This past March, as the winter quarter drew to a close, UW History held its annual History Honors Colloquium, a culmination of a two-quarter senior research seminar in which fifteen students presented their papers. Three of those students, Emma Kane-Galbraith, Gabby Lundquist, and Jacob Krell, produced some exceptionally high-quality, original papers that have the potential to be published. Their research entailed cracking a secret code, traveling to archives in France, and browsing through endless pages of old magazines and listening to hours of talk show recordings. At first glance, their topics couldn't be more different in time and place: deaf education in the early twentieth century Pacific Northwest, African soldiers in the interwar period, and the trans community in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, they exhibit some striking parallels in that they are all relevant to our current time by confronting ableism, racism and transphobia.
Jacob Krell grew up in Bremerton, Washington, just a short ferry ride from Seattle, and chose to focus his research locally. In his paper, he reconstructs the life and education of deaf people in the Pacific Northwest during the early twentieth century. He came upon this topic quite unexpectedly while browsing through the microfilm section of the UW Special Collections. Within the collection, Jacob found the diary of Alexander Wade, a deaf man who lived in western Washington around the turn of the twentieth century. Although Wade led a seemingly unremarkable life - he grew up on a family farm, attended the state school for the deaf in Vancouver, and worked as a wage laborer in various lumber mills - Jacob was captivated right away. "I came across the diary at random in the library catalog one day, and while I had no background in deaf history, I quickly realized that there was an important story waiting to be told." While a large part of the diary focused on mundane descriptions of everyday life, Jacob noticed that some parts seemed to be written in a curious code. "It took a bit of doing, but context and repeated letters helped me figure out a few words, and from there I was able to crack the code. Each letter is represented by a different letter, number, or symbol: G is represented by the number 8, for instance, while M is represented by the Greek letter Δ." As Jacob deciphered the entries, he discovered that Wade came up with this code to record a dark reality at the school for deaf people. "Many of these coded entries, I discovered, describe a non-deaf teacher’s sexual abuse of deaf girls. Wade gives us a unique window into what unfolded: complicity from the superintendent, a courageous stand by a deaf teacher, an incomplete response by state officials, and a cover-up that made these diaries the only remaining evidence of what really happened." After graduation, Jacob plans to attend law school. "My future may not involve anything directly adjacent to my research topic, but I know I’ll find ways to apply everything I’ve learned from the honors program – and from Alexander Wade – to what comes next."
Initially majoring in psychology when she came to the UW from the Bay area in California, Gabby Lundquist soon realized that the program wasn't for her and has since found her intellectual home in the history department. Nonetheless, her fascination with the human psyche and her aspiration to understand how humans have responded to traumatic and life-altering events still guide her historical research interests. In her thesis, Gabby explores how the French medical and military establishment treated North African soldiers who experienced shell shock after WWI and WWII. To this end, she looked at French governmental documents and analyzed the biological racism in postwar medical journals. "I argue that the French government worked with its imperial medical establishment to construct a racial, linguistic and religious hierarchy that perpetuated African subjugation." While Jacob deciphered a secret code, Gabby was conducting all of her research in French - a language that she has only studied while at university. Not only were the majority of her sources in a different language, but she also traveled to a different continent to do her research. "My experiences within the French Military Archives in Vincennes were without a doubt my favorite part of the process. It was truly a surreal experience to be in such a historically significant site and to have held documents from over a hundred years ago." Hooked by her experiences in archival research, Gabby wants to continue to graduate school. "Through this program, I was able to get a glimpse at what academic research would entail and it solidified my aspiration of becoming a historian. I have loved the UW and Seattle, but I am a bit of a wanderlust person and have always wanted to live in as many cities as I could, so I will be leaving after I graduate."
Emma Kane-Galbraith can't remember a time when history wasn't one of her major interests. She signed up for the honors seminar after taking a class in queer and trans history with Professor Laurie Marhoefer, who encouraged her to apply. Emma's work focuses on the history of GenderPAC (the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition), one of the first trans rights organizations in the U.S., founded in 1995. She shows that a schism occured in the trans movement in the early 2000s, when GenderPAC started promoting gender rights for all people instead of solely focusing on trans rights. Opponents of this change of direction denigrated the organization and spread the misconception that it ceased to exist. Emma discovered this controversy by chance while browsing through old magazines. "One of my hobbies is reading chronologically through old magazines, and in the summer leading up to my transfer to UW I decided to go through the archive of Transgender Tapestry, which ran from 1979 to 2008 and became the most popular trans periodical." In her thesis, she argues that the organization GenderPAC and the magazine Transgender Tapestry represent different factions within the trans community. She didn't only read through pages and pages of the magazine but also listened through hundreds of hours of audio material. "I used interviews conducted by GenderTalk, which was a trans talk radio show in the 1990s and 2000s. Over 400 episodes of the show are available to listen to online and they provide a fantastic window into turn-of-the-millenium trans culture, but they’ve received very little scholarly attention." Besides browsing through magazines and listening to talk show episodes, Emma also used an online archive, the Transgender Usenet Archive, compiled by Avery Dame-Griff in 2023. "This gave me a view into how trans people were discussing GenderPAC among themselves online at the time." Her historical research has a profound impact on how Emma sees our current moment of political infringement on gender rights. "So much transphobic rhetoric tries to claim that being transgender is some sort of new phenomenon, that I think it’s very important to remember that not only have trans people always existed, but for over thirty years we’ve been politically organized as a distinct movement with national recognition. And we’re still fighting for lots of the same rights we were then." Emma is interested in taking her research to the next step by doing a PhD and researching how self-described “cross-dressers’” organizations reacted to and influenced the growth of the trans rights movement in the early ‘90s. But she also really wants to stay in Seattle and is currently looking into pursuing a masters in library science at the UW. "I do love archives!"
Although Jacob, Gabby and Emma focused on very different topics, distinguished in place and time, the three of them ultimately tried to address a similar problem. How can historians reconstruct the experiences of people who did not fit into official narratives?