In an America in which rights are constantly being lost, found, created, debated, granted, and withdrawn, it is necessary to evaluate the methods of determination and reasoning behind the Supreme Court’s decisions that alter the livelihoods of its citizens. Abortion, a hotly contested right that has been stripped away from American women in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), provides an avenue of research ripe for an unrelenting analysis of judicial reasoning and constitutional interpretation. This thesis analyzes Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs, focusing specifically on his assertion that a constitutional right must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” It critiques this standard and Alito’s attempt to demonstrate that abortion fails to meet this interpretation. Upon examination, Alito’s opinion uncovers selective historical interpretation, omission of evidence, and outcome-driven, inconsistent reasoning. By incorporating historical and constitutional research that Alito either overlooked or excluded, this thesis argues that abortion does, in fact, possess meaningful historical roots and constitutional support. Alito’s reasoning reflects alarming patterns of partisanship and agenda-based decision-making within a body entrusted with neutrality. Public trust in the judiciary is eroding rapidly; decisions that retract established positive rights while advancing a one-sided agenda intensify national frustration. If the Supreme Court is to remain a legitimate judicial body, its justices must be held accountable for accurate, scrupulous reasoning. Likewise, the American public must remain informed about the historical foundations of fundamental rights– rights that, as Dobbs demonstrates, can be suddenly revoked with serious consequences.

RELATED ABSTRACTS

• From Buck to Dobbs: The Constitutional Logic of Reproductive Policing, Ryan, Sarah Elizabeth, UMass Amherst, Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Concourse, B8
• Case Analysis: Tik Tok v. Garland (2025), Maloney, Peyton Abigail, Worcester State University, Poster Session 3, 1:15 PM - 2:00 PM, Auditorium, A29
• Public Opinions and Views of the Supreme Court Throughout American History: How These Views Shaped the Role of the Court, Falk, Wyatt, UMass Amherst, Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Concourse, B7
• Reimagining Justice: Indigenous Justice Initiatives and What Western Justice Systems Stand to Learn, Balkema, Maxwell Skye, UMass Amherst, Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Concourse, B10
• Jury Impartiality and Its Epistemic Limits: Cognitive Constraints and the Sixth Amendment, Cook, Keira M., UMass Amherst, Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Concourse, B11

Paris is often described as the world capital of secularism: the emblem of “laïcité” and constitutional religious neutrality. Yet this modern identity stands in tension with the city’s origins. The same skyline that now overlooks a secular republic was once shaped by sacred authority; its monarchy grounded legitimacy in theology, and its civic rhythms were ordered around Christian ritual. How did a city built upon the foundations of Western Christianity become the guardian of religious absence in public governance?

This project offers a cultural analysis of that transformation. Through literary examination of Parisian historical texts, architectural study of sacred landmarks such as Notre-Dame Cathedral, and analysis of modern French secular doctrine shaped in the aftermath of the French Revolution, I trace the Christian foundations that structured Paris’s political imagination and the revolutionary and intellectual forces that redefined it. Particular attention is given to the reconfiguration of authority: from sacred monarchy to constitutional secularism.

The irony is not contradiction but transformation. Paris’s secular present does not erase its Christian past; it emerges from it. To fully understand Contemporary Parisian culture and doctrine we must understand the rich history which led to where they are now today. In the tension between cathedral and constitution, the modern identity of Paris takes form.

RELATED ABSTRACTS

• A Look Into the 18th, 19th, and 20th Arrondissements of Paris, France, Voorheis, Brielle Anne, Mount Wachusett Community College, Poster Session 2, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM, Auditorium, A59
• A Secular Idea of France: The Politics of Reaction and the Price of Overreach, Potter, Josiah Samuel, Mount Wachusett Community College, Poster Session 4, 2:15 PM - 3:00 PM, 163, C14
• The War Abroad and on the Homefront: How the Vietnam War Redefined and Mobilized Black Resistance” “The War Abroad and on the Homefront: How the Vietnam War Redefined and Mobilized Black Resistance, Nozawa, Ryo, UMass Amherst, Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Concourse, B3
• Exploring Historical Problem Solving Techniques of Islamic and Japanese Mathematicians for a Modern Audience and Integration into Higher Dimensional and Computational Applications, Lemek, Quintin, Fitchburg State University, Poster Session 4, 2:15 PM - 3:00 PM, Auditorium, A66
• The Evolution of the Gender Identity Spectrum, Gender Expression, and Societal Acceptance: 1980s to Present, Kirby, Keva C., Northern Essex Community College, Poster Session 3, 1:15 PM - 2:00 PM, Auditorium, A66

