Ryan Aiken and Professor Paul Kerry, History My research into the legacy of Holocaust rescuer Raoul Wallenberg is far from complete, and now, over nine months after beginning my investigation to accurately document Wallenberg’s heroic efforts to save Hungarian Jews during the last days of WWII, the overall emphasis of my original thesis has been redefined to […]
Woman’s Exponent: Chronicling the Relief Society’s Involvement in the Quest for Political Equality, 1900-1914
Paige Tuft and Dr. Rebecca de Schweinitz, History Department Main Text As most of my research tends to do, this project took quite a different turn then originally intended. I intended this research to continue on with the topic of my senior thesis concerning the political activism of women in Utah during the 1920s by […]
Veterinary Medicine
Jeffrey Tucker and Dr. Michael MacKay Importance of Project It is not an overstatement to claim that the work Dr. Michael MacKay and I were able to conduct through the benevolence of the ORCA programme represents the cutting of history of medicine research. We have engaged a field that is strikingly underdeveloped, yet extremely relevant […]
Japan Encounters the Russian “Barbarians” The Iwakura Mission’s Visit to Saint Petersburg, 1873
Galina Chenina and Dr. Aaron Skabelund, Department of History As a Japanese history major in Russia prior to transferring to BYU, I focused my study and research on mid-nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. My training provided me with a theoretical understanding and the methodology to conduct research using primary and secondary sources in Russian, Japanese, […]
The Chinese Name for God: Preserving Unity in the Protestant Term Controversy 1847-1890
Shayla Sturgess and Dr. Kirk Larsen, Department of History My project began as a supervision course for the Cambridge Direct Enrollment program. Although I initially had planned a project focused around Chinese history I was unable to find a supervisor with that area of expertise and therefore my project changed entirely from what I had […]
Imagining a Controversy: The Taft-Katsura Memorandum in Korean Historical Memory
Joseph Seeley and Dr. Kirk Larsen, Department of History One of the most important lessons I learned over the course of this project was that a finished research project is often dramatically different from what is originally planned. When I began consulting with my advisor about doing an ORCA project together, our initial idea was […]
Religion and Jane Eyre
Bradley Kime and Professor Paul Kerry, Department of History Modern readers might be surprised to learn that the 1847 publication of Jane Eyre caused an uproar. Plenty of critics praised the novel’s author, but many of the loudest voices were shocked by its content. In a satirical essay the next year, Edwin Whipple surveyed the literary […]
Maintaining German Identity in Namibia
Nanci Johnson and Dr. Mark Choate, Department of History Research in the National Archives of Namibia started out very slowly. I arrived in Windhoek and met all sorts of challenges that I thought I had prepared for. I experienced an attempt at ATM theft against me and then needed to relocate to another guest house […]
Healing the Wounds of Exile: A Canadian Exile Community 40 Years After Flight from their Chilean Homeland
Michael Hoopes and Dr. Evan Ward, Department of History The result of my research among the Vancouver, Canada Chilean exile community was overall a positive, more concrete understanding of the mindset of the community, though certain difficulties relating to my inexperience have rendered the data I collected somewhat useless. I entered seeking to more clearly […]
Protest and the PRI: Examining US-Mexican Relations, 1968-1971
Jacob Glenn and Dr. Andrew Johns, Department of History A green flare shot up in the air, lighting the sky. A red flare shortly followed. As the surprised crowd looked up, “a hail of bullets” turned a peaceful student protest into a massacre at Tlatelolco. Indignation at police brutality and political authoritarianism had triggered a […]