The Senior Program

The senior seminar paper or honors thesis is the culminating experience for history majors at Hamilton. It is a semester-long research project in which students draw on their accumulated skills and knowledge to produce focused, high-level scholarship on a specific topic or problem.

Recent projects in history include:

• Deir Yassin, 1948: Memory and Forgetting in the Construction of Nationalism.
• Daqing Spirit: A Great Celebration of Maoism
• Persecution and Perseverance: A Historical Analysis of The Book of Martyrs
• The Trial of Warren Hastings: Historical Contention over the Repercussions and Legacies of Hastings, Burke, and Empire
• Dancers, Dames, and Dissenters: How Women Navigated Race and Gender at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair 
• A Lawyer's Duty: Elihu Root, Historical Memory, and the Construction of US Empire
• “Olympic Ideas for Selfish Ends”: The Projection of Soviet National Identity at the 1980 Moscow Games
• Observing the Masses: Snapshots on the Road to the British Welfare State
• Historiography of the Holocaust: Reevaluating the Intentionalist -- Structuralist Debate
• “Unfixed in Place and Time”: The 1919 Canadian Labor Revolts in Song and Memory
• Much More than a “Body of Sentimental Women”: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Construction of a Lost Cause Civil Religion at the Beauvoir Home 
• The Crumbling Tower of Anthropology: Missing Epistemic Foundations in the Study of Race and Culture
• Nature and Nation: Creating American Wilderness.
• The Battle of Algiers and its Afterlives: Interrogating the Tactics and Transmission of Modern Power through the Yves Godard Papers
• Aljamiado: Resisting Spanish Catholic Oppression through Islamic Literature
• When Issues Arise: Grappling with the History of the Valley of the Fallen
• The Impact of Inclusion: Accessible Housing in the 20th Century Disability Rights Movement