History
You could win a paid summer fellowship and analyze, as one student did, the 20th-century African-American debutante ball.
History is the research and interpretation of human
experience in the past
LEARN FROM THE PAST
Being a historian is more like being a crime scene investigator than it is about memorizing facts and dates. You learn to ask good questions about the historical “crime scene.” What happened? Why? Who was involved? How did it go down?
Our students work to collect original evidence, organize and analyze it and present it to an audience in a compelling way. All majors do a substantial senior research project—from African-American debutante balls to 19th-century prison reform movements—that breaks new ground.
As a historian you may be digging in a field with archaeologists, through old letters in an archive or into the pockets of a centuries-old coat trying to determine what was kept there.
And you’re not just focusing on the distant past. Our students learn how to collect oral histories from living people who have witnessed what might otherwise be lost. They know historians of the future will thank them.
A mummy, allegedly John Wilkes Booth’s, traveled carnival sideshows for decades after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. What that says about American history is the topic of
Professor Wyatt Evans’ book, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory and a Mummy.
Careers Made easy
work history
Some of our alumni continue to research, write and teach history for a lifetime. Others work for museums. We also launch those who go on to be attorneys and physicians, or work in key roles in government or nonprofits.
We stay connected with our alums. We help them get where they want to go. It’s one of the benefits from having worked so closely with them as undergrads; we really know whether they are politically minded, teaching-centric or whether they are into the long ago and far away.
In fact, our alums, seeking to keep this close-knit atmosphere alive, funded a summer scholarship to support current students with research or internship stipends. The Leavell-Oberg Scholarship honors and continues a beloved Drew history professor’s legacy of supporting student research.
Full-Impact Students
Stephen Petro
My SHEAR/Mellon Fellowship for history at the University of Pennsylvania helped complete my voluminous research for my honors thesis on the antebellum penitentiary system. I couldn’t have done it without the overwhelming support of my Drew professors.
Full-Impact Students
Miya Carey
I interned with the N.J. Amistad Commission, adding secondary source materials to a series of web-based textbooks integrating African-American history. It’s an important project in helping diversify how students learn about the American experience.
Full-Impact Students
James Fargher
As a history major, I’ve become much more critical of other people’s accounts of the past. I question why someone is writing something and critically analyze different perspectives of history.
Passionate Faculty
James M. Carter
Associate professor & chair
I’m working on two research projects: one on U.S.-China relations during the Boxer Rebellion, the second on the relationship between the government and private corporations in the realm of foreign policy from World War II through the 1960s.
Ph.D., University of Houston
Passionate Faculty
C. Wyatt Evans
Associate professor
My current work is a study of Civil War domestic security for Oxford University Press as well as a longer-range project on the “memory of the good” in American history.
Ph.D., Drew University
Passionate Faculty
Edward Baring
Assistant professor
I’d call myself a Europhile. My work on the history of European philosophy allows me to travel all over Europe, and I enjoy getting to experience different ways of life around the continent. And I am always interested in how American students think about and understand European history.
Ph.D., Harvard University
Passionate Faculty
Jonathan Rose
Professor
I’m working on a study of Winston Churchill’s literary career. (Indeed, he even published a novel.) I’d say I take great satisfaction in writing, in making words do things on the page.
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Passionate Faculty
Christine Kinealy
Professor
I’m working on book that looks at private donations to Ireland during the Great Famine. It is an uplifting story. I’d call myself a jobbing historian—happy in an archive or classroom.
Ph.D., Trinity College, Dublin
Passionate Faculty
Lillie J. Edwards
Professor & director
I’d say I’m an idealist. This probably comes from my own liberal arts training that showed me the intellectual, creative and spiritual power human beings have to change the world in which they live. My current work includes a book project about the social mobility of the black middle class, using my late mother’s college diary.
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Passionate Faculty
Frances Bernstein
Associate professor
My teaching and research interests include Russia and the USSR, medicine, disability and sexuality and the body. I’m working on a new book, Empire of Broken Men: Disability and Medicine at the End of World War II.
Ph.D., Columbia University
Passionate Faculty
Sharon Sundue
Associate professor
My research and teaching interests center on early American history. My new research project is a study of the little-known consequence of the abolition of slavery in New Jersey and Pennsylvania—human trafficking in the early American republic.
Ph.D., Harvard University
Successful Alumni
- Senior foreign affairs officer
U.S. State Department - Assistant prosecutor
Warren County, New Jersey - Senior producer/writer
MTV
At each semester’s History Happening, students present original work.
All the history majors are there to cheer them on; they’re all research hounds.
It’s just part of our culture here.
My Favorite Course
“I loved learning about the imperial rivalry of the greater European powers. Professor Rose is like a walking history book, and he gave great insight into the political, strategic and cultural influences.”
James Fargher on Europe, 1914–1945: The World Wars and the Great Dictators