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:

• Right in ‘Grain’ Sight: Grain Trade in Medieval England Before the Twelfth Century
• Expanding the Universal Brotherhood of Theosophy: A Woman at the Margins of a Marginal Movement
• Reform Without Resolve: Stranded Between History and Progress at Washington and Lee University
• With Freedom Comes Responsibility: The Newspaper Revolution and Nellie Bly
• The 1980 Olympic Boycott and Its Impact on American Athletes Through the Eyes of Mary Decker and Edwin Moses
• Ethnic Germans in Utica, New York: A Cultural History of Immigration, Dissemination, and Rejection
• Go-To-Zero: The United States Military's Disastrous Withdrawal from Afghanistan
• Finding Success: A Business History of Mid-Late 19th-Century English Photography, The Chromotype and Woodburytype
• Before Loving v. Virginia (1967): Eugenics, Visual Culture, and the Struggle Over Interracial Marriage
• Between Utopia and Reality: Moisei Ginzburg’s Organization of Contemporary Architects
• Constructing Newton: Religious Anecdote, Genius, and Piety in 19th-Century America
• “Trying for a Better World”: Nancy Astor and the Commodification of the New Woman and Social Welfare
• Policy and the Promise of a Better Home: The Myrdals and the Social Architecture of Stockholm’s Barnrikehus, 1930–1940
• Contesting Spanish Identity: History and the Nation in the Work of Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz from 1948 Through 1971

Honors theses

• Networks of Health and Healthcare: Tracing Sickness in a 16th Century Spanish Household
• Tea, Tomahawks, and Truth: Native American Imagery and Historical Memory of the Boston Tea Party
• All I Know Is What I Don’t Read in the Papers: Reconsidering William Dudley Pelley (1928–1939)
• The Bassigny Prophecy and the Enduring Power of Medieval French Millenarianism
• Irish Family Memory: Narrating Systems of Support, Ethnicity, and Pedigree Through Correspondence
• To the Winner, the Potatoes: Brazilian National Identity in Literary Work
• Digitizing Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a New Filipino Nationhood
• Reporting Korea: The Black Press’ Fusion of Anti-Communism and Colored Internationalism During the Korean War (1950–1954)