Backlash: Inside Florida’s African American Studies Ban
To history professor Erin D. Chapman, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ restrictions on the AP curriculum is a dangerous precedent—for educators and a divided country.
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Examining the Past to
Understand the Future
Studying history through today's lens
Who We Are
With an unparalleled location in the nation's capital, award-winning faculty and access to some of the most important research repositories in the world, the GW Department of History offers an ideal platform from which to explore our past. Undergraduate and graduate students are exposed to a diversity of topics, from the Africa diaspora to the Cold War, from imperialism to urbanization, from the founding of Islam to Jewish history, from race relations to labor, law and politics. Students graduate with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary for success in a wide range of careers.
Where We Are
The Washington, D.C., area offers a front-row seat to history. Students are immersed in their surroundings through trips to museums, battlefields and historical sites including the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Jamestown Settlement, the Gettysburg Battlefield, the Society of the Cincinnati and George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.
Through the department's collaborative relationships with institutions throughout the region, students also have extraordinary access to historical documents at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the National Security Archive and the Smithsonian Institution.
"Thanks to the History Department, I was able to learn fascinating subjects, conduct important research, conference with knowledgeable and attentive professors, and graduate feeling prepared for the future as a historian."
Max Skidelsky
BA '20
History by the Numbers
Our Highlights
Department Headlines
Africa's Impact on the African American Experience
How does Africa figure in “real and imagined ways” to the African American experience?
Failing Grade: Are Americans Flunking History?
History professor Christopher Brick has a lesson plan to raise our humanities IQ.
Commemorating History’s Dark Chapter
History PhD student Ashley Valanzola is researching the stories of six extraordinary Jewish women—Holocaust survivors who worked to honor the memory of lives lo
Faculty Books
Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865
In Chained to History, Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate...
Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia
Land of Strangers is a moving account of late Qing efforts to assimilate the “Musulmans,” or Uyghurs, in China’s newly established Xinjiang province. Shifting deftly between theoretical analysis...
Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade
In this new and timely history, Assistant Professor of History Sarah Matthiesen shows how the effects of incarceration, for-profit healthcare, disease, and poverty...
Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State
Associate Professor of History Benjamin Hopkins makes a provocative case that “failed states” along the periphery of today’s international system are the intended...