Emerging from the political decline of the Islamic “Gunpowder Empires,” the Central Asian Nadir Shah assumed leadership of the former Safavid Empire before winning notable victories over his Ottoman and Mughal counterparts. In this paper, I attempt to grapple with the complex issue of Nadir Shah’s ethnic identity, which has alternately been presented as either Turkic or Persian. As such, I attempt to navigate the trend of nationalist historians to appropriate Nadir Shah into their own nation’s retroactive “national history,” relying not only on the works of such historians, but also those more removed from nationalist perspectives. Using readings spanning from the 18th century until the present day, I note the shifts in Nadir Shah’s ethnic identification across nations and time periods as well as the differing degree to which historians attempted to restrict the king’s identity to a single ethnic group. Highlighting political changes affecting Central Asia during the 18th century and their enablement of Nadir Shah’s navigation of class and race-based hierarchies, I then critique narrow national identifications of Nadir Shah and attempt to highlight nuances within the issue of pre-nation state ethnic identity. In conclusion, I assert that pre-nation-state identity may have been mutable and that Nadir Shah’s identity, rather than sitting on one side of a Turkic-Persian dichotomy, reflects a fluidity of nationality extant in 18th century Central Asia.

The Holocaust is an example of an Encounter with the ‘Other’ in world history. It is plain to see that the Nazis viewed the Jews as “other”, but the converse is also true, and to see the Nazis as the “other” is still common today. However, is Nazism an aberration, an “other”, an outsider to the historical process? And even more than that, are individual Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann “other”? There are primary sources from the time regarding Eichmann’s personality and actions. These primary sources include trial and interrogation transcripts as well as literature about Eichmann from the time. There are also secondary sources to see what scholars think about Eichmann. My paper is organized by the questions I ask about the Eichmann texts and the understandings I form through those documents. Some of these questions might be formed as: Is Nazism an aberration, an “other”, an outsider to the historical process? And even more than that, are individual Nazis “other”? Specifically, who is Adolf Eichmann and what problem does he pose for humanity? What does Eichmann as an individual perpetrator mean for history? Is Eichmann the Other? Or, what do we have in common with “evil” and its banality? My primary hope for researching this topic was to understand, in some small way, human evil. To know about Adolf Eichmann and his evil is not to understand him or excuse him. His personality and character (or lack thereof) remains befuddling to me. In terms of what this paper accomplishes, I I address “otherness” as a concept which alienates perpetrator from victim as well as victim from perpetrator, and (for this essay) the perpetrator as Other for the rest of society.

In the early seventeenth century, French Catholic missionaries arrived in the region of New France now known as Quebec intending to make Christians out of the Amerindian population. Over the next century and a half, the missionaries proceeded to build schools and hospitals and to establish their orders in the colony. Two of the Catholic orders that sent members were the Jesuits and the Ursulines. Both orders concerned themselves with the education and conversion of the Amerindians, mostly the Huron tribe. Through their missionary activities, they formed a nascent community of individuals with shared beliefs and purposes. A number of factors, including their geographic location, their connections to their founding orders back in France, and the particular social environment surrounding them caused the Jesuits and Ursulines to live and work differently from their counterparts in France. These differences caused the missionary community to develop a distinct identity. Using The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents and the correspondence of Ursuline Mother Superior Marie de l’Incarnation, this research project examines the distinct identity missionary communities in New France developed. These sources record the daily activities of the Jesuits and the Ursulines in New France, while also revealing how individuals of each religious order understood their collective mission, which was characterized by interaction and cooperation between the orders. More universally, this project sheds light on how individuals form new communities and the way identities, even institutional identities, adapt to new environments.

