history 400 theses

Link to archives of past presentation posters; also linked below under the appropriate semester header from 2020-.

History majors write an original piece of historical scholarship, based in research in primary and secondary sources, in their senior year as a capstone. All along in our courses—perhaps in a 100-elevel survey, and then in History 200 and upper-division courses—our students learn not only to take in history, but to question it, and form their own interpretations based on sources and critical analysis. History is not said and done; it is always being remade, as we ask different questions of the past and hold up old or original sources to new light. Students become scholars who become historians in their own right. And in History 400—as you can see by taking a look at some of the theses linked below, on a great variety of topics, delving into the past all over the world and looking at it from a variety of angles—Puget Sound historians get to spread their wings and take in the lay of the land of a place and time of their choosing. Each in their own way, they show us something new and wondrous through the historical perspective they develop in their research and writing.

Note: This archive of History 400 theses represents the work of many history majors over the years, and only for the sections in which Doug Sackman was the instructor. It is incomplete (and some links were lost when the university changed its website); if you wrote a history 400 thesis with, but don't see your name or paper linked below, feel free to send me a copy and I will post it. 

° For Puget Sound Historians:  Here are some journals that publish undergraduate research in History. Students who have written history theses are encouraged to browse this list and consider submitting their research for potential publications. 

Journals that Publish Undergraduate Research

Fall 2024 [presentation poster above]

Carina Bunch, Scattered: The War Relocation Authority’s Role in Japanese American Displacement During the Resettlement Era, 1943-1945

Ben Kaufmann, Scattered Sparks: Survival Strategies in the Post-World War Two American Jewish Community

Charlotte Levine, Black Identity and the Origin of Man: How the Nation of Islam Mirrored Eugenics and Science

to Empower Black Identity between 1930-1975

Mattias Mulchi, We Insist!: Max Roach’s Musical Politics and the Effort to Reclaim Jazz as a Black Space

Emmet O’Connor, Three Birds With One Stone: The FBI’s Attempted Hoodwinking of the Communists, the Unions, and the Mob

Alyssa Shane, Restitching History: Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts as Space-Makers for Black Women

Walter Stackler, Outsourcing Failure:Contractors, Construction, and Labor’s Last Gasp at WPPSS Nuclear Projects 3 & 5, 1979-1983

Nieve Whitehouse, ‘The dead... met their fates with wonderful bravery:’ The Relationship Between British Public Schools and the Military During the Great War

Fall 2023/Spring 2024

• Isabella Rodriguez, Picturing Mid-Century Butches and Femmes: a history of fashion, sexuality, and gender 

• Claire Keppler, The Trial of the Warrior Woman Unearthing Gender Bias in the Scholarship of the Viking Age

• Jamie Garity, The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker: A Deeper Look into Quaker Philadelphia and Quaker Ideals

• Skylar Reynolds, A Shattered Mirror: How Woodstock 1999 reflected the 30 years that changed the music and

audience to spread chaos instead of love

• Patch Gleason, Beyond the Law: Protest, Police, and Terrorism in Atlanta

• Ned Carlsen, The Machine Gun: A Weapon Like No Other

• Kuma Lenick, A Universe of Rats: John B Calhoun and The Rat Utopia 

• Aaron Walter, Unethical Business Practices and the Great Recession 

Spring 2023

• Connor McDaniel, Coast Salish Myth: Practice, Place, and Change

• Lauren Moseman, How the Tallest Stack in the World becomes Buried in History:
  Landscape Transformation in Ruston WA

• Jessamyn Navis, Naturalizing the Plant-Based Diet: Primitivism & Appropriation within American Vegetarianism 

• Matthew Babor, America’s Craft Beer Revolution and Regional Consciousness in the PNW

• Rocio Guevara Perez, The Two Heads of Joaquin Murieta: Representations of a Mexican Bandit and Folk Hero Maia King Cayere, Puerto Rican Anti-Colonial Resistance in the 1950s

• Chris Beyer, Power and Pedagogy: Education in Japanese American Incarceration Camps

• Maddy Hadden, Well Manicured: Vietnamese American Nail Workers in the 21st Century

• Jack Schnider, A New Irish Battleground: the Struggle over Irish Identity in 19th Century America 

• Brian McMurray, Ran Low on Supplies: an Investigation on Food and Culture During Sieges 

