You can find a brief section of my upcoming paper at the following link:
In this section I address governmental policy towards indigenous groups in 19th Century as well as Soviet policy in the 20th Century. These topics will fall in the middle of my final product so bear in mind that more information will come before and after these pages.
Throughout these past few weeks I have inquired more knowledge about the Trout Gallery that I had ever intended to do. Most of my research has been with the help of Professor Earenfight, the current director of the Trout Gallery. He has helped me enormously by giving me material that is relevant to my research.
When I initially started my research on the Trout Gallery I had countless questions that I wanted to explore and find the answers to. A lot of my questions were basic questions that could be answered by reading information on the Gallery itself through the website. I never thought to explore the questions as to why specific things happened and why the Trout Gallery for example, never established a set of guidelines when selecting donations until now. As I met with Professor Earenfight, he was able to answer a lot of the basic questions for me, so now I need to focus more on the questions as to why these things occurred.
Finding time to do my research has been one of the challenges I gave come across. Although there are not a ton of documents I need to spend hours reading through, I do have four other classes and homework that has been piling up since it is the end of the semester. I try to find as much time as possible researching and writing my research paper but at times it is difficult.
Another challenge that I have come across is the insufficient amount of documents. Because the Trout Gallery is currently in the process of establishing a mission statement and general guidelines, I do not have a lot of historical documents. With that being said, I have to rely a lot on information Professor Earenfight is presenting me through meetings and interviews which may or may not be biased because I do not have another point of view. I was thinking that interviewing the previous directors of the Trout Gallery may be helpful in finding answers to my ‘why’ questions.
Mercenary soldiers are hardly a new phenomenon on the world stage, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries they’ve acquired a new notability, starting with the large operations in the Congo and today with the booming private military contractor industry. My paper aims to take a look at the driving forces behind this resurgence of mercenary work, analyzing the evolution of modern mercenary soldiering from large-scale warfighting to more technical, consulting and security work, along with the motives and politics behind mercenary work.
My work will include primary sources from the Congo, Biafra, Angola, the Sierra Leone Civil War, and several other coups and operations. These sources are all easily attainable, and this paper ought to prove quite fun to write.