CommunityCollegeResearchGrant(CCRG)
Track2:MentoredUndergraduateResearch
Round1-2016
Miller,Karen
ProposalSummary
ProjectTitle
MentoringHistoricalResearch:American-FilipinaFamilies,State-SponsoredHomesteading,
andFailureonthePhilippineFrontier1913-1921
ParticipatingFaculty:
1.LeadPI
Name: KarenR.Miller
Rank: Professor
(PleaseinsertadditionalPIsasnecessary)
Abstract(200wordsmaximum):
Department: SocialScience
Campus: LaGuardiaCommunityCollege
This research will explore why state leaders were interested in moving Christian settlers onto
majority non-Christian islands in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. I hypothesize that
state leaders used homesteading as a strategy for quelling and redirecting worker and peasant
discontent on populous, majority-Christian islands. I also suspect that they used homesteading as a
tool to reshape non-Christian landscapes and their Muslim or “pagan” inhabitants. Ultimately, I
hypothesize, homesteading radically transformed the Philippines’ non-Christian islands and can be
seen as one of the origins of contemporary conflicts and ongoing clashes in the present day
Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). This project will use historical method. My
student mentee and I will use research in both archives and printed primary sources to examine these
questions. These will include personal correspondence between interested parties, newspaper
accounts, journal entries, and other sources that can be found at archives. We will use the records I
have already collected from archives in the United States and the Philippines. We will also travel
together to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to examine original sources. Together,
the researchers will explore these documents’ utility for the proposed hypotheses.