The History Honours program gives students the opportunity to complete a research project with guidance from History faculty. Students will present their work at the annual History Honours Conference which is held in May of each year.
Students who are interested in completing a History Honours can contact the History Department Coordinator, Nicole.Kungle@ufv.ca for more info or visit the UFV Academic Calendar program page for the History Honours.
Note: HIST 400 and HIST 440 may not be offered in the same academic year.
Past History Honours Student Research Projects
"Where the Dead Must Go: Vampires of the White Death in 18th and 19th Century New England" by Maggie Meyers
Abstract:
With numerous interpretations spanning across cultures, there is something about the vampire that is inexplicably alluring and fascinating. However, this alluring image of the vampire is a relatively recent concept. While these creatures of the night have become iconic figures that have taken over popular culture, they were much more monstrous than what is known today. Between the years of 1784 and 1892, an outbreak of tuberculosis ravaged the rural areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In 19th century America, vampires served as metaphors for disease and were believed to be behind the New England Vampire Panic. The most famous case of the panic is Mercy Lena Brown and her family. The purpose of this paper is to weave the story of the Brown family into the larger narrative of vampire history and explain why vampires are the perfect monster to pin behind outbreaks of disease.
"Cementing the Divide: How Progressive Housing Reform Entrenched Inequality in Post-War Chicago" by Brad Duncan
Abstract:
This paper examines the failure of Chicago’s post-war public housing initiative through the lens of its founding ideals. In the mid-twentieth century, progressive housing reformers sought to address urban poverty and racial segregation through large-scale housing initiatives. Though well intentioned, these efforts proved unable to account for the social, class-based, or cultural dynamics of the communities they aimed to transform, nor the broader societal reactions they would elicit. By prioritizing direct relief for the city’s poorest residents, the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) policies disrupted natural patterns of community formation and dynamism, prompting backlash from homeowners, community organizations, and local officials while jeopardizing its financial durability. As the CHA’s economic resources dwindled, so did its political influence, social capital, and capacity to manage its properties. Public housing became both a symbol of—and scapegoat for—urban disfunction. Tragically, this stigmatized the very people whom the CHA had most yearned to uplift, Black Chicagoans, through a racial, rather than an economic lens. Drawing on a range of sources, including resident voices and archival newspapers, this paper argues that Chicago’s housing crisis was not simply a product of racism or mismanagement, but a tragic byproduct of ambitious ideals poorly aligned with the realities on the ground.
"The Divide Between Ideal and Reality: Hegemonic Masculinity Within the Third Reich" by Grace Pope
Abstract:
The contradictions between Nazi Germany’s idealized concept of Aryan masculinity and the lived experiences of German men during World War II are quite revealing; they expose the psychological, emotional, and moral struggles of soldiers. Despite being moulded into the rigid Nazi frame through discipline, strength, and loyalty, soldiers often found themselves confronting the violence and vulnerability of war, defying the regime’s idealized masculinity. While the regime influenced a rigid ideal of masculinity, soldiers turned to comradeship for emotional refuge, which defied Nazi expectations. At the same time, disobedience, through subtle and overt actions, revealed the fractured framework of Nazi’s ideal masculinity. Sexual violence, along with other wartime hardships, exposed the unachievable expectations of idealized masculinity within Nazi propaganda and the brutality of soldiers’ actions, further highlighting the divide between the nation’s ideal and the disturbing reality. The division between the Nazi’s masculine ideal and the soldiers’ lived realities emphasizes how, when in extreme war conditions, unrealistic ideals will crumble, revealing the deeper and unruly, often unspoken, human truths.
