What is Shared Services?

At the start of the year, the College of Arts and Sciences re-structured administrative support for all departments and programs within CAS. These new groupings, called Academic Support Units, are comprised of staff who work directly with departments on academic administration and business operations. This shared services model allows CAS to create a tiered model of service with more consistency across departments. 

The Department of History falls under Academic Support Unit 5, along with nine other departments and programs.

What does this mean for you?

Fortunately, ASU 5 is based in McKenzie Hall. Students can expect to see more staff coming in as department roles shift and physical locations change. Therefore, if you need in-person assistance, please visit the Student Support Center in 201 McKenzie or email ASU5@uoregon.edu to get help from our academic support team:

Kendall Wilber, Academic Programs Assistant — can help you apply for the history major and minor, connect you with advisors, address class enrollment issues and approvals, and provide department stamps.

Alohi Wright, Undergraduate Programs Coordinator — can connect you to advisors for major/minor requirements, address class enrollment issues and approvals, and assist with grades, incompletes, and degree requirements.

Where can I find more information about the restructure?

More information can be found here.

All history undergraduates are invited to attend our lunch on Tuesday, January 10th from 12:30–1:30 p.m. in McKenzie Hall room 375. Join us for an informal chat and hang out with fellow history majors and our department head Vera Keller. There will be pizza!

Tuesday, May 23
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

Rebellion, Political Culture, and State-Building in Post-Roman Hispania

The end of the western Roman empire in the fifth century led to fragmented processes of state building. In the Iberian Peninsula and southern France, Roman and Visigothic elites crafted a new state, known in modern times as the Visigothic kingdom, until the Arab conquest in the early eighth century. My current project demonstrates how practices and ideas created a unique political culture in the aftermath of empire in this region. While earlier studies have discussed these questions as a matter of traditions or identities (Roman, Christian, Gothic or “Germanic”), my project analyzes how a seemingly endemic problem of rebellion and royal succession shaped the political culture of the kingdom. I argue that political and intellectual elites discussed rebellion and its consequences to shape the boundaries of state power, to limit kingly authority, and to redefine the political community in the aftermath of empire. 

Damián Fernández is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He has published on the social, political, and economic history of the Iberian Peninsula in late antiquity, including Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 CE (UPenn Press, 2017). He is currently co-authoring a translation and commentary of the Visigothic Code (Liber Iudiciorum) and writing a monograph on rebellion and political culture in post-imperial Hispania. 

Tuesday, May 9
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

Reading the Matrix of Ritual Space

Since antiquity the emperors of China were conceived as mediators between the powers of heaven and the fate of man. This role is represented in the ritualization of space on a micro and a macro level: Just as the design of ceremonial robes donned for ritual performances placed the emperor at the center of the cosmos, the layout of the capital designated the imperial palace and its government precincts as the ritual center of the political realm. This presentation explores two cases that demonstrate how the ancient roots of such ritual representations were used in the legitimization of power in China’s turbulent 20th and 21st centuries.  Both cases signify the consistency of the symbolic power assigned to ritual space since ancient times. 

Ina Asim is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Oregon. Her research interests include the social and cultural history of the Song, Yuan and Ming periods (960-1644), with a focus on urban spaces and material culture, especially the history of silk textiles and textile technology.  

Tuesday, April 25
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

George Washington Carver, Tuskegee Institute, and the Politics of Food Power in the Rural South

The rural South in the early-to-mid twentieth century was dominated and shaped by the presence of row crops. Season after season, cotton, corn, and increasingly, soybeans, occupied fertile land, replanted to the point that once-rich Delta lands became barren. Disparately trapped in the debt cycles of sharecropping and underpaid farm work, Black farmers in the rural South planted these crops at the demands of landlords hoping to eke out a profit. Unfortunately, those profits often failed to cover the costs of living for those farmers and farmworkers. In Tuskegee’s earliest days, Booker T. Washington identified food insecurity and over-reliance on credit for food as one of the foremost concerns in the Black Belt. When George Washington Carver started his career at Tuskegee in the late 19th century, he pursued the spread of scientific agricultural knowledge with the intent of helping cash-poor farmers address their food needs by cultivating and storing their own foodstuffs. Carver’s initiatives marked a radical departure from the normative cycle of debt-based control held by the planter class. Those initiatives, such as his periodic bulletins, use of the state extension service, and accessible training on Tuskegee’s campus—and the ways in which self-determination relative to food security upset the planter/sharecropper power dynamic—are the subject of this talk. 

