Dr. William G. Thomas, III

Welcome to the Department of History at the University of Nebraska! The Department of History promotes excellence in research, teaching, and service, seeks to prepare students for a diverse and interconnected world, and works to democratize and open history for the citizens of Nebraska. In the last three years our faculty have written or edited more than 23 books, written over 100 journal articles, and secured over $700,000 in research grants. We have won some of the nation's most prestigious book awards, including the Bancroft Prize. And our faculty have also been recognized for distinction with honors such as National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. We have also been awarded some of our discipline's most distinguished prizes, such as the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize.

We are a department that values and promotes the highest quality teaching. Our faculty are committed to providing undergraduate and graduate students with the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind for successful lives. We emphasize deep engagement with the sources of the past and our teaching focuses on developing our students' critical thinking, analytical writing, and depth of understanding. We also value our students' learning by doing--through experience. And so we are developing a new partnership with NET Television and Radio to create "The History Harvest"--a program for our majors to harvest digitally community history throughout Nebraska. This unique program will be joined in the coming year with an innovative May term class for History majors to travel to historic sites in Europe and North America, conduct their own research, and gain a deeper understanding of history's meaning and legacy today.

Our majors have many wonderful opportunities to work with faculty on research projects. We currently have active funded research projects with faculty on William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Civil War Washington, D.C., Railroads and the Making of Modern America, Native American history, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the history of the Great Plains, and Digital History. Teams of undergraduates often work side-by-side with graduate students and faculty on these research initiatives in both the academic year and the summer.

Finally, our majors have numerous opportunities for recognition, teamwork, community, and outreach. Phi Alpha Theta, the history national honors society, is an active organization in our department. Phi Alpha Theta helps support community service efforts, such as judging and helping organize Nebraska's National History Day competition, and in addition Phi Alpha Theta sponsors undergraduate research by organizing paper and poster sessions at the James A. Rawley Graduate Conference in the Humanities.

In 2011 our department will welcome two new faculty members. Gerald Steinacher will join our department as an Assistant Professor of History. He will teach Modern Germany, Jewish History, and the Holocaust, as well as graduate courses in contemporary European history. Professor Steinacher earned his Ph.D. and his Habilitation degrees at the University of Innsbruck. In 2010 he was the Joseph A. Schumpeter Research Fellow at Harvard University's Center for European Studies. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice with Oxford University Press. He is working on a new book about the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross between 1939 and 1950. We are pleased to welcome Professor Steinacher.

Bedross Matossian will join our faculty as well teaching in the fall of 2011. He specializes in the Modern Middle East and will teach new courses on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian Genocide, and the Middle East in World History. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Professor Matossian earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2008. His dissertation, entitled "Ethnic Politics in Post-Revolutionary Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Arabs, and Jews in the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1909)," dealt with interethnic politics during the first year of the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918), when a dramatic escalations of ethnic tensions culminated in the counterrevolution and the Adana massacres of 1909. Professor Matossian has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently researching the history of the Armenian genocide. We are pleased to welcome Professor Matossian.

We have much to look forward to in 2011-2012! New classes on The History of Terrorism, Modern Middle East History, and the History Harvest will be offered. And we will host Thomas Andrews (Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War) for the 2011 Carroll R. Pauley Memorial Lecture. In the spring of 2012 we will help host the Center for Great Plains Studies Symposium on "1862-2012: The Making of the Great Plains." Join us for these events!