Translation is a tricky business, especially when concerning religious texts. The problem of effectively communicating a culture's ingrained beliefs to another through a different language has potentially important implications for the original audience. An excellent example of this is the Septuagint, the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew scriptures. My project focuses on the Greek version of the Hebrew Leviticus, a book which contains vital information about the Hebrew religion and sacrificial procedures. I examined the translation via a verse-by-verse, word-by-word comparison between the Greek and Hebrew versions, in particular noting the translator's accuracy, grammar, and communication of important Hebrew sacrificial terminologies and ideas into the Greek. By such a comparison and investigation of the translator's word usages, it is possible to reconstruct how the original non-Hebrew speaking audience understood and interpreted this text. The significance of this reconstruction lies in the fact that early Christianity used the Septuagint, including Leviticus, as a supportive foundation for its beliefs.

Emperor Claudius was a target for gossip and disgust for many Romans in his time. He suffered from what we believe was Cerebral Palsy, an illness for which the Romans had no understanding, nor knowledge of how to manage it. This illness resulted in Claudius having a pronounced limp, poor motor control, and a serious speech impediment. Upon his death, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a satire called the Apocolocyntosis, which detailed Claudius' attempts at deification, his eventual rejection from heaven and his descent into the Underworld. It is not a flattering piece of literature; Claudius is depicted as incompetent, stuttering, and childish, and is poorly treated by his peers within the text. Seneca explores Claudius' condition thoroughly in the Apocolocyntosis and eventually offers his own end to Claudius' power, giving Claudius a social status in his final resting place in the Underworld which Seneca believes is befitting of his condition.The piece provides us with an opportunity to explore Roman concepts of social capability and capacity for power, which were heavily based on the ability to speak well, as portrayed through the lens of Stoic philosophy. Through exploring the main tenents of Stoicism and their connections to Roman social ideals, a combined set of values emerges which can be applied to the Apocolocyntosis in order to better understand the perception of Claudius by his Roman peers. The Emperor embodies a conflict for the ideal social order of Roman Stoics, as he violates what Stoics consider to be "human" but doesn't fit their definition of "animal." This analysis creates the opportunity to explore Stoic Roman ideals for humanity, the way in which mental illness and speech impediments violate their desired natural order, and how Claudius is used to provide a conclusion to this contradiction.

The actions and attitudes of Roman imperial women have fascinated both ancient and modern historians alike, and many have used them in order to pose larger questions about the nature of Roman power and the lifestyle of the early Emperors. The representations of imperial and highborn women in the texts of Roman historians provide a unique and complex window into the lives of some of the most polarizing females of the early days of the Roman Empire. In this paper I seek to explore the manner in which the second century CE historian Tacitus, and the third century CE historian Cassius Dio, characterize and utilize these women within their narratives of the end of Augustus’ reign, and the reign of Tiberius (ca. 27 BCE-36 CE). Furthermore, I elucidate these authors’ reactions to notable women through the lens of female morality and virtues, especially those espoused by Augustus’ moral legislation. This series of laws regarding marriage, children and adultery were presented by Augustus as a return to ancient mores. This was in stark contrast to the reality of the Augustan state and the early Principate in which highborn women were often able to exercise large amounts of political power through their male relatives. A closer examination of high-placed imperial women, such as Livia, Agrippina the Elder, and Julia, through this lens of Augustan morality reveals that the sources, especially Tacitus, are very uneasy about women whose actions in the political sphere are completely unprecedented and “new”, but who adhere to the “old” standards of modesty and feminine virtue. In order to explain this interesting phenomenon I will explore the historians’ portrayals of “good” Roman women, “bad” Roman women, and women who are morally upright but suspect with regards to their engagement in political power.