Camille Goldmon is an incoming Assistant Professor in History at UO. She is currently on leave while pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton. 

Tuesday, March 21
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

Racialization within Imperial Imaginaries: Romans, Gauls, and Vietnamese

The figure of the Gauls has been pointed out to play a key role in the development of French ethnic and national identity, but less attention has been paid to how it was used in the development of an imperial one. Drawing on the theory of relational racial formation, this paper explores how the Gauls were racialized across space and time, from the Roman world to colonial Vietnam, and how this racialization process contributed to the maintenance of the imperial hierarchy.  This transhistorical lens ultimately demonstrates how race was used to set limitations within imperial imaginaries as to who can and cannot “inherit” the classical tradition and, by proxy of that, who can and cannot transcend the binary between colonizers and colonized. 

Dr. Kelly Nguyen (she/her) is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow  in the Department of Classics at Stanford University. 

Tuesday, February 21
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

The Work of Wisdom in a Catastrophic World

This lecture explores how a variety of mid-20th century American intellectuals navigated the demands of contemplation and the rewards of the interior life with their felt obligations to intervene on the major social and political issues of their day.  

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti and Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she researches and teaches U.S. thought and culture in transatlantic perspective. She is the author of American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2021), The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (Oxford, 2019), and American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago, 2012), and is currently at work on a history of ideas about—and the quest for—wisdom in 20th-century U.S. history.

Tuesday, February 7
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

Regional Networks and the Origins of Cities in Ancient West Africa

Cities emerged in the first millennium BC in the Inland Niger Delta of Mali, but the regional cultural and economic settings within which they developed are not well understood. Archaeological research in the Mouhoun Bend region of neighboring Burkina Faso spanning the first millennium BC and early first millennium AD indicates that interconnected networks of farming settlements were well-established in the greater region in the period prior to and during urban growth. This presentation will examine the social, religious, economic and political data from archaeological excavations in the Mouhoun Bend to provide new perspectives on the intercultural setting that enabled and shaped the more well-known urban societies in Mali. It suggests that understanding deeper histories throughout the region, including the development of possible marketplace nodes, provides new insights into the first millennium BC origins of urbanism. 

Stephen Dueppen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His primary research focuses on the last 3,000 years in West Africa, addressing diverse topics including technologies, religious practices, local and interregional economies, the development of institutionalized inequalities, egalitarian revolutions, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. He is the author of Egalitarian Revolution in the Savanna: The Origins of a West African Political System and Divine Consumption: Sacrifice, Alliance-Building, and Making Ancestors in West Africa, in addition to numerous articles and book chapters.   

Tuesday January 24, 2023
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

Remembering, Forgetting, and Mythologizing the Native South

Professor Ellis will discuss the creation of imperial narratives of conquest and erasure and federal policies that led to the marginalization of Louisiana’s small Native nations in the early nineteenth century. This narrative erasure, Ellis argues, has warped our understanding of early American history and has serious consequences for contemporary Native nations in the Gulf South today.  

Elizabeth Ellis is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history. Prior to joining Princeton, she was an assistant professor of History at New York University and director of NYU’s Native Studies forum. Her first book “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South,” examines the formation of Native nations in the early southeast and the ways that Indigenous migration and immigration practices shaped and limited the extent of European colonization. Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements and is committed to organizing and fighting for Indigenous self-determination. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. 

Written by April Winz • November 16, 2022

The University of Oregon Knight Library’s History subject librarian, Kevin McDowell, is here to help. As a librarian, he meets with students to assist them in their research projects by helping them find resources. These include books and articles for primary and secondary sources and citation management. In addition to this, he supports the teaching and research needs of history professors through collection development. 

