Burkhardt Review, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Conference Edition

As teachers of history, we often exhort our students to write for an imagined audience of smart, critical readers.Of course, a research paper may stem from a class assignment and, in that case, the professor will read the submission and issue a grade, but the process is more than a dialogue between student and teacher.In conducting research, the author interrogates sources and engages in a conversation with pre-existing scholarship.And the meritorious work of ambitious students will find its way to a larger audience, one way or another.The Ball State University Student History Conference provides a venue for students to present their work to a larger audience of peers and mentors.For the 2018 conference, the Student History Conference Committee received submissions from undergraduate, MA, and PhD students from local and national institutions.Through a competitive selection process, 20 papers were accepted for presentation.Of those papers, three received awards and are now included in this volume of the Burkhardt Review.Networks emerge as a shared theme across these three articles.In "Sex and the City: The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Mann Act of 1910," Megan Vohs examines the public policy repercussions of the "white slavery" myth that captured the attention of moral crusaders in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.Vohs shows how members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union amplified public anxiety about racialized sexual predators victimizing white girls and white purity.Although the organization stood by a conservative understanding of the domestic sphere as the place for female activity, its members hardly shied away from efforts to promote legislation that impacted both private sexual choices and public perceptions and litigation.Whereas Vohs focuses on an early twentieth-century organization intent on influencing and policing individual behavior in the United States, Isaac Melhaff brings our attention to networks of trade unionists and intelligence operatives in the Americas during the Cold War.Melhaff's paper, "Subverting Solidarity: The Role of American Organized Labor in Pursuing United States Foreign Policy Objectives in Chile, 1961-1973," won the award for Best Undergraduate Paper in World History.His research challenges the usefulness of the U.S.-World divide through a trans-national analysis of Cold War politics.The article traces the flow of money and people across organizations and borders as it explores the covert actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, in concert with the American labor union, to undermine worker solidarity in Latin America in the decade prior to the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Chile's democratically elected, socialist president Salvadore Allende.v Frank Lacopo's article, "A Tale of Two Templa: Sacred Spaces, Intercultural Encounter, and the First Jesuits in Italy and Japan," similarly tracks the cross-border activities of networked individuals, in this case the Jesuits who sought converts in Early Modern Europe and beyond.Lacopo breaks the mold of national and regional history by comparing Jesuit conversion houses in Kagoshima, Japan and in Rome.In doing so he not only illuminates the importance of physical spaces to conversion experiences, he also contributes to our understanding of the sixteenth century as an age of movement, displacement, and cross-cultural encounter.These articles together show the power of networked individuals to effect historical change.The group is generally more powerful than the individual.Even the scholarly network wields more influence than the lone historian amidst her books and documents.It is thus our pleasure to see the imagined audiences of these fine works of scholarship transformed into a network of actual readers, yourself among them.

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