William G. Thomas, III

John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History

Contact Information:

615 Oldfather Hall

Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
Phone: (402) 472-8318
E-mail:

Joined the Department:

August 2005

William G. Thomas, III teaches 19th century U.S. history and specializes in Civil War, the U.S. South, and in Digital History. He earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia. From 1998 to 2005 he served as the founding Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. He was the Project Manager of The Valley of the Shadow project at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at U.Va. from 1996 to 1998.

Thomas is a Lincoln Prize Laureate in 2001 from the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College for the Valley of the Shadow project with Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, and with them was awarded the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association in recognition of the project as an outstanding contribution to the teaching of history. Thomas was a Mead Honored Faculty at the University of Virginia in 2004-05. He has recently been awarded a Digital Innovation Fellowship in 2008 from the American Council of Learned Societies. He was awarded a fellowship from the British Association of American Studies for 2008-09 and was the Visiting Professor of North American Studies at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.

He is currently working on a book titled "The Civil War and the Making of Modern America" (Yale University Press) and a digital project on "Railroads and the Making of Modern America," a web-delivered set of sources on railroads, technologies, culture, and social change. With Douglas Seefledt, Thomas leads The Digital History project at UNL--also online at http://digitalhistory.unl.edu.

Graduate students in Digital History at University of Nebraska engage in a variety of new courses on the theories, methodologies, and practices at work in the field. We support graduate students ambitions for digital dissertations and theses, and offer assistantships for work on grant-funded research projects in digital history. Our graduate assistants work with historical GIS, database development, and web site development and programming. Our goal is to train historians for and in the digital medium of scholarship and communication.

Office Hours Spring 2010 Monday 2:00-3:30 and Wednesday 9:00-11:00

Expertise:

• Digital History
• U. S. South
• U.S. Nineteenth Century
• Civil War

Education:

Ph.D.--University of Virginia, History, 1995
M.A.--University of Virginia, History, 1991
B.A.--Trinity College (Connecticut), History, 1986 with honors in History
Episcopal High School, 1982

Courses Taught:

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