The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

This article examines the recollection of Qin demise memories of medieval Chinese elites, arguing that they took the “Qin demise” notion as a means to achieve their respective political agendas. The Qin dynasty was the first empire that accomplished the unification of all-under-heaven in Chinese history; however, it collapsed in fifteen years. When analysing the causes of the Qin collapse, a controversial question catches enduring attention: To what extent does the system of administration account for the Qin demise? This question has led to an unsettled debate over the respective merits of the investiture- and commandery-county systems among Chinese literati for more than two millennia. This paper historicizes the debate about administrative system from Wei to mid-Tang, during which transitions of regimes occurred frequently. To examine this debate, the discourses of five intellectuals are chosen chronologically. By studying their memories pertaining to the reasons behind the Qin demise, this paper compares their attitudes to different administrative institutions and attempts to explain the underlying ideologies and historical backgrounds. In the end, I will present a unique mnemonic pattern across time, based on the elites’ discourses.

James C. McNally, the American Vice Consul in Zürich, Switzerland during the First World War occupied an important position in American-German diplomacy during the conflict. His influence came from his relationship to his son-in-law, the German naval officer, Friedrich Mensing. The American government placed McNally in Switzerland in order to leverage this relationship and report valuable intelligence back to Washington. He also came to be seen as important by the German government in Berlin, owing to his ability and willingness to forward peace negotiations directly to top American officials. McNally worked in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a peace deal, going against his official instructions from the State Department and leading to him being viewed with suspicion by his colleagues and superiors. James McNally engaged in these unauthorized, secret peace talks as an active way of furthering his own importance and in an attempt to advance his career.

In 1844, a man whose nom de plume was the unimaginative “A Pioneer” provided a full-page account of Mexico’s “Upper California” in The Farmer’s Monthly Visitor. He presented a land of inexhaustible vegetation and “innumerable herds.” As he put it, “there is no country in the world that offers as flattering inducements to emigrants as Upper California; nor is there a country…so eminently calculated by Nature herself to promote the prosperity and happiness of civilized and enlightened men.” According to this pioneer, the only people in the region were an assortment of mostly non-white people who lived in a “deplorable state of ignorance.” This essay uses primary accounts and secondary sources to examine US perceptions of Mexican California’s resources, economy, and people with the goal of improving the historical contextualization of US expansionism. This essay argues that from the 1810s-1840s, travel writers and commercial interests used new forms of scientific racism circulating through the English-speaking world based on changing conceptions of nature, technology, and resource use to justify conquest. This essay demonstrates that the motivations of involved Americans focused on agricultural wealth, livestock, and maritime possibilities.

ABSTRACT: Authority is a frequent topic of analysis when discussing the works of Mamluk era jurists Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim. The common interpretation of their views is one of authoritarian control. Some previous works have argued that both authors were in favor of expansive government that regulates all aspects of society absolutely. However this minimizes the nuance in their opinions, as well as perpetuates the idea that Ibn al-Qayyim was simply a copy or imitation of his teacher, Ibn Taymiyya. Each author tackled the issue in their own way with Ibn al-Qayyim more readily discussing and critiquing authority in academia. They often did share opinions with some key differences, namely in the extent to which the word of authority was to be adhered to. In a broader sense, they both did take hard stances on the role of authority, and advocated for its expansion, however neither author was in favor of a state with absolute control. Instead they offered a view of authority that was supposed to adhere to Shari’a as much as it was to enforce it. In their mind society would be chaos without authority, and authority that didn’t follow Shari’a ideals was incapable of properly running society.

In this paper, I will investigate four key questions relating to the rhetoric used to talk about Irish unmarried Mothers and their experiences. How did the rhetoric of the Catholic Church characterize the unmarried mother and influence her treatment? How did the state initially speak about unmarried mothers and did Catholicism influence this diction? How did this written description in law shape the experience of mothers like Mary? How do statements made in the Final Report of the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes continue this legacy of demeaning government reference to the unmarried mother? I will bring together the social and legal history through analysis of social discourse and subsequent laws. I will attempt to answer this using evidence from the Irish Government’s archive, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, and publicly available witness statements. Analysis of primary sources, with these questions in mind, highlights a planned home system justified through demeaning characterization of the unmarried mother in religious and government communications.

Twentieth-century Anglophone waves of "Egyptomania" - in the second and seventh decades forms the basis for much of our cultural understanding of the New Kingdom. The songs "Old King Tut" and "King Tut" provide examples of this aforementioned narrative surrounding the life of Tutankhamen, an eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh. Their extremely inaccurate lyrics do more than induce eye-rolling from scholars of Ancient Egyptian history, these subversions of the truth reveal the politics behind both twentieth-century waves of Egyptomania. This essay, written for the Sarah Lawrence Programme at Wadham College, University of Oxford, examines these songs as examples of cultural attitudes towards the New Kingdom with the relevant social context.