He is also currently working with a group to digitize a unique collection of more than 90 albums of Japanese woodblock prints that are held in the Library’s Special Collection and University Archives. 40 of the albums have been digitized and are available through the Oregon Digital database as the Gertrude Bass Warner Collection of Japanese Votive Slips.

To meet with him, you can schedule an appointment here: https://uoregon.libcal.com/appointment/15180 or email him at kevinmc@uoregon.edu.

McDowell graduated from the University of Oregon with a BA in History and holds two MA degrees. One in Japanese History from the University of British Columbia, and the other in Information and Library Science from the University of Arizona. He started working at the Knight library as the Japanese Studies Librarian in 2012, later becoming the subject specialist for History in 2019.

Kevin’s Library Page

April Winz is a communications specialist for the History Department at the University of Oregon.

Tuesday, November 15
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

“We Would Have Become Fish!”: Ecological Transformations and the Human-Environment Relationship in Early Imperial China

Political consolidation and state-building efforts during the early Chinese empires led to massive ecological transformations, a fact registered in early imperial debates about infrastructure projects, especially large-scale water control systems. These debates provided opportunities to reassess the relationship between humans and the natural world, with some arguing for less active interventions in the environment. While far from our contemporary notions of environmental “sustainability” or “awareness,” such proposals for the first time theorized natural resources and ecological systems as interlinked complexes whose disruption could have long-term, unpredictable effects.  

Luke Habberstad is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures and the Department of Religious Studies. He researches China’s late Warring States and early imperial periods (4th century BCE-2nd century CE). His publications include Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles (University of Washington Press, 2017) and articles in journals and edited volumes.   

Summer sessions are a great way to earn credits quickly and knock out some of those course requirements. History courses are offered during all three sessions, in a variety of intriguing topics. Check out the list below.

Looking to fulfill specific core or major credit requirements? Refer to our Group Satisfying and Multicultural Credit chart to find the right course for you.

Session I (June 21–July 18)

HIST 192, Japan Past & Present

An introductory survey of Japanese history and culture from its premodern past to its present. Utilizing lecture, art, film, and translated texts from Japanese authors, this course will explore themes of overseas contact, political change, and culture and society. does not require the purchase of a textbook. All course materials will be provided via Canvas.

HIST 363, American Business History

This class will both chronologically and thematically trace the history of American business from the colonial era up to the twenty-first century. We will focus on various topics such as the brutal businesses of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism; the development of modern management and accounting techniques; the shifting relations between employers and employees; the role of business in underrepresented communities; the rise of the military-industrial complex; business and environmental justice; and the rise of the Silicon Valley and the gig economy.

HIST 396, Samurai in Film

Examination of the image of Japan’s warrior class, the most prominent social group in Japan for over seven centuries. Combines films, readings, and lectures.

HIST 463, Sports in U.S. History

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, sports tell us a lot about who we are and where we’re going. This class examines histories of opportunity and oppression in American sports history, inviting students to be both celebratory and critical. We conclude with a special unit on sports history at the University of Oregon.

HIST 468, Pacific Northwest History

Regional history to the mid-twentieth century. How the Pacific Northwest mirrors the national experience and how the region has a distinctive history and culture.

Session 2 (July 19–Aug 15)

HIST 190, Foundations of East Asian Civilizations

What is East Asia, and how has its history shaped our contemporary world? This course serves as introduction for tackling these big questions by exploring aspects of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditional cultures from prehistory to the seventeenth century. This survey requires no prior knowledge of East Asia and all course materials will be available on Canvas.

HIST 309, Women in the U.S. II

Survey of the diverse experiences of American women from 1870 to the present.

HIST 352, U.S. in the 1960s

This course will be an online space to read, think, and talk about the Sixties as both a watershed in modern U.S. history and an era whose contested reputation continues to preoccupy current observers. Specific topics include American popular culture and countercultures, politics and presidential elections, the evolution of social activism and rights agitation, breakthroughs in science and technology, foreign policy, and national economic and environmental transformations…and much more!

