MA in History Distinguished Theses
Distinguished MA theses are nominated by the advisor and awarded by an independent faculty committee. Authors have the option of posting the entire thesis or just an abstract. If you would like to see the entire thesis, please request it from the author directly using the contact information provided in the abstract.
Recent MA theses awarded departmental distinction:
- For a Healthy and Community-Controlled Bronx: White Lightning’s Fight Against Social Abandonment and Struggle for Neighborhood Socialism (Terrence Freeman, 2025)
- Enemies of the State: Sanctuary as Resistance in the Reagan Era (Georgia Kamm, 2025)
- “Bleeding Liberty”: Patriotic Violence in Revolutionary Virginia (Hunter Hullinger, 2024)
- Multiracial Unionism in an Imperial Context: CIO Unions in the Panama Canal Zone, 1946-1956 (Jeffrey S. Wright, 2024)
- “Of men who died the Republic to save and free the slaves:” Memorial Day’s Interracial Legacy in Brooklyn, New York, 1878-1897 (Lawrence King, 2021)
- “To Purchase or Hire”: Life at the Convergence of Freedom and Slavery in British Occupied New York, 1776-1783 (Anna Gallagher, 2020)
- How Jewish Leaders Lobbied for Rights and Renegotiated Community While Besieged in Dutch Brazil, 1645-1654 (Jason Perlman, 2020)
MA in Archives and Public History Capstones
All students in the Archives and Public History MA program are required to complete a culminating capstone project. Students research and present issues in public history, archives, and public memory through a variety of formats: article length research papers, collaborative projects with relevant organizations, and media creations that contextualize historical source material and bring it to public attention.
Select Archives and Public History capstone projects:
- Mapping White Supremacy: The Klu Klux Klan at the Jersey Shore (Katherine Quigley, 2024)
- What About the Children? Oral Histories About Growing Up Mixed Asian Before Loving v. Virginia (Gracia Brown, 2023)
- Resurfacing Archival Labor: Confronting the Impact of Professionalism in the History, Theory, and Practice of Archival Work (Lia Warner, 2023)
- Survival Without Rent, An Archival Documentary on the Lower East Side Squatter Movement (Katie Heiserman, 2023)
- Here is a Rent Strike (Rane Stark-Buhl, 2023)
- “Burn it up if you have it”: Developing an Access Policy for the 1966 Bob Dylan Fan Mail Collection (Nicole Font, 2022)
- Yesterday on Main Street: Memorializing Slavery in New York’s Suburbs (Julia Butterfield, 2022)
- The Old Days Back Again: A Lost Cause Case Study in the Internet Age (Jubilee Marshall, 2022)
- Riding the J Train (Theresa DeCicco, 2021)
- A Living Archive: Folkways Records and Ethnographic Sound Archives (Clinton Krute, 2019)
- Writing Women into History: American Army Nurses in Vietnam, 1962-1973 (Emily Anderson, 2019)
- Description and Access Models for Web Archives: Three Case Studies (Celeste Brewer, 2016)