About Volume 5, Issue 2 (Fall 2025)
This paper attempts to answer questions about class and race regarding that South Asians navigated while they resided in England. The paper delves into two groups of South Asian men: lascars (seamen) and more affluent South Asian men. It analyzes if the differences between classes were more critical than that of ethnicity, asks how these different demographics interacted with the white population of England and explains how each demographic navigated life throughout their time in Britain. The basis of this paper attempts to compare the difference of all these questions between different demographics to determine what role class played in a world dictated by white supremacy, specifically for South Asians in the very racialized environment that the British Empire created, specifically in the metropole.
This research investigates how Indigenous reservations influenced the early development of community archaeology in North America from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through examination of three key case studies - the Ozette site, Vanatta site, and Navajo Cultural Resources Management Program - the study reveals that reservation systems, despite their colonial origins, created institutional frameworks that facilitated collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous communities. The legal and administrative structure of reservations required archaeologists to obtain tribal permissions and engage with Indigenous communities, leading to increased recognition of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. While social movements and archaeologists' ethical awakening contributed to the field's transformation, the research demonstrates that reservation-based projects had lasting impacts, including the establishment of tribal cultural organizations and innovative curation practices. The findings challenge simplified narratives of professional reform by highlighting Indigenous agency's crucial role in archaeology's evolution from colonial practices to more inclusive methodologies.
American political history commonly paints the revolutionary cries of the mid- to late-eighteenth century as a united effort to fight the oppressive mercantilist policies of the Mother Country. With reinforced Navigation Acts passed in 1763, the American economy was further limited in favor of Britain, reducing the colonists’ agency to trade with other nations or to develop a manufacturing industry. Adding flame to the fire, the Townshend Acts of the late 1760s further irritated colonists faced by higher taxes on British manufactured goods—an attempt by Parliament to recuperate the costs of the French and Indian War. Without representation in Parliament, certain pockets of elite colonists became increasingly frustrated—with merchants and large-scale planters vying to shift the political ground rules that shaped the parameters of capitalism. These patriot leaders, portraying the British policies as intolerable limitations of economic and political self-determination, both misrepresented the interests of the vast majority of colonial agriculturalists and damaged the planters’ own long term interests. Elite merchants, despite actively working in service of a vision for commerce detrimental to the plantation-based economy, capitalized on this support, deploying arguments about liberty and economic sovereignty to justify the elites’ desire to transform their prospects for commercial and territorial expansion.
The Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, concluded between the Cossack Hetmanate and the Grand Duchy of Muscovy at the Pereiaslav Rada, marked a decisive moment in the trajectory of Ukrainian-Russian relations. Celebrated in Russian historiography as a fraternal “reunification” of kindred Slavic peoples, and condemned in Ukrainian scholarship as the beginning of imperial domination, the agreement remains one of the most contested episodes in Eastern European history. This essay critically examines competing Russian and Ukrainian historiographical interpretations of the Pereiaslav Agreement by analyzing how each tradition reconstructs the events, motives, and aftermath of the Rada. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources—such as Khmelnytsky’s “Articles of Petition,” Tsar Alexei’s “March Articles,” and Vasilii Buturlin’s diplomatic report—alongside major secondary works, the essay evaluates the narratives advanced by key figures in both traditions. It argues that Ukrainian historiography offers a more accurate and historically grounded reconstruction of the agreement by emphasizing the divisions between the two parties in matters of ethnic identity, religious politics, and political sovereignty. Rather than symbolizing a historic reunification, the agreement functioned as a provisional and ultimately ill-fated alliance, concluded under conditions of strategic necessity. By challenging the dominant Russian paradigm, this essay contributes to ongoing debates about national identity, historical memory, and the long legacy of empire in Eastern Europe.
This research paper focuses on the role of women in the fight against South African apartheid in the 20th century. The paper highlights the role of the Federation of South African Women (FSAW), a group that worked to peacefully resist apartheid, and the women who played prominent roles within that federation. Starting with early resistance to racist laws in the 1910s we will follow the growth and contributions of the women's movement to the anti-apartheid efforts taking place in South Africa until the early 1960s when the freedom movement was forced to shift underground. Special attention is given to the Anti-Pass March held in 1956, a gathering of an estimated 20,000 women in protest of the racist restrictions being placed on the non-white citizens of South Africa. A detailed account of the event has been created through the synthesis of primary sources such as autobiographies and personal letters with secondary sources created by those outside of the historical event. The paper also examines the different consequences that the women who helped to orchestrate the march had to endure and explores the efforts to memorialize the event in the current period.