"The Land Under Heaven: Motoori Norinaga and the Japanese Collective" by Andrew Kelly
Abstract:
In Japan’s early modern period, the notion of public community and identity flourished through many modes. Playwrights, poets, and authors realized new audiences, geographic space was reimagined and put to physical form through accessible maps and travel guides, and mirrors and surveys gave an encyclopedic overview of Japan’s growing cities. The Tokugawa era, termed for the Tokugawa Shogunate’s reign over military matters in Japan, is often viewed in oversimplified terms as an era of stability and censorship, yet it was also a time of great social and political change. This is the context for Japanese philosopher and writer Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), who forms a sense of national Japanese identity that is rooted in collective habitation within a divine country innately endowed with an idealized but morally distorted “Way”, or a moral and emotional ideology. His ideas provide the foundation for what will eventually evolve into modernized, westernized nationalism come the Meiji Restoration (1868), a trend that would abscond from Norinaga’s ideal of an apolitical, sympathetic community and instead highlight his conceptions of Japan’s circumstantial superiority to China and the rest of the world.
"The Artistic Criminal: Censorship and Surveillance of Black Novelists in Cold War and Modern America" by Jennifer Carstensen
Abstract:
In the fight against communist ideas in Cold War America censorship and surveillance were commonly employed, especially against creatives like authors. Minority authors, such as African Americans, found themselves particularly targeted because of the ways they criticized the American state. However, this is not something that started and ended with the Red Scare, as in modern day America the same kinds of authors are targeted by book bans and governmental actions to silence their dissenting voices. This paper delves into the ways in which African American authors were and are silenced through techniques like FBI surveillance, censorship, book bans, and legislation both in the Cold War and 21st Century to compare the two eras and see how similar or different they are. Through this analysis we see that while the rhetoric and tools of censorship change, the targets remain the same, and that the internet age makes it impossible for these actions of censorship to go unnoticed by the broader public.
"The Impact of Racial Ideology and Internal Rivalry on Recruitment for the Waffen SS: The Latvian Legion" by Steven Prosser
Abstract:
This essay explores the position of Latvia in WWII, specifically examining the nation’s role in the Nazi Waffen SS. Under the command of Heinrich Himmler, the Waffen SS was to play an instrumental role in establishing a society based on horrendous racial ideologies. Roughly 900,000 soldiers fought as members of the SS, however nearly half of these soldiers came from other nations. People of Germanic and Nordic backgrounds, along with various western Europe nations were considered suitable for recruitment to the SS. However, many nations, in particular those in eastern Europe, were disputed among members of the Nazi regime as to where they fit in their constructed racial hierarchy and whether they could be accepted into Germany’s elite military units. Latvians were considered by many of the Nazi regimes top ranked officials, including Hitler himself, as being inferior. As a result, several opposed to the notion of forming a Latvian Legion. Yet the small nation of roughly 2 million people ended up producing one of the largest foreign divisions of the Waffen SS. This essay explores how the Latvian Legion developed under these circumstances.
"The American Superiority Complex: The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb" by Abigail Taggart
Abstract:
The end of the Second World War was marked by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, these bombings symbolized a new beginning as well. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States of America would rise to
an all-time high just a few decades later, the effects of which are still being felt today. While the official reasoning for the use of atomic weaponry remains focused on the projected casualties of an Allied invasion of Japan, revisionist historians and declassified intelligence documents reveal a far more subtle reasoning. The U.S. government sought to intimidate the Soviet Union and prevent dividing Japan, as they had in Germany, and the constant dehumanization of the Japanese in the American perspective and propaganda, most evident in the characterization of the kamikaze pilots, allowed Japan to be the target of atomic weapons. As such, it was the desire for,
and internal perception of, the United States to be a racially, intellectually, and technologically superior nation to those that may oppose her that drove the decision to drop the atomic bomb.
"(Re)Indigenizing the Creator's Game: Settler Colonialism and Lacrosse's Journey from Eastern Lands to Stó꞉lō Hands" by Carlanna Thompson
Abstract:
This project not only highlights that the version of lacrosse played by Indigenous peoples in the BC was a colonized version of what was originally the Haudenosaunee variation of the game in Northeastern North America, but also that this colonizer’s import was subsequently incorporated and co-opted by Stó:lō communities for their own purposes. In the process, it provided a vehicle for cross-community communication and relationship building, for fostering of pan-Indigenous identities, and for supporting pride in their own identity and proficiency. The effect was thus a ‘re-Indigenization’ of the sport of lacrosse in the Fraser Valley in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.