Duke University. Department of History

The study of history emerged as a separate field of study at Trinity College in the late nineteenth-century supported by a change in popular attitudes, interests, and the ongoing professionalization of the field of historical inquiry. In 1891, Trinity College became the first southern educational institution to establish a distinct chair of history. In 1896, Stephen B. Weeks founded the Trinity College Historical Society which gave further impetus to strengthening the Department of History and supported a gradual shift from local to world history topics. By 1923, when Trinity College was ready to transition into Duke University, six semester hours of history course work was required for graduation. William K. Boyd and William T. Laprade formed the foundation of the History Department at Duke University, with Boyd's focus in American History with a concentration on Southern history and Laprade's focus on British history. In 1923, E. Malcolm Carroll joined the history faculty and shifted his research from American to continental European history to suit a void in research focus within the department. Between 1925 and 1939 the Department of History grew from six members to eighteen.

The transition from Trinity College to Duke University also included not only a change in name but also a shift from a small liberal arts college to a research university and consequently the emphasis of the Department of History. Under the direction of Boyd and President William Preston Few, the University sought to expand its collection of books and primary source material in the library to facilitate a new faculty concentration on original research and substantive contributions to historical understanding through scholarly publication. By the end of the 1930s, the Department of History had added five new faculty members that would spend their entire careers at Duke University: historian of British and Commonwealth history, William B. Hamilton; military historian Theodore Ropp; Harold T. Parker, historian of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; English Rennaisance specialist Arthur B. Ferguson; and Richard L. Watson, Jr., historian of the Progressive Era and early twentieth-century United States.

Other noteworthy faculty joined Duke in the decades following the Second World War including Emeriti Professors Joel Colton in European history in 1947, Anne F. Scott in Women's History, military historian I.B. Holley, Peter H. Wood and Robert F. Durden, historian of the 19th century U.S. South, the Duke family, and author of The Launching of Duke University: 1925-1949 published by Duke University Press.

Currently the Department of History operates with a Chair and Directors of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies. The chairman is appointed by the Provost on the basis of the department's recommendations and in consultation with the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the Graduate School. The chairman is appointed to a three-year term and will normally serve no more than two consecutive terms. The chairman is the principal point of contact between the department and central administration and is responsible for proposing appointees for the director of graduate and undergraduate studies; departmental committees; arrangement of the schedule of courses and teaching assignments; budget preparation, proposals, and departmental spending. Also, the chairman is to insure excellence in the faculty and to take the initiative in determining departmental needs and faculty prospects. However, the chair must cultivate the active cooperation and consent of his colleagues in order to maintain the collegial integrity of the department.

Portions of this Historical Note were adopted from Robert F. Durden, The Launching of Duke University: 1924-1949 (Duke University Press, 1993), 131-138.

There has been a Dept. of History at Duke since its days as Trinity College.