Projects

by Mitchell Foster

In the midst of the Civil War, the infamous and violent draft riots of New York brought added turmoil to the state. This project focuses on the specific events throughout the drafts and through visualizing the details, it aims at better understanding the motives behind the participants, specifically the police force tasked with the quelling the riots. Combining the accounts of newspapers with the David Barnes book and census will help completely lay out the events of the riot throughout the entire week.

by Sama Mammadova

This project explores whether Renaissance bankers like Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned and donated religious art as restitution for the sin of usury and, if so, why exactly would they choose art to achieve this purpose. It examines the way in which the anti-usury sentiments promoted by the Catholic Church caused Italian bankers to seek ways to save their reputations in the society and redeem themselves in the eyes of Church and God by commissioning religious art and donating it to religious institutions.

by Nathaniel Hay

Though it lacks any great rhetorical immediacy today and indeed has largely been forgotten, Carthage was a recurrent and powerful symbol in eighteenth-century French political discourse, particularly during the French Revolution. Long after its physical eradication, the Punic city lived on as an idea, a vessel into which scholars, statesmen, and ordinary citizens could pour contemporary concerns and anxieties. The afterlife of ancient Carthage in Reviolutionary political discourse provides a window onto the ideological mentalities of the era.

by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee

On March 22, 1933, the Nazis established Dachau Concentration Camp, located less than 15 miles from Munich, Germany, as a camp for political prisoners. One block at the camp was devoted specifically to clergy who had been made prisoners for engaging in actions considered to be anti-Nazi. These clergymen held different religious positions, were of different backgrounds and ages, and were made prisoners for varying reasons. Although Holocaust research is oftentimes limited by the survival of wartime documents, much information about the clergy sent to Dachau Concentration Camp has survived in the form of individual testimonies of survivors and in the form of archival data. This project explores these datasets to learn more about the clergy who were sent to Dachau Concentration Camp.

by H.H. Kang

Korea is a geopolitical fulcrum in world history. Bordering continental Asia on one side, and maritime Japan on the other, it has sat uneasily at the foreground of international war. This project probes Chosŏn Korea’s (1392-1910) military reforms in response to a series of Japanese and Manchu invasions at the turn of the 17th century. During and after these wars, Chosŏn adopted musketeers as the core of its new standing armies, and this technological reform triggered cascading changes in Korean society.

by Chloe Chapin

The nineteenth century saw a codification of the male wardrobe, and no element was more uniform than that of the dress worn specifically for evening functions. Male Formalwear is an under-researched area of fashion history, and with this project I hope to identify changing trends in evening dress by looking at a number of prominent American families throughout the nineteenth century.