            This project demonstrates that territorial Arizona was influenced by nationwide Progressive movements, through which the territory’s society developed progressive values that enabled Arizona to achieve statehood in 1912. While Arizona’s territorial history is portrayed in pop culture as a tale of the Wild West, this reputation did not last into statehood. Around the turn of the 20^th century, Arizona became a relatively organized territory with an effective government and diverse, law-abiding citizens despite its notoriety for delinquency from just decades prior. This change occurred simultaneously as the nationwide shift into the Progressive Era, in which Americans campaigned for reforms such as labor regulations that were also popular in Arizona.

            Despite the similar progressions of Arizona and American history during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Arizona historiography frames the territory’s reform as isolated from progressive influences, and Progressive Era study overlooks Arizona, instead focusing on the American Northeast, Midwest, and California. This paper closes this gap in the historical record by analyzing the efforts of Arizona laborers, women, and settlers in local social movements, connecting Arizona’s reform to national Progressive Era movements. This essay then concludes that Arizona voters’ support for labor unions, women’s rights, and temperance as influenced by national movements and embodied in the 1910 Arizona Constitutional Convention and 1912 Constitution was integral to Arizona’s reform in character and governance.

RELATED ABSTRACTS

• A Secular Idea of France: The Politics of Reaction and the Price of Overreach, Potter, Josiah Samuel, Mount Wachusett Community College, Poster Session 4, 2:15 PM - 3:00 PM, 163, C14

Bartolomeo de Las Casas, a 1500s Spanish Dominican friar and social reformer, led a one-man mission against the slavery of his time. Most scholarship revolving around Las Casas is incredibly polarized, viewing him as a reformed saint or as a colonizer hiding behind spiritual liberation. This presentation investigates Las Casas’s works and determines his motives. The goal is to see where he contradicted himself and consider how the audiences he addressed influenced or changed his perspective. In cross-examining his writings, (In Defense of the Indians published around 1550, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies published in 1552, and History of the Indies published in 1561) contradictions abound, and this has led to diverse scholarly readings of Las Casas. The presentation exposes the flaws in the argument of Las Casas’s spiritual transformation (originating from Historian Lewis Hanke) while also questioning the claim that Las Casas was just another colonizer (originating from Professor Daniel Castro). This presentation is interested in examining Las Casas as a man who spread the message of abolitionism to anyone who would hear it, even if the facts had to be skewed to do so. Las Casas’s works are misrepresented depending on the perspective and history of whoever is examining them, leading to Las Casas's depictions across academia being skewed one way or another depending on the camp you fall into. This work attempts to focus n on who Las Casas was and if he was truly fighting Spanish bondage alone.

RELATED ABSTRACTS

• Education, Propaganda, and Myth-Making in the Third Republic, Nault, Tyler B., UMass Boston, Poster Session 2, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM, 165, D2
• The Politicized & Innocent: The Weaponization of Childhood in the Propaganda of the Boston 'Busing Crisis', Harris, William, UMass Boston, Poster Session 2, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM, 165, D3
• Effects of the Berlin Conference, Ibekilo, Gabriel C., Holyoke Community College, Poster Session 5, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM, Auditorium, A69

Following the crushing defeat at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, France experienced an identity crisis, one that was merely the most recent in the tumultuous near-century since the Revolution. The abolition of the Bourbon monarchy, and execution of Louis XVI in 1793 began a cycle of instability: republics, emperors, and even a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. The constant throughline in all these changes was the expansion of France’s colonial holdings. The Third Republic not only sought to create stability in the present, but in the past as well. Recent history presented a panorama of dissension, but the more distant past could provide a commonality that transcended these divisions. Whatever this past would be, it would need to be old enough to predate organized government in France, and be able to extend indefinitely. By making an identity not limited to any period of time, either in the past or future, this identity would exist outside of temporal events. Thus, the Third Republic of France created a new national identity, by means of propaganda disseminated through primary schools as an important tool, to grant the state infallibility in the past, present, and future. This presentation will explore why the Gauls were chosen for this narrative, and how the primary school textbooks of Ernest Lavisse instilled and perpetuated this myth in the minds of French students. Additionally, this presentation will explore the use of Gallic symbolism in France.

