History

Nyhus Small Grant Awards, 2010-2011

Nicholas Pisegna '11
During my senior year at Bowdoin, I completed an honors thesis in history under the direction of Professor Allen Wells. My project focused on the development of baseball in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and how the sport’s development influenced the growth of the sport in the United States as well as how baseball influenced the political, economic, and cultural relationship among the United States and the two Caribbean islands. I used the Nyhus Travel Grant to fund two separate trips to the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center in Coopertown, New York, the Baseball Hall of Fame’s historical archive. The Grant allowed me to compensate for one of the glaring deficiencies in my project, namely that I do not speak Spanish and, as a result, am not able to examine many of the Cuban and Dominican accounts on baseball history. The archive houses an extensive collection of unique and rare items that document the complete international and domestic history of baseball. Both trips proved to be vital to the completion of my project, as they allowed me to collect the majority of the primary source material—from newspaper clippings to correspondence among American and Caribbean ballplayers and baseball personnel—that I used in the final version of my thesis. During my first trip to the Hall of Fame before Thanksgiving, the information I encountered helped me recognize the few events that shaped the development of baseball in all three countries and, in turn, the development of the relationship among all three countries: integration of Major League Baseball in 1947; the Cuban Revolution in 1959; the advent of free agency in Major League Baseball in 1975; and the Cold War, including it’s affect on the relationship between Cuba and the United States during the war and the affect of the post-war fallout on Cuba and the relationship among all three countries. Over the course of my second trip to the Hall of Fame during winter break, I was able to collect critical details about individual ballplayers, American, Cuban, and Dominican, and how those defining events shaped the individual players and the professional leagues in all three countries. My research at the Hall of Fame, thanks entirely to the Nyhus Travel Grant, stands out as one of the most valuable experiences I had at Bowdoin, as it allowed me to conduct unique primary source research and to complete the most challenging assignment I encountered at school, my honors thesis.

Previous Nyhus Travel Grant Recipients 

Nyhus Large Grant Awards, 2009-2010

Fatoumatta Kunjo '10 completed a senior thesis under the direction of Professor David Gordon on the role of griots, artisans who relate and perform—both orally and musically—the history of their culture in Senegal and the Gambia in West Africa. Her project, entitled “Casamance Histories: Lalo Kebba Drammeh’s Performance of the Ngansu-Masing Epic” interprets one historical epic in particular, performed in 1972 at the Gambian national radio station. Touma needed funds to travel to The Gambia to work in the National Radio Archives this past winter, where she researched the epic’s performance and its relationship to politics in the Casamance region of Senegal. She also interviewed local scholars and musicians who specialize in the role of griots in the Sengambia region of West Africa and visited the National Archives in Senegal. We’re thrilled to report that Touma will pursue a doctorate in African history next year at Stanford.

Brian Powers '10 completed an honors thesis entitled, “Practice and Protest: Early Black Physicians and the Competing Demands of Professional Life and Racial Activism,” under the direction of Professor Patrick Rael. The essay recovers the history of early African-American physicians in the antebellum North. Brian asks what did it mean to be a black professional at a time when many of their brethren were still enslaved. To quote from Brian’s successful Nyhus application, “this project will seek to understand the nuanced ways in which parental upbringing, medical education, and the realities of medical practice combined to create a unique set of circumstances for each physician…” Brian utilized Nyhus funds to track down primary materials on black physicians at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library and the Kings City Medical Library (all in New York), and the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Harvard Medical School Archives and the Massachusetts Medical Society. Brian will begin a two-year position this fall as a Program Assistant with the Roundtable for Value and Science Driven Health Care, which is affiliated with the Institute of Medicine in Washington, DC. Long-term, he’s considering medical school, including those that offer a M.D. along with a PhD in the History of Science/Medicine.

Previous Nyhus Grant Recipients