We’re finally into finals week here at AC 2nd, and that means it’s time for another round of Senior Seminar presentations! Tonight (6-9pm, CC 430 – all are welcome) we’ll hear eight students reflect on their experiences conducting original research into a wide variety of topics. Coincidentally, all of the papers are set in the 20th and 21st centuries — a first for Senior Sem, as far as I know.
In order of when they’ll be presented, here are the papers — each with its thesis or research question and links to three especially significant primary or secondary sources used by the researcher.
Sarah Ouverson, “Manufactured and Manipulated: The Creation and Development of Glacier National Park”
“Although Glacier National Park offers many attractions to the people who visit it, creating this area meant manufacturing an experience as well as manipulating aspects of the environment to fit the mindset and desires of the American visitors.”
- Digitized materials at Mansfield Library, University of Montana
- Advertisements for Glacier from newspapers in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database
- Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks
Tyler DuBois, “The Spanish Transition: Forgetting and Recovery of the Past”
“In 2007 the Spanish government passed the Law of Historical Memory that opened Spanish society to a retelling of its history and reforming its collective memory of the past. Why after so many years of silencing the past did the governing body of Spain decide to reopen the conversation about what happened during the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship?”
- Articles from the leading Spanish newspaper, El Pais
- Joan Ramón Resina, ed., Dismembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy
- Alison Ribeiro de Menezes et al., eds., Legacies of Dictatorship in Contemporary Portugal and Spain
Fletcher Warren, “‘A Long Way from Minneapolis’: Minnesotans in the Spanish Civil War”
“…why did sixty Minnesotan men travel to a foreign country to fight and die for a government and people they had no previous connection to? In addition, how was their decision to volunteer renewed, challenged, deepened, or shattered by their experiences of war in Spain? And how did volunteers continue to understand their decision as they became veterans and returned to the United States?”
- Clarence Forester Papers, Minnesota Historical Society
- Memoirs held at the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center
- Volunteers database at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University
Kelly Van Wyk, “The Paneled Lives of Extraordinary Women: Comic Books, Superheroines, and American Women in the 1940s”
“During the wartime Forties, women in factories and women fighting crime [in comic books] both expressed autonomy, agency, and competency while remaining within the bounds of conventional femininity. To what extent were comic books reflecting cultural adaptations to American femininity and to what extent could they have been shaping its revision?”
- William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter, Wonder Woman Archives
- Jean-Paul Gabilliet et al., Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books
- Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America
Sarah Herb, “Life after Liberation: A Brief History of Jewish Survivors’ Experiences after the Holocaust”
“What was the experience of Jewish concentration camp survivors in the British and American zones [of occupied Germany] between the time of liberation in 1945 and the time of reintegrating back into society by the mid 1950s?”
- Oral histories at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Harrison Report
- Michael John Hargrave, Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student’s Journal
Bob Johnson, “Refugees of the Partition of India, 1947: Experiences and Resettlement”
“What was to become the Partition of India and Pakistan also came with unforeseen tragedy at the time as millions were uprooted and were moved across rushed and tentative borderlines as refugees. This paper will be exploring the experiences of these refugees and what the underlying causes and impacts the Partition had on Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike. The focus will be greatly on the refugee experience as a result of the Partition. In terms of regions it will primarily look at the Punjab experience as well as being supplemented with subjects from Bengal and other areas.”
- Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
- Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An Eye-Witness Account of the Partition of India
- Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories
Mike Vangstad, “From Separation to Participation: The Experience of Bethel College During the Civil Rights Movement”
“A look into Bethel’s past… shows that significant work toward racial reconciliation began in the early phases of the Civil Rights Movement. The process of adaptation and experimentation Bethel underwent throughout this time is enlightening and interesting, inspirational and frustrating.”
- The Clarion (student newspaper)
- Annual Reports of the Baptist General Conference
- G. William Carlson and Diana L. Magnuson, Persevere, Läsare, and Clarion: Celebrating Bethel’s 125th Anniversary
Paul Flowers, “Counterterrorism after 9/11: The Rise of Leviathan and the Fall of Privacy”
“[The tragic sequence of events on September 11, 2001] raised two major questions: How do we defend against a threat that looks just like us, and can blend into the background? What is more, how do we balance privacy with the needs of security and safety for the public? These are weighty questions, and ones that are being debated hotly, even now. Throughout the course of this paper, I will examine how counterterrorism policy in the United States has evolved since the attacks on September 11, 2011 (9-11) under the administrations of former president George W. Bush and current president Barack H. Obama.”
- Government documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests
- The 9/11 Commission Report
- Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
CC 4th 
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