In the early nineteenth century, the Transatlantic Slave Trade was in a period of rapid transformation. Britain’s abolition of its own slave trade in 1807, and active British attempts to suppress the trade in the following years, caused massive shifts in the patterns of the trade. Slave traders developed new methods to maximize profits in an increasingly dangerous business, while the British navy and parliament debated how to deal with recaptured slaves. Caught in the middle of these struggles were the more than one million people sold into slavery from 1807 to 1869. This study attempts to retrace, in as much detail as possible, the lives of 437 of them: the shipmates of the Ana Maria, who were “freed” by a British vessel in 1821 and resettled in the colony of Sierra Leone. Drawing on accounts of the Ana Maria’s voyage and capture, firsthand descriptions of life in Sierra Leone, and secondary sources, this paper follows the shipmates’ attempts to develop new identities and communal strategies in the face of intense hardship. Additionally, it brings into focus the highly ambiguous legacies of Britain’s “war against the slave trade.” Despite its humanitarian mission, racism, a shortage of funds, and a strong cultural belief in the enlightening power of Christianity and hard labor created a harshly policed and desperately unsafe colonial regime in Sierra Leone that replicated many of the conditions of slavery in the Americas.

Prior to World War II, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) marketed their warped ideals, virtues, and goals to the German people under the veil of attractive imagery that exploited post-World War I discontent in Germany. Hitler believed that effective propaganda imagery, or visual rhetoric, could be used to “...awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.” By exploring the visual rhetoric of Hitler and the NSDAP, this article reveals their strategic use of propaganda that resulted in the establishment of an attractive, persuasive facade that facilitated their rise to power. Analyzed in this essay are not only various compositions of party propaganda but also written and spoken compositions that highlight the ideals established by the visual rhetoric. Such works of rhetoric include Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the “25 Points of the Nazi Party,” and “Hitler’s Speech to the National Socialist Women’s League.” Those works broadened the NSDAP’s targeted audience to women and children and communicated the party’s racial and biological constructs related to beauty standards.

This manuscript discusses how acupuncture has been incorporated into the twenty-first century US healthcare system. It traces the development of Chinese Medicine, and its uniquely localized variations in the US to date: Chinese Medicine in the US, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and American Chinese Medicine. I argue that Chinese Medicine has now entered a new stage, United States Chinese Medicine— where strictly, acupuncture’s definition in state regulation has affected its coverage under both private and federal health insurance to the detriment of patients and practitioners alike. The interaction of federal and state governments, regulatory boards, insurance companies, and acupuncture practitioners has created an unorganized framework across the country, effectively transforming it from being a unified “American” practice into an incongruous set of fifty. Through a lack of federal direction, separate state-specific acupuncture ecosystems emerge, in which practitioners follow available financial incentives to determine their state of choice. Through the non-consensus between governments, insurance providers, and practitioners concerning the purpose and practicality of acupuncture, insurance providers default to the biomedical healthcare paradigm’s standards to assign a monetary value to said component of alternative/complementary medicine. As a result, practitioners must not only be equipped with the skills of their medical profession, but also be prepared to identify their place in the medicolegal landscape, as to ascertain the profitability, legality, and direction of their business.

Following the Gold Rush of 1849, San Francisco exploded into a dynamic urban center. Starting with a meager population of 50 people in 1844, the total skyrocketed to about 56,000 by 1860. While, early on, this growing population was overwhelmingly male, over time, single and married women came in search of opportunity at the edge of the “civilized” world. During the nineteenth century, women across the United States became the figureheads of morality in the pure, domestic sphere. However, many women extended their moral authority into the public sphere through charitable enterprises. In my research, I examine how elite, Protestant women in San Francisco exerted their influence on the ever-growing urban landscape through their management of charitable institutions and, as a result, created new opportunities for themselves. Inspired by the welfare work of their East Coast counterparts, I argue that women in San Francisco sought to regulate the perceived social ills around them and uplift the city to a higher moral standard. While these women formed numerous organizations for this purpose, the San Francisco Protestant Orphan Asylum provides insight into their underlying goal of producing model citizens. I argue that by molding and shaping the “deserving poor,” such as orphans and half-orphans, to fit their idealized vision for society, these women carved out greater space for themselves as legitimate socio-political leaders. Although they lacked voting rights, I assert that elite women pushed the bounds of womanhood by molding San Francisco from a Wild West town into a modern metropolis.