History Students Pursue Honors Research
Trying to understand contemporary politics? Trying to source supplies for the next great widget? Trying to mitigate traffic in Knoxville? It all requires research, and our History Honors Concentration students are becoming experts at it, learning the craft of research as they explore historical events, issues, and problems about which they are deeply passionate.
History Honors students take two intensive honors courses in history and then cap off their experience with a two-course thesis writing sequence in which they conceive, plan, and execute a 50-page (or more) original research project.
This year, Aiden Ponder is diving deep into the gangs of New Rome (Constantinople). These were chariot racing fans who organized themselves into something like politic pressure groups who could even influence emperors.
James Singhel tackles the gangs of New York, Irish immigrant gangs and groups who in the nineteenth century worked to find a place in US society.
Joseph Espinal investigates the invention of stringed keyboard instruments like the piano and the accompanying music and social changes during the Renaissance.
Thomas Hyde examines the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when conservative women leaders led various cultural and political fights against what they saw as dangerous encroachment of evil in American life.
Olivia Kapinos digs into nineteenth century women textile workers in Massachusetts who bravely struggled for better working conditions and better pay.
Cole Fritts takes up a trio of pro-Union reverends from East Tennessee who resisted the Confederacy by word and even by deed, sabotaging a new railway line.
Samantha Konsavage sifts through the impressions of southern soldiers abroad in World War II in both the European and Pacific theaters of war, drawing upon an incredible archive of letters from abroad housed here at Special Collections in Hodges Library.
Alexander O’Connor confronts the efforts by Catholics in Germany to recover their political power after collaboration with the Nazi regime, eventually leading to the most successful political party in post-war Germany.
History Honors students get to work on topics they love, while they develop skills that will serve them well whatever they do after graduating.