HIST 368, The American West in Popular Culture

Examines the American West as reflected through popular culture of the 18th–20th centuries. The course
utilizes primary & secondary source writings, art, music, radio, television, and numerous films set in the Western genre in dialogue with one another.

HIST 449, Race and Ethnicity of Asian American Histories

How have Asian immigrants and Asian Americans shaped the U.S. today? What are the commonalities and differences across this large and diverse racial group, and how have Asian American communities defined themselves and their histories outside of mainstream racial narratives and stereotypes? This course examines these questions by exploring histories of Asians in America with a critical eye toward race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and class.

HIST 469, 20th Century Indigenous America

Variable chronological, thematic, and regional topics. Repeatable twice when topic changes for maximum of 12 credits.

Session 3 (Aug 16–Sep 12)

HIST 202,19th Century U.S. History

Creation and development of the United States and its social, economical, political, and cultural consequences. Jacksonian era, expansion, commercial and industrial revolution, slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, imperialism, and the Progressive Era.

HIST 273, Environmental History

How have humans and the natural environment shaped one another over time? Environmental history is a relatively new, interdisciplinary field that examines this deceptively simple question. This course introduces students to key concepts and methods in environmental history, which explores the changing relationships between humans and nature. This course will be asynchronous to fit with students’ summer schedules.

HIST 470, Slavery in U.S. History

Explores aspects of the African American experience in the age of slavery and Reconstruction. Key topics include the origins of slavery and the slave trade; evolution of race and racism; communities and cultures of the enslaved; acts of resistance, evasion, and rebellion; racial slavery and capitalism in U.S. history.

Join us in congratulating Patience Collier on receiving the Margaret Wiese Graduate Research Award.

Patience is a graduate student with the Department of History, researching Native American history.

The Margaret Wiese Graduate Research Award supports graduate research related to preserving the culture, language, or artifacts of northwestern Native Americans. Learn more at gradschool.uoregon.edu.

All are invited to a free book talk presented by Bathsheba Demuth:

“The Ethical Choices of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and the Nature of History”

Thursday, November 21, 2019
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Knight Library Browsing Room

Whales and Economy

Bowhead whales have been known by three distinct groups of hunters along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk looks at how whales became known through the labor of their killing: how were whales, particularly bowheads, imagined and treated, and how did this change across economic systems? What kind of emotional relationships were possible? And what kinds of relationships were considered ethical between humans and whales? It then examines how whales themselves responded to indigenous, capitalist, and communist hunters, examining oral histories, logbooks, diaries, and Soviet records for evidence of different whale adaptations and responses to these varied human hunting pressures.

The talk closes by asking what including whale behavior in our analysis of human-whale interactions provokes in our historical understanding, and how to situate non-human actions in human narratives of the past. 

About the Speaker

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, where she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interests in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she spent several years training sled dogs. In the years since, she has visited and lived in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. She has a BA and MA from Brown University, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in publications from the American Historical Review to the New Yorker. Her first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Arctic is just out with Norton.

Keep us in the loop!

We need your help knowing all the great things the history community is doing. We want to hear from faculty, graduate students, majors, and alumni. Please send us specific updates from your research, teaching, work with a professor, or related work in the community. Did you find an amazing source? Send us a photo and explanation. An event coming up? Send us a blurb and information about any co-sponsors. A photo from the field or study abroad experience? You don’t need to be on social media yourself to participate—you are part of the community we want to promote. (And please spread the word to your university and community partners!)

Use this online form to send us your announcement.

This form won’t go away, so feel free to submit often and on an ongoing basis. If you prefer, you can also email your content, including accompanying images, directly to Fela McWhorter at felaw@uoregon.edu.

We are seeking a fabulous Accounting & Communications Coordinator. Click here to apply.

Gift from Eugene residents Gordon and Sherry Paine will significantly enrich UO’s holdings of rare books.

