Undergraduate Research

First of all, I suppose I was one of those few for whom the “Begins With” reminder was actually very useful. I use the library catalog, JSTOR, and Worldcat all the time (usually with Zotero on Mozilla as an organizer for all this) but for some reason I just hadn’t bothered to click the “Begins With” tool before. However, as far as sources go, I’ve found Zotero to be immensely useful for keeping track of both internet and written sources when I’m just flying by and want to tag a few journals or books for review later. Unfortunately, its bibliography feature is less helpful, as it isn’t quite capable of discerning all the information necessary for a decent footnote or bibliographic entry. It gets the rudiments generally (author, title) but has trouble with publishers and their locations among other things.

However, I have used Zotero quite a bit the last few days going through the databases and catalogs listed above, and I’ve found several sources in Swem thanks to the like-subject groupings. I doubt I could read all of the books and articles I’ve managed to compile already (most of which are secondary sources), but the sheer amount is encouraging.

What did discourage me after looking at the primary source bibliography assignment due Wednesday was my lack of primary sources. Since my level of Chinese reading comprehension is relatively low, and most English-language archival sources are up at Yale - a trip I would find too costly to make - I wasn’t sure I’d have enough primary sources to make my thesis really credible as a history honors thesis.

Then I had my first meeting with Professor Canning on Friday (given how busy he is with transfer credit students) and he basically told me to stop worrying about primary sources. I was also worried about the sheer scope of my paper fitting into 100 pages or less and carrying a cohesive argument or narrative. Through discussion back and forth, including what exactly I hoped to produce from my research.

I want to argue that the influx of Chinese students into U.S. schools and universities since 1854 has profoundly affected US-China relations. To do this, Professor Canning has steered me towards using several case studies as opposed to my previous idea which would have involved a glance at four eras somewhat unevenly balanced throughout time. Instead, we will look at individuals or groups of individuals over the last 150 years.

First, I plan to make a timeline of U.S. and Chinese history to reflect on and pick out the major events in both histories as well as the major crossovers (such as the Opium War, the Versailles Treaty,  the rise of Communist China, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre). Then I will begin looking for the student views and actions during these eras. This week’s plan, however, is just to make that timeline and ground myself in the context. After that I can begin arranging the specific cases relevant to my research.

I met with my adviser on Tuesday, and we worked out a schedule for the semester.  We’re going to meet every other week, at which point I’ll submit a write-up of my research notes from the past two weeks.  These notes will be in paragraph form, so there is a definite possibility that parts of these write-ups will actually end up in my thesis.  This will help me “weed out” the notes… determine what is, and isn’t applicable.  This will also help me focus my argument.

This week I focused on expanding my bibliography.  I’ve found some additional secondary sources.  My adviser suggested I pick up some sources that discuss Western History (in a more general sense) to help me place women and the Dust Bowl in a broader historical context.  I have also found some great secondary sources through the America:  History and Life database and have requested them through ILL… so now I’m anxiously awaiting their arrival.  I would also like to find some additional primary sources.  The source I am most excited about is in a library currently under renovation… and the documents will not be available until “late fall.”  (A specific reopening date is currently unknown.)  I plan to visit the library as soon as it opens, but I’d love to find additional primary sources… especially in case that one source doesn’t work out.  (At this point I’m afraid the library won’t reopen early enough for me to use the source.)  My primary sources currently consist mostly of journals and letters, as well as some essays from the time, and I hope to expand that to include newspaper and magazine articles and other such documents.  Overall, though, I’m pretty content with my bibliography at this point.

I haven’t had as much time as I would like to work on my research isnce classes began.  Now that the semester is starting to settle (and I have much fewer meetings to attend) I will be able to devote large chunks of time to my research, which I am really excited about.

Also, I would just like to say that I am in love with the “America:  History and Life” database.

As far as my Monroe project went, I’m not exactly sure what happened.  I sent back a much better draft to my advisor, but haven’t heard anything in almost a week.  Granted, the deadline was last Friday.  I sent my copy to her four days ahead of time… I wonder what happened. On the honours thesis [...]

I met with Dr. Lounsbury Thursday Aug. 28th.  I came in excited to show him all the research I had done over the summer.  I proudly handed him the bibliography of sources I had waded through, but he remained unimpressed.  After talking about some more sources available and the direction of my research, his last words to me were “Get Reading!” That definitely got me motivated.  This past week I feel like I accomplished a lot.  I read through Longstreth’s bibliography for City Center to Regional Mall and picked out some interesting articles and books I plan to peruse.  Tuesday I went over to the Rockefeller Library and found a great book written in 1951 entitled Shopping Malls: Design and Operation, by Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro.   Although I had a good grasp of commercial design, Shopping Malls rectified my limited knowledge of the intricate dynamics and functions of shopping centers.  Baker and Funaro also gave a good introduction to the rise of shopping malls and gave me tons of examples of shopping centers that employed features of Merchants Square. This was definitely a good find and served as a good primer to the development of shopping centers in the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the blogospheric face of my thesis project! I’ve been examining through anthropological goggles the sorts of things people do in and about New Town, and how “New Town”—the public and private roads, the houses and shops, not only in their physicality, but as represented in the consciousness of the folks who apprehend it and invoke it as a signifier—emerges from cultural processes.

The project extended pretty naturally from my developing interest in spaces as things anthropologists can study, especially the idea of a non-place (Augé 1995), which as Marc Augé frames it is that singular outgrowth of hypermodernity which, rather than mediate people’s relationships to each other, to history, and to some spatialized identity (the quality of being “from” somewhere), wipes away history, isolates its inhabitants, and actually confers identity and, you might say, subjectivity: on the freeway, person becomes driver, experiencing the present landscape as text and compressed images, articulating her agency through a technologically mediated universe. Of course, as Merriman (2004) notes, even the most insipid sorts of places have histories, and people still form relationships on the road, albeit through honks and bird-flips. Curiouser and curiouser!

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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 »

The Middle Ages, like no subsequent era of western history, suffers from a dearth of sources, and never is this more striking than when trying to reconstruct the history of the common people. Medieval peasants, and most townspeople, were illiterate, leaving no traces of their beliefs or thoughts from their own hands. Their lives must be gleaned from the writings of the literate class, the clergy, who documented their world in chronicles and letters that supply much of what we know about the period. People often think of medieval clergy as popes and bishops living in lavish palaces, far removed from the lives of everyday people, but, in fact, many dealt directly with common people on a daily basis and could closely observe their practices. The economic revolution that gave rise to towns in the High Middle Ages also influenced the creation of new orders of mendicant friars, who traveled from town to town preaching to anyone who would listen. In this way, the friars involved themselves in a dialogue with ordinary people that informed their own sermons that had to appeal to that audience. I intend to use these sermons and other clerical writings to investigate popular beliefs and practices in 13th century Europe. I have three primary sources from which most of my material will come, all of which were written in the first half of the 13th century. Etienne de Bourbon was a Dominican friar who worked as an inquisitor for many years in the south of France, and he compiled his first-hand knowledge in a collection known as Tractatus de diversis Materiis Praedicabilibus, which contains hundreds of stories to use as exempla in sermons. Jacques de Vitry began as a regular canon in Liège and later became involved in the Fifth Crusade and was named Bishop of Acre, and later became a Cardinal. He too wrote many sermons and compiled a collection of exempla. Caesarius of Heisterbach, unlike the previous two, was a cloistered Cistercian monk in the Rhineland of Germany, who wrote a collection of miracle stories called the Dialogus Miraculorum that supplied sermon stories for many sermon writers of his time and later. Only the last is available in English translation; the first two will require extensive translation from the original Latin. 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 »