Undergraduate Research

The purpose of my investigation is to research and analyze the role that international organizations played in the successful struggle for Namibian independence.  Additionally, I will be looking at how South Africa’s policy of apartheid affected the decisions made by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the Western Contact Group.  The major questions I will be addressing are these:

• Why and how did the international community become involved in the Namibian independence movement?

• What role did apartheid play in gaining support for Namibian independence?

• To what extent did international involvement affect the outcome of the war?

 

By the end of the 1950s, a country known as South-West Africa had begun to struggle against the race-based policies enforced by their occupier, South Africa.  Newly formed domestic groups, particularly the South-West African National Union (SWANU), the Herero Council, and the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) protested South African rule and the racial system of apartheid.  South Africa refused to negotiate with these anti-colonial organizations and instead banned their meetings and persecuted their members.  By 1966 the newly formed People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) launched a war of independence.  (more…)

I went to the lab today to pull some data off of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences: like Excel, but engineered for data about people).  I actually have a copy, but it’s the student copy that I got for my psych stats class.  And by student copy I mean worthless copy.  It won’t do multivariate analyses, and doesn’t handle files that contain more than 50 variables.  My study currently has about 70, so I can’t even see my data without leaving the house.  I suppose I could buy a copy, but the grad pack is about $200 and, alas, I am a poor undergraduate.  Anyway, I wanted to pull some numbers for a project summary that’s due this Friday, and noticed something odd. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, time to get started here. The above photo shows me in the lap of Alma Mater, the “nourishing mother” of scholarship, bearing an expression which adequately conveys my sense of frightened excitement as I stand upon the brink of a senior thesis. This new blog will chronicle my year-long journey through the personal nirvana/hell which I have laid before myself as an honors student in history. Perhaps a quick introduction is in order? I’m Michael Blaakman, a senior history and religious studies major from Rochester, New York. I sing with the W&M Choir and with an a capella group called “DoubleTake.” I work at the Wren Building, participate in an international service trip through the Catholic Campus Ministries, and am a full-time resident of the Daily Grind (upon whose familiar high-top seats I am perched as I write this entry). This post is intended as a kind of intellectual biography. I’m feeling a bit scatterbrained this afternoon (really, for the last week), so this will be a useful exercise in centering my zen or whatever and rationalizing my decision to pursue a thesis. My thesis will examine the architectural and cultural transition from taverns to hotels in early New York City. I’ll use this entirely obscure topic as a lens to reflect on (do lenses reflect? I suppose not . . . ) the cultural history of New York City in the early national period. How in the hell did I settle on this topic? I’ve spent most of my time as an undergraduate drifting between a few disciplines in American history. Through a handful of internships and independent studies I’ve explored my compatibility with careers as a preservationist, an architectural historian, and a material culture . . . person. I like these things (a lot), but am pretty settled on a future in regular academic history. I won’t discuss why right now, but I will say that this rough draft of a life plan has guided my selection of a thesis topic. Read the rest of this entry »

I had finally got the gumption to write up my SNP paper. It was, admittedly, not what I’d hoped to produce, but it was a fair enough assessment for the requirements. I thought. This morning I woke to a lovely letter in my inbox saying, more or less, that I had to re-do [...]

The sun beat down on the twenty or so students of the College of William & Mary as they gathered around a slender, gray-haired professor with glasses. Together the group, which included myself, made up Professor Pease’s Architectural Design class for the fall of 2007. They followed their new professor on a walking field trip, a rarity for college-level courses, to tour the architecture of Colonial Williamsburg. The first stop on the trip was the simple, unassuming brick alley next to the Cheese Shop that connected the shopping area to off street parking lots in Merchants Square. Professor Pease paused a second, then described how this passage was one of his favorite spots in Williamsburg. Immediately questions like “what’s so special about this spot?” and “how can you possibly enjoy a mere connection between two points?” popped into my head, which I never vocalized. It was at that moment I realized there may be something important about this area that I had not seen before. I wanted to know more.

