This project examines how structural and socioeconomic barriers contribute to imposter syndrome among first-generation Latinx and immigrant college students in California. It asks how financial pressures, institutional culture, and limited access to support systems shape students’ confidence and sense of belonging in higher education. These challenges are especially significant for students navigating college without prior family experience in higher education. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines secondary data analysis with qualitative interviews to better understand students’ lived experiences. Drawing on theories of assimilation and ethnic boundaries, the research explores how broader systemic inequalities influence internal feelings of self-doubt and exclusion. The findings suggest that imposter syndrome is not simply an individual struggle, but is closely connected to patterns of institutional and financial exclusion. These experiences can impact students’ academic confidence, identity, and persistence in college, shaping how they navigate academic spaces over time. Overall, this project highlights the need for more inclusive and culturally responsive support systems that promote equity, belonging, and empowerment for first-generation Latinx college students. It also underscores the importance of institutional accountability in addressing the structural inequalities that shape students’ experiences, encouraging colleges and universities to move beyond access and toward meaningful support and inclusion.

This bibliographic essay examines the pivotal role of African American women in shaping the transition from slavery to freedom before, during, and after the Civil War. Although historians have documented Black women’s roles in abolition, wartime communities, and postwar organizing, archival gaps and barriers to publication have produced an uneven historical record, leaving their activism underrepresented and fragmented. Using qualitative historical analysis, the essay draws on primary sources, including Susie King Taylor's memoir, alongside secondary scholarship on abolitionism, wartime labor, and Black women’s club movements, to trace patterns of continuity across these periods. The findings demonstrate that African American women were central to abolitionist resistance, organized support systems within United States Colored Troops (USCT) communities, and later built institutions that advanced education, political activism, and community development during Reconstruction and beyond. Through sustained organizing and institution building, Black women transformed emancipation from a legal declaration into a lived social reality while preserving the historical memory of African American struggles for freedom. These findings contribute to Civil War and Reconstruction scholarship by foregrounding the enduring political and institutional leadership of African American women and reframing their activism as a continuous historical tradition.

This study explores how Asian American cafes in Los Angeles shape identity formation and community-building among young adult Asian American women. We define Asian American cafés as locally owned cafés that incorporate Asian-inspired flavors, aesthetics, and cultural cues in ways that make them culturally familiar environments for people in the Asian diaspora. Drawing on scholarship on relational space, third places, food studies, and spatial negotiation, this paper argues that meaningful connections and a sense of belonging are actively produced in Asian American cafés, rather than passively experienced. Using qualitative methods, we conducted four semi-structured interviews with Asian American women (21-22) around café culture, cultural identity, and perceptions of cafés as gendered spaces. Through inductive coding, key themes of independence, relationships, recognition, community, and aesthetics emerged to shape our findings; revealing that cafe-hobbying grows alongside increased personal mobility. Visiting these cafés becomes a form of self-directed place making as they form relationships and belonging within spaces that prioritize intentional design, co-ethnic presence, and culturally familiar flavors that signal recognition and memories they identify with. Asian American cafes become significant sites where Asian American women negotiate visibility and reduce feelings of otherness through the normalization of Asian American cultural presence strengthening pride within their cultural identities.

Fencing policy in colonial-era Massachusetts (1620-1776) was a product of debates in England surrounding the economic and societal value of enclosure. Colonial Massachusetts, referring to the Massachusetts Bay (1628-91) and New Plymouth (1620-91) colonies and their merging as the Province of Massachusetts Bay (1691-1776), oversaw the development of intricate and remarkably consistent legal codes that defined what was considered a fence. I argue that economic and religious considerations heavily influenced the development of Massachusetts colonial fencing policy. Primary sources from England and New England discussing economic and philosophical motivations to fence land were synthesized along with secondary sources outlining the development of Massachusetts fencing policy. Protecting crops from livestock served as a primary economic motivator to fence in property. Massachusetts colonists referenced moral teachings from the Bible concerning divine defense as a vehicle to support fencing as a physically and religiously protective measure for landowners. Enclosure through fencing became a core tenet of how the Massachusetts colonists, as the elect people of the Christian God, appropriated and “improved” land. I conclude that fencing was fundamentally an expression of the economic and philosophical aspirations of the English colonial elite. The significance of this research project is its explication of how Christian religiosity permeated the fundamental legal philosophies of enclosure and fencing in English thought.