The purpose of this project was to demonstrate how the imagery of childhood is utilized for propaganda purposes, more specifically using the racially-charged period of Boston’s “Busing Crisis” to imitate both the conservative and liberal political spectrums so recognizable in the United States today. I believe that the linking of children to political issues adds a deeply-personal dimension that incites people more impactfully than statistics or logic ever could, and though this may seem like an obvious argument, it is one that is oft-overlooked by academics due to it’s emotional nature that does not lend itself to being easily-quantified. Historian Victoria Grieve developed a framework of looking at children in cold war propaganda of the 1950s as within the realms of “neutral” or “politicized,” a framework that I wished to apply and develop more on with my own city’s history. My research drew heavily from a number of archival propagandic pieces of the period from both pro- and anti-bussing contingents, demonstrating both the similarities and differences between them. In addition, I make a point of deeply-analyzing the language and design choices of these various sources – some of them are overt in their intentions, while others are a great deal more subtle, a subtly which I believe was both intentional and makes them no less effective.

The Dreyfus Affair, the wrongful conviction of French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894, is most often remembered as an example of antisemitism and a miscarriage of justice. What receives far less attention however is the role the Affair played in the secularization legislation that would sweep across France in the years to come.

This project argues that the group most responsible for enabling that legislation was the anti-Dreyfusards themselves, drawn overwhelmingly from Catholic institutions and organizations. French republican politicians had sought to reduce the Church's role in public life for decades but lacked the political conditions to do so. By committing themselves against Dreyfus, even after that position had been publicly disproven, Catholic institutions had discredited themselves more thoroughly than decades of republican anti-clerical arguments had managed to do beforehand. It was this continual overreach that handed anti-clerical politicians the mandate to finally make various secularization laws and acts of the early twentieth century possible, a phenomenon far from isolated to this single chapter of French history. 

This project employs historical and legal analysis of primary sources, including parliamentary records and contemporary press, as well as drawing on works by historians Maurice Larkin, Ruth Harris, and John McManners. This case also illustrates a pattern visible well beyond France: from the collapse of Prohibition to the current backlash against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, institutional overreach in moments of political crisis has repeatedly accelerated a movement's own disempowerment, handing opponents a mandate they could not have built alone.

Twenty-first century open educational resources (OER) lack many of the constraints of their printed counterparts. OER therefore should offer authors the freedom to pursue controversial topics and to include more up-to-date historical scholarship. This study examines 20 physical and 10 OER U.S. history textbooks published between 2000 and 2025. The author analyzes the currency of the scholarship behind topics like the Trail of Tears and more generally Native Americans in the context of Jacksonian America; the presence or absence of traditional historiographical narratives; the language used to discuss these topics; and the strictures of the secondary education textbook market and industry. This study finds no significant disparity in the narratives and only minimal differences in topics treated. Differences emerge in the rhetoric deployed in descriptions of Native Americans and various historical events. The promise that OER held for authors is thus not achieved.

Mark Moseley, the former professional placekicker who played for 4 teams over 16 seasons in the National Football League (NFL), certainly fits the mold of a story tailor-made for a Hollywood film. The purpose of this project is to examine the historical background of Moseley’s playing career to produce a screenplay for a biographical film focused upon the dramatic events of the 1982 NFL season. Utilizing archival research through newspaper and magazine articles, documentary and game footage, as well as sports record books, the research conducted will be converted into a screenplay that intends to depict both the highs and lows of Moseley’s career, while highlighting the 1982 season, which is similarly very intriguing. In this season, the NFL saw a player-strike, which shortened the year, helping to pave the way for Moseley to be named the League’s Most Valuable Player, helping his team, the Washington Redskins on their journey to become Super Bowl Champions. Never before in the history of the league had a placekicker been named Most Valuable Player, and it is more likely than not that it will never happen again, further proving that Moseley’s story as one befitting of historical research and a biographic film that will further exemplify his legacy entirely.