Award-winning theses by history majors

Since 1992 the History Department faculty have awarded an annual prize for the best senior thesis in history. History students have also received the Edward A. White Award in American Studies or an award in their second (dual) major, such as Gender and Women’s Studies (now Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies).

Name Thesis
2013 Willa Oddleifson ‘A Façade of Most Exquisit Gallantry’: The French Educational Reforms of the Late Nineteenth Century and Their Impact on Women’s Education
Carolyn Angius The Concrete River: Industry, Race, and Green
Justice on the Banks of the Los Angeles River
2012 Marisa Mendoza Canciones del movimiento Chicano – Songs of the Chicano Movement: The Impact of Musical
Traditions on the 1960s Chicano Civil Rights Movement
2011 Julia Mebane Narratives of Conquest: Yosemite National Park and the American Construction of ‘Nature’
Joss Greene Irresponsibility, Deviance and ‘Bad Citizenship’: Interrogating Racial Hierarchy in Policy Discourse and HIV/AIDS Representation
Laura Nolan Storytelling, Dislocation, and Healing: Community-Led Responses to Displacement and Disaster, Katrina to the Present
2010 Zeenat Hassan The Black Menace: Why African Americans are Over-Represented in the California Prison Population
Anne Hershewe The Mississippi Citizens’ Council: Motivations and Justifications for Segregation, 1954-1964
2009 Jessica Butler Sexual Degeneracy in Nazi Germany: Tracing the Ideological Theory of Homosexuality from Medicalization to Persecution
Kyle Delbyck A New Frontier of Racial Discourse?: The Interplay between Hegemonic Racial Paradigms and Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign
Rebecca Fogel Loaded Images: Colonial Representation of Palistinian Women
Sarah Pripas From Mothers of the Republic to Citizens of the World: Hannah Bailey, Lucia Ames Mead, and American Women’s Pacifism in the Age of Imperialism
2008 Rachel McCullough The Spread Of The English-Speaking Peoples and the Brujo Afro-Cubano: Theodore Roosevelt, Fernando Ortiz, and the Imperial Science of Race
Sarah Young ‘Aping the men’ (Re)defining Woman : The Construction of Gender at Somerville College, Oxford 1879-1914
2007 Jessica Christian Movement in the Borderlands: Women, Gender, and Immigration in San Diego, California
2006 Kellin Crossman Pioneering Women: Los Angeles Clubwomen and the Growth of a Feminine Consciousness, 1875-1911
Anne O’Dowd Media, Class, and the State in Interwar Britain, 1919-1939
2005 Grace Magruder Epistolary Communication of Nationalism, Patriotism, and Identity in the Civil War
2004 Jawziya Farhat Zama Countering Official Narratives of Turkish Nationalism: The Memoirs of Halide Edib
2003 Rebecca Engle O Samizdate a Společnoski: The Problematics of Czechoslovak Dissent
2001 Linda C. Bassett ‘We the People?’: Representations of National identity in Federal Citizenship History Textbooks
Melinda Snarr Revolution Unveiled: Algerian Women in the War of National Liberation, 1954-1962
2000 Isela Gutierrez Origin and Development of the Black Student Movement at the Claremont Colleges: 1966-1969
1999 Sarah Woodman White Buffalo Calf Women: Lakota Women Enabling Survival and Adaptation
1997 Lynn Charles Resolving Nationalism and Socialism in the South African Context: The Ideology of the Communist party of South Africa, 1921-1954
Poppy Meier The Politics and Prejudice of Welfare Reform
1996 Nissa Perez The Insular Manuscript: A Comparative Study of the Lindisfame Gospels and The Book of Kells
Sarah Prehoda Undermining the Consensus Coalition: The Roots of the 1995 Welfare Reform Effort
Elizabeth Siebel Public Action and Private Interest: Patterns of Women’s Political Action in the United States, 1848-1992
1994 Maureen Rooney The Transformation of the Church and the Military in Spain 1950-Present
1993 Jennifer Barker-Benfield The Older the Fiddle, The Sweeter the Tune: A Study of Sunset Hall, Retirement Home for Radicals
1992 Nancie Carollo Voice from the 1950s: Women and the Traditional American Family
Sunny Rivera Sisters Along the Border: The Social and Economic Impact of the Maquiladoras on Working Women on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Abigail Roach History of French Colonialism in Algeria and Senegal and Post Colonial Cinematic Response
1990 Jeanne Renee Hammond Women and the Feminine: The Gendered Meaning of Representations of the War in Vietnam
1986 Kathleen Jackson The Chicago Race Riot of 1919: Was it an Inevitable Event in the History of Chicago?