Below are excerpts from research reflection reports written by recipients of undergraduate research travel grants. These grants are made possible, in part, by gifts to the Annual History Fund. To read graduate student research highlights, click here.
Sabrina Kim
Essex, Manchester, Portsmouth, Preston, England
I am so grateful for the opportunity to have spent the past ten days in England, engaging with physical materials and incredible people that have added immensely to my research thus far. One of my objectives was to contextualize the World War I women’s workforce and the development of World War I football within the larger labor and gender history taking place in England at the time. This trip has provided me with vital material and resources for my thesis, and I’m looking forward to continuing my work this semester. Being able to engage with primary sources in-person and learning from those directly connected to the legacy of women’s football in England has been so inspiring.
Andres De La Cruz
Watsonville, California
These funds provided me with the opportunity to visit Watsonville, California, the site of the historic Watsonville Canning Strikes, an 18-month-long strike led by Mexican and Mexican American women that has largely been forgotten today. Visiting Watsonville helped me gain a deeper understanding of the lives and strategies employed by the women who led the strike and allowed me to better understand how they built grassroots support within their community. This experience also inspired me to begin exploring the possibility of petitioning for a mural change at the site of the old factory so that future generations of children can see a depiction of the victors of the Watsonville Canning Strike and feel a sense of pride in their community’s history. Thanks to your generous donation I continue to be inspired to uncover, advocate for, and share the histories of marginalized communities that have too often been forgotten, so that their struggles and victories can be recognized and honored by us all.
Helen Parra
Havana, Cuba
The generous funding I received from the Department of History allowed me to complete a second research trip to Havana, Cuba. My senior thesis uncovers the earlier contributions of maestros voluntarios (volunteer teachers) whose literacy work created and shaped the basis for the broader national Cuba Literacy Campaign of 1961. By analyzing original oral histories, pedagogical materials, and images, my thesis reclaims the earlier contributions of maestros voluntarios as grassroot revolutionaries who were largely motivated by socio-economic and political factors and often came from a background of radical oppositional politics. Furthermore, my thesis uncovers racially discriminatory attitudes against Afro-Cuban teachers and explores how their black identities affected their marginalization from the triumphant literacy story that was crafted and publicized by the government. I spent five days in Havana and conducted oral history interviews with four teachers. By willingly and enthusiastically participating in interviews, conversations, and communicating or writing their stories, the volunteer teachers reasserted their part in the celebrated triumph of the national literacy campaign and challenged the selective publicization of the literacy movement. Thank you for helping me conduct this research and recover the crucial literacy efforts of these volunteer teachers.
Garrett Watson
Washington, D.C.
For my research trip, I visited Washington D.C. I was able to study a bevy of records on Cold War Jazz Diplomacy at the National Archives II in College Park MD. Many of these records were ones I had only been able to find reference to through secondary scholarship, and seeing them directly is going to make a huge difference in the quality of my research. The records I studied are Controlled, but not Classified, meaning so long as I followed the Archives declassification protocols, they let me take pictures of the records for my own use. As such, I took over 500 scans of records and will be actively reviewing them as I write. These records provide a great insight to the State Department’s perspective on their Cold War Cultural Exchange Initiatives. In the process, I saw how dramatically the categorization of records changed between different eras and Presidential Administrations. It gave me an admiration for the people that catalogue this information and the extreme lengths that they go through to preserve it and keep it accessible. The College Park National Archives is the single largest archival building in the world, and I came away from it fully impressed. I am deeply grateful to UC Berkeley for helping make it possible through this generous grant.