Nicole Spangler, a senior majoring in history and classics who received a Beinecke Scholarship to support her graduate studies, always enjoyed digging through a library archive or researching online. Her fascination with historical research began as a sophomore in high school, when she learned about the Newsboys Strike of 1899 and set out to discover everything she could about it. She spent hours investigating historical questions, and every time she uncovered new information or read something no one else had seen for years, it felt like “a big scavenger hunt.” 

When Spangler arrived at WashU, she declared a history major and thought she’d study English alongside it. But after a first-year classics course that immersed her in the ancient world and language study, she was hooked.

By the summer after her first year, she found herself in a ditch in the Mediterranean excavating the Late Bronze Age site of Iklaina. She first went to Greece as a student. This summer, she returned with a brush, trowel, and dental tools in hand, working as an assistant to a trench supervisor. 

“Classics derailed my plans. I fell in love with the language and archaeology,” she said. Spangler added classics as a second major, but she eventually realized that after graduation, she still wanted to pursue her first love: original research in 19th-century American history. For a time, choosing between the two fields felt difficult.

As a Living History Scholar during her sophomore year, Spangler was able to pursue her own original historical research for the first time. Her project focused on 19th-century social reform. She studied the Missouri School for the Deaf in the aftermath of an 1880 ban on sign language in schools, examining how social reform intersected with broader questions of race, religion, and disability. She was particularly interested in the ways religiously motivated reform efforts affected working-class people, especially juveniles. 

Although Spangler ultimately decided to pursue history in graduate school, she credits classics with changing how she approaches the field.  

“Classics and, in particular, archaeology, force you to look very closely at detail,” she said. “It introduced me to material culture in a new way, a way you don’t get sitting in a classroom and reading about history.” That perspective also changed how she thinks about 19th-century architecture and institutional design, challenging the idea that archaeological thinking belongs only to the ancient world. “Now, when I work with institutions in the 19th century, I ask, ‘How was this institution built?’ ‘Who designed it, and how would it have impacted the people who were living here?’”

This past summer, Spangler split her time between archaeological work at Iklaina and archival research in New York for her senior history thesis.  She’s writing about the 1872 murder trial of Justus Dunn, a 16-year-old who had been incarcerated since age 13 and was accused of killing a guard at a house of refuge. The killing and subsequent trial became a public flashpoint in debates over the treatment of incarcerated juveniles. 

Spangler’s research examines both the circumstances surrounding the case and the broader religious and xenophobic conflicts that unfolded in contemporary newspapers. In the spring, she’ll submit her senior thesis on the Justus Dunn case before heading to graduate school in history next fall.

“The most striking thing about Nicole as an emerging historian is her outsized capacity for originality,” said Iver Bernstein, a professor of history, African and African American studies, and American culture studies. “She has a gift for productive framing, spotting the micro-historical case that can open up into a broader reinterpretation of a field, along with the historical imagination and tenacity to locate the evidence, listen to it, and write about it in ways that accomplish that reinterpretation persuasively.”

The Beinecke Scholarship will help make that next step possible. But for Spangler, the award also reflects years of being encouraged to follow questions across disciplines, from American archives to archaeological trenches in Greece.

“I’ve been given incredible opportunities to research through WashU that I’m not sure I would have had elsewhere,” she said. “It’s affirming to have people believe that I can produce original work and give me the freedom and support to research what I want from my own angle.”