Upperclassmen students enrolled in History 300 wrote research papers on topics of personal interest as part of the course’s customary spring research paper. The parameters of the paper were to write about an event in American history that occurred during or prior to the year 2001, spanning across nine to eleven pages. History 300 students reflected on their paper topics and the rationale behind their selection.
Murewa Biyi-Olaoye ’27
“My topic is the Tuskegee syphilis study. I decided to go deeper into the impact it had on the U.S. healthcare system afterwards. I focused on the aftereffects and the late 1900s. I [originally] wanted to talk about sickle cell anemia, because my father has it. With the research for that, I realized a lot of the research was in the last 20 years, and I thought it was a little too recent. I [wondered] whether there’d been any other times where people in marginalized communities have had this sort of disease or sickness and were not treated well. Yes, the paper is so much work, so much reading, but you’re learning about something that you’re interested in, and I definitely feel like I learned it all.”
Jasjit Hargun ’27
“My paper is on Philippine independence and why they got independence when they did. The Philippines had been taken by the U.S. from the Spanish in the very end of the 19th century. But even as early as 1916, there were moves to get the Philippines more autonomous and later independent. Despite that, it still took all the way until 1946 for that to happen. I looked into what the motivations were in both the Philippines and the U.S. for independence keeping the islands. Choose a topic that gets you excited because even though nine to eleven pages isn’t much for a research paper to fit everything, it’s still a lot to write about a topic that you’re not interested in. Your paper is only going to be good if you have the motivation to actually research and really dive into those topics. It’s important you choose something that interests you.”
Zoë Gilbertson ’27
“I wrote about the music of the counterculture movement in the 1960s and 70s. I talked a lot about how Bob Dylan electrified folk music and how that expanded the new lefts and separately the hippie audience to this new genre of rock and roll that was deeply politicized. In that repopularization of rock music, the Beatles [and] Jimi Hendrix, came this new era of psychedelic rock, and I specifically analyzed the Grateful Dead, and [how] psychedelic rock or acid rock influenced by LSD culture in San Francisco, especially in the west coast.”
Owen Huang ’27
“My topic is the SR-71 Blackbird. It’s a CIA spy plane from the Cold War. I wrote about how the United States felt the need for it to exist because of the tensions of the Cold War and how its development was similar in a lot of ways. It was wasteful spending because it didn’t end up being super useful to the United States. I wanted to write about the Cold War. I was looking online and settled on this plane. I knew I wanted to write about airplanes from my interest in aerospace engineering. This topic matters today because it’s an example from the past of how paranoia and fear can drive government spending and how that can happen to act on the world stage, especially as the U.S. and China potentially are entering a more tense environment in the world.”
Saanika Slotwiner ’27
“[My History 300 paper] is on the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War and how television in that event impacted American public opinion. The point of the paper was that television itself didn’t actually end up changing opinion that much, which is what popular belief is, but it was more like a catalyst in people understanding what they thought about the war. Make sure you have all your sources before you start writing and double check the source criteria. I had to find a couple sources last minute and it was stressful.”
Shiloh Robinson ’27
“I wrote about the Roanoke colony, which is the first colony that England tried to establish in North America. It was in 1857. It was England’s hope to create a settlement to strengthen their claim in the new world and have a base for attacks on Spanish ships during the Anglo-Spanish War. They established their posts, [and] their colony in 1857 and when they got there, they had a bit of trouble, so they needed to go back to England to get supplies. The governor of their colony went back, and when he came back after three years, the whole colony disappeared. What I believe is that assimilation with the local native tribes was likely the reason they disappeared.”
