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.

...