Historiographic Essay (HIST 801-America inerpreted)

This essay showcases a general overview of the historiographical changes in United States history, focusing on early schools of thought into post-modernism. This was the first essay I wrote for my program of study at UNK and it is interesting to see how my opinions and writing styles have changed over the course of my academic career.

Historiographic essay Major field

This essay offers a single, chronologically structured historiographic account of bodily autonomy in America from the seventeenth century through the early 1940s, organized around the work of Carol Berkin, Juliana Barr, Mary Ann Irwin, Molly Ladd‑Taylor, and Adam Cohen. It begins with colonial households, coverture, and enslaved women’s labor to show how autonomy was contingent on status, race, and local law, and how everyday disciplines—religion, education, and material culture—normalized bodily regulation; it then moves to the eighteenth‑century borderlands, where gender functioned as a diplomatic language and Indigenous sovereignty compelled Europeans to negotiate on Native terms; next, it traces nineteenth‑century reproductive governance through professionalization and censorship into twentieth‑century welfare administration, where eugenic logics became routine bureaucratic practice; finally, it examines how Buck v. Bell translated those regulatory habits into constitutional doctrine while Skinner v. Oklahoma offered only partial restraint. Throughout, secondary studies illuminate how law, medicine, welfare, and moral reform braided together to manage bodies—especially women’s—across households, missions, courts, and agencies, and the concluding sections show how these logics persist in contemporary carceral and social‑service settings and in current debates over reproduction and care. I chose to focus on this topic to highlight my major field—Early American History with a concentration in constitutional law—and to demonstrate how patterns established in the early period continue to shape social and legal life, revealing bodily autonomy not as a linear expansion of rights but as a contested practice formed in the friction between lived experience and the institutions that govern it.

Historiographic Essay Minor Field

In this essay, I examine how Indigenous North American history has moved from primitivist caricatures to a field that foregrounds Native agency, intertribal politics, gender, and borderlands complexity. Drawing on Ned Blackhawk, Richard White, Pekka Hämäläinen, James Merrell, and Karl Jacoby, I synthesize how violence is historically contingent, how intercultural “middle grounds” and Indigenous power reshape regional orders, and why multi‑vocal evidence (oral histories, calendar sticks, winter counts, autobiographies) is essential. I focused my minor in Indigenous history through the lens of my work with the National Park Service, where my time along the Niobrara National Scenic River revealed an often-overlooked history shaped by Ponca, Pawnee, and Lakota communities. Building from this foundation, I braid place-based observations with case studies on the Ponca and Great Plains Native women to highlight the uneven visibility of smaller nations and women’s experiences in the historical record. In my role as a park ranger, this integrated approach not only demonstrates core ethnohistorical competencies but also strengthens public interpretation and collaborative partnerships along the Niobrara.

Research Paper (HIST 848: Historical Methods)

This paper assesses major shifts in the historiography of eugenics in the United States during the interwar period, examining how historians have come to understand the movement as deeply embedded in American society rather than merely a fringe scientific theory. Recent scholarship highlights how eugenic ideas influenced public policy, religious thought, and constitutional interpretation, shaping debates about social order, citizenship, and national identity. The legal acceptance of eugenic principles—most notably in the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell—demonstrates how these ideas became institutionalized within American law. For my studies in Early American History in the M.A. program at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, this essay reflects many of the historical themes that have drawn my interest to the field, particularly constitutional history, religious history in America, and cultural history, while also illustrating how these traditions shaped the broader development of American thought and policy.

Book Review (HIST 848 readings: ConstituTIONAL Rights)

This book review was part of my course requirements for HIST 848: Constitutional Rights. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen impacting my view of history, especially constitutional history, of the United States.

Book Review (HIST 848 Readings: Native American history)

This review explores a critique of Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn. It was during this course and while reading this work that I decided on my minor topic, Native American Studies, at UNK in 2019.