Silvia Tennenbaum (1928-2016), a German born Jewish woman, author, and activist, lived in the United States following her family’s exile in 1936. Tennenbaum wrote multiple semi-autobiographical novels reflecting her grapples with memory. Towards the end of her life, Tennenbaum attempted to chronicle her memories more directly; instead of fictionalizing, she wrote specifically of the gaps in her recollections. The archival materials used for this paper, having remained unpublished, serve as a memorial to this fragmentation. Tennenbaum’s notes powerfully exemplify how first-person narratives of Jewish survivors of Nazism complicate Holocaust historiography and the Holocaust’s impact on the Jewish Diaspora. For decades, women’s experiences of the Holocaust were largely disregarded. Dedicated analysis of women’s experiences becomes vital in understanding the act of memorialization itself. While historical attention has focused on the contrasting experiences of men and women as better or worse, first-person testimony has lent itself to understanding variety and nuance in individual experiences, recognizing each as holding value in its own subjectivity. This is true for Tennenbaum and her lifelong struggle with memories of homeland and with realizing an identity amid loss and destruction. The researcher and the researched ask the same questions: What is the status of the fragmentary and the archival as elements of memorialization? What constitutes ethical engagement of resurrecting such evidence in the present? This paper brings Tennenbaum’s memories in their obscurity and archived state into focus, arguing that the subjunctive nature of Tennenbaum’s notes bridges Holocaust historical narrative with present Jewish identity and collective memory.
During the nineteenth century, as the territory of Utah pursued statehood, it faced intense national scrutiny. The innate protestant values of American conservatism brought constant backlash to the Utah territory as republican lobbyists continually pushed for disenfranchising polygamists in the name of upholding traditional values. As Utah was one of the first territories to grant women suffrage, the rest of the nation believed Mormon women were victims of polygamy and coerced into voting for their husbands’ choices: the rhetoric that women were suffering from Mormonism is a continual ideology present from before the Civil War and up until the eventual acceptance of Utah’s constitution in the late 1880s. In retaliation, the suffragists advocated for their autonomy through protests and media, in conjunction with the national suffrage movement. This paper situates the Mormon Suffragists as the center of political activism in the Utah territory as they combatted both religious intolerance and gender discrimination, all amid statehood application.
In October 1956, Hungarian citizens of various education levels, social classes, and political affiliations united to overthrow their Soviet rulers. Ultimately failing, these same people were then forced to flee in search of political or physical freedom. By 1957, over thirty thousand Hungarian refugees had arrived in the United States in an operation often depicted as the most rapid and successful integration of refugees into the country to date. Numerous works have detailed the processes of integrating these refugees into the economic structure of the United States, but few have formed distinctions between those Hungarian refugees who fled due to their revolutionary participation and those who left for other social, political, or economic reasons. This paper seeks to make this distinction, focusing on those Hungarian refugees who fought in the 1956 revolution as a group with distinct ideological and cultural beliefs both before and after their resettlement to the United States. Doing so highlights the ways that the 1956 Hungarian revolutionaries were able to reconcile their Hungarian nationalist and Western-averse sympathies with the reality of having to form a new life within the United States. Instead of fully melting into the country’s social and cultural systems, these “freedom fighters” formed a distinct Hungarian American dual identity. This response to relocation contests the generalized idea that the 1956 Hungarian refugees readily and easily assimilated to life in the U.S and illuminates how countries often offered humanitarian relief during the Cold War in hopes of bettering their global image.
The 18th century Caribbean has long been understood by academia and popular imagination as a diverse arena for competing, cooperating, and overlapping ethnic, religious, imperial, and indigenous groups. One interaction that requires more thorough analysis is between Africans–enslaved and free–and (predominantly) Sephardic Jewish merchants. Two diasporic peoples, Africans and Jews navigated the transatlantic slave trade and, during critical moments of imperial crisis, shared in resistance to oppressive political forces. British Jamaica was a particularly volatile island that saw African and Jewish attempts at liberation intimately intersect. The 1729-to-1740 First Maroon War allowed African Maroons to secure autonomous communities in the Blue Mountain region; meanwhile, Jewish merchants leveraged their access to the Crown, particularly from 1737 to 1739, to petition against local governmental taxation that was disproportionately levied on them for alleged assistance in the African rebellion. Later, in 1799, Franco-Jewish merchant Isaac Sasportas devised a slave revolt in Jamaica to follow the Haitian revolutionary model; Lockean visions of egalitarianism drove Jewish demands for British colonial equality, with the First French Republic’s abolitionist stance affording an opportunity to expand minority rights across the Atlantic world. Ultimately, through primary source investigations and analysis of current scholarship on 18th century Jamaica, my research illuminates how African-Jewish intersectionality offers a more comprehensive understanding of the 18th century Caribbean’s experience for diasporic communities who served as regional economic drivers.
