Rothermere American Institute 2016-17 Travel Awards Recipients’ Reports

Rothermere American Institute 2016-17 Travel Awards Recipients’ Reports POSTGRADUATE AWARDS ROBIN ADAMS, ST PETER’S COLLEGE D.Phil. Economic & Social History Award in support of archival research in New York My research trip to New York in January 2017 was indispensable to my DPhil thesis and, without the financial assistance gratefully received from the Rothermere Institute, the extent the research undertaken would have been greatly curtailed. A study of the funding of Irish Republican Government during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) would have been incomplete without reference to funds received from America, and a satisfactory analysis of this source of finance would have been impossible without a research trip to New York. My research in began in the archives of the New York Public Library, where I sifted through the personal papers of Frank P. Walsh, a leading figure in the American labour movement who was heavily involved in lobbying for official recognition of the Irish Republic in 1919-21. I also read through the papers of Senator William Bourke Cockran, a New York senator who was a key figure in fundraising for the moderate Irish nationalist cause, and then the radical Irish nationalist cause. In addition, I gained access to the papers of J.C. Walsh, a Canadian journalist who played a pivotal role in fundraising for the nascent and not-yet-recognised Irish Republic, and William Maloney, another advocate of the Irish republican cause in America, who was suspected by some of being a spy for the British government. All of these collections were information rich from both an organisational and a personal point of view, enabling a far deeper understanding of the personalities involved and the political dynamics at play. My second port of call was the library of the American-Irish Historical Society. Here, I was granted access to the papers of a number of prominent Irish Americans, and of a number of members of the Irish Republic’s mission to the United States (1920-21). Chief among these resources were the papers of Judge Daniel Cohalan, an influential Irish-American who, although initially supportive of the Irish Republic’s mission to America, its fundraising campaign and campaign for recognition, became an outspoken critic of the mission and sought to undermine its leadership. These papers were particularly useful, as I had hitherto only gained access to the other side of this dispute, so funds from the Rothermere Institute allowed balance to be brought to the narrative of this disagreement and nuance added to its analysis. I wish to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the Rothermere Institute and its benefactors for facilitating this research trip. As became abundantly clear on arrival at New York, the extent of the source material available in the New York Public Library and the American-Irish Historical Society necessitated a lengthy time commitment, and funds awarded by the Institute were crucial in enabling a sufficiently extended period of research. The contribution of this research trip to my thesis was invaluable and the contribution of the Rothermere Institute to the research trip fundamental. JONATHAN ASKONAS, ST CROSS COLLEGE D.Phil. Politics Award in support of archival research in Washington, DC My trip, February 4th to March 2nd 2017, encompassed primary source archival research, meetings with leading experts in my field, and two major conference presentations. The primary purpose of the trip was to engage in primary source archival research in support of my DPhil thesis on American learning and local knowledge transmission in counterinsurgency operations, focused on Vietnam (with extensibility to Iraq and Afghanistan). I hoped to make several reconnaissance trips to archives, make connections with archivists, and generally establish the feasibility of my project within the empirical evidence available. This was a great success. I visited the US Army archives at the Army War College in Carlisle, PA, the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis, and contacted the digital archivist at the National Archives in College Park, MD. In each case, I was able to get a good sense of what material in these archives would support my project, and the results were extremely encouraging, and are now allowing me to write my confirmation of status package. The contacts and materials gained during this trip has greatly accelerated my thesis work. During this trip, I was also able to meet with and gain feedback from leading experts on Vietnam and counterinsurgency, including John Nagl, Jacob Shapiro, Conrad Crane, and Stephen Biddle. I am incorporating their feedback into my project, but they were quite encouraging of my approach and its timeliness. The secondary purpose of the trip was to give two papers at the International Studies Association Conference. Both of these papers had already been honed in RAI Graduate Seminar meetings. This early feedback paid off – both were well-received and are on their way to becoming journal articles. I remain profoundly grateful for the RAI, not only for funding my research but also for its wonderful programming and scholarship which have enriched my time at Oxford, and I would like to especially thank RAI’s benefactors. Their philanthropy is funding cutting-edge and vital work on American politics, history, and society, at a time. The work I have seen from my colleagues, funded by or supported by the RAI, is a substantial return on investment. JOSEPH BARRETT, NEW COLLEGE M.Phil. Economic & Social History Award in support of archival research in Washington, DC and Philadelphia In the 1960s-1970s, policymakers and politicians in the United States and Britain “rediscovered” poverty. Despite different welfare traditions, institutions, and political interests, both countries introduced new anti-poverty initiatives that emphasized compensatory education and community action. My thesis compares the development and implementation of two of these new initiatives: Head Start in the United States and the Urban Programme pre-schools in Britain, both of which applied community action and compensatory education concepts in attempts to mitigate the effects of child poverty. The literature on these programs, and anti- poverty policy in this period more broadly, focuses almost exclusively on experts and politicians, largely overlooking local implementation and how poor communities responded to and influenced program development. To address this gap, my thesis will include case studies of individual programs in comparable urban areas in both countries, examining the programs’ day-to-day work and how they were experienced and shaped by the “poor” children, parents, and communities they targeted. In July and August of 2016, I traveled to archives in the United States to conduct research on the federal politics of Head Start and to gather material for a case study of Head Start’s local implementation in the late 1960s. In July, I spent a week at the National Archives in College Park, MD, where I examined the records on Head Start within the files of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). In the Archive, I focused on the Inspection Reports (prepared by federal investigators) on individual Head Start programs and the Narrative Progress Reports that community organizations across the United States sent to OEO to meet the conditions of federal grants. I also examined the records of the OEO Director and files on “public reaction” to OEO programs both of which helped me to place Head Start within the larger context of the War on Poverty. Analyzing these files enabled me to understand the lens though which the federal government approached the work done by Head Start programs around the country and the issues that typified the implementation of this new initiative. This research also helped me to identify a specific program, the Head Start program run by the Social Development Commission of Milwaukee, from which there were enough surviving records to prepare a case study. Following my research at the National Archives, I travelled to Milwaukee to examine the records of the city and county government agencies and the non-profit organizations that were involved in developing and implementing Milwaukee’s Head Start program in the 1960s. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I reviewed the papers of Mayor Henry Maier to understand the city government’s approach to poverty alleviation. I also examined documents related to Milwaukee’s school desegregation case to analyze the intersection between Milwaukee’s civil rights movement and the politics of social service provision. At the Milwaukee Historical Society and Marquette University Archives, I consulted the papers of non- profit organizations that administered Head Start programs and the papers of county government officials. My trip was capped by a visit to the Milwaukee Public Library, which holds evaluations of Milwaukee’s early Head Start program and an extensive collection of local newspaper clippings from the 1960s and 1970s. The opportunity to work at these archives will enable me to write a thesis focused on the local implementation of Head Start (and the Community Action Program more broadly) a topic that is neglected in the existing literature on the War on Poverty and that would have been impossible to explore if I had not been able to visit the archives in person. This fall, I will build on my research in the United States and develop a comparative study by conducting research at archives in Britain on pre-schools funded by the Urban Programme in the 1970s. I am very grateful for the opportunity to undertake this research and thankful for the generosity of the benefactors of the RAI without which these archival trips would not have been possible. I am also thankful for the consideration and assistance of the RAI Travel Grants Committee. The opportunity to visit these archives has greatly enriched my academic experience at Oxford and I hope to repay this support by sharing and discussing the results of my research with my peers at Oxford this academic year.

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