• Neil Griffin, Podcasting History 

Fall 2022

• Cameron Nielsen, Crimping in Portland and how it was Remembered

• Ryan Carruth, Assimilation or Preservation: Indigenous Athletes at the Carlisle Boarding School

• Peter Fagan, Major League Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption and Its Consequences on Player Labor Standards

• Theo Bauman, From the L.A. Riots of 1992 to 2020’s Say Their Names movement: Lack of accountability for racially biased crimes committed by state officers and how it directly fuels social unrest

• Imani Jenkins, Re-thinking Narratives: The Images of Black Saint Maurice

• Audrey Reiss, L'Opéra-Comédie et Les Maisons de Débauche: Prostitution and Power in Mid-18th Century Paris

• Ari Zansberg, This is a Survivor: The Life of Harry Zansberg and other Holocaust Survivors, 1945-48

• Carolynn Davies, Fermenting Freedom: The Silenced Battle Between Women’s Banned Beer Brewing and the South African Apartheid State in the Western Cape between 1960 and 1980

• Alex Elmore, T-34: Myth, Legend, or Just a Tank 

• Chloe Shankland, Cracks in the Foundation: Queerness in the Liminality of Literary Castle Space

Spring 2022

• Olivia Babcock, Anomaly to Troublemaker: Understanding the role of an Indian Woman in uMkhonto we Sizwe

• Teddy Carbone, Catch 22: The Gender Dilemma of the Modern Roman Catholic Church

• Ernestina Savage, The Gendered Cocktail of Postwar America 

• Maija Petterson, Women and Weaving: Native California  Baskets and the Power of Healing

• Corey Richardson, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act: Pausing the Imperial Process

• Mimi Duncan, Black Women Reclaiming the White Wilderness

• Sam Baker, Post-War Blues and the Resurrection of Mythic Nationalism: Post-Vietnam War films and their reflections of American culture.

• Aria Goodman, Perpetuating Fear of the Other: How the Patriot Act Spread Intolerance After 9/11  

fall 2021 

• • • Jesse Graves, The Grand Campaign to Sell a Lie: The Space Shuttle Program

    • Talia Ackerman Hirsh, Becoming White and the Beachwood Bubble: a Bird’s Eye View of American Jews’ Journey to Suburbia ​

    • Samuel Kaufman, In the Strongholds of Our Hearts: Classifying Self-Help in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Oneg Sabbath Archive as Acts of Multi-Dimensional  Resistance and Survival

    • Matt Roge, “Hungry in Three Languages”: (Un)Conscious Youth Efforts at Crossing Ethnonational Divisions in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

    •  Jack Rosoff, Tā Moko: Masculinity in Māori Tattoos during the Colonial Period (2021)

  fall 2020

• • • Matthew Mason Moser, The Social Drama of the Slansky Affair: Examining the Personal Convictions and Cultural Apprehensions that Made U.S. Clandestine Media Operations Ineffectual

    • Tim Kiesling, Why Save Private Ryan? Legitimizing American Empire for the Post-Cold War Era Through Film

    • Finn Kearney, Translating Faith and Philosophy: The Engagement of the Jesuit Strategy of Accommodation in Chinese Syncretic and Anti-Heterodox Traditions and the Reception of Chinese Ideas in Europe

    • Alexander Jacobson, PROTO-NATIONALISM IN SCANDINAVIA: SWEDISH STATE BUILDING IN THE MIDDLE AGES

    • Meredith Folensbee, The Man on the Other Line: Personality, Presidency, and Paradox through the Voices of  Lyndon B. Johnson and Dean Rusk

    • Esther DelliQuadri, Landscaping Memory: Exploring Germany’s Memorialization of the Holocaust

    • Rowan Coates, Power Dynamics and Decolonization: Understanding Native Representation in the Pacific Northwest

    • Eva Baylin, Sewing Style and Fashioning Identities: Stories and Stereotypes of the Young Jewish Immigrant Women Working in New York City’s Garment Industry Around the Turn of the Twentieth Century

spring 2020

• Ian Thorne (2020), “Get Hyphy”: An analysis of Bay Area Immigration History through Bay Area Hip Hop

• Olive Mullen (2020), Threads of Imperialism: Knowledge Production and Identity in American Quilts 

• Priyanki Vora (2020), Ayurveda in The Face of Globalized Medicine: The Place of Diagnostic Technology In a South Asian Medical Tradition