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Educate Yourself with the UO Department of History’s #Trumpsyllabus Winter 2017

Are you wondering about…

the first Populists?  Take HIST 202: Building the US (Ostler)

the Mexico-U.S. border? Take HIST 248: Latinos in the Americas (Weise)

social inequalities? Take HIST 457: Gilded Age (Ostler)

celebrity-politicians? Take HIST 399: U.S. Cinema (Beda)

Occupy Wall Street?  Take HIST 351: American Radicalism (Pope)

“75 years after Pearl Harbor: ‘Real-life heroes’ from Lane County are not forgotten”

Article in the Register-Guard, December 7, 2016 by Rob Romig

Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 4 pm — 110 Knight Law Center

The National Committee on US-China Relations presents a national simulcast and live talk.

China Town Hall: Local Connections, National Reflections

Henry A. Kissinger is the national simulcast speaker for the 10th annual China Town Hall. While national security advisor, Kissinger played a crucial role in arranging President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, which opened the door to the re-establishment of US-China relations. Following Kissinger’s simulcast presentation, Kristen McDonald, China program director of Pacific Environment (PE), will give a live talk on the environmental sharing of planet Earth with China. She leads the efforts of PE, which is focused on protecting the living environment of the Pacific Rim, to address pollution and build strong and effective grassroots environmental organizations in China. McDonald received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy and Management, and is the founder and former director of the China Rivers Project, which works to expand river ecotourism and conservation in China. China Town Hall is a national day of programming presented by the National Committee on US-China Relations, designed to provide Americans across the US the opportunity to discuss issues with leading experts. For more information, please contact the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at 541-346-5068.

https://www.ncuscr.org/content/china-town-hall

http://caps.uoregon.edu/

Ford Lecture Hall, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Presented with the support of CAPS (Jeremiah/NRC), Academic Affairs, EALL, Asian Studies and Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities.

Films will be introduced by China film curator, Shelly Kraicer.

Thursday, October 20

2:30 pm Female Directors 女导演Directed by Yang Mingming (43 min) Two brilliant young women, art school graduates with deliciously profane vocabularies and supreme confidence, talk sex, cinema, and power, as they wield their shared video camera like a scalpel. Yang Mingming’s superb debut is hilarious, moving, and subversive: is it documentary or fiction, or something new that violates both modes with gleeful abandon?

3:30 pm The Emperor Visits the Hell唐皇游地府Directed by Li Luo (67 min) Winner of Vancouver International Film Festival’s Dragons & Tigers Prize, a quietly astonishing tour de force that hinges on a lovely

conceit: relocating to the present the famous story of the Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong’s visit to the underworld. Shot in elegant, black-and-white long takes, the film spins a tale of the local Dragon King river god. Feuding with a fortune teller, he alters the weather without authorization and is condemned to death. When the Emperor fails to commute the god’s sentence, otherworldly retribution is swift: he is summoned to Hell. Li’s audacious use of multiple levels of storytelling and filmmaking craftily subverts every authority.

7:15-9:00 pm  Four Ways to  Die in My Hometown我故乡的四种死亡方式 Directed by Chai Chunya (90 mn) A four-part fiction film that’s as much poetry as it is narrative, Chai Chunya’s gorgeous work, evokes four characters – a poet, a searcher, a puppet master, and a shaman – each with intense spiritual links to the land (the film was shot in and around Gansu province) mediated by four elemental symbols: earth, water, fire, and wind. The film’s logic is dreamlike; Chai builds up a series of striking, pictorially spectacular tableaux. Shot in and around Gansu province. Two young women lose a camel, then a father. A retired puppeteer meets a gun-toting tree thief.

Shamans and storytellers evoke a lost spiritual world that Chai films back to life.

Friday, October 21

2pm-3:50pm Egg and Stone鸡蛋和石头, directed by Huang Ji (100 min) Winner, International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Tiger Award, Huang Ji’s brave film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in Hunan, Egg and Stone creates a powerful autobiographical portrait of a young girl’s attempts to grapple with a terrifying world of sexual danger. Since her parents moved to the city to work, she has been forced to live with her uncle and aunt. Huang Ji’s visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka (also the film’s producer and editor) contributes beautifully crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power.

