JOINED THE DEPARTMENT

2005

BIO

William G. Thomas III is the Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. He served as Chair of the Department of History from 2010 to 2016. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Lincoln Prize Finalist.

He is the author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (November 2020, Yale University Press), about enslaved families in Maryland who sued for their freedom in the decades after the American Revolution. A Question of Freedom received the 2021 Mark Lynton History Prize, one of the Lukas Prizes, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Best Book Prize.

Thomas is the PI and Co-Director of the U.S. Law and Race Initiative at the University of Nebraska, a teaching and research program with funding from the Mellon Foundation. He is also a co-producer of Animating History, a series of award-winning live action animated documentary films, including The Bell Affair (Amazon Prime, 2024).

Prior to his appointment at Nebraska, he served as the co-founder and Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, where he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of History in the Corcoran Department of History. He was a co-editor the award-winning digital project, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. With Edward L. Ayers, he co-authored “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” one of the first pieces of digital scholarship published in the American Historical Review.

A dedicated teacher and mentor, Thomas was Chair of the Department of History and guided the department to the University-wide Departmental Teaching Award in 2017. He received the Hazel R. McClymont Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award in 2012 from the College of Arts and Sciences at Nebraska, the highest award for teaching in the College. He was named a Mead Honored Faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia in 2004-05 in recognition for his dedication to undergraduate teaching.

Thomas has published essays in Civil War History, The Journal of Historical Geography, The New York Times, The Washington Post, EDUCAUSE Review, and Inside Higher Education. He is a graduate of Trinity College (Connecticut) and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Trinity College and as Vice President of the American Historical Association.

CV

CURRENT DIGITAL MEDIA PROJECTS

• Co-Producer, Animating History
• Director, U.S. Law and Race Initiative
• Project Director, O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family
• Co-Editor, The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
• Project Co-Director, The History Harvest

TEACHING

• HIST 111: American History After 1877
• HIST 111H: Honors American History After 1877
• HIST 244: Nineteenth Century America
• HIST 341: American Constitutional History
• HIST 364: Slavery and Emancipation in U.S. History
• HIST 365: U. S. South
• HIST 396: History Harvest
  HIST 445/845: The American Civil War and Reconstruction
• HIST 450: Capstone Seminar – Global History of Slavery and Emancipation; Slavery, Freedom, and American Law
• HIST 919 / ENGL 919 / MODL 919: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Nineteenth Century – Legal Fictions
• HIST 941: Overview of American History (formerly Readings and Problems in American History Before 1877)
• HIST 946: Interdisciplinary Readings in Digital Humanities
• HIST 953: Comparative Topics and Approaches in History – Legal History
• HIST 970: Seminar in Digital History

SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS

• 2021 Mark A. Lynton History Prize from the J. Anthony Lukas Prizes, Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation (Harvard University), for the best in American non-fiction writing
• 2017 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article in Civil War History
• 2012 Lincoln Prize Finalist for “The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America”
• Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer
• 2012 Hazel McClymont Distinguished Teaching Award, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Nebraska
• The James Harvey Robinson Prize, 2003, American Historical Association, with Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, for Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War

GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS

• The Mellon Foundation, 2023-present, U.S. Law and Race Initiative
• The National Science Foundation, 2021-2024, Co-PI with PI Katrina Jagodinsky, Digital Legal Research Lab, Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2016-2017
• National Endowment for the Humanities, 2014-2016, Collaborative Research Award
• National Endowment for the Humanities, 2009-2011, Digging into Data Challenge Award
• American Council of Learned Societies, Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2008
• British Association of American Studies, Visiting Professor in North American Studies, Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library, in Residence, London, August 2008 to November 2008

BOOKS

• A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War, Yale University Press, 2020.
• Editor, A Lincoln Dialogue, by James A. Rawley, University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
• The Iron Way: Railroads, The Civil War, and the Making of Modern America, Yale University Press, November 2011.
• Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South, Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

ARTICLES

• “Reconstructing African American Mobility After Emancipation, 1865-1867,” co-author with Richard G. Healey and Ian Cottingham, Social Science History October 2017.
• “Places of Exchange: An Analysis of Human and Materiél Flows in Civil War Alexandria, Virginia,” co-author with Kaci Nash and Robert Shepard, Civil War History December 2016.
• “Railroads and Regional Labor Markets in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States: A Case Study of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,” co-author with Richard Healey and Katie Lahman, Journal of Historical Geography Vol. 41 (July 2013).
• “What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1 No. 1, Winter 2011.
• “The Promise of Digital History: Interchange,” Journal of American History (September 2008).
• “Black and on the Border,” co-author with Edward L. Ayers and Anne Sarah Rubin, in Gabor Boritt, ed., The African American Soldier in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

CONFERENCE PAPERS

• “The Curious Origins of Hearsay,” American Historical Association, Denver, January 2017.
• “Bringing the Dead to Life: Slavery, Imagination, Narrative, and the Scholarly Enterprise,” Southern Historical Association, St. Petersburg, Fl., November 2016.
• “Recovering Family Networks in Early Washington, D.C.,” Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Conference, November 2016.
• “(Dis)covering Race: Legal Records and the Fragmentary Histories of American Families,” American Historical Association, New York City, January 2016.
• “African American Mobility After Emancipation, 1865-1867,” Society of Civil War Historians, Lexington, June 2012.
• “Valley of the Shadow Project and its Progeny, 20 years later,” Panelist, American Historical Association, Chicago, January 2012.
• “Digital Analysis of Texts: The Mobility of African Americans after Emancipation,” Organization of American Historians, Houston, March 2011.

INVITED LECTURES

• “Time, Space and Place in the American Civil War,” University of Georgia, Lecture Series in Digital Humanities, April 2015.
• “Digital Teaching in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Emory University, April 2015.
• “Why the Digital? Why the Liberal Arts,” Middlebury College, December 2014.
• “Revisiting the Dead House at Fort Williams: A Story of Civil War History and Memory,” Sesquicentennial of the Civil War Lecture Series on Religion and the Civil War, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia, May 2013.
• “Future Trends in Digital Humanities,” Keynote, CIC/Big 10 Symposium on Digital Humanities, April 2012.

EXPERTISE

• Digital Humanities
• Digital History
• Nineteenth-Century U.S. History
• Civil War
• Slavery
• Legal History
• U.S. South
• Science, Technology, and Society