Through archival research conducted in the Fond R-2905 at the National Archives of Moldova, I hope to answer the question: What were the ideological, artistic/architectural, and social narratives surrounding the post-WWII Soviet reconstruction of Chișinău, Moldova? Particularly, I attempt to chart how members of the Union of Architects navigated the complicated historical memory and national politics of post-war Soviet Moldova while reconstructing the capital city according to Stalinist architectural principles. This project expands existing urban historiography on how post-war reconstruction worked in the Western Soviet periphery. Drawing upon auto-ethnographical research conducted over four months in this city, special attention is also drawn to the role of architecture from this period in modern urban historical memory.

Museum spaces have the potential to bring objects and their stories to life, making history dynamic. In the case of Lebanon, museums are foundational places for producing and preserving Civil War memory. The 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War was infamous for its brutal fighting and ubiquitous violence. An official policy of postwar amnesty and amnesia has allowed its root causes to worsen and stunted reconciliation efforts. In this thesis, I analyze museums as sites forging memory of the Lebanese Civil War within the context of ongoing conflict and governmental/educational censorship. Firstly, I argue that a memorial museum effectively immerses visitors in secondary witnessing through spatiality and memory dialogue. Secondly, I argue that in art museums, artists are actors who intervene in historical narratives, both memorializing events and articulating how there is no true end to the violence. Thirdly, I argue that institutions in the region of the Chouf, an area mostly populated by the Druze ethnoreligious minority, avoid grappling with recent memory and become complicit in the government’s project of silence. Overall, through my discussion of eight institutions, I articulate the significance of museum spaces for collective memory, transitional justice, and historical understanding. Memory work in Lebanese museums has not yet been researched, and my thesis seeks to fill this gap, arguing that understanding why and how the past is remembered in these spaces is essential to comprehending Lebanon’s past, present, and future.

This study aims to examine the educational experience of Mexican Americans in Fillmore, CA, from 1980 to 2000, with a specific focus on 1985. Fillmore, a town nestled between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, became the first city in the nation to adopt an “English Official Language” resolution while having a fifty percent Hispanic population and a growing bilingual program for Spanish-speaking youth. A majority of Anglo parents, along with very few Mexican Americans, saw bilingualism as a scam and called for English-only instruction; this group eventually fueled the 1985 city council resolution. Using educational history methods like the examination of newspapers, institutional archives and oral interviews/personal collections, this study aims to explore the resolution effects on local students, understand the rationale behind Mexican Americans who sided against bilingual instruction, and examine the long-term effects on Fillmore’s social fabric and its educational system. From preliminary findings, I hypothesize that the division between Anglos and Hispanics increased, that a majority of Hispanics resisted such a resolution, and that projects of bilingual education nonetheless persisted. This research will add to the body of knowledge on Mexican American educational history and will serve as a counter-narrative to the Anglo-centric view of history used to describe Ventura County. Fillmore’s story reinforces the need for more bilingual teachers in a growing multilingual and multicultural state.

This study examines how the political, social, and economic importance of Maya ruins in the Mexican state of Yucatan has changed in the perspectives of local, government, and foreign actors across the 19th-21st centuries. Research focuses on case study sites where Maya ruins had multiple stages of use and construction by various groups in post-Colonial history; where industrial concrete is visible on top of Maya carved stone. At the archaeological sites and communities of Xcambo, Ake, and Izamal, archival research, and interviews with community members, and local experts track the local and national creation of ruins as patrimony and tools of autonomy. I analyze the layered social history, and memory associated with these places that reveals that prior to the development of Mexican archaeology in the early 20th century, ruins were used and partly destroyed, for their materials in state-led industry. Using the enthusiasm of foreign adventurers and archaeologists, the federal government then used the ruins to create a shared Mexican patrimony, and centralize land under federal and private ownership. Throughout these contexts, local resistance for identity, autonomy, and legitimacy has manifested in the cultural and material construction around the ruins. This analysis of historical sources and interview data contextualizes current political discussion on the protection, maintenance, and importance of these sites as large construction projects aimed at increasing tourism that continue to be executed and planned.