CYCLOIDEA (CYC) is a member of the TCP family of transcription factors, whose name stands for TEOSINTE BRANCHED 1, CYCLOIDEA, and PROLIFERATING CELL FACTORS.  The members of this transcription factor family are involved in regulating plant growth and cell proliferation by binding to DNA. Previous studies show that CYC has duplicated at least twice in the core eudicot angiosperms and that the CYC2 paralog is involved in controlling flower symmetry. The goal of our research was to characterize duplications of CYC in Rhododendron, with the long-term goal of seeing how these duplications affect flower symmetry. To accomplish this task, we used the R. williamsianum genome sequence to design primers specific to each paralog in order to PCR-amplify the CYC genes from four Rhododendron species, representing two subgenera (Hymenanthes, Rhododendron). Amplified products were cloned and sequenced to recover all alleles. We used our Rhododendron sequences and sequences from the conserved TCP and R domains of other species as out-groups in a Bayesian analysis to reconstruct the gene tree. From this tree, we have identified 2 main duplications in Rhododendron CYC genes as seen in other core eudicots. We also found that the CYC2 paralog has undergone at least 2 gene duplications and that the CYC1 paralog underwent one. Future research will focus on finding when CYC2 duplications occurred in rhododendrons and determining if, where, and when these CYC2 duplicates are expressed in Rhododendron flowers.

For my history thesis I am studying French intellectuals’ appropriation of World War II memory in debates over the Algerian war. My research involves close readings of the works of key French intellectuals, some of which were printed in major French periodicals like Le Monde, L’Express, and Les Temps modernes. I focus predominantly on the last Governor-General of Algeria Jacques Soustelle and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In these intellectuals’ arguments, two opposing conceptions of national honor arise. Soustelle was a staunch supporter of French sovereignty in Algeria. He connected the war to France’s duty to combat totalitarian and tyrannical threats to democracy, embodied in his eyes in the FLN Algerian rebels. In contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre argued against the war and colonialism, disparaging France for resembling Germany during World War II and compromising its democratic values through the use of torture. Within the context of intellectual petitions and French military coup d’états, these opposing conceptions of honor polarized contemporary debates. These debates in turn contributed to an environment of political instability that brought about the fall of the Fourth French Republic in 1958 and pushed France to settle a cease-fire with the FLN in 1962. However, despite their differences, both Soustelle and Sartre’s conceptions of honor were rooted in the same democratic ideals of the French Resistance of World War II. My research thus also reveals the unique, powerful, yet also dangerous multiplicity of memory. Algerian war intellectual debates revealed that intellectuals could draw on the same collective memory of a previous conflict in order to support radically opposing contemporary arguments and agendas. This reminds us that contemporary conflicts and ensuing debates cannot be understood in a vacuum. Memory is a strong rhetorical tool, and in many ways must be considered central to political and historical scholarship.

During the 1960s and 70s, jazz enters the curriculae of school music programs as a result of social protest in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In Seattle, this acceptance of jazz as an academic art form coincides with the downfall of its popularity in the once vibrant club scenes of Jackson Street and the Central District. While Seattle once boasted a jazz scene that nurtured the likes of Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Ernestine Anderson, by the 1960s, the tradition of jazz becomes confined within high school and college jazz ensembles. Thus, Seattle's jazz scene is distanced from its working class roots, and its accessibility limited to those students who could afford to study it. Yet, even within these programs, racial tensions persist, particularly in the development of the University of Washington jazz program within the School of Music. I will argue that the complicated racial politics and history of Seattle's high school and college level jazz programs through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s restricted the availability of formal jazz education in Seattle to the wealthy and privileged. While many students, educators, and musicians from this time period viewed jazz as free of racial tensions, citing integrated ensembles as evidence, this idealized perspective ignores the larger political and economic factors that have always affected equal access and opportunity to quality jazz education. I expect that if we examinine the complex history of jazz education in Seattle, we will gain a greater understanding of why we must strive to make music programs accessible for all students.

What Persian politicians dubbed as ‘the woman question’ in the early twentieth century towards the end of the Qajar Dynasty became, and still remains, a hotly debated topic in Iran that is undeniably intertwined with Iranian ideas of nationalism. The question asked what the new role of women should be in society and what should be done to accomplish it. My honors history thesis examines how both the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-1979) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-present) used women to visualize the national state of wellbeing. This thesis is rooted in extensive research in primary sources conducted over five months; my main sources include oral interviews of local Iranian-Americans, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s autobiography, Women and Her Rights in Islam by Ayatollah Motahari, Tehran’s most popular women’s magazine, Zan-e Ruz, private family photo collections, newspaper articles, and speeches by the main political figures of the time. I answer the questions: how did each of the respective governments use control of women’s clothing as a strategy to implement their contrasting nationalist ideologies, and what was their reasoning behind the specific compulsory dress codes? Through analysis of books and speeches by Mohammad Reza Shah and Ayatollahs Khomeini and Motahari [leading Shiite clerics of the creation of the Islamic Republic], I conclude that parallel to the cultural notion that women represent familial honor, both regimes viewed women as symbols of national honor, and thus sought to control their clothing and socialization. Through poetry, political cartoons, and advertisements found in Zan-e Ruz, I investigate the transitions between mandatory hijab to Western clothing in the 1930s and back to mandatory hijab after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Using oral history methodology, I determine a paradox that shows that despite outward appearances, a new contrary culture developed in the private realm.