From 1996 until 2012, the rate of cesarean section in the United States has increased almost 63 percent from 797,119 to 1,296,070, reaching an all-time high of 32.9 percent of births at present. Starting in 2009, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has published guidelines for inducing labor and performing maternal-requested cesarean deliveries. Since 2007 the rate of “home-births” surged, increasing by almost 50 percent to over 35,000 now. Various media such as Ricki Lake’s popular documentary, The Business of Being Born, have questioned the current birthing system in the United States. They call for a return to “traditional” methods of infant delivery, or delivery primarily by midwife. The result is polarization between modern obstetrics and midwifery. Each faction is quick to place blame. This paper refocuses the discussion away from the usual statistical evidence of quantitative recordkeeping and concentrates on the anecdotal and proprietary experiences of ancient medical writers, drawing from often forgotten historical sources. With these in mind, I argue for a more holistic and nuanced approach to determining the correct course of action, bearing in mind the often competing interests of preserving and reducing historically low maternal and infant mortality rates against cultural and traditional concepts and identifiers. To do this I present a brief history of ancient gynecology and obstetrics, offer details into ancient dystocia (difficult labor) and its “remedies” (including embryotomy), and discuss the effect of innovation on dystocia. Finally, I reveal that birth is a far more complicated event than either traditionalists or western medicine recognize or willingly concede, reducing it to either a natural process or a pathological one, respectively.

The diaries kept by Emma B. Andrews are an undervalued resource for learning about Egyptian culture, history and many turn of the century discoveries. Andrews (1837-1922) was the mistress of Theodore Davis, an archeologist responsible for the excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Andrews accompanied Davis on his trips and kept records of her life in Egypt. Her diaries provide readers with valuable insights into the social, cultural and scientific climate during her years in Egypt. However, these first-hand accounts have gone virtually unnoticed for years. Now, at the University of Washington, undergraduate students have the unique opportunity of working with the Andrews diaries to prepare them for online publication through the Newbook Digital Texts Project. The project allows for inexpensive publication of materials with less difficulty than traditional publication methods. Students work to translate, transcribe, edit and tag large amounts of texts in order to make them universally available on the web. Students researching the diaries have a variety of tasks to complete before the diaries will be ready for publication. During our presentation, we will focus on the process by which we are compiling these writings, which include: transcribing the diaries to an electronic textual format which must be completed and edited twice for accuracy; running the transcriptions through an auto-tagging program to create an online format for the texts; converting the auto-tagged version into XML format and adding new content, including historical research on people mentioned in the diaries; as well as how we hope this will change research in this area in the future. Undergraduates working on The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project are passionate about and committed to making this valuable resource available to the world with the hope that it will become a more widely recognized in the world of academia.

 The JMS Diaries is a collection of 16 original diaries and 30 transcriptions of Joseph Mathia Svoboda's original diaries. As an employee of the Lynch Brothers’ Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company, Svoboda wrote daily accounts of life on the Euphrates River between 1862 and 1908. These diaries give us insight into valuable cultural and social perspectives about Iraq during the late 19th Century. The NEH-funded Newbook Digital Texts in the Humanities project works to transform such valuable primary source documents into digital texts, making them easily accessible to scholars and the general public. As undergraduate researchers, we work with these primary texts to gain both research and digital archiving skills. Our editorial team works through a five phase process consisting of transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding and formatting each text. First, we transcribe the texts from the original handwritten documents to plain text digital form, editing and proofreading them. We format the transcriptions in a standardized way for our work-flow manager to then apply a program, written by our technology team, which converts this format into XML-TEI markup (tags). XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a human and machine readable markup language used for encoding documents, which we use in a form standardized by TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative. We convert these to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for web display and to LaTeX typesetting language for printing. Our history team extracts information from the texts thus produced to write our project "wiki" (the Svobodapedia. Svobodapedia serves as the basic annotation source for the final text, which is made available to readers on our website and as a print-on-demand book. Since beginning the project in September 2012, we have completed two diaries consisting of 400 pages each, and continue to work toward advancing this evolving, ongoing repository of primary source documents.