History & Art History

ABC News Presidential Historian and George Mason University professor Richard Norton Smith has been busy speaking and writing about historical context for the presidential election and the inauguration. Along with his schedule of television commentary, he has written a number of articles offering historical insight into the current political scene. Here are two recent examples [...]

Professor Martin Sherwin’s book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (coauthored with Kai Bird), has just been awarded the prestigious Duff Cooper prize, which is awarded annually to the best work of history, biography, or political science published in Britain. This is the latest in a long list of prizes garnered [...]

The popular exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples” has hosted over 150,000 visitors to date. It features luxurious works of art excavated from opulent houses of the urban elite in Pompeii and from nearby imperial villas on the Bay of Naples, all illustrating the region’s importance [...]

Dr. Randolph Scully’s recent book, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740-1840, has been awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize for best first book in church history by the American Society of Church History. The book reconstructs the dynamics of the biracial, evangelical religious world that [...]

Undergraduate history major Liz Moore is working with Professor Benedict Carton on a major research project entitled, “Writing Histories of the Mandela Miracle from the U.S. Government Perspective: Unclassified Documents of the National Security Archive and the Transition to Democracy in South Africa.” Their research – part methodological, part analysis – involves [...]

This fall the Department of History is pleased to welcome senior faculty member Cynthia A. Kierner. Dr. Kierner received her B.A. from McGill University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She comes to the department from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Professor Kierner is the author or editor [...]

The Center for History & New Media (CHNM) is pleased to announce the launch of its newest website: Making the History of 1989. This project provides students and teachers access to a substantial collection of high-quality primary sources; a set of multimedia interviews that make visible the processes by which historians transform events and sources [...]

One of our Western Civilization Postdoctoral Fellows, Dr. Nicole Hudgins, was recently awarded a CTAC grant from the Center for Teaching Excellence for her proposal, “Critical Thinking on the Web: Assessing the Value of the Internet to the Practice of History.” The project will expand upon Dr. Hudgins’ Western Civilization course assignment, which asks [...]

The department welcomes Ryan Swanson as our Finley postdoctoral fellow for 2008-09. Professor Swanson completed his Ph.D. at Georgetown University in June 2008. His dissertation, “Jim Crow on Deck: Baseball During America’s Reconstruction,” explores how racial segregation was implemented following the Civil War. He is teaching U.S. sports history this fall.

What does it mean to be Zulu today? Is this different from what it has meant in the past? A new book of analysis and insight, Zulu Identities: Being Zulu Past and Present, edited by Dr. Benedict Carton, along with John Laband and Jabulani Sithole, wrestles with these and many other questions to show [...]