Contentious debates among Natives and non-Natives concerning the fate of wild horses on Yakama tribal lands in Washington State have waxed and waned for more than a century. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the Yakima Indian Agency welcomed non-Indian sheep and cattle ranchers onto Yakama tribal lands against Native wishes, taxing rangelands, and resulting in widespread overgrazing. By the 1920s, agency concerns for the economic stability of non-Indian ranchers facilitated a need to gain access to communal tribal grazing lands that served to sustain Yakama horses. Because of this, agency officials orchestrated systematic assaults on Yakama horse herds, citing horses as the primary culprits of overgrazing and land degradation. However, Yakamas showed little interest in removing their horses at the behest of non-Native officials, and instead vehemently opposed settler encroachment on communal grazing lands. Through an interrogation of archival sources, conducting interviews, and reviewing scholarly sources across disciplines, I argue that Yakamas and non-Natives used wild horses as a terrain of struggle, whereby asserting competing claims to Indigenous lands and resources. Thus, examining wild horses as a tool of Indigenous resistance during the early twentieth century provides a useful lens for understanding the many forms of Native opposition to colonial hegemony, while simultaneously calling attention to the multiplicity of problematic and archaic tropes employed by non-Natives in an effort to provide justification for divesting Native communities of meaningful lands and resources.
 

Conventional wisdom concerning labor migration in Southern Africa holds that cheap, migratory labor was necessary for the extraction of base metals and the profitability of colonial mining. The different geologic, political, economic, labor and domestic conditions of mines across the region has, as a result, been obscured. The deterministic view of labor migration within “cheap-labor theory” does not consider the individual reasons why workers and other migrants chose to migrate. As self-perception has become embedded in ideas of work-membership, able-bodiedness, and gender, specific historical analysis of urbanization in different contexts has become necessary. Using health data, colonial and mining company records, and anthropological accounts, along with secondary scholarship, this study addresses dependency relationships between urban black populations, native leaders and colonial and mining authorities. The hypothesis is that relationships of dependence may have translated into forms of citizenship that were not institutionally recognized or that may be antithetical to Western, liberal ideas of freedom. Assessing these relationships in the context of health offers an understanding for how individuals navigated issues of social and political change that are important for decision making in the fields of global and public health, and urban planning. Structural and institutional inequalities created by historical circumstances have resulted in the different quality of state membership experienced by marginalized communities. Understanding how membership and self-perception has been historically created is an essential element for deconstructing institutional and social barriers that contribute to global health inequalities in crucial ways.

The principle objective of this research is to contribute to a critical body of work by recent scholars who have challenged the popular understanding and the perceived differences of both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Minister Malcolm X. Scholarship has not yet adequately compared and contrasted the political messages and insights that each leader presented in the final years of his life. This research engages with Malcolm X’s and MLK’s later works, which were critical for understanding new developments in their political messages and strategies. In order to comprehend the final years of both leaders, this paper will use a close reading of primary and secondary sources to provide a comparative analysis of their work. Also, the paper seeks to explore the commonalities and divergent strategies that MLK and Malcolm X used in their final messages and suggests ways that these messages are still relevant to US society.

Possession Sound is located within Puget Sound of western Washington. Students at the Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA), a dual enrollment program in conjunction with Everett Community College, have collected environmental data in Possession Sound such as pH, and dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations since 2004. Our group participated in this academic year, 2015-2016. Based on seasonal trends, it was hypothesized that pH of Possession Sound would be higher during summer, due to usage of CO₂ for photosynthesis, and lower during winter due to lack of photosynthesis. ORCA students collected water chemistry data at the sample site, Mount Baker Terminal, using a YSI 650, and analyzed the monthly mean value from 2010-2015. These monthly mean values showed that pH levels were highest in late spring and early summer months. These data of summer seasons’ correlation to higher pH levels supports our conclusion that less direct sunlight in winter season is linked with a higher acidity and lower pH while more direct sunlight provided in summer season is linked with lower acidity and higher pH levels. The pH levels were lowest during winter, January and February, at a pH of 6.81. The average rose in the spring months of March, April, and May to 7.72 while the average pH peaked during the summer months of June, July, and August was at a high of 7.97. However, it was shown that late spring had consistently higher pH levels. DO levels followed similar trends when investigating those levels. The average DO levels during summer months was 11.4, while the lowest was Fall at 9.88 instead of in expected winter. Although further evidence is needed to connect the fluctuations in DO and chlorophyll via biological processes to these observations of pH. Once this investigation is done, there will be a better understanding of the pH parameters marine organisms can withstand in the Possesion Sound.