During the colonial period in Korea the Japanese tried to squelch Korean identity, enfolding the Korean people within their expanding empire. As Japan’s policies and actions on the peninsula became increasingly oppressive, the Western world naively accepted Japan’s benign explanations. However, not everyone disregarded the warning signs in East Asia. Thomas F. Millard, an American journalist, was struck by the Korean plight and took up the Korean cause for independence in his writings. Millard was not only immersed in the affairs of East Asia, he was passionate about what he wrote. As Japanese historians and politicians worked to distort the Korean voice so that it reflected a supposed need for and acceptance of Japanese assistance, Millard attempted to expose their deception. In response to Japanese domination, Korean nationalism rose. Koreans formed a national identity centered on their shared heritage. Identity needs both internal and external recognition. Though the Korean people never identified as Japanese, during the colonial period the rest of the world saw them as Japanese citizens, not Koreans. In 1948 the United Nations agreed that nationality was a human right. Though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was far from being conceived in the early 1900s some people already believed in the rights that it would solidify; Millard was one of those people. He saw Japan’s actions as criminal, and he wrote about just that. As the Japanese tried to muffle Korea’s voice, Millard became a conduit for that voice. In a present-day world that still wrestles with the vestiges of imperialism, Millard’s work is a testament to the importance of listening to the multitude of voices that continue to sound around the globe.

Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, and Jezebel are the three queens presented in the Bible who are known most widely today.  These three figures are not the only important female leaders mentioned in the Bible: there are stories of numerous other women who stood near the heart of political power.  I argue that the Bible presents four archetypes of women in power.  The first is the Israelite women in an Israelite king’s court.  This woman will rarely speak in the text and, when she does, it is only to show her obedience to God’s will.  The second archetype is the Israelite women in a foreign king’s court.  They serve an instrument of God’s will within the foreign courts that they inhabit.  Their presence near the foreign power brings blessings and wealth to the Israelites in their adopted kingdom, at the expense of its native subjects.  The third group is the foreign women in the court of an Israelite king.  These women are viewed as dangerous.  They are nearly always portrayed as acting contrary to the interests of the kingdom and they also frequently accused of drawing the king away from God in some sense.  The fourth and final group is the foreign women of a foreign king’s court.  They represent God’s power to act even outside the boundaries of Israel, often acting as witnesses to God’s punishment or the instrument through which God acts to carry out his plans for Israel.  A study of these women, through a careful reading of the Bible, will give us a better understanding of how the biblical authors conceived of female power – whether that of queens or other positions of political power.

For my research, I was interested in the growing popularity of belly dancing in the United States, with a focus on misconceptions, stigmas, stereotypes, and the benefits that have attracted women (and some men who take classes and perform) to belly dance. I  researched these ideas that contribute to and surround belly dancing because of my personal experience as a local Seattle Belly Dancer. I was interested in both the reasons for the increase of interest and the stereotypes that need debunking. My question is: why have cultural perceptions of belly dancing shifted from a stereotype of sexualized dance to one of female empowerment and growing popularity? In order to answer this question I used participant observations, discourse analysis, photovoice and articles from both the media and scholarly. Rachel Kraus’s article titled “We are not Strippers: How Belly Dancers Manage a (Soft) Stigmatized Serious Leisure Activity” was useful in quoting and comparing her research on the stigma’s of belly dancers. From my research I found female empowerment about their bodies to be one of the core reasons for the growing popularity and also found stigma’s of the dance form being for male entertainment, which is a fallacy. The research  helped me become more aware of my community and its complexities.

In Washington State, the majority of juvenile offenders are handled by the juvenile criminal justice system. However, juveniles who commit serious violent crimes undergo a process known as declination, in which they are processed as adult defendants in adult courts. These juveniles are typically housed in jail with adult inmates, an experience which nation-wide studies have shown to be severely damaging to both their mental and physical well-being. Research regarding the prevalence of this practice in Washington State is slim. Our report aims to rectify this dearth of information by examining relevant statutes and case law, by interviewing various actors in the criminal justice system—including incarcerated youth themselves—and by sending information requests to all 39 counties in Washington State. The first section of our report will detail the types of declination in Washington and how to distinguish between the four main holding facilities: the Juvenile Detention Center, Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration, jail, and prison. Part two will present statistics regarding the number of declined juveniles held in each county jail since 2009, as well as county policies surrounding these declined individuals. Our preliminary research shows that hundreds of juveniles have been declined and held in jails since 2009. The third section will analyze the repercussions of incarceration on a juvenile’s life, as well as detail our personal interviews with several inmates from the Green Hill Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration. Our final section will analyze the differing opinions on the declination process, as well as present some of our own recommendations for improving the current system. We hope that these ideas will lead to the adoption of policies that will protect both public safety and the well-being of the inmates themselves, and provide these youth with the tools they need to successfully reintegrate into society.

