Sam Bisno ’24 spent the summer before his senior year of college traversing the United States in a rental car, searching for a place that no longer existed. He had recently taken Professor Matthew Karp’s course “The American Civil War and Reconstruction,” and read the abolitionist Solomon Northup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave. One passage in the book describes the apprehension of enslaved workers as they brought the cotton they picked to the “gin-house” for daily weighing. A large haul meant an increased assignment for the next day; a small haul resulted in a whipping.

Bisno, like most American history students, knew that the invention of the cotton gin played a role in slavery’s expansion. But Northup’s account of the “gin-house” suggested the presence of  something more than a machine.  Within the structure, it seemed to Bisno, there was a harsh and complex labor regime: a whole material and social world that revolved around the gin. It was that world that Bisno, in his rental car, hoped to uncover.

The search eventually led him to consult materials housed in more than a dozen archives: the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware; the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and the Special Collections Libraries at the University of Georgia in Athens, among other repositories. Bisno studied plantation maps, overseers’ correspondence, and interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted in the 1930s. From those sources, he eventually learned that the gin house was typically a multistory structure with rooms for the cotton yet to be cleaned and the lint that the gin produces; outside it, a giant wooden press would pack the processed fiber into bales of cotton. Skilled enslaved laborers worked throughout the establishment; those called “ginners” operated the machine itself. Back at Princeton, Bisno wrote a senior thesis arguing that the cotton gin transformed plantations into quasi-factory complexes. In turn, the industrialization of cotton production changed how planters and overseers exercised power, and how enslaved people resisted their control.

But for Bisno, the greatest revelation came on the road. “Renting a car and driving around to all those places—it was like, okay, this is the work of history,” he said. For Bisno and other Princeton history majors, studying the past means pursuing knowledge in a literal sense: following people, events and ideas first encountered in course readings or lectures to the other places they might appear in the world. Much of the method of history lies in the travel logistics—the rental cars, homestays, and archive appointments.

So, it’s perhaps no surprise that so many recent history majors have won postgraduate fellowships to follow their historical interests to new places. Bisno, a Mitchell Scholar, will continue studying slavery at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, both a hotbed of abolitionism and the birthplace of many slave owners. Two of his classmates, Alice McGuinness ’24, a Sachs Scholar, and Sam Harshbarger ’24, a Rhodes Scholar, will enroll at the University of Oxford, where they’ll join Marie-Rose Sheinerman ’23, now beginning the second year of her Rhodes Scholarship. Meanwhile, for Kenji Cataldo ’20, a year-long Dale Fellowship spent pursuing independent research in Hawai’i has evolved into a part-time job, a podcast, and a master’s program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

For a Princeton history major, a passage like Northrup’s description of the gin house can become a kind of portal. From Dickinson Hall and Firestone Library, such portals open to any number of worlds.

“Unsettling how I looked at the world”

English, not history, was Marie-Rose Sheinerman’s favorite subject in high school in New York City. She loved writing, worked on her high school newspaper, and had what she remembers as a “cringe poetry phase.” It wasn’t until she took Professor Beth Lew-Williams’s “Approaches to American History” course in her sophomore year at Princeton that Sheinerman realized that history was also a literary exercise. “It was so unlike any type of history that I’d done in high school,” Sheinerman remembers of the class. “There was no test, or textbook.”

 Instead, there was a packet of primary documents related to three major historical events: the conflict over the Stamp Act (1765-66), the passage of the Dawes Act in 1877, and school integration of Little Rock, Arkansas (1955-59). Drawing on these sources, the students in the class had to put together the story of each event themselves. It was the creativity inherent in such work that appealed to Sheinerman: the “puzzle aspect” of constructing a narrative from the incomplete and biased accounts that survive from the past.

Historical storytelling, she soon learned, meant understanding past events on both longer time horizons as well as in broader contexts. Sheinerman, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s, later enrolled in Professor Ekaterina Pravilova’s course on “Revolutionary Russia.” Pravilova’s course began not in 1917 but in the 1860s, and examined literature, culture, and social movements as well as politics. Sheinerman wrote her final paper for the course on Isaac Babel’s short story collection Red Cavalry (1926), and its treatment of violence against women and Jews during the Polish-Soviet War. While Sheinerman also enjoyed the courses she took on Russia in the Politics Department, history was a way to “dig deeper” and bring together her interest in the region and her literary background. For Sheinerman, now an aspiring journalist, the Babel paper was a first foray into a topic that has become a preoccupying research interest: writers as historical actors.

Like Sheinerman, Kenji Cataldo did not begin their Princeton career anticipating that they’d study history. As a high school student in the Twin Cities, they were more interested in math and science than the humanities. They considered pursuing a pre-med track at Princeton. But in their sophomore year, they took Professor Jennifer Rampling’s course, “What Is the Scientific Revolution?” The class showed them that the roots of many of the science disciplines they understood as modern were in fact very unmodern, connected to older religious and other traditions. Studying the history of science was “a kind of unsettling of how I looked at the world,” Cataldo said.

