Three Department of History Undergrads Win Research Awards

History Undergrads Win Library Research Awards

Department of History Major Sylvia Cotten has won the 2025 Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Library Award for research from the University of Maryland Libraries. Cotten's research paper is titled "The White Man's Way": Navigating Race and Memory in Federal Indian Boarding Schools," and was written for the History Honors Thesis program. Her submission explores what she calls "Forced Indigenous Labor Schools" (FILS).  She argues that these methods of cultural dispersion (and the "civilizing mission" as a whole) are rooted in the value of whiteness, which includes English literacy, Christianity, nationalism, and racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She used newspapers from the Carlisle Industrial Training School and the Genoa Indian School as primary sources. Cotten's thesis was supervised by Colleen Woods. The thesis can be read on DRUM. 

Taylor Mason is winner of the 2025 Library Award for Undergraduate Research for her paper "F is for Feminism: Understanding 1970s Social Conflict through Sesame Street," written for the Department's Capstone Research Seminar. Her paper views the television show Sesame Street through the lens of American civil discourse. She argues that Sesame Street was more than a show with joyous characters and catchy music: it was a two-way mirror into the consciousness of American culture. The show has been studied for its learning outcomes and legacy in popular memory, but historians have not looked at the discourse surrounding the program. The archival records of the Children’s Television Workshop (Sesame Street’s parent company) are held in UMD’s Special Collections in Hornbake Library and preserve tens of thousands of letters from both children and adults debating issues such as gender roles, nutrition, community, and racial equality. The archive shows that a combination of asserting an identity and voicing an opinion can provide meaningful examples for how Americans engage in civil discourse to change the world around them. Katarina Keane supervised Mason's research. The paper can be read on DRUM. 

A third Library Award for Undergraduate Research was awarded to Holland Schmitz for their paper "Lesbian Newsletters, Pulps, and Manuals: A Primary Source Analysis" written in the History Honors program for HIST396: Honors Colloquium II. This research paper studies lesbian publications in the mid twentieth century through LGBTQIA+ databases and resources available through UMD Libraries. The paper examines two widely distributed lesbian newsletters: The Ladder and Vice Versa, which were published in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as two lesbian pulp novels: We Walk Alone by Ann Aldrich and The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan. The pulp novels, often published under pseudonyms, were sold in nearly every drug store and shop. These popular texts influenced many people to recognize that lesbians are worthy of love and protection, and are strong activists and allies for issues that affect queer identities. The research was supervised by Colleen Woods. This paper can be read on DRUM. 

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