History

Dec 9, 2019 - Three history majors completing discipline-specific honors programs in history delivered condensed versions of their honors theses and answered questions from their faculty thesis committees during separate defenses in December 2019. Luke Sower, Katie Allison, and Leah Atkins all successfully defended their theses.

Sower’s defense of his thesis titled “The Lords of All Creation: Environmental Transformation in the Rise of Tenochtitlan” took place on December 3. His faculty committee was comprised of Dr. David Thomas, who was his thesis director, Dr. Keith Bates, and Dr. Karen Martin of Union’s Department of Language. In his thesis, Sower argued that the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan provides a fascinating study of the intimate link between human civilization and its natural environment. The city’s builders (a tribe called the Mexica) constructed their urban metropolis on a small island in the center of Lake Texcoco, and they used dikes, canals, and aqueducts to transform the lacustrine environment to their own benefit. This control of the lake water allowed them to construct large areas of chinampas gardens, one of the most productive agricultural techniques of the pre-industrial world. These works of environmental engineering were not small-scale, locally oriented practices, but massive, state-run, landscape-transforming public works. These Mexica efforts exhibited their ambition and opportunism and played a significant role in their construction of Tenochtitlan into a city that, at its height in the early 16th Century, was one of the largest cities in the world. photos

On the morning of December 9, Allison defended her thesis on “Biblical Feminism: An Oxymoron?”. Her thesis committee members were Dr. David Thomas, who supervised her thesis work, Dr. Keith Bates, and Dr. Janna Chance of the Department of English. Allison’s thesis was an intellectual history of second wave (1970s and 1980s) evangelical feminism and the ways in which evangelical feminists bridged the divide between conservative evangelicals and secular feminists during a period of increasing polarization. Conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists dismissed feminism as an individualistic grab for power that denied Biblical authority, and feminists often dismissed Christianity as hopelessly patriarchal. Conservative evangelicals and secular feminists agreed on one thing: that Scripture prescribed a hierarchical view of gender, an understanding that Biblical feminists argued against. Second wave Biblical feminists sought to demonstrate that God’s design for relationships between the sexes in the home and the church was not patriarchal or hierarchical but rooted in unity and mutuality. They argued that an egalitarian approach was a move toward Biblical justice portrayed in the creation accounts, and that this approach was supported by the entire thrust of Scripture. In so doing, they rejected the polarized camps that claimed the positions were mutually exclusive. photos

On the afternoon of that same day, Atkins presented her thesis about “Poisonous Women: Gender and Power in Ancient Rome.” The three faculty members on her committee were Dr. Henry Allen, who directed her thesis, Dr. David Thomas, and Dr. Scott Huelin, the Director of the Honors Community. Using the works of the Roman writers Tacitus, Livy, and Juvenal, Atkins studied the question of aristocratic women poisoning their spouses as an aspect of gender and power in the early Roman Empire. She described the poisonings as symbolic of what she called feminine ambiguity in Roman culture. Poisonous women represented in their persons two opposing ideas: while they acquired masculine powers in areas such as politics and finances, they occupied a lesser status in Roman society than men. Atkins maintains that the writers’ depictions of poisonous women are reflections of the resentment and anxiety of aristocratic men over the new levels of power that upper-class women achieved as a result of the political and social transformation that Emperor Augustus brought to the Roman world, and that his Julio-Claudian dynasty continued thereafter. photos

In addition to the honors students and their faculty committees, other members of the history department as well as students attended one or more of the presentations. Honors Director Huelin was present at all three defenses and Sower’s mother attended his.