Embedded Files
Welcome to my Undergraduate History Research page! This page contains published work from my undergraduate studies at Manhattan College (August 2019 - May 2023), where I earned a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Studies with a concentration in African and Middle Eastern Studies. During this time, I developed a strong foundation in historical methodologies and engaged in extensive research, culminating in several publications and presentations. This early work allowed me to dabble in a variety of fields before I chose to pursue further research in North African history at the graduate level.
Photography, Identity, Power: William Henry Jackson and the American Colonial Gaze
Photography, Identity, Power: William Henry Jackson and the American Colonial Gaze
History Matters: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Research
Abstract: William Henry Jackson (1843 - 1942) was one of the most influential photographers of the American West during the nineteenth century. He worked for the United States Geological Survey, various railroad magnates, and his own studios, creating both ‘scientific’ and artistic images of Native Americans, landscapes, and development. This project pays special attention to how Jackson photographed and wrote about Native Americans, their interactions with the land, and white settlement through colonial and white gazes. The main theoretical framework for this project is Orientalism, the construction of Otherness particularly between the metropolitan West and peripheral East. Applying this lens to American studies shows how white Americans underwent the same process of treating peoples of the Americas as a primitive Other, facilitating the white settler-state in the American West. Through his photography, Jackson extensively cataloged Native American people and nations for the federal government, giving it the knowledge it needed to control, overtake, and exterminate an entire race. Similarly, Jackson contributed to the myth that Native Americans were a naturally vanishing race, easing fears of cultural and physical genocide, which advanced the exact same process. Finally, as a commercial photographer, Jackson advertised white tourism, settlement, and development in the region. Through both his photographs and writings as an ‘expert’ on Native Americans, William Henry Jackson Orientalized indigenous people as an important image, myth, and memory maker of the American West.
Click Citation to Read: Hollister, Reese. “Photography, Identity, Power: William Henry Jackson and the American Colonial Gaze.” History Matters: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Research 19 (May 2023): 39-96.
Japanese Peace and Soft Power: Osaka Expo ‘70 in the Cold War’s Space Race
Japanese Peace and Soft Power: Osaka Expo ‘70 in the Cold War’s Space Race
Colorado Journal of Asian Studies
Abstract: Japan relied on international events like Osaka Expo ‘70 to exhibit its technological soft power because the nation had no ability to showcase any offensive capabilities. Japan had little desire to proliferate nuclear weapons, so they exhibited their involvement in the Space Race. Japan entered the Space Race around the time of the fair, using space as a place to conduct paramilitary operations. War in the nuclear age became “war of technology,” where space technology was “at the cutting edge of ‘combat.’” This combat especially took place in the imagination with competing visions of a future in space. Osaka Expo ‘70 is useful towards understanding Japanese defense options in the 1970s because it symbolized their non-alignment within the Cold War. This phoenix continued to rise not with flames, but with jet propulsion.
Click Citation to Read: Hollister, Reese. “Japanese Peace and Soft Power: Osaka Expo ‘70 in the Cold War Space Race.” Colorado Journal of Asian Studies 10 (Summer 2023).
The Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History
Abstract: During the long process of decolonization in South Africa, the Sharpeville Massacre was a turning point for the African National Congress' decision to begin using violence for the internal resistance to apartheid. Nelson Mandela and the ANC reacted to the Sharpeville Massacre by shifting their methods to incorporate the practicality of anti-colonial violence. In his 1964 "I Am Prepared to Die" speech, Mandela acknowledged that peaceful resistance was met with brutal force, and this could not go on. The ANC continued its strong non-violent resistance while also developing a military wing and conducting sabotage. This essay brings into question the realities of non-violence in the face of violent oppression.
Click Citation to Read: Hollister, Reese. “The Sharpeville Massacre, Violence, and the Struggles of the African National Congress, 1960-1990.” The Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History 13, no. 1 (April 2023), 62-75.
Lenses, Focus, and Fluidity:
Lessons from Medieval Queer History
Lenses, Focus, and Fluidity:
Lessons from Medieval Queer History
The Gettysburg Historical Journal
Abstract: The Medieval era is sometimes overlooked within the field of Queer and Transgender History, but a recent shift in focus has revealed new discoveries and interpretations. This historiographical analysis posits that in the Middle Ages, gender and sexuality were much more fluid than previously believed.
Click Citation to Read: Hollister, Reese. “Lenses, Focus, Fluidity: Lessons From Medieval Queer History.” The Gettysburg Historical Journal 21 (August 2022), 45-62.
Postcolonial Museums and National Identity in Vietnam
Postcolonial Museums and National Identity in Vietnam
The Gettysburg Historical Journal
Abstract: Following the Vietnam Wars, the nation of Vietnam used museums to construct its identity for both national and international audiences. This paper first investigates the colonial origins of Vietnam's museum landscape, stemming from French ethnographic museums in colonial Indochina. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism then serves as the theoretical framework to understand Vietnamese nation's collective, historical memory of the French and American Wars. This paper concludes that the Vietnamese national identity is based on the shared trauma and socialist solidarity that arise from anti-colonial resistance. Museums both construct and preserve this national identity, and it leads Vietnamese nationals to imagine a community between space and time with people they may never meet.
Click Citation to Read: Hollister, Reese. “Postcolonial Museums and National Identity in Vietnam.” The Gettysburg Historical Journal 22 (Spring 2023): 105-23.
Political Myth and Malthus: Re-evaluating an Essay on the Principle of Population
Political Myth and Malthus: Re-evaluating an Essay on the Principle of Population
Hamilton Historical
Abstract: Robert Malthus’ 1803 Essay perpetuated multiple political myths about indigenous peoples, not because Malthus had malicious intent to speak about these people negatively, but because his views aligned comfortably with his greater society in metropolitan England. Whether the myth at hand was indigenous indolence, infanticide, or cannibalism, Mathus unconsciously supported them in his aim to create a universal human history where population was the solely important variable, similar to how his contemporary stadial theorists wrote their histories. Because his sources on indigenous peoples were popular, accepted, and respected in his society, Malthus’ discourse on indigenous peoples did not divert from his society’s norm. While Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population is no longer a reputable work of demography, it instead offers insight into how English society around the turn of the nineteenth-century viewed far-off people who lived in distant worlds.
Click Citation to Read: Hollister, Reese. “Political Myth and Malthus: Re-evaluating An Essay on the Principle of Population.” Hamilton Historical (May 2023): 12-17.
Page updated
Report abuse