Schedule at a Glance Speaker Index Room 1 Room 2 Room 3 Room 4 Room 5 Room 6 Room 7 Room 8 Room 9 Room 10 Room 11 Posters Special Events
This thesis examines activism and resistance within the Black community of Vanport, a wartime housing community that existed between 1942-1948. While much of Oregon remained overwhelmingly white, Vanport was the home to a comparatively large Black community. However, the existence of this community was short-lived, as in 1948, five years after it was founded, Vanport was destroyed in a catastrophic flood. Little trace of Vanport remains today, as none of the city infrastructure was rebuilt, and instead the land was eventually turned into a public park.
Faculty Sponsor: Ellen Eisenberg
Discipline: History
This project aims to explain the history of the Chemawa Indian Boarding School here in Salem. I will then explain the full historiography of the boarding schools from how they started, what their purpose was, how the schools treated the children, and what roles the government played in the establishment of the boarding school system. My focus will then shift to the historiography of Chemawa, how and where the school started, what things were the students being subjected to, as well as focusing on certain student case studies from the Charles Larsen collection and on SuAnn Reddick’s study of the Chemawa Boarding Schools graveyard that is a part of their land.
Faculty Sponsor: Ellen Eisenberg
Discipline: History
This paper discusses the people, organizations, and protests that made up the movement opposed to Trojan from the beginning of its construction in 1968 to PGE’s announcement that the plant would not be restarted in 1993. Through an examination of archival sources including oral histories, hearing minutes, newspaper articles, voter pamphlets, and protest handouts, this paper describes several attributes of the anti-Trojan movement. Based on this examination and an analysis of a sampling of secondary sources, this paper determines how the anti-Trojan movement broke with and conformed to larger trends among North American anti-nuclear movements.
Faculty Sponsor: Ellen Eisenberg
Discipline: History
The purpose of this project is to investigate the understudied relationship between radical women in 1920s Oregon, and the paternalistic, patriarchal nature of far-right organizations through a case study of the KKK’s women’s groups. In collecting a historiographical arm, the body of this paper will focus on the intersectionality of current historical discussion of the topic and primary source evidence from the time period itself. Using oral histories, newspapers, census data and more, this paper will serve as an illuminating discussion of the association between gender and the far-right, women and the Ku Klux Klan.
Faculty Sponsor: Ellen Eisenberg
Discipline: History
The history of termination is one that has changed over time as history and historians started to value the perspectives and stories of the Natives themselves. In the years leading up, the government and the people of the Grand Ronde had different views on the prospect of termination. I am looking to examine documents from the State Archives and histories from the Grand Ronde to determine the attitudes of the government and the tribe to discern the decision of termination and the responses to it.
Faculty Sponsor: Ellen Eisenberg
Discipline: History
The central research question of this paper is how to best explain the emergence of fears surrounding cultural Marxism in the United States after the seemingly unequivocal defeat of communism in the Cold War. In order to answer this question, I investigate competing explanations of this counterintuitive phenomenon, particularly in regard to key intellectual and political figures who shaped this narrative on both the far-right and far-left. Through understanding the origins and rationale behind “cultural Marxism,” I separate fact from fiction to unveil the roots of the culture war in this modern red scare and the ideologues behind both sides.
Faculty Sponsor: Seth Cotlar
Discipline: History
This presentation will examine the interactions between ideology, academia, and politics through the case of the denazification of German Universities in the postwar era. More specifically, how did the German professoriate participate, aid, or frustrate the transition from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic? What determined the survival or removal of German professors, and to what extend were they able to act independently to secure or salvage their academic careers? I contend that all but the most explicitly compromised German professors were allowed significant leeway by the occupying forces and their own colleagues in determining their return to the Universities
Faculty Sponsor: William Smaldone
Discipline: History
This project explores the relationship between radical activists and city institutions in Chicago in the wake of nation-wide urban riots from 1966-1970. It is my claim that such riots in Chicago marked the entry of an impoverished underclass youth into the Freedom movement, who redefined racial subjectivity and political radicalism through the context of anti-colonialism and community autonomy. International socialism and inter-community solidarity became usable frameworks with which to criticize inequality, police brutality, and the obstructionist mayorship of Richard J. Daley. The city government was openly hostile to this development and responded with police surveillance and political assassination.
Faculty Sponsor: Sammy Basu
Discipline: History
This project explores the relationship between Unions and HRM (Human Resource Management) practices in identifying patterns of advocacy on behalf of workers. Historically, workers’ rights have been dependent on Union-Employer relations; but with the standardization of the HR industry, the primary keepers of workers’ rights have transitioned to HR professionals. This project analyzes periodicals written for HR professionals, Federal audiences, and Union members in the 1980s to provide clarity on the relationship between Unions and the developing HR industry.
Faculty Sponsor: Sammy Basu
Discipline: History
I will trace the history of childbirth practices in the United States during the twentieth century from about 1920 to 1970, when it moved more into hospitals and institutions, and how and why they changed as well as what it meant for parturients and women generally. More specifically, I will be evaluating the changing roles of women and women’s agency in mid-century birth practices.
Faculty Sponsor: Sammy Basu
Discipline: History
In the thousand some years that Ireland and England have been entangled there has always been difficulty in defining that entanglement. As Terry Eagleton said, “...the British could never decide whether the Irish were their antithesis or mirror-image, partner or parasite, abortive offspring or sympathetic sibling. A colony is not just the ‘other’ of its metropolis but its peculiar other, part of it through antagonism”. I propose that one framework through which to analyze and understand the relationship is eco-colonialism. This framework is placed using three examples over roughly 800 years: settler-colonialism and agrarian cultivation, deforestation, and the Great Famine.
Faculty Sponsor: Wendy Boring
Discipline: History