On Friday two of my students in History received their Masters. I am very proud of both of them for the hard work they put into their theses and the research they conducted. Congratulations Kaci and Trevor!
Kaci Nash wrote a terrific thesis on Northerners–soldiers, nurses, teachers, missionaries–who traveled into the South in the Civil War and the imperializing discourse they adopted in their writings. Kaci’s thesis combines traditional historical approaches and digital textual analysis for close reading. Her work is one of the first in our department to deploy Digital Humanities methodologies into the final thesis.
Kaci Nash, “On our way for the sunny south,” University of Nebraska.
One of my favorite parts of Nash’s thesis documents the ways that Northerners encountered the flora and fauna of the South: she writes “In a great display of power, soldiers often made animals targets as they traveled through the landscape on the railroad.” She quotes Rufus Kinsley near Terrebonne, Louisiana in February 1863: “From the the top of the cars where many of us stood, we saw hundreds of huge alligators, and large numbers of turtles, and a great variety of snakes, lying on large logs just above the surface of the water. We shot several, and shot at a great many.”
Kaci Nash, William G. Thomas, and Trevor Shalon, August 2012, University of Nebraska
Trevor Shalon’s Master’s thesis explores the court records of the D.C. Court of Appeals, National Archives, Record Group 21. Trevor focused on the petitions for freedom by African Americans in Washington, D.C. between 1810 and 1830, and on the early legal work of Francis Scott Key in these cases. Trevor Shalon, “A Plea for Freedom,” University of Nebraska.
