As Mellon Research scholars in the summer of 2026, History majors Isabella Brammer and Martín D. Salazar Sánchez knew they wanted to study colonial documents from Latin America. In order to do that, they first needed to decipher the texts, written in old scripts in Spanish and Portuguese. With Dr. N. L. A. Gharala, both students developed skills in paleography that allowed them to study Inquisition cases from archives to make original historical arguments about understudied histories. Isabella discovered the domestic uses of hallucinogens like peyote in seventeenth-century Mexico by people with African, Asian, European, and Indigenous, ancestry. Martín used paleography to read testimonies of enslaved men in Brazil who created “bolsas de mandinga” to protect themselves from harm. Martín plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Brazilian history, and Isabella wants to one day work in public history or as a research librarian.
As a History major, Martín D. Salazar Sánchez writes, “I noticed for the first time that history is always changing. I became aware that history varies depending on time, location, who is interpreting it, and other factors that make history differ and even contradict other versions of a specific event. This is the main reason why I decided to major in history, and I believed that to learn history in a more precise manner I should study history from different perspectives in order to have ‘the bigger picture’ of a historic event.”
“I majored in History because I believe it is crucial to understand those who came before us, especially regular everyday people, to gain in-depth insight into the role they played in the history of humanity.” — Isabella Brammer, History Major, Class of 2027