Over the next few months I began reading more into urban planning and architecture.  Simultaneously, I was beginning to toy with the idea of pursuing honors in the history department.  I decided to combine my growing interest in architecture with my aptitude for studying history and searched for an appropriate topic.   Like many research topics, my final topic little resembled what I was considering in these early days.  My first direction of study centered on looking at the evolving plan of Williamsburg over the centuries and its importance as one of the first master-planned cities in the Mid-Atlantic colonies.  After some abortive preliminary research and some discussions with Dr. Carl Lounsbury, the Colonial Williamsburg Architectural Historian, I found this topic too broad for a thesis (and that many of my ideas had already been published in the book Tidewater Towns by John Reps).  I then looked at what else in Williamsburg could possibly be a topic for study.  Most of the buildings in the Historic Area had already been studied ad nauseum, but what about the buildings outside this area that were still relevant to the Williamsburg Restoration of the 1920’s and 1930’s?  This is where I found Merchants Square.

I found it easy to ask questions about Merchants Square.  What was here before the commercial area was built to accommodate the increased tourist traffic to Williamsburg?  What did business owners, townspeople, students, and architects think of the new shopping center built right on top of Williamsburg’s downtown?  What were the architectural, financial, and social considerations of architects planning and building Merchants Square?  Was the development of Merchants Square part of a larger movement in commercial design?  What role did the car’s development have in all this?   I found the answers harder to find.  Unlike my previous topic, there was no glossary of ready-made answers to these questions.  I felt that researching this topic might actually be an important contribution to Williamsburg’s history.  As soon as I realized this, I knew I had found the right topic.

When John D. Rockefeller Jr. set out to develop Merchants Square, he was contributing to a larger commercial movement across the United States.  In the late 1920’s the car had transitioned from a toy of the wealthy to a household necessity which created new considerations for planners of commercial areas.  New parking lots, paved roads, and larger stores were needed.  It was now possible to drive to several different stores during a shopping trip and to travel further to find the best bargains.  As business owners realized that they could exist outside of the downtown area, many began leaving in search of cheaper rents.  Along with other factors, this caused the once thriving downtown areas of many American cities to lose their vitality and importance as they were replaced by regional shopping centers.  Longstreth outlines this phenomenon in his book From City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950.  Merchants Square was one of the pioneers for new open air shopping mall designs, but it was unique in that it was designed in a historical community context.  The real question I want to evaluate is: did the transition from Williamsburg’s downtown area to Merchants Square help or hurt the community in the long run?  As usual when I study history, I want to know why people, places and events are important and what effect, if any, they have on life today.  Hopefully as I pursue my research I can find answers to some of the questions posed here.

“It’s hard to start a blog.” That was my first thought, after staring at the blinking cursor in MS Word for about five minutes, trying to figure out how to introduce myself, what I am researching, and make whoever is reading this immediately feel compelled to shout, “Look at this awesome blog I’ve found!” So, I suppose although none of you have had that reaction quite yet, I’ll simply dive in and go ahead and introduce myself. I am a double major in Government and History and a rising senior, looking at applying to law school, from Northern Virginia. I have also more recently become a researcher. This is more due to a set of fortuitous circumstances than any natural ability on my part. The main impetus towards research was the Monroe Scholar designation I received my freshman year. I can vividly remember being introduced to the Monroe program with all the other Monroe Scholars, listening to previous scholars describe their research and thinking, “Man, I wish I got a $3,000 grant to my tuition, instead of a $3,000 research grant.” As you can tell, I was not exactly Mr. Investigator. Read the rest of this entry »

Seriously, it’s not good to procrastinate, even if it’s unintentional.  Sometimes time can pretend to be stretchier than it truly is, leaving people like me caught at the edge of a cliff when they should have already built the bridge to walk across.  I’ve got research on the SNP - several notes files exist in [...]

So, someone commented on my first post that the real solution to my “Odic Tradition” dilemma was to find an ode about Odin, and thereby save myself a lot of time–thus, when someone says, “Oh, is that about odes or Odin?”, I can say, “Why, both!”

Well, that day is here.

Behold the beauty that is Thomas Gray’s “The Descent of Odin. An Ode.” I don’t even know how he could have brought himself to affix such an awkward title to anything.

And so my new goal is to work this thing into my honors thesis somehow.

Next time, a serious post about something research-related. Your Neomodernist is up to the neck in scholarship applications and compiling a thesis excerpt, but she’ll try to get something blog-like together about that soon.

Happy Thursday, folks. (Don’t I wish it were Wednesday, which, in Old Norse, is Oðinsdagr, or Odin’s Day?)

I admit, I fell off the face of the earth for two months. I was in Halifax, NS, soaking up the last feeble summer sunshine rays that exist in the upper northern hemisphere. Then I moved halfway down the east coast back to Williamsburg. Not having much experience with moving from A [...]