4pm-6pm River of Life生命的河流 Directed by Yang Pingdao (101 min) One of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers, Yang Pingdao’s creative camera brings unexpected beauty. Using innovation to conjure the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised between fiction and documentary to crystallize moments in his family history, recreating its emotional weight and variety in cinematic form. Combining extended family chronicle, implicit national history, and soul-bearing autobiography, Yang employs gentle formal experimentation to invent new cinematic pathways.  Opening film and prize winner of BIFF 2014.

Coll Thrush, Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia

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“An Evening with Reza Aslan: Religion, Identity, and the Future of America”

Reza Aslan is a best-selling author, public intellectual, scholar of religions, producer, and television host. Through the lens of his own experience—his family fled Iran during the Revolution in 1979 and settled in the U.S. when Reza was seven—and the conflicts he faced as an immigrant growing up, Aslan will examine the crisis of identity that is currently gripping the U.S., and suggest some possible ways in which we should think differently about race, religion, and identity in order to abolish the hatred and discrimination that has led to this crisis. As Aslan points out, America has, from the beginning, been a diverse nation, built on immigration and ethnic diversity.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016
7:30 p.m. (doors open at 7 p.m.)
156 Straub Hall

Aslan is the author of the international bestsellers No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005), and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013).

The lecture is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a book sale and signing. It will be live-streamed at: ohc.uoregon.edu.  Seating is limited to 500; no tickets or reservations. Doors will open at 7 p.m.

For more information or for disability accommodations (which must be made by Oct. 11th) please call (541) 346-3934 or ohc@uoregon.edu

I am working as a legal assistant in a non-profit called Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, TX through Border Servant Corps. I do asylum casework, so I am constantly traveling between the detention center, court, and the office. My favorite thing about my job is that in a way, I get to be a writer, a detective, a researcher, a journalist, and an activist all at once. My experience studying history definitely strengthens my capacities for critical thinking, strategic investigation, and conscientiousness in my tasks. I concentrated on the Latin American region for most of my four years, so the knowledge I gained in college allows me to contextualize the multi-ethnic and globally reaching interactions I have every day and listen to our clients’ narratives with cultural sensitivity. My least favorite thing about my job is having to turn asylum seekers down, since non-profit work entails limited resources, and sadly there are too many people in need. As a result, I have been learning about immigration through a systemic framework, and am consequently learning a lot about politics and policy in conjunction with law.What’s unique about this place is that it is situated right on the Mexican border, so I can see into Ciudad Juarez from Mexico. On my daily bicycle commute, I observe the juxtaposition of developed streets and extensive poverty on either side of the fence, which serves as a regular reminder of the oppression upon which many foundations of Mexican society were built. At the same time, there is a distinct beauty about the fluidity of the two cultures, which borrow from each other, intermingle, and adapt. Fronteriza culture is vivid, poetic, resilient, and enchanting. I am looking forward to allthat I will learn throughout the rest of this service year, and I hope to attend law school in the future.

As a naval intelligence officer in Iraq in 2006, Clair Wiles applied the skills she learned as a history major to discern patterns and understand cultures. The result? “Hundreds of lives saved.”

In 2006 I was recalled to active duty as a Navy intelligence officer in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was stationed at Camp Victory in Baghdad where I served on the briefing team for the Corps and Theater commanders. Our daily battlefield updates were a seeming blur of attacks and at one point I felt like I was doomed to spend a year just reporting how many people were killed in action every day. After a particularly brutal day, I assembled my team and asked them to bring order to the chaos of reporting — to find patterns, to predict attacks, to understand the religious and tribal culture of each area of operations and produce a daily brief that we could share with convoys to prevent attacks. The result? Hundreds of lives saved. Yes, the skills I learned from the University of Oregon History Department literally saved lives.