Elizabeth Miller, a senior from Arlington, Kansas, received the top undergraduate paper award at the 2024 Northern Great Plains History Conference, which was held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, recently.
Miller was one of several individuals from or with ties to Hastings College who attended the conference, which was an excellent opportunity for Hastings’ historians at all career stages to engage in sharing their award-winning scholarship and learning from others.
Miller presented her original research in the paper “There Will Probably Be No Bloodbath in Turkey: How Differences in Secularism and Nationalism Prevented US Intelligence from Predicting the 1960 Coup in Turkey.” She was awarded a $200 prize for the Outstanding Undergraduate Paper. The judges especially praised her meticulous interpretation of numerous primary sources in the paper.
Miller spent the summer of 2023 studying Turkish in Ankara, Turkey, after earning a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Emma Morelli delighted the audience with her research on the little-known Billy Graham musical western, Mr. Texas, in her paper, “A Wonderful Ride: Billy Graham’s Utilization of Western Musical Cinema in 1950s America.”
Morelli, a junior from Thornton, Colorado, argued that the film showed Graham’s effort to evangelize new audiences using new media of the mid-20th century, an effort that paved the way for the contemporary Christian entertainment industry.
Dr. Rob Babcock, professor of history, presented findings from his months in Latvia during his recent sabbatical. Babcock’s research is focused on food and ideology in the former Soviet Republic. His paper, “The Menus of Jurmala: What Can They Tell Us?” tried to highlight changes and continuity in restaurant dining in the resort city of Jurmala.
Olivia Perez ‘22 presented a paper, “Championing a Nation and People: The Lithuanian Riflemen’s Association, Ethno-Nationalism, and the Meaning of Sport in Lithuania, 1920-1940,” which examined the uses of sport and sports imagery by paramilitaries to define Lithuanian national identity. Perez recently completed her masters in history from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and has been accepted for a funded PhD program at Rutgers University.
Dr. Wayne Riggs, the College’s vice president of academic affairs, also attended and chaired a panel.
This is the 58th year of the conference, which features historians, undergraduate and graduate history students, and both independent and affiliated scholars who live and work in the Northern Great Plains. The conference features a wide variety of topics spanning the globe and time.
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