In another history of science course, Professor He Bian’s “Medicine and Society in China,” Cataldo conducted their first oral history project. For a final paper on the globalization of acupuncture, Cataldo interviewed three practitioners in central New Jersey with varied degrees of connection to traditional Chinese medicine. One of the practitioners had been a barefoot doctor—a rural healthcare provider trained as part of the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China—while another had no connection to China at all. Cataldo wrote about the different ways that traditional and Western-trained practitioners legitimized their work, the latter emphasizing physiological interventions over herbal remedies. The project shaped an interest in the global transmission of ideas and practices about science, medicine, and health, and the bases for recognizing expertise—themes Cataldo would continue to explore through the medium of oral history. The method was a way to witness the production of scientific knowledge “in action,” connecting larger ideological structures to the people who navigated them in real time.

“I might as well look in the archives”

For many Princeton history majors, university-funded travel provides an opportunity to dive deeper into a research topic and examine archival sources firsthand. Alice McGuinness had first become interested in South Asia as a high school student, when she spent her junior year of high school learning Hindi in Indore, India through a U.S. State Department language program. Back in Milwaukee, there weren’t any Hindi classes, so McGuinness got a job at an Indian restaurant to keep up her language skills. At Princeton, she decided to major in history after taking courses such as Professor Gyan Prakash’s “The Making of Modern India and Pakistan,” and Professor Beth Lew-Williams’s “Asian American History.”

McGuinness also began studying Urdu and Bengali online during the gap year she took to work for a refugee aid organization after her freshman year. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2022, when pandemic travel restrictions abated, that McGuinness had a chance to return to South Asia.

She found herself with time remaining on her visit to Kolkata after her Bengali language course ended. “I just thought, well, I’m a history student, so I might as well look in the archives,” she said. In retrospect, she realized, this was somewhat naïve—it took about a week just to get access to the West Bengal State Archives in Kolkata. “But once I did, I was smitten.”

In Professor Wendy Warren’s class, “The History of Incarceration in the U.S,” McGuinness had begun researching the relationship between feminism and carceral politics. So, in the Kolkata archives, she asked the librarian if there were any records related to women and prisons in Bengal. Ultimately, she learned about a colonial-era program that transported Indian women convicted of crimes to a prison on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. There was so much material in the archive that McGuinness applied for funding from Princeton to return to Kolkata in October, and she wrote her fall junior paper on the program with Professor Michael Laffan. (In the spring, she stayed closer to home, digging through local court records related to another feminist group, the Santa Cruz Women Against Rape).

Like McGuinness, Sam Harshbarger first developed a yen for travel in high school, when he visited Russia through two separate student-exchange programs and spent a gap year prior to college backpacking through northern and eastern Europe. When he began Princeton in the fall of 2020, classes were remote due to the pandemic. “With a U.S. passport, I could go to the Bahamas, Serbia, or Turkey,” he remembered thinking at the time. He had spent time in Turkey during his gap year, working with a humanitarian organization called the Syrian Emergency Task Force. So, he rented an apartment in Istanbul, enrolled in Turkish classes, and worked part-time with the task force while completing his Princeton work online. History courses with Professors Natasha Wheatley and Michael Reynolds offered a “critical approach” to the issues he saw unfolding firsthand in his humanitarian work.

Subsequently, Harshbarger spent every summer and winter break in Turkey, often staying with the family of a Princeton classmate from Istanbul. On each subsequent trip, he would get to know the city better. Harshbarger spent many of his days touring the mosques in the southern part of the city, which is heavily Syrian, with a friend from the refugee organization. They would spend six or eight hours together, eating in restaurants, touring mosques, and visiting the local shops. In the evenings, he’d have long dinners with his host family in the northern part of the city. He traveled throughout the region, too. “I still feel very connected with it,” Harshbarger said of Istanbul. “But it’s always been not just about Istanbul. It’s a launching pad into so many other parts of the world.” His research came to focus on Turkey’s international connections.

“A certain energy”

Coursework, research travel, and junior papers prepare Princeton history majors for a senior thesis that represents the culmination of years of study. Bisno traces his senior thesis on the cotton gin to the interest he’s had in the intersection of race and capitalism since high school, when he wrote a school paper on Black steelworkers in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He explored that theme at Princeton in courses with Professors Vera Candiani, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Isadora Mota as well as Karp.

Bisno wrote his spring junior paper on the Beaufort, South Carolina branch of the Freedman’s Bank, which deposited the savings of newly emancipated African American after the Civil War, with Professor Alison Isenberg. His research, he realized as he embarked on the thesis, had led him further and further back in time—from his initial interest in 20th-century labor to Reconstruction, and then to antebellum slavery.

