Political Science Student Sam Wobbe Receives 2020 Julia Walsh Award
May 26, 2020
The faculty of History, Politics, and International Relations congratulate political science student Sam Wobbe for winning the 2020 Julia Walsh Award, an annual recognition of the best student paper in the fields of history, politics, and international relations.
While Nazism is often ascribed to the short term troubles Germany experienced after the First World War, Wobbe’s paper, “From Bismarck, to Wilhelm, to Hitler: Germany’s Legacy of Imperialism,” makes a powerful case for deeper roots. He argues that German unification, the emergence of German nationalism, and the legacy of nineteenth-century European imperialism all set the stage for the emergence of Nazism. In Wobbe’s account, Hitler himself was less a cause than he was a symptom of a disgruntled nation bent on imperial conquest.
Several other strong contenders were also selected. Dharma Merkle’s paper, “Nowhere Men: The CIA, LSD, and a Plan for Nobody,” is a fascinating exploration of the CIA’s bizarre and inhumane mind control experiments during the Cold War.
Haley Sante’s “In Big Brother We Trust: Constitutional Contempt by the USA Patriot Act,” alerts us to the ways in which U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance programs violates citizens’ privacy rights.
Nathan Shu’s paper on Belgian imperialism in the Congo explains how such a brutal colonial regime could draw upon the language of liberalism and human rights to justify itself.