In Touré’s 2012 book, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, Touré quotes Henry Louis Gates, stating, “if there are 40 million black Americans, then there are 40 million ways to be black.” While there exist as many ways to be black as black Americans, and while American pop culture and mainstream media are experiencing new exposure to different modalities of blackness, the rhetoric of black authenticity and the perceived need to prove oneself based on a racial category are still prevalent. Through a close reading of excerpts from Stew’s play Passing Strange, Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbor, and Paul Beatty’s novel White Boy Shuffle, I will use the analytics of authenticity and blackness in literature to explore how identity manifests itself for black males in hip hop music. In focusing on rappers Childish Gambino and Kanye West, I complicate a static popular image of blackness that is transformed through different modes of socio-economic status and education level by these artists. My research explores the lingering rhetoric of authenticity, focusing on contemporary intersectionalities of identity in regards to gender, socio-economic status, and race. These intersectionalities can conflict and influence one another for individuals who struggle to personally define themselves, while simultaneously being defined by their communities. In focusing on how black identity is created within the arts, specifically literature and music, my research aims to unpack the idea of “authenticity” surrounding blackness and make meaning of the ways in which black male teenagers and young adults explore, qualify, and define their identity in regards to race. Ultimately, my analysis sheds light on a more heterogeneous representation of black identity, while suggesting that restrictions on identity for black Americans are not obsolete in the 21st Century.

In many ways, popular understandings of the U.S. Occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924 and its complex consequences are incomplete. This understudied “intervention” has been virtually dismissed in U.S. collective memory, justified as one of many “reasonable” campaigns of the early 20th century necessary to ensure the emerging political and economic hegemony of the United States, and has been subsequently forgotten. As a result of this forgetting, what remains in U.S. collective historical memory is notably lacking a human element, prizing the actions of governments, politicians, and landed elites over the impacts to and responses of everyday people. This study attempts to disrupt the dominant narratives by uncovering some of the ways in which Dominican people resisted the conditions imposed by foreign invasion and occupation, paying particular attention to non-violent forms of resistance. By drawing upon newspaper articles, musical lyrics, and poetry in order to supplement our understanding and to serve as a foundation for critique of existing scholarship, this study also has the potential to demonstrate not only how the Dominican people have historically negotiated with, struggled against, and survived foreign actors, but also how they have transformed the very mechanisms that have sought to “civilize” them.

Sulawesi, in northern Indonesia, is strategically positioned to test competing models of modern human expansion, and trajectories of cultural change and interaction. Recent excavations in South Sulawesi have revealed a long and continuous archaeological sequence spanning most of the Holocene. We used sedimentological methods to investigate site formation and the environment of deposition at Gua Mo'o hono. These methods include the analyses of chemical and physical attributres of sediments, and particle size analysis. For determining the basic chemical  properties of the Sulewesi sediment samples, we used measurements of pH, electrical conductivity, organic carbon proportion by mass, and carbonate proportion by mass. For determining the basic physical properties of the sediment samples, we determined the color using the Munsell color chart by analyzing hue, value, chroma, viewing conditions, sample freshness, and the moisture content, as well as by measuring the magnetic susceptibility of the samples. Lastly, for dertermining particle size distribution of sediment samples, we use the pipette method and camsizer method of sediment granulometry. Our results present the environmental context to human occupation at the site. We discuss the relationship between the environmental and major cultural changes such as the introduction of ceramics at this site. The expected results are an improved understanding of the environment of site formation and the climatic conditions for humans that occupied the site.