History

Rice’s size does not allow us to engage in every possible area of research within a given discipline. Instead, we always have concentrated on targeted areas that will have the most significant impact on both Rice and society at large.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our Department of History. While providing students with an outstanding grounding in world and U.S. history, the history department has been developing its prominence in three specific areas.

For decades, Rice has been recognized internationally for its expertise in Southern U.S. history, a particularly fertile field of study considering the national and international influence that the South has historically had in culture, economics, and politics. To further deepen and widen our influence in this field, we recently have brought in an additional historian of the South and young new historians of U.S. women’s history and African migrations to the New World. One of Rice’s crown jewels is the Journal of Southern History, the official publication of the Southern Historical Association. The journal moved to Rice in 1959 and, since 1983, has been edited by John Boles, whose high editorial standards have increased its luster as the publication for Southern history and helped give Rice high visibility and credibility in the field. Also here, among Fondren Library’s superb holdings in Southern history, is the widely admired documentary project, the Papers of Jefferson Davis.

Intellectual and cultural history constitute a second broad area of distinction. Although this program is only a few years old, it already has had a significant impact, particularly in the history of science. It dovetails with our third, and most recent, concentration—global and comparative history. Because the history department has a larger proportion of world historians than is the national norm, particularly in premodern and non-Western histories, we can offer specialization in a number of historical traditions and tailored interdisciplinary majors that address issues not normally available in less-flexible programs. Our graduates from this program are particularly well-equipped to understand the historical issues that have yielded cultures and economies very different from our own.