The First World War (1914-1918) introduced the world to the horrors of warfare on an industrial scale. But it also gave rise to the one of the most dynamic and active anti-war movements of the 20th century. This research explores the activities of the local Pacific Northwest anti-war movement during World War I. National resistance to the militarist and imperialist policies of the United States peaked during the war period, and the Seattle anti-war movement provides a fascinating case study of how socialists, anarchists, labor unions and pacifists organized a robust anti-war movement. Using a wide variety of contemporary local newspapers, letters, activist memoirs and labor union meeting minutes, this study weaves together the story of Seattle’s radical and pacifist organizations during the First World War. This study finds that despite aggressive persecution from the Federal government, conservative labor unions and pro-war business interests, the Seattle anti-war coalition continued to offer active and radical resistance to militarist policies up until the end of the war.

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.

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.

In many ways, our contemporary understanding of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, and its associated successes and failures, has been severely limited through socio-historical and political machinations to collapse and periodize it. Rather than situating it within or connecting it to the broader historical continuum and highlighting the rich multiplicity of forms of struggle and survival, the simplistic narratives we receive through media (and other forms of cultural production) are ones of heroes and villains—of near-infallible visionaries and separatist and corrupt radicals, one that highlights the contributions of the few at the expense of the many. Two such groups whose historical agency and significance suffer from such undertakings are the Black Panther and the Young Lords Parties. It can be said that both groups have suffered not from a crisis of denotation, but one of connotation—referring specifically to the ways in which their collective contributions have been socially diminished as they are instead associated with fear, needless violence, corruption, militancy and relegated to the margins. Thus my research asks: how did these groups function as powerful symbols of transformation during Modern Civil Rights Movement? To what end? How and why were individuals within these groups and even the organizations themselves framed as threats to the social order and how would their objectification exacerbate their struggles for equality? I seek to uncover through a careful examination of foundational documents, news articles and other print media, interviews, and film, how socially produced marginalization enabled a multiplicity of violence against them (and their associated communities) and also illuminate some of the associated contemporary consequences.

Much of the wisdom written on the subject of Iraqi railways confides in the German interest of the 19th century in extending a railway from Baghdad to Haydarpasa, World War I, and the birth of the British Mandate, as noted in Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010). As a result, there is a need within the academic literature regarding British controlled Iraqi railways and the correlation of concessions to various oil companies during the 1920s. This study has also found that the U.S. had a covert interest in the shaping of the Iraqi nation, while most research has focused on the British imperial agenda concerning the railways. By using data based on the Records of Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Asia, 1910-1929, which includes confidential correspondence between the American Consulate of Baghdad and Washington DC and pamphlets regarding the infrastructure, along with integral secondary source material like Peter Sluglett’s Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (2007, 2nd ed.), this study addresses both a wide variety of identities such as the intellectuals and elite as well as Bedouin tribes and Kurds within the Iraqi nation, who were embedded within this new imperial reality, and the U.S. clandestine approach to addressing the issue of oil concessions. The methodology employed within this research project consists of both the imperialist agenda of Britain and the U.S. embryonic interests in Iraq, while conveying the consciousness of those imperialized and/or colonized. Therefore, this had implicated that there was a lack of sectarian violence prior to the creation of Iraq, and as such, there were new ethnic identities and nationalisms that resulted from its creation of which they were inherently influenced by the prospects of oil and the extension of railways throughout Iraq.

The diaries kept by Emma B. Andrews are an undervalued resource for learning about Egyptian culture and 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 yearly 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. The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project aims to increase the availability of this source with the hope that it will become more widely recognized in the academic world. 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 text 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. First, transcriptions of the diaries to an electronic textual format must be completed and edited twice for accuracy. Next, the diary transcriptions are run through an auto-tagging program to create an online format for the texts. The diaries are then converted into XML format and new content is added to them, including historical research on people mentioned in the diaries. Undergraduates working on this project are passionate and committed about making this valuable resource available to the world in a way it has never been before.

With the fifth largest proven crude oil reserves in the world and a government dependent on oil for 90% of its annual revenue, it is difficult for the 21st century individual to imagine what Iraq’s economy looked like before petroleum was discovered in 1923. In fact, relatively little is known about Iraq’s pre-oil economy, including the methods that were used to transport and trade commodities, what commodities were traded, and the prevalence of commercial travel. My research project focuses on the historical role of steamships in Iraqi commerce and travel, and how the Joseph M. Svoboda Diaries can illuminate the patterns of 19th century commercial trade and travel along the Tigris River in the part of the Ottoman Empire that is present-day Iraq. By examining Diaries 47 and 48 and cataloguing Svoboda’s descriptions of the commercial river voyages he takes as part of his job as a clerk on British steamships, my research seeks to illuminate what goods were traded, what kind of people used steamships as a mode of travel, and what places along the Tigris River functioned as commercial hubs. I plan to create a visual map of Svoboda’s river journeys, and to identify which river ports were significant and which ports typically provided what commodities. (Example: Coot as a hub for coal.) By superimposing Svoboda’s steamship routes on a map of present-day Iraq, I hope to investigate what impact, if any, this 19th century steamship traffic had on the modern-day river ports mentioned in the text and explore whether these commercial hubs retained their historical economic significance into the 20th and 21st centuries.

This project – an ongoing collaboration between the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) and Social Media (SoMe) Laboratories at UW – investigated the spread of misinformation during the Boston Marathon Bombings over Twitter, ultimately leveraging social media in crisis situations for communication, news reporting, and aid coordination efforts. Thus far we classified six rumors within the roughly twenty million tweet dataset, isolated several temporal “signatures” representative of certain kinds of rumors, and identified tweet characteristics (URLs and location data, for instance) associated with either misinformation or correction. We then further investigated the role of URLs and domains in the spread of misinformation, postulating that outside sources play a significant role in the development of temporal signatures. Finally, using a combination of rumor classification and machine learning, we began to create an application that automatically identifies misinformation in real time as it spreads.

H5N1 Avian Influenza is a global threat. Given the globalized nature of our world as well as the universal human susceptibility to disease, an influenza outbreak in Southeast Asia poses a concern for the rest of the world. Although there are no major transmission cases reported among human populations, the virus might evolve to become lethal over time. Despite it being a global threat, only the West was well situated for preparedness during the 2005 outbreak in Asian poultry farms. Vaccines created were targeted towards developed countries, and few drug companies were willing to work with Indonesia and Thailand because of lower profit potential. This policy report is designed to accommodate the needs of high-risk countries. Due to the potential destruction of what the avian influenza carries, this report outlines the fundamental causes of avian influenza. We question how the avian influenza virus is evolving to become infectious to humans, and investigate necessary changes to avoid future outbreaks. From our research through news articles, public health journals, microbiology textbooks, and a telephone conference with Dr. Suraya Afiff of the University of Indonesia, it is apparent that food sovereignty is the most crucial issue in preventing future outbreaks. We address our policy-recommendation report to La Via Campensina (LVC) an Indonesian Non-governmental Organization attempting to regulate the poultry industry and working to minimize the negative consequences of large agriculture. Through this report to LVC, we hope to convey a specific set of strategies that will mitigate future pandemics. Above all, we show LVC the importance of considering future outbreaks in the fight for food sovereignty.