 2017). Like an invasive species, it is nearly impossible to eradicate these lies once released into the media ecosystem. While fake news is not new (think P.T. Barnum and 17th-century canards), its virulence has reached epidemic proportions, infiltrating all aspects of society. This constitutes …

Super Bowl, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

In the beginning, it was no larger than a snowflake. Then, it grew to the size of a snowball. Within a few years, it resembled a Midwest snowstorm. Now, it is nothing short of an avalanche.

Deuce Redemption: Grindhouse Cinema, Moral Panic, And Urban Renewal, Robert Brenner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you consult standard histories of the “redevelopment” of 42^nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, AKA “the Deuce,” you will read that it was filled with nothing but criminals and pornographers, that decent people avoided it at all costs, and the only way the block could be “saved” was by seizing it via eminent domain, evicting all the current tenants, and replacing them with Disney and its fellow entertainment corporations.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a more nuanced alternative to these standard histories. I will argue that the Deuce was a lower-class, multiracial, queer entertainment …

Building A Global Partnership Through A Shared History, Lisa Lacross, Shawn Dillard, Bri Ard, Kern Jackson

International Journal of Transformative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Effective global partnerships in higher education promote intercultural awareness (Delong et al., 2011) and influence future study and work abroad experiences by articulating the value of global learning (Lewin, 2009). Seeking to broaden global engagement opportunities for minoritized students, specifically African Americans, one institution developed a virtual exchange program through a global partnership of stakeholders from Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cape Verde, and the United States. Grounded in a shared history of the 2019 discovery of the last reported ship to bring enslaved West Africans to the United States, students from Mobile, Alabama and Cotonou, Benin participated in virtual discussions that …

Gone With The Wind: The Confederacy's Trojan Horse, Skyler J. Shipp

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper analyzes the film Gone with the Wind as a piece of Southern nationalist propaganda. This includes an exploration of the earlier Southern nationalist film Birth of a Nation, as well as a comparison to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. In my analysis of Gone with the Wind’s production process, including memos between producer David O. Selznick and other members of the production team, I find that Selznick maintained tight control over the film’s production and was extremely concerned with maintaining positive publicity for his film. This led him to allow a few seemingly progressive …

Sugar, Spice, And Everything Nice: Sweets As A Communicator Of Power And Wealth In Early Modern Spain, Liam Rafaty

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

What makes a luxury good so valued among the elite? How is luxury defined? This paper examines sugar and the value placed on sweet treats in early 17th-century Spain when sugar was a prized, expensive good among the elite. The 1611 cookbook by royal chef Francisco Martínez Montiño draws attention to this through the popularity of sweet goods, the portion sizes of the recipes, and the emphasis on sweet treats being served at gatherings, and the 1747 recipe book written by the head pastry chef for the Spanish crown Juan de la Mata provides an interesting contrast as sugar’s availability …

Restitution Of Jewish Property In Northern Transylvania During The Early Postwar Years, Stefan Cristian Ionescu

History Faculty Articles and Research

The restitution of Jewish property in the multiethnic region of Northern Transylvania faced numerous challenges during the first post-Holocaust years as a result of the complicated wartime history, postwar demographics, legal status, interethnic dynamics, and occasional violence. Having the lowest rate of survival among all Jewish communities in Romania, most of the region’s Jews died during the deportation and did not return to their native places to claim their properties. This impacted the extent of restitution of individual private property. Some of the Aryanized property was restituted to the Jewish survivors or their heirs because the wartime beneficiaries fled the …

The Growing Rift Between Holocaust Scholars Over Israel/Palestine, Shira Klein

History Faculty Articles and Research

"A chasm has formed between Holocaust scholars concerning Israel/Palestine, deepening immeasurably since 7 October 2023. Unlike previous controversies in the field, the divide is not just historical or methodological; it revolves around academics’ role in the world today, particularly the public stand they choose to take on Palestine/Israel and Zionism. Two main camps have formed. Put reductively, one camp defends Israel, while the other defends Palestinians, although differences between individual scholars within each camp make for more of a spectrum than a clear-cut divide. How, despite a diversity of ideas and foci within each camp, did two academic-political antipodes solidify …

