History Commons^™

The Albigensian Crusade: The Intersection Of Religious And Political Authority In Languedoc (1209-1218), Alexis Nunn

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The Albigensian Crusade saw religious goals conflict with political realities in Languedoc as crusaders attempted to establish secular and religious authority in a region that saw the crusade as a war of aggression rather than one of religious reformation.

Religious Archives And The Postmodern Perspective, Molly Malone

Graduate Student Symposium

What is postmodernism? How can this perspective be used to analyze religious archives, records and archivists in the United States during the 21st century? What can other countries, such as Italy and Russia, reveal about the socio-political conditions surrounding religion and its archival record? And how can these situations be compared to the United States?

These are the main questions I address in my research on religious archival records. Religions have always supported long traditions of record keeping, some dating all the way back to ancient times. My purpose is to understand the postmodern perspective on religion and critique Enlightenment …

A New Look At The Constitutional Convention And State Ratifying Conventions: How Reason And Interest Played A Role, Nicole Carroll

Western Libraries Undergraduate Research Award

Although there have been amendments added over time, we continue to follow the foundation laid out in the Constitution over 200 years ago. However, there currently remains disagreement among scholars over the motivation behind decisions made during both the Constitutional Convention and the State Ratifying Conventions. Some scholars argue that the Constitution was the final result of thoughtful deliberation in which reason and principle prevailed. Other scholars suggest that reason had little to do with the Convention and both individual and state interests drove the decisions that were made. Some scholars come in with a third point of view, but …

Between Lake Baikal And The Baltic Sea: Genomic History Of The Gateway To Europe, Petr Triska, Nikolay Chekanov, Vadim Stepanov, Edward J. Vajda, Elza K. Khusnutdinova, Ganesh Prasad Arun Kumar, Belyaev Conference, 2017

Modern & Classical Languages

Background: The history of human populations occupying the plains and mountain ridges separating Europe from Asia has been eventful, as these natural obstacles were crossed westward by multiple waves of Turkic and Uralic speaking migrants as well as eastward by Europeans. Unfortunately, the material records of history of this region are not dense enough to reconstruct details of population history. These considerations stimulate growing interest to obtain a genetic picture of the demographic history of migrations and admixture in Northern Eurasia.

Results: We genotyped and analyzed 1076 individuals from 30 populations with geographical coverage spanning from Baltic Sea to Baikal …

More Than Faith: Latter-Day Saint Women As Politically Aware And Active Americans, 1830-1860, Kim M. (Kim Michaelle) Davidson

WWU Graduate School Collection

I explore the political ideology and activity of female members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from 1830 to 1860. Looking at personal sources such as diaries, letters, and poetry, this study posits Mormon women as intellectually active, politically engaged, and culturally aware in addition to religiously devout. This thesis first examines the ways in which early LDS women exhibited Democratic political ideology in the ways in which they viewed themselves and the ways in which they viewed the world around them. Looking at concepts such as “common woman” ideology, producerism, freedom rhetoric, Mormon-American exceptionalism, and Manifest …

A Malleable Strength: The Formation Of Jewish Identity In Response To Imperialism In Antiquity, Abigail L. (Abigail Lynn) Russell

WWU Graduate School Collection

In this project I argue for a diachronic approach to Jewish identity that takes into account their experiences as imperial subjects under the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Seleucid Empires. By looking at how the Jews engaged with imperialism and identity as a process that spans these different imperial regimes, we can construct a clearer image of Jewish identity in antiquity.

I argue that Jewish identity must be examined as an ongoing process that was aided by literature and propelled by imperialism. Their identity as Jews was centered on one key idea: a separateness from others that was based in a …

Rethinking The “Ghetto Synthesis”: Problems And Prospects In The Black Metropolis, Brent Gaspaire

WWU Graduate School Collection

This thesis seeks to document the combination of explicit and structural factors which created and still continue to create adversarial conditions for inner-city African Americans. In the process, it considers the utility of the word “ghetto” as a descriptive term and more broadly as an analytical framework. Throughout the twentieth century there were numerous factors working throughout the United States to consign African Americans to an inferior socio-economic position. Consequently, this thesis suggests that poverty in low-income African American neighborhoods as well as the continued persistence of residential segregation across the U.S. is the result of conscious policy choices and …