• Adelaide Beeman-White (2020), Finding Maria: Based on the 1893 Diary of Maria A. Cox

• Elan Bowman (2020), Narratives of Surveillance from Oakland to Vietnam: An Internationalist Study of American Policing During the Cold War

• Skyler Allen (2020), Walking a Tightrope Between East and West: Post-Cold War Ukraine, the United States-Russia Divide, and the Complexity of the Modern Ukrainian Situation

• Fran Leskover (2020), Becoming an American: The American Intelligence Service during the War for Independence and a Notion of Liminality 

earlier theses, 2015-2019 [with  links]

• Steven M. Malachowski  All You Knew: Twentieth Century Southern Appalachian Coal Miners and their Experience with Death and Danger,

• Julianna Christine Leach Memory Through Manga: Japanese Comic Book Representations of Mass Death in Hiroshima and World War II, (2018)

• • • Dusty Gorman,  The Committee Continues: Tacoma’s Anti-Chinese Committee of Fifteen, 1885-1895 (2019)

    • Nick Ehrhard, From Reich to Riches: German POWs and Their Great American Vacation (2019)

    • Lindsey Hunt, The Digital Locker Room: Insecurity and the Rise of Toxic Nerdy Masculinity on the Internet (2019)

    • Douglas Fournet, "I See Genocide": The Struggles of the Ponca nation to Reclaim Their City from Pollution (2018)

    • Erin Koehler,  “Unnatural Alliances”: White-Indigenous Marriages and Settler Colonialism on the Pacific Northwest Frontier (2018)

    • 2016: Peter Ellerkamp. The First Globalization: Portugal, the Age of Exploration, and Engaging the “Other” in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

    • 2016: Erica Thomas. Sanctuary Burning: The St. Brice’s Day Massacre and the Danes in England under Aethelred the Unready 

    • 2016: Corey Oken. Drogheda and Wexford: Cromwellian Massacres in Context

    • 2016: Steven Malachowski. All You Knew: Twentieth Century Southern Appalachian Coal Miners and their Experience with Death and Danger  

    • Ryan Guzman, “I’m the 82nd Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are going:” The Creation of the Elite 82nd Paratrooper Mentality in WWII (2015)

    • Danielle Penn, Occupy Alcatraz (2015)

    • Alex Plant, Woodrow Wilson the “Possessive” and Political Historian: Discovering an Identification with the American Founding (2015)

earlier theses, before 2015  [with  links]

• • • Alex Markey, La Migra, la Huelga, y la Raza: Deportation & the Boundaries of Race, Class, & Nation in the Depression-era Southwest (2013)

    • Tedra Hamel, Silencing Sacagawea: Eva Emery Dye & the Origin of an American Myth (2011)

    • Julia Miller,  “God Save Us Nelly Queens”: Religion and Homophile Activism in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, 1964 - 1968 (2011)

    • Rob Wellington, The Mourning After Columbine: Controversial Christian Commemoratives (2011)

    • Ayanna Drakos, Challenging How We Remember: Preparation and Practice of Black Teachers in Pre‐Brown Black Schools (2011)

    • Garner Andrews, “A Superior!Order!of!Red!Men”:!Constructing the Alaskan Native in Turn of the Century America (2011)

    • Kathleen Powers, When Hate Inhabits Space:The Aryan Nation’s use of Free Space in Idaho and the State’s Refusal to be defined by the White Power Movement (2011)

    • Micah Coleman Campbell,Morality, Piety, and Muscular Christianity: Lessons in Manliness from Mid-Nineteenth Century American Sunday School Books (2011)

    • Madeline Bailey, On the Fringes of Society:The Relationship between Mormon Settlers and Utah’s Native American tribes in relation to the Mountain Meadows Massacre (2011)

    • Kevin Curlett,  Witch Hunt in the Snow: Progressive Era Ideology in the Courts and Newspapers Following America’s Deadliest Avalanche (2011)

    • Sarah K. Jenson, Renaissance of the Western Man: How Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Became a Model for Masculinity 1883-1916 (2011)

    • Caitlin Barrow, "Sex, Lies, and Tenure": How The Trail Handled Scandal (2011)

    • Hallie Hoogland,Commercial Aviation, Women, and Celebrity: Exploring the Significance of the Lindberghs’ Good-Will Tour to Japan to the Emerging World of Commercial Aviation in the 1930s (2011)

