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Welcome to the Web Page of the History Department at the University of Miami With this brief introductory letter let me thank you for visiting our website and give you a quick overview of our program, our objectives and goals, and a little taste of the excitement that animates our program here at the University of Miami. We pride ourselves on being a small, high quality program that provides first-rate teaching for both undergraduate and graduate students; an active collection of scholars who are doing cutting edge research and publishing important work of wide-ranging interest; and a collegial group that enjoys working with our students, colleagues at the university and beyond as well as the broader community to make history come alive and enrich our culture and our lives. At Miami our classes are small and we have the opportunity to work closely with students at all levels from broad ranging introductory courses to graduate seminars. One advantage of those close working relationships is that we pride ourselves on not just imparting knowledge, but stimulating students to think critically with history. For history with its study of how people function in complex social and cultural environments that change over time is an ideal discipline for honing the skills necessary to think clearly and critically – the kind of critical thinking that allows one not only to be a good historian, but also a good lawyer, doctor, politician, business person or simply a thoughtful, cultured, engaged adult. Thus we stress a slightly different three Rs – reading and writing of course, but also reasoning – and we are very proud of the results. Our students have gone on to become teachers at all levels from kindergarten to research university professors in the US and abroad, but many have also become very successful lawyers, doctors, politicians, business leaders and most importantly cultured, thoughtful people. We like to think that we are making history at UM literally by helping to form the people who lead our society and enrich it with their intellectual range, vision and critical thinking. When one turns to research and publishing our department is definitely making history. With a faculty of twenty-three we have published over sixty volumes – with some of the most important presses nationally and internationally including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Chicago, California, Blackwell, etc. and dozens of articles with the most cutting edge journals in the field. Reflecting these accomplishments and aiding them, three members of our department have won the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and we have also been awarded a host of other major research awards including National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, Fulbright Fellowships (for both our faculty and our graduate students), American Philosophical Society Fellowships, and invitations to numerous research centers in the US and abroad. The department has been particularly active publishing on issues of race, gender and urban development in modern America; political culture, religion, sex and society in the early modern world (including the Americas); Latin America and Caribbean social history both in the colonial and modern periods; politics, economy and culture in modern Europe; and the African Diaspora and its economic and social impact. More telling yet the department has a unique balance in its research interests with scholars working on the cutting edge of the new cultural and social history, world history, and microhistory as well as scholars doing path-breaking work on more traditional topics such as urban, political and intellectual history. Although the financial crisis that has had a devastating impact on many history programs has not spared us entirely, we have managed to continue our plans for growth for the program both in terms of offering a wider range of courses at the graduate and undergraduate level and in terms of hiring important new faculty for our program. At the graduate level our new year long seminar that runs across the summer allowing graduate students to work in archives and libraries around the world is now in its third year and has turned out to be a great success with students already having done research in Italy, England, Holland, France, Mexico, the Caribbean and the U.S. and produced a number of first rate research papers many of which are well on their way to becoming first-rate dissertations. At the undergraduate level we have totally revamped the program strengthening our senior seminars, offering new topical survey courses to attract a larger range of students and increasing our majors to close to two hundred. We also were able to hire an exciting young scholar in Chinese History, Stephen Halsey, who earned his PhD at the University of Chicago and works on modern China, statecraft and international relations in the context of world history. Over the next few years as the economy recovers we plan to make additional senior hires in Latin American and Caribbean history and add another American historian as well. Yet perhaps the hardest positive feature of our department to measure is the most important. Walking our halls, pausing for a coffee in our lounge, dropping by the departmental offices, one repeatedly encounters knots of students and faculty – from all over the world – involved in conversation: earnest, quiet, excited, laughing, lively, thoughtful, but virtually always good. A similar lively collegiality infuses departmental functions, whether they are the periodic visits of noted colleagues from around the world who come to discuss their ideas and research, our own more or less formal discussions of our research, or simply the periodic celebrations that mark out the academic calendar. As historians we work a great deal on our own, late into the night and/or early in the morning, trying to interpret a text or an event with the perfect take or simply trying to write that line that makes our history sing – as Homer promised – but crucially behind that solitary labor, and supporting and enriching it, in good times and in the harder economic climate of the moment we enjoy a rare community of colleagues, of students, of Friends of History (a formal support group made up of alumni and supporters of the department) and just plain friends of history who share the pleasures and the excitement of making history at UM. I hope that your visit to our website will give you some sense of that excitement, at least until you can visit our department in person. Quickly, but with my best, Guido Ruggiero
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