Since 2009 the Department of History at the University of Bristol has published the best of the annual dissertations produced by our final-year undergraduates. We do so in recognition of the excellent research undertaken by our students, which is a cornerstone of our degree programme. As a department, we are committed to the advancement of historical knowledge and to research of the highest order. Our undergraduates are part of that endeavour.

Listed below are the the best of this year’s undergraduate history dissertations, with links to the dissertations themselves where these are available. Please note that these dissertations are published in the state they were submitted for examination. Thus the authors have not been able to correct errors and/or departures from departmental guidelines for the presentation of dissertations (eg in the formatting of footnotes and bibliographies). In each case, copyright resides with the author and all rights are reserved.

Student	Title	Best dissertation of 2009 prize
Isabelle Amazon Brown	Goodbye Father? Girls, Patriarchy and Social Change: Father-Daughter Relationships in 1960s USA (PDF)
Emily Baughan	British Women’s Relief Efforts for Boer Concentration Camps in the South African War, 1899-1902
Rachel de Courcy	Representations of Charles Stewart Parnell in English and Irish Newspapers (PDF)
Rachel Ellis	Experiencing ‘Dark Tourism’: the real Auschwitz? (PDF)
Rose Farrell	The Civil Defence Hiatus: A Rediscovery of Nuclear Civil Defence Policy 1968-1983 (PDF)
James Green	Reagan, Armageddon and the 1984 Presidential Debate: On the Overlap of Political and Apocalyptic Discourses in America (PDF)
Harriet Lowson	‘The Poor Prostituted Word’: The taste debate in Britain 1750-1800
Michael Mantin	‘A Great Army of Suffering Ones’: The Guild of the Brave Poor Things and Disability in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (PDF)
Sarah Parkes	Religion, Urban Association and Politicisation - Bristol and the American Crisis 1774-1776
Melanie Pocock	The French Pantheon, 1791: Re-defining the dynamics of power in public art