History
The Furman University History Department has a proud tradition of service to Furman and its students.
Large enough to offer real diversity in courses and instructors, the department also encourages students to get to know their professors on an individual basis. Working together, the history faculty and its majors come to understand how the past shapes the present and what the years ahead might bring.
Our department maintains a balanced program designed to meet a broad spectrum of student needs. The faculty has a wide range of expertise, from the United States and Europe to Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and thus can help students understand the forces that have shaped countries around the world. The structure of the program helps students enjoy the benefits of this range of expertise without imposing excessive limits on their freedom to choose particular courses.
The introductory course, “History of the Modern Era,” is taught by all members of the department. Among the upper-level offerings, European history is organized by major eras and nations; Latin American history is divided into its colonial and modern components; African history approaches the history of the continent as a whole; Asian history courses cover premodern and modern China, Japan and the Indian subcontinent; and United States history is treated chronologically as well as thematically in such courses as “History of Women in America” and “The African-American Experience.”
A major in history includes at least eight courses numbered 21 and above. The major includes History 21 (Issues in United States History) and two other courses in the history of the Western Hemisphere, two courses in European history, one course in Asian or African history, a senior seminar, and at least one additional elective course within the department. One of the three courses fulfilling the Western Hemisphere requirement must be a U.S. history course taken with a Furman professor. Students who wish to be certified to teach social studies in the public schools build on this basic program, with additional hours as determined by the education department, including South Carolina history and selected courses in political science, sociology, economics, computer science, and geography. Students are of course also encouraged to take more than the required minimum number of courses.
History majors benefit from other programs and resources. Many take advantage of Furman’s excellent study abroad programs and travel to Africa, England, France, Germany, Spain, the Middle East, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Japan, or China. In addition, the James Buchanan Duke Library contains a fine collection of the 20th-century diplomatic papers of major European nations, a wide selection of materials in South Carolina history, and many other published sources and monographic studies.
Commitment to the Classroom
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The Furman history department is proud of its commitment to undergraduate education. Faculty members are productive scholars who also relish the opportunity to bring history to life in the classroom. They have been rewarded for this commitment with an impressive number of university and national teaching awards.
Six current members of the department have received the Alester G. Furman, Jr. and Janie Earle Furman Award for Meritorious Teaching, awarded annually at Furman. They are William J. Lavery (1986), Marian E. Strobel (1992), David S. Spear (1995), James B. Leavell (1996), T. Lloyd Benson (1998), and Timothy G. Fehler (2001).
Research Opportunities
The history department offers students excellent opportunities to put their research skills to work in projects of their own devising, under the direction of a faculty member.
History majors have published their work in professional journals and in the Furman Humanities Review, and Furman students have also presented their papers at academic conferences such as those of the national history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta. History faculty have sponsored more than a dozen Furman Advantage research projects in recent years, on topics including the attitudes of recent German immigrants to the Confederate cause in the Civil War; the history of the Greenville Woman’s College; including music and technology in an expanded history curriculum; and performing textual analysis of 19th-century American newspaper editorials.
Looking to the Future
The skills encouraged by the liberal arts in general and by history in particular—the ability to articulate significant questions, find and evaluate evidence, weigh alternative methods and interpretations, appreciate complexity and ambiguity, draw sound conclusions, and articulate substantive arguments with clarity and precision—are prized by employers, as well as by graduate and professional schools. As a result, any number of career possibilities are open to history majors, including teaching, law, ministry, medicine, government service, banking, business, journalism, and work with museums or historical societies. Furman history majors have entered graduate school in a variety of fields at such universities as Duke, Emory, Princeton, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Yale, and attended such law schools as Duke, Georgia, Harvard, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia.
Two graduates of the Furman history program, Vernon Burton (1969) and Matt Lassiter (1992), have earned acclaim in recent years for their outstanding scholarly work. Burton, who completed his Ph.D. at Princeton and is a professor at the University of Illinois, is the author of In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He was also honored as one of four “Professors of the Year” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Lassiter, who received his doctorate from the University of Virginia, is a professor at the University of Michigan and editor of The Moderate’s Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia.
Furman History majors have also pursued careers in international relations. Robert Wood (1973) and Deborah Malac (1975), are now with the State Department, while David Tolbert (1979) is Chef de Cabinet for the Chief Presiding Judge at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal.
Other top history graduates include Greenville lawyers Larry Estridge (1966), who earned his law degree at Harvard, Henry Parr (1973), who received his law degree from Virginia, and Scott Pfeiffer (1988), who earned his law degree at the University of South Carolina; Kelly Jo Price, who went on to attend medical school at the Medical University of South Carolina; and Tomiko Brown-Nagin (1992), who, after graduating from Yale Law School and serving as a law clerk for federal judges, went on to doctoral studies in history at Duke. She currently is a professor at Washington University Law School.
See Also
