History and Historic Preservation Department

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The History and Historic Preservation Department offers a major in history (with optional concentrations in prelaw studies and in secondary education with certification in history or social studies). The department also offers minors in history and historic preservation. History is human life recreated from the traces left by our ancestors. In its modern form, the study of history equips students with analytical skills and research techniques of immense practical and vocational value. The history program not only acquaints students with different ages, societies, and cultures, but also develops powers of writing, speaking, and thinking. The curriculum is organized to provide students with general knowledge, as well as technical competencies essential in such fields as business, law, government, teaching, publishing, and museum and archival work. Practice and theory are linked through internships in local historical societies, museums, and government agencies, as well as through courses in applied history that explicitly foster these connections.

Department Faculty

Professors

Jean H. Baker (American history, 19th-century political history, women’s history), Julie Roy Jeffrey (history of 19th-century American women, architecture and family history, 20th-century foreign policy), Sanford J. Ungar (History of the Media and First Amendment Conflicts, History of Africa, 20th-century America in the World)

Associate Professors

Robert Beachy, chair (early modern/modern European history, German history, history of sexuality, social and cultural history), Matthew Hale (early America, Atlantic world, print culture)

Assistant Professors

James Dator (early modern Carribean, comparative slavery and slave resistance, creolization and ethnogenesis in the African Disapora), Evan Dawley (East Asian history, China and Taiwan, Asian colonialism), Erica Fraser (Russia, Eastern Europe, gender and Jewish history), Tina H. Sheller (historic preservation, early America, public history)

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