Updated for recent submissions.

-Tracy

----- Original Message -----
Alan Brody
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I am looking for materials dealing with American restaurants, particularly theme restaurants. I am particularly interested in items that would support a project on the restaurant business in America. I am looking for materials that deal with individual theme restaurants, such as Trader Vics, Hard Rock Cafe, etc.

Alexandra (Sasha) Boni
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I do new political history of Cold War America which in essence is trying to meld diplomatic and cultural history into one. My proposed dissertation is an examination of the political nuclear issues of the late 1950s compared to the 1980s and the trying to trace the impact these issues had on the cultural nuclear awareness by examining visual media such as political cartoons, film, television, etc.

Erin Bush
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The murder trials of Laura D. Fair (San Francisco, 1871) and Kate Southern (Pickens County, Georgia, 1878) including, subsequent community (national?) impact and newspaper coverage. I am broadly interested in how women and others used constructs of "female-ness" in the late nineteenth century during a murder trial, especially when the accused admitted their guilt. I hope to address issues in the "medicalization" of womanhood as it was used for and against the accused. Laura claimed insanity due to dysmenorrhea and Kate was newly pregnant when they killed their respective victims. In both cases, these women were sentenced to hang, but Laura was acquitted on appeal and Kate was eventually released and pardoned.

Roger Connor 
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I'm looking at the intersection of social construction and U.S. government policy towards technological innovation between 1930 and 1955. My case study is rotorcraft development by the military and the Post Office/Civil Aeronautics Board. The emphasis will be the dynamic in policy between the Depression, World War II and the early Cold War and how this was influenced by popular modernist enthusiasm for technology. My methodology is to explore the exercise of human agency in the establishment of federal approaches to technology and how this evolved into contradictory or complementary approaches over time and between government agencies.

Erika Elvander
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My interest is in public health efforts in British occupied East Asia in the late 19th century. My M.A. paper was on the bubonic plague outbreak in Hong Kong in 1894, comparing it to the SARS epidemic that occured over 100 years later, and looking at how that informed Hong Kong identity, as well as British-Hong Kong interactions, and then later Hong Kong Mainland China interactions.  My interest is in using the lens of public health and science to better understand the complicated relationship of Britain to its territories in East Asia, and how the intended and unintended short and long term consequences of these efforts on identity, governance, and the day to day life of residents of these areas during that era.

Tracy Fisher
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I'm planning to research how and why the decision was made to repatriate American war dead in the 20th century (and perhaps to compare the American and British experiences).  Both during WWI and WWII, the government encouraged people to bury their war dead in Europe, but many families resisted doing so.  At the same time, there are a number of overseas cemeteries of American war dead in Europe, reflecting the willingness of some families (including the families of Teddy Roosevelt and George Patton) to let their dead stay in Europe. In addition, the Tomb of the Unknowns was developed after WWI in the US as well as in France and Britain to reflect those with "no known grave." In Korea and Vietnam, there seems to have been little question that the US dead would be repatriated completely -- it's not yet clear to me whether that's because Asia was more foreign than Europe or simply because with no stable front line, there was concern that the dead would be in the hands of the enemy.  I'd like to examine whether the US was influenced in its decisions by the actions of European states like Britain or France when deciding how to handle the dead and how the government decided whether each new war would be run like the last war or not with respect to the treatment of the dead.

John Lemza
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Although my project is still in the early stages my intent is to conduct research and gather information on the existence of a civil-military shadow culture and society that existed in Germany during the period of the Cold War. Focusing on the established overseas military communities I want to investigate their integration by governmental and non-governmental organizations as essential pieces of the front line of containment against an expanding communist hegemon. This project will encompass political as well as social and cultural considerations in the context of �soft power� projection to bolster America�s image abroad. Central to it will be a focus on the realities of a separate identity that allowed this civil-military culture to serve as a bridge for social and cultural union with host nations and as an important conduit for the export of American diplomacy and consumerist ideals to win the battle of ideologies. Interviews with the faculty and staff of the German Historical Institute have already been conducted to obtain assistance in framing the objectives of the project and to gain familiarization with that institute�s resources. Assistance in locating resources that establish a connection between national strategic policy and planning (military or civilian) and the integration of overseas military communities would be very helpful. There are some military resources available at the Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, PA and at the National Archives at College Park that I will investigate.

Lynn Price
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In my major paper for my MA, "Negotiating Freedom: The Process of Manumission in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, and Alexandria, Virginia," I examined the methods of creating, defining, and manipulating the concept of freedom in the early United States through the Virginia Free Negro Registers and manumission documents, along with various other legal and political sources. My dissertation will expand this work, moving from a more focused social history to include intellectual history, incorporating race and gender constructions. I hope to do this through a comparative examination of manumission in the mid-Atlantic states to the colonization of Liberia. Primary sources such as the American Colonization Society Papers--available at the Library of Congress and the Library of Virginia--and legal and political documents such as newspapers and speeches will be used to examine the rhetoric that surrounded colonization and a new type of freedom for American slaves. Firsthand accounts from Liberia, including letters and diaries, will be used to investigate the results of such rhetoric on the ground, hopefully yielding useful clues to the social, racial, and gender constructions of freed slaves. Overall, such research will allow my dissertation to analyze the differences in the constructions of freedom for freed slaves who remained in the United States to slaves who emigrated to Liberia.  

Tad Suiter 
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My dissertation will explore the earliest years of the daily newspaper comic strip from roughly 1900 to 1935. During this period, black and white comic strips in the daily paper went from being a completely new medium, scattered throughout the a small number of newspapers in major cities and aimed primarily at urban working class and immigrant readers, to a truly national popular medium, enshrined on their own page in the majority of newspapers throughout the country. The comics page of the daily newspaper, moreover, is a valuable resource for historical research that has been largely
overlooked by historians. In its earliest days, between 1912 to 1922, the daily comics page was an intensely multivocal site within the newspaper that was often allowed greater freedom in terms of editorial control than much of the rest of the paper. These comics meant something to their readers -- within the daily comics of this period one can observe very important political issues being explored, gender roles being teased out in the era of the "New Woman," and difficult issues of ethnicity, race, and Americanization being worked through from a variety of approaches.