Works in this collection are all winners of the Library Research Prize and include a paper/project and companion essay about their research process using library resources. Research by the student should show evidence of substantial use of library resources and indicate academic excellence, including employing effective library research and information literacy skills, constructing arguments supported with evidence, and citing sources appropriately.
Beginning in 2020, the prize is given specifically to First Year students in either the Inquiry Seminar or Humanities III programs who are nominated by their professors for the quality of their work.
Submissions from 2021
His Soul Is Marching On: The Abolitionist Spirit of John Brown, Sam Carlson
In the time of Bleeding Kansas, a period of some of the most intense internal strife in US history, abolitionist John Brown was at the center of attention. His capture of Harpers Ferry and his public execution made him a symbol of the confl...
John Brown: The Hanged Hero, Sam Derfus
On Sunday October 16th, 1859, John Brown and 21 men besieged Harpers Ferry in an attempt to sow chaos and upheave the institution of slavery. Brown held the area for a few days before being captured, taken to court, and killed. Seen as an i...
Fur Trade in Minnesota: the Rise and Fall of Ojibwe Power, Soraya Keiser
Before any Europeans came to the shores of North America, Native Americans inhabited these lands. They fished the waters, harvested the earth, and hunted the game. Within the large continent, the Great Lakes region was especially abundant, ...
Submissions from 2020
All Students Are Worthy: A Comparison of Special Education Within Countries, Makenna Brown
Dating back to the 1800’s, people with a disability have been thrown into mental institutions, beaten, abused, and underestimated. For those with a disability, having an opportunity to be educated was not thought possible. They have been de...
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: How the Law has Disregarded Violence against Indigenous Women, Tavniah Dyer
This paper explores the concerns encompassed in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women issue and the recently begun movement. The MMIW movement is bringing recognition to the problems of unequal consideration given to Native American wom...
Life-Long Benefits of Studying Abroad, Ellora Olsen
9 AM in Tokyo, Japan is when instead of being a commuter, you get to be a sardine. Physically crammed into the train with hundreds of other people, you better be prepared to get comfortable (or uncomfortable, if we’re being honest) for your...
Submissions from 2019
Gender in Bethel University’s Political Science Department: A Qualitative Study of the Experiences of Female Political Science Students, Sarah E. Bylsma
In one political science class I took recently, I noticed some interesting behaviors among myself and my classmates...This situation got me thinking about the role that gender plays in politics, and this course gave me the opportunity to cl...
Submissions from 2018
Wise Women: The Female Junzi in Confucian Ethics, Berit Turnquist
In the context of Confucian ethics, there are few concepts as indefinable yet centrally important to the system of thought as a whole as the ideal of the sage. The sage is a key topic of discussion in The Analects of Confucius, and has been...
Submissions from 2017
A Narrative Approach to Forgiveness Amidst Disagreement, Christopher Bengtson
While not always the case, there are instances where parties involved disagree on the nature of a particular offense. Personal conflict can lead to rifts in personal relationships or moral trust of the larger community; disagreement over th...
Submissions from 2016
Hannah More's Moral Imagination: Fiction that Reformed a Nation, Emma Beecken
She has been described as the most influential woman of her era and Britain's greatest propagandist. Her works were far more popular than Jane Austen's and were personally requested by royalty. She ran in the highest circles, dear friends w...
Submissions from 2015
The Role of Memory in Forgiveness: A Post-Forgiveness Investigation, Zachariah Berry
There is a fundamental importance and value in maintaining a memory of wrongs done in the past. What do we do, however, when we think that we have forgiven someone, but aspects from the past wrong continue to manifest in our conscious aware...
Images of Suffering: An investigation of Francisco Goya's 'Disasters of War' and William Blake's 'Illustrations for the Book of Job', Chris Christenson
Francisco de Goya and William Blake, who we regard today as two of the greatest artists of the Romantic era, each produced a provocative set of engravings towards the end of his life. Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra [The Disasters of War]...
A 21st Century Fairy Tale: Disney Princesses and Perceptions of Gender, Gina Graham
Disney's animated characters, songs, story themes and trinkets are true cultural icons, venerated across the world by staunch believers, adults as well as children, who live in massive urban centers and in tiny rural hamlets (Faherty 1). Fo...
Fullness of Life for Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, Jared Hedges
The great eighteenth century pragmatist William James worried once that a particular philosophy was “too economical to be all-sufficient” (James 83). He goes on to say: “Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality’s key-note.” Virginia...
Apostle to Burma: A Case Study of Ecumenical Evangelicalism in the Life of Adoniram Judson, Jacob Manning
Adoniram (1788-1850) and Ann Judson (1789-1826) boarded the Caravan along with Samuel and Harriet Newell in Salem, Massachusetts on February 19, 1812 with a directive from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to preach t...
Penal Substitution and Divine Forgiveness, Daniel Thweatt
According to Keith Ward, “One must...reject those crude accounts of Christian doctrine which...say that Christ has been justly punished in our place so that he has taken away our guilt and enabled God to forgive us. Almost everything is eth...
The Paneled Lives of Extraordinary Women: Comic Books, Superheroines, and American Women in the 1940s, Kelly Van Wyk
When scholars examine a society in search of the principles that it holds most dear, popular culture promises an attractive and engaging medium where one can search for answers. Intellectual disciplines such as art history, film studies, an...
A Long Way from Minneapolis: Minnesotans in the Spanish Civil War, Fletcher Warren
In 1996, eighty-one-year-old Minnesotan Clarence Forester and sixty-seven fellow Americans traveled to Barcelona at the behest of the Spanish government. There, they feasted at state banquets, received honorary Spanish citizenship, and para...
Submissions from 2014
Cochlear Implants, Language Acquisition, and Speech Intelligibility: The Effect of Age at Implantation, Danielle Becker
A review of the current literature on outcomes of individuals using cochlear implants, especially in the relationship between age at implantation and speech intelligibility was conducted. Literature describing norms for language acquisition...
The Pivot: American Involvement in Asia, Marisa Tillman
Part I: On November 17th, 2011, President Obama addressed the Australian parliament and presented a plan to shift American attention towards the Asia-Pacific region (Beitelman 2012, 1086). This is a policy known as the Pivot, which represen...
Submissions from 2013
Trees Nestled Among Skyscrapers: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Creation of Central Park, Matisse Murray
In the remarkable degree of scholarship that has been written on Frederick Law Olmsted since a resurgence of interest in his life during the early 1970s, there have been a number of varying interpretations regarding the social attitudes wit...
Submissions from 2012
Utopia or an Iron Cage? Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and the Future of Modernity, Ryan Steel
Student Library Research Prize winner Ryan Steel discusses modernity and some of its core characteristics and the way they manifest in modern social reality using the perspectives of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche as general ...
Submissions from 2011
Innovation and Harmonization in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura, Nathan Cornelius
Raphael's paintings for the Stanza della Segnatura, Pope Julius II's personal library in the Vatican, are one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance art. My research project explored the rich meaning behind this innovative series of image...
Submissions from 2010
Alcuin and Vikings: A Theology of Carolingian Election, Chastisement, and Exaltation, Taylor Ferda
Throughout the long history of the Church's struggle to take seriously the biblical precepts for peacemaking, the changing context has always brought with it a difficulty in being a witness to peace in a world gripped by violence. The Vikin...