History

History is a way of understanding the whole of the human condition as it has unfolded in time. Without history, nothing makes sense, from the meaning of words to the formation of identities, to institutions, states, and societies. History straddles the boundary between the social sciences and humanities. Like the other social sciences, it has established methods of investigation and proof, but it differs from them in that it encompasses, potentially, every area of human culture from the beginning of recorded time. Like the other humanities, it uses ordinary language and established modes of telling its stories, but it is constrained by evidence left us from the past.

The History Department is home to a distinguished group of scholar-teachers whose work ranges from the medieval to the post-modern, from the Middle East to the Midwest, from gender and sexuality to science and economics, from micro-history to world history.

Wesleyan and the World

Schatz Pens New Book on the Influence of the National War Labor Board

Ronald Schatz, professor of history, is the author of The Labor Board Crew: Remaking Worker-Employer Relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan Era, published by the University of Illinois Press on Jan. 11, 2021.

Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919

The German Studies department would like to congratulate Erik Grimmer-Solem, (Professor of History and affiliated with German Studies) on his latest publication, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). His book–as he tells his readers–“seeks to reshape our understanding of Imperial Germany’s history by reconstructing the complex overseas entanglements of Germans in North and South America, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey” https://egrimmer.faculty.wesleyan.edu/current-projects/research/.

Event Calendar

Mar 31

Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression featuring Professor Bertrall Ross

06:00 pm

$location

From Our Department

Schatz Pens New Book on the Influence of the National War Labor Board

Hot off the Press: New Papers by Hingorani, Tucker, Case PhD ’19

Who Shaped the Story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

by William Johnston

“The Poorer Sick”: American Gynecology and its Irish Subjects in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York City

by Charlotte Rich

Link to article: https://slcwhblog.com/2020/04/28/the-poorer-sick-american-gynecology-and-its-irish-subjects-in-mid-nineteenth-century-new-york-city/

Compared to other ‘wartime presidents,' Trump’s record stands apart

by William Johnston