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Browsing by Author "Furrow, Heath A."

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    Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review (Vol. 7, full issue)
    Hemmingson, Grace; Furrow, Heath A.; Ebersohl, Courtney; Brenner, Talia; Keillor, Genevieve; Chehade, Nala; Mastakas, John Mark; Kapinos, Andrew; Megargee, Andrew (Virginia Tech Department of History, 2018-04-23)
    Welcome to the Seventh Volume of the Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review! Our team of undergraduate and graduate editors work to present the best available original undergraduate historical research from Virginia Tech and institutions across the East Coast. The Review seeks to provide undergraduate researchers with opportunities to improve their historical skills, experience the publishing process and, ultimately, to know the joy of seeing their hard work appear in print. Our board of undergraduate editors employs a blind review process, scoring each work according to a standardized rubric which emphasizes the author’s engagement with the secondary literature on their topic, ability to create an argument from their primary source base and ability to clearly articulate their ideas. The excellence of the articles included in this volume stems from our author’s hard work, dedication and willingness to accept and employ constructive feedback, as well as the long hours of analysis, proof-reading and effort on the part of our undergraduate, graduate and faculty editors. For volume Seven we have expanded the scope of the Review in ex-citing new directions. This marks the first year that the Review will include historiographic articles in addition to pieces of original re-search. This represents an exciting opportunity to help undergraduates engage in and write about historical conversations. We have also included the winners of the Department’s awards for Best Paper and Best Digital History Project.
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    We Can Do Very Little With Them:  British Discourse and British Policy on Shi'is in Iraq
    Furrow, Heath A. (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-26)
    This thesis explores the role of metropolitan religious values and discourses in influencing British officials' discourse on Sunni and Shi'i Islam in early mandate Iraq. It also explores the role that this discourse played in informing the policy decisions of British officials. I argue that British officials thought about and described Sunni and Shi'i Islam through a lens of religious values and experiences that led British officials to describe Shi'i Islam as prone to theocracy and religious and intellectual intolerance, traits that British officials saw as detrimental to their efforts to create a modern state in Iraq. These descriptions ultimately led British officials to take active steps to remove Shi'i religions leaders from the civic discourse of Iraq and to support an indigenous government where Sunnis were given most government positions in spite of making up a minority of the overall population of Iraq. This study draws on documents created by British officials serving in Iraq from 1919-1922, including official reports and correspondence, published government reports, personal correspondence and memoirs. It also draws on biographies of British officials, the secondary literature on religion and civil society in Great Britain, and the secondary literature on Shi'i Islam in Iraq. I engage in the historiography surrounding European Imperial perceptions of Islam and argue that historians should pay greater attention to the role that metropolitan religious experiences and values played in informing the way that imperial officials differentiated between different groups within Islam. I also engage in the historiography of British policy in mandate Iraq, offering a deeper view of how British discourse on Shi'i Islam developed and how this discourse influenced the policy decisions of British official.