    • Steffen Minner, Claiming Mount Tahoma (2011)

    • Katrine Nielsen, Understanding Army Advertising: Repairing the Divergence of American Liberalism and the Realities of Army Culture since the All-Volunteer Force (2011)

    • Glynnis Kirchmeier, The Problem of Legitimacy: How Public Health and Race Converged in Tacoma and the Skokomish Reservation, 1881-1885 (2009)

    • Jason Schumacher, From Condemnation to Accommodation: Changing American Perspectives on Slavery and the Creation of a Unified National Narrative through Textbooks, 1890-1940 (2009)

    • Maddy Ryen (2008) “Queer Passion for a Girl”: Media Coverage of the Alice Mitchell Trial and Changing Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Love

    • Nadine Leonard, Truly the Man of the Revolution: A Study in the Historical Treatment of Samuel Adams (2008)

    • Aimee Ono,  “Our Best Thoughts Bloom Forth”: Forming a Japanese American Community of Correspondents during World War II (2008).

    • Mieko Matsumoto, Speak Proper English!: Language and Power in Hawai‘i (2007)

    • Kyla Burnet [2007]Context versus Care: The Importance of Cultural Understanding in Native American Medicine

    • Kendra Bertschy [2007], Riding Jim Crow:The Pivotal Role of the Students in the Freedom Rides of 1961

    • Laura Stevenson, Nurture and Neglect: Mount Rainier National Park and Native American Relations (2004)

    • John Moore:  A Love Affair Gone Bad: Puget Sound and the Northern Pacific Railroad Company (2004)

Other theses (incomplete list; no links/links broken)

• Marq Schuling An Invading Army of Rockettes: How US Military Policy on Homosexuality and the Voyeurism of the Vietnam War Era Shaped the Gay Rights Movement, 1956-1969, 

•  Hope Schulman A Horrific Choice or Willing Complicity: Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany,

• Cole Souder Pop-Culture Politics: How Cable News Created the Tea Party, Trump, and a Fake Populist Movement, 

• Erik Evans, "We Were Conditioned to Work with Our Hands": Assimilation through Individualism and Vocational Training: An Attempt to Americanize Native Americans

• • • Jeanne Krenzer, Fly Me to the Moon: Space, race, and the American Dream  

    •  Hattie Lindsley,Viva Fiesta San Antonio: Race Plays a Part in 'the Sublime Memory of Glory and Pageantry'

    • Jennifer Miller, Destroying "The Path to Knowledge and the False University": Democratic Participation and Identity Assertion in the Chicano Education and Mural Movements

    • Jessica Murray, Traditional Silence to Political Activism: The Evolution of the Ideal First Lady

    • Max Honch: The Military-Industrial-Suburban Complex: The Race for Nuclear Arms and Nuclear Families in Southern California 

    • 2105: Charlie Bailey, Jewish Experiences on a Christian Frontier

    • 2016: Walden Dylan Nichol. “The Hand of God was Over the Battle-Line”: Conversion and the Definition of Catholic Identity Against a ‘Heathen’ Other in the Chronicles of Late Antiquity 

    • Joe Adamack [2007], Politics versus Convictions: Martin Van Buren, Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the Trials of Mutinous Slaves

    • Kainoa Correa, Voyaging into History: The Revival of Ancient Polynesian Voyaging

    • Sarah Brust, Mayhem, Misgivings, and the Macabre: Public Response to Serial Killers

    • Amanda Bevers:"Rosie the Riveter Goes West:The Mobilization and Migration of Women Workers During World War II"

    • Katie Carlson: "On Sacred Ground: The Political Origins and Cultural Outcomes of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, 1890 and 1973"

    • Hillary Dobson: Carving Western Identity: recreational skiing’s impact on western culture

    • Tiffany Dyer: Pesticides and the United Farm Workers:An Extension of the Struggle For Social Justice

    • Andi Gray: Supper on the Trail: The Significance of Food and Provisions in Early Western Travel

    • Josie Lomax: Propaganda and the Citizen in British Feature Films of World War II

    • Michael Read: In the Name of Progress: An Examination of Progressive Education at the Cushman Indian Trades School, 1870 – 1920

    • Aubrey Shelton: More than a meal: How the Western Washington fishing rights movement changed the Puyallup community

    • Robyn Wright: Finding A Sense of Place in Walla Walla: The Role of the Whitman Story in the Development of Walla Walla’s Community Identity