Ten students were selected for a Bisbee Prize by their teachers for outstanding research on their U.S. history papers. For the annual spring tradition, faculty, students, and guests gathered on Zoom to recognize the students’ impressive work on topics ranging from 19th-century Chinese immigrants to communism in Hollywood. The award winners rotated through break-out rooms to discuss their papers and answer questions on their research.
Matt O’Rourke ’21, who wrote about the prohibition movement, said it was the personal stories, such as how people resisted prohibition and tried to find ways around the laws, that “made the research really interesting.”
The Bisbee Prize was established to honor Ethan Wyatt Bisbee, a former history faculty member and department chair who retired in 1993 after 40 years of teaching. The Prize was endowed in 2005 through a gift by John Warren, formerly of the history department, and his wife, Laura Warren ’78, former head of Robbins House. Bisbee passed away earlier this year.
The students received the award-winning book The Sum of Us by alumna Heather McGhee ’97. Recipients of the 2021 Bisbee Prize are:
Evelyn Cao ’22: “Struggling For Truth: Stereotyping Chinese Immigrants in the 19th Century”
Thea Chung ’21: “Medical Colonization of the Vagina: The Sims’ Speculum and White Male Power”
Eliza Dunn ’21: “Pageants and Patriarchy: How the Miss America Pageant of 1968 Shaped Second-Wave Feminism”
John Kulow ’‘22: “War Plan Red: From Trade Rivalry to the Brink of War”
Matthew O’Rourke ’21: “Drinking in Secret: Everyday Americans’ Resistance and the Fall of the Prohibition Movement”
Yavuz Shahzad ’22: “Sounds of Unification and Rebellion: Exploring the Relationship Between Jazz, Black Culture, and Integration”
John Hull ’22: “American Imperialism in Vietnam”
Chen-Chih “Shiloh” Liu ’22: “Martínez, Kochiyama, and Boggs: How Non-Black Women of Color De-Homogenized the Black Power Movement”
Madeleine Cesaretti ’21: “Giving a Dam: the Debate over Hetch Hetchy Valley”
Christopher Scanlon ’22: “The Collision of Communism and Film in the WWII Era”