Eisenhower, Wilson, And Professional Baseball In Kansas, Revised, Mark E. Eberle

Monographs

Ever since General Dwight David Eisenhower mentioned in 1945 that he had played professional baseball under the pseudonym Wilson sometime after his 1909 graduation from Abilene High School, there have been attempts to document this assertion. Yet, he offered little detail for researchers to follow, not even the team or year. If true, however, it has been speculated this would have made him ineligible for intercollegiate competition in 1911–1915 while he attended the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, where he played on the football team. Thus, interest in the story has persisted. Newspaper accounts of baseball mention …

Issue No. 122: Spring 2025

La Crónica de Nuevo México

2 A Letter from the President

3 Conejos Indian Agency, 1862-1864: Agent Lafayette Head’s Ute, Military and Civilian Problems by Virginia Sánchez

10 Five Remarkable Women of Lea County, New Mexico’s Little Texas Frontier by Jim Harris

15 Donaciano Vigil Maurilio E. Vigil and Helene Boudreau

19 Jewish Community in Las Vegas Reclaimed Historic Temple Montefiore by Dianne Layden

22 New Books

23 HSNM Remembers

Down The Bay Oral History Project Newsletter - Winter 2025, Center For Archaeological Studies, Mccall Library

Down the Bay Oral History Project Newsletter

Public newsletter sharing information about progress and discoveries during the Down The Bay Project.

This Land Isn’T My Land: How Canonical Literature Has Shaped Representation In The Outdoors, Claire Himmel

American Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

River Flowing Through: Lost River Cave And Its Community, Elizabeth Coleman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Lost River Cave and Valley is a popular tourist attraction in Bowling Green, Kentucky, that also holds historical significance and importance to the local community. The Cave and Valley have functioned as a business, place of leisure, green space, and place of work for over 200 years. This thesis will explore the different ways that humans and non-humans have worked together to create a sense of place in this natural space. This will be accomplished utilizing “assemblage” theory from the discipline of philosophy. These assemblages will be made up of oral history interviews completed in 1999, one from 2009, and …

Supplementary Materials To "Preindustrial Inequality In Mexico", Amilcar Challú, Israel García Solares, Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato

History Faculty Publications

Supplementary material to "Preindustrial Inequality in Mexico" by Amílcar Challú, Israel García Solares, Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato, in Preindustrial Inequality in Latin America, edited by María Inés Moraes and Amílcar E. Challú (Routledge, forthcoming 2026).

Issue No. 123: Fall 2025

La Crónica de Nuevo México

Table of Contents

2 A Letter from the President

3 La Bajada: A nightmare for Model Ts and trepid tourists by Richard Melzer

10 Naming Las Cruces and Mesilla: First recorded European presence in the Mesilla Valley by C. W. “Buddy” Ritter

15 Love it or Lea it: A county named for the father of Roswell by Jim Harris

18 Corona just keeps on booming by Sherry Robinson

23 New Mexico History Museum: Active partner in education by Neil Dodge

27 New Books

Decolonizing Health In Madagascar: A Francophone Perspective, Delaney K. Brenner

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

Complexity Machines: New Histories Of North American Automobile Production, 1900-1950s, Kevin A. Moskowitz

History Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation examines the design and manufacture of the mass-produced automobile in North America from its inception at the start of the twentieth century through the height of production in the late 1950s. This network of producers constituted the single largest industry in North America. The success of this market required producing a product that was desirable to consumers in design, affordable to purchase, and could be built in high enough quantities to justify the realignment of the rest of North American society to serve this new method of transportation. This dissertation is a shift away from demand studies concerned …

A Song Of Soil And Seeds: The Delicious History Of Tunisian Grain Agriculture And Its Solution To Contemporary Food Scarcity., Ella Schonberger

Scripps Senior Theses

“A Song of Soil and Seeds: The Delicious History of Tunisian Cereal Agriculture and Its Solution to Contemporary Food Scarcity” by Ella Schonberger explores the history of Tunisian grain agriculture as a continuous narrative of adaptation, resilience, and colonial disruption. This thesis traces the historical journey of Tunisian grain agriculture, from its indigenous Amazigh roots through successive waves of Roman, Ottoman, and French agro-colonialism, to the environmental and agricultural pressures of the Green Revolution and today’s climate crisis.