While the idea for a senior thesis might develop organically from a long-held research interest, the project still requires extensive preparation and guidance. Isenberg introduced Bisno to the collections at the Hagley Library, which holds significant materials on American industry. Karp referred him to Professor Seth Rockman, a Brown University historian of slavery and capitalism, and Professor Michael Blaakman also advised him on the project.

Historical research, though, also involves encounters with the unexpected. Cataldo followed their interests in science and empire to Puerto Rico, researching the intersection of environmental activism and the independence movement since the 1970s. Like Bisno, they sought guidance from faculty, including their senior thesis advisor, Professor Jeremy Adelman, as well as Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, an emeritus professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese who became an informal second advisor. Díaz-Quiñones introduced Cataldo to activists on the island, enabling them to set up their first interviews. But soon after Cataldo’s arrival in San Juan, massive protests broke out following the leak of offensive text messages sent by the island’s then-governor, Ricardo Rosselló. Cataldo’s plans were suddenly put on hold: most of their contacts were out protesting.

With their planned interviews canceled, Cataldo decided to observe the demonstration. They were on the streets when police sprayed tear gas to disperse protesters calling for Rosselló’s resignation. Ultimately, the protests and their repression reframed Cataldo’s research: not only helping them see a link between past social movements and the island’s present political crisis, but also allowing them to have more meaningful conversations with the activists they interviewed. “There’s this kind of heady feeling when you’re seeing 600,000 people marching, and remembering the last time you got people out on the streets,” they said. “It gives it a certain energy.”

For other thesis writers, emotional encounters took place in the archives. Building on her junior paper, McGuinness wrote her senior thesis on the imprisonment of women in Bengal. In the May before her senior year, while doing research in the colonial records held at the British Library in London., McGuinness stumbled upon a mention of a woman, Unjoo, whose name she had encountered in the Kolkata archives the previous fall. The Kolkata records had discussed the possible commutation of Anju’s sentence, because she was pregnant. But Unjoo seemed to disappear from the historical record after her sentencing. Months later, in London, McGuinness found one more brief mention of the case: a record noting that Unjoo had given birth in prison, and that her baby died shortly thereafter.

“I [still] have questions”

For history majors who won postgraduate fellowships, pursuing research in a new context seemed like a natural next step after the senior thesis. While researching Turkey’s participation in the Asian-African Bandung Conference of 1955, Harshbarger became interested in other connections across the continents. “I [still] have questions I want to answer, and archives that I know will have the answers to these questions—but I’m running out of time here,” he remembered thinking as he finished his thesis research. “What can I do?” He decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in history at the University of Oxford, where he will research international students who traveled to Baku in Soviet Azerbaijan from Africa and western Asia to study hydrocarbons, the organic compounds in petroleum. 

But research after Princeton continues to take unexpected turns. In 2019, Cataldo applied for a year-long Dale Fellowship to complete an independent project on climate change and colonialism in the Pacific. They hoped to spend time in Guåhan (Guam), Okinawa, the Northern Marianas Islands, and Hawai’i. But Covid-19 interrupted their travel plans, and Cataldo had to spend the whole 2020-2021 academic year in Hawai’i. Hoping to combat the isolation of the pandemic, they volunteered with the Hawai’i People’s Fund, which supports local grassroots organizations. Cataldo began working with a Native-Hawai’in-led non-profit called Mālama Mākua, which seeks the restoration and return of the sacred Mākua Valley. The U.S.army has occupied the valley since World War II, and used it for live-fire training for six decades. (As a result of Mālama Mākua’s legal advocacy, military leadership signed a statement in federal court formally ending the use of the valley for live-fire training in 2023). Cataldo’s role with the People’s Fund turned into a part-time job, and the Mākua Valley and Mālama Mākua’s activism became the subject of their master’s research in Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Four years later, they’re still living in Honolulu. 

Spending their entire fellowship year in Hawai’i, Cataldo said, “ended up being the best thing that could happen.” After traveling extensively as an undergraduate—Cataldo spent a pre-college gap year in India and a summer in Germany before doing their thesis research in Puerto Rico—staying in one place allowed them to develop the deep, reciprocal relationships they now consider essential to their research.

Sheinerman, now in her second year at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, is also thinking about depth as well as breadth. Expanding her senior thesis on the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s coverage of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, Sheinerman is continuing to research English-language news coverage of the early Soviet Union for her master’s thesis in history. Studying the history of foreign correspondence has made Sheinerman, an aspiring journalist, wary about reporters’ tendency toward “parachuting” into places without local knowledge or language skills. Instead of immediately trying to establish herself as a journalist in an unfamiliar location—as some veterans advise young writers—she hopes to work somewhere where she can grow as a writer before specializing.

For the three Class of 2024 fellowship winners just about to begin their studies abroad, at least one thing will be familiar. McGuinness, who will pursue a master’s degree in refugee and forced migration studies next year as a Sachs Scholar at Oxford, is excited that Harshbarger and Bisno will join her in the U.K. “We spent many, many nights in Firestone finishing our theses together,” she said.