American History

Subject Group

There is a thriving American History programme at Cambridge. Amongst undergraduates, the course on American History is the most popular of the options in Part I of the Historical Tripos. There is always an American special subject for students in Part II of the Tripos. There is currently a special subject on American Women in the Revolutionary Age and a Part II course on the Rise and Fall of Segregation in the American South. Graduate students read either for the M.Phil in Historical Studies (a 30,000 word dissertation), or a three-year Ph.D. Cambridge has produced more Ph.Ds in American History in the last ten years than the rest of the British universities put together. Over half the university posts in Britain in American History filled in that period have been obtained by scholars who received some or all of their training at Cambridge. The Faculty's strength lies broadly in two areas: the American South, and the history of America's foreign policy.

The Mellon Research Fellowship

Our current Mellon Research Fellows are Ellie Shermer and Katharina Rietzler.

Dr Shermer received her Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she helped found and run the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. She is on leave from Loyola University of Chicago to finish her first book, Creating the Sunbelt: Political Upheaval, Economic Dynamism, and Metropolitan Growth in Twentieth Century Phoenix, and begin her second, The Business Pursuit of Public Higher Education: The Corporate Transformation of American State Universities and College.

Dr Rietzler has a PhD from University College London, and has been a visiting doctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, and the University of Oslo. She is a member of the Oslo Contemporary International History Network, and is currently completing a monograph on American philanthropic foundations and their role in shaping conceptions of the international sphere from 1910 to 1945.

The previous incumbent was Andrea Franzius, whose area of research was twentieth century American history embracing culture, race relations and foreign policy. Other recent Mellon Fellows were Katie Barry, whose book Femininity in Flight was published in 2007 by Chapel Hill; Jay Sexton, now at Oxford; Francois Furstenburg, now at Montreal University; Kirk Swinehart, now at Wesleyan; Emily Clark, now at Tulane and Tim Minchin, now at La Trobe. The Fellowship has been particularly valuable for Fellows who have been turning their PhDs into books.

The Pitt Professorship

The Visiting Pitt Professorship in American History Institutions is held in History in alternate years and has included many distinguished scholars in recent years, including Mary Beth Norton of Cornell University, James Patterson of Brown University, James L Roark of Emory, Daniel T Rodgers of Princeton, Michael Bordo of Rutgers, J Mills Thornton of Michigan, Jim Kloppenberg of Harvard and Nancy Hewitt of Rutgers. Our 2011-12 Pitt Professor is Alan Brinkley of Columbia.

Research Seminars

There is a weekly evening seminar for American History faculty and graduate students which usually meets eight times a term on Mondays in Clare College. Speakers are drawn from universities around the UK. In addition, a number of distinguished American academics come to Cambridge specially to present these seminars.

Graduate Workshop

There is a graduate workshop which meets weekly. It is currently convened by Ellie Shermer, Mellon Research Fellow.

The Mellon Professorial Fund

The Mellon Professorial Fund enables us to bring over senior American historians, usually for a week of intensive seminars and lectures. The Visiting Senior Mellon scholars since 1992 have been Sylvia Frey, Tim Breen, Jim Cobb, Bruce Nelson, Warren Kimball, Britt Snider, David Thelen, John McCusker, David Nye, Robert Tucker, Linda Kerber, Bob Brigham, David Chappell, David Goodman, Steve Lawson and Morgan Kousser.

Conferences and Colloquia

The Fund has enabled us to organize four colloquia on the civil rights movement with leading British and American scholars, and conferences on the New Deal (1993), Political Culture in the Early American Nation (1995), Southern Women’s History (1998), Progressivism (2004), and a conference in honour of James Patterson (2006). In 2001, with the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg and the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Institute in New York, we organised a conference in honour of Arthur M Schlesinger Jr on the Age of Schlesinger. In 2002 we invited Robert McNamara for a one-day symposium on US Foreign Policy from the 1960s to the Present. We have also hosted the conferences of the British Association for American Studies (1995 and 2005), the European Southern Studies Forum (1995), the Southern Intellectual History Circle (1996), and British-American Nineteenth Century Historians (1994, 1996, and 1999). We have collaborated with Warwick in a conference on the Colonial Low Country South (1997) and Lancaster in a conference on McCarthyism (2000). There is an on-going collaboration with Tulane for a series of conferences on The South in the Atlantic World. The first took place in New Orleans in 1996, the second in Cambridge in 1999 and the third on Freedom Struggles in the Atlantic World in New Orleans in 2001. In 2006 we hosted a fourth conference with Tulane on Hurricane Katrina: Historians as First Responders. The subsequent Tulane-Cambridge conference took place in New Orleans in October 2009. In 2011 we hosted a conference with a number of scholars from Boston and Princeton Universities on the International Dimensions of US Political History.

In collaboration with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, Brunel University and Warwick University we have organized annual conferences on colonial and early national history since 1998. Cambridge was instrumental in the founding and funding of both the British Early American History Group (BEAHG) and the Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) and their annual conferences are often in Cambridge.

Exchange Program with Boston University

The Fund also provides financial support for an exchange programme for graduate students of American History at Cambridge and the History Department at Boston University. This programme is part of the joint institute for the study of political history run by Boston and Cambridge, which also organises annual conferences held in Cambridge in alternate years.

Web Officer : Suzanne Donovan