Combining archaeological evidence, historical records, agronomic research, oral interviews, and firsthand culinary experimentation, this paper examines how Tunisia’s heirloom grains—sorghum, millet, and …

Iii.A.2 Displacement & Barriers To Home Ownership, Kim Rostan, Bria Harper, Jim Neighbors, Mark Byrnes

Crafting Democratic Futures

This document explains how systemic racism and discriminatory policies from the Civil War & Reconstruction period through the 20th century prevented African Americans in Spartanburg from building wealth through land ownership and home equity. It details barriers such as Black Codes, sharecropping, convict leasing, exclusion from New Deal programs, discriminatory housing policies, and urban renewal projects that displaced Black neighborhoods without providing equitable opportunities for economic advancement.

Silent Testimonies: The Global Evolution Of Grave Marker Art And Meaning, Erik Culley

Bakerman Student Research Awards

Grave markers are more than simple memorials; they are meaningful cultural objects that reflect how societies understand death, identity, belief, class, and community values. The size, material, decoration, and inscriptions of gravestones change over time in response to economic conditions, religious beliefs, social structures, and consumer culture. By studying grave markers across different regions and historical periods—such as early modern Europe, nineteenth-century Germany, and immigrant cemeteries in Australia—archaeologists can trace broader cultural transformations. Research shows that the rise of external grave markers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was closely tied to increased material consumption and a growing emphasis on …

Justice And Restitution In Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives And Communities, 1944-1950, Stefan Cristian Ionescu

History Faculty Books and Book Chapters

On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short term restitution. However, from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations which dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and many businesses were lost …

“Off To Greek Camp”: A History And Examination Of Greek America And Its Adaptation Of American Summer Camp Culture, Julia J. Walsh

Honors Theses

Camps are one of the most distinct institutions of American childhood, offering children a place to socialize and explore their identities. Since the late 19th century, camps have been used to inspire religious, social, and ethnic identity. Extensive research has been done into some kinds of summer camps, this thesis attempts to add to this literature through analysis of Greek Orthodox Summer Camp programs run under the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (The Metropolis of Boston Camp and Ionian Village). This dissertation examines the role of the modern religious summer camp in building and maintaining Greek American and Greek Orthodox …

Mortal Rivers: A Case Study Analysis Of Indigenous Water Sovereignty Within The Penobscot And Lakota Nations, 19th Century To Present, Moya S. Stringer

Honors Theses

Indigenous water sovereignty has long been a contested problem within the continent of Turtle Island. In 2016, the Lakota Nation globalized the message Water is Life through their movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil infrastructure that would put one of the continent’s largest watersheds at risk. The revolutionary fervor of the Water is Life movement travelled all the way to the Penobscot Nation in the Dawnland, a place we now call Maine. In an adjacent vein to the Lakota, the Penobscot people have spent the 21st century addressing damming projects and rampant pollution from the 1900s in a …

Asian American Navigation In Higher Education: Do We Belong At Colby College?, Amanda Rose Alpert

Honors Theses

This thesis explores how Asian American students navigate their belonging at Predominantly White Institutions (PWI), specifically a case study at the higher educational institution Colby College. In understanding how Asian American students navigate the spaces around them, this thesis dives into the history of Asian immigration to the U.S., the Asian American politicized label, and the different diasporas and cultural nuances Asian Americans experience that make up the complicated, diverse, and misunderstood label. Through exploring global racializations of Asian bodies and legacies of Western imperialism and colonialism, this gives a basis of how Asian Americans understand themselves as persons living …