Regional Fields
United States History
From a small part of Europe's far-flung colonial empires, the United States became a major global power. Awareness of this transformation has long inspired historians' efforts to interpret the United States in global perspective. At the same time, the rich literature on the national history of the United States just as often generates debates about the country's supposedly exceptional past. Recent attempts to write "international" histories of the United States remain engaged in dialogue with an enormous literature that focuses in great detail on the United States and its internal life. Yet even during the most isolationist periods of its national history, the United States has been connected to the world through trade, migration, cultural and ideological conflicts, intellectual and social exchanges, war, and international politics. At the same time, people around the world have been fascinated or appalled by a country they viewed through their own very distinctive national perspectives.
The University of Pittsburgh Department of History offers a wide variety of courses and out-of-class activities that help students and faculty to view the history of the United States from local, continental, hemispheric, Atlantic, and global perspectives. U.S. historians at Pittsburgh have national and international reputations for their strengths in U.S. social and economic history, and particularly in the fields of U.S. legal and military history, labor and the working class, race, cities, and women and gender. Many maintain a lively interest in the relationship of work, society, economy, and culture. Others analyze central themes in U.S. history from comparative points of view or explore the history of the city of Pittsburgh and of Western Pennsylvania as a region.
Pittsburgh’s U.S. historians have been particularly active in creating transnational themes in Atlantic History, REG (Race, Ethnicity, and Gender). and Capitalism and Empire thematic groups within the department. In the now-well-established and ongoing yearly seminar on Atlantic history, U.S. historians interact with graduate students, colleagues, and invited guests in African, Latin American, and European history. Pittsburgh’s Americanists have also helped to organize and sustain a long-lived seminar on working-class history that meets monthly to discuss the work of graduate students, faculty, and invited guests. The department’s E.P. Thompson lecture attracts a wide audience each year.
While recognizing that most MA and PhD students who enter the Pittsburgh program will ultimately teach U.S. history, the department can point to increasing numbers of recent graduates who have found work in local, regional, and national public history settings, using the analytical, research, and writing research skills honed in their studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Demand for U.S. historians who can teach world, global, or Atlantic history is strong, and also growing.
Faculty in U.S. History
Barbara Burstin Barbara Burstin is a lecturer in the Department of History. She teaches courses on the United States and the Holocaust, Jews in the United States, and Pride and Prejudice in American History. She published After the Holocaust: The Migration of Polish Jews and Polish Christians to Pittsburgh after World War II University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. She produced a documentary film, titled A Jewish Legacy: Pittsburgh. She is currently finishing a history of the Jewish community in Pittsburgh from the 1840s to 1915.
Carolyn J.L. Carson Carolyn Carson is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and coordinator of the Urban Studies Program. Her research interests focus on racial health disparities, women's health issues, and urban medical institutions. Publications include an article on the medical choices of Southern black migrant women in the Journal of American Ethnic History and a forthcoming one titled “The Unintended Consequences of Policy Decisions Affecting Maternal Services for Pittsburgh African Americans” in a special issue of the Journal of Health and Social Policy on why race still matters. She has also written several hospital histories, including her book Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit: The History of the St. Francis Medical Center. Her courses include Introduction to Urban Studies, Urban Field Research Seminar, and International Urbanism, a course developed to enhance the comparative urbanism concentration within the urban studies major. As an optional part of the International Urbanism course, she bi-annually takes students to Paris and London for an integrated field trip abroad.
Robert Doherty Robert Doherty is a professor of history. He teaches modern American history, Native American history, and environmental history. He published Disputed Waters (University Press of Kentucky, 1990) and Not First in Nobody’s Heart (Iowa State Press, 1992). He is currently researching the relationship between expert witness testimony on Ojibway treaty rights and the concept of sovereignty.
Laurence Glasco Laurence Glasco has two teaching and research interests. One is the history of Black Pittsburgh, including Legacy in Bricks and Mortar: Historic Sites of Black Pittsburgh, and several publications, notably “Double Burden: A History of Blacks in Pittsburgh,” “Taking Care of Business: Black Entrepreneurs in Turn of the Century Pittsburgh,” and The Negro in Pittsburgh, a 1940 Works Progress Administration (WPA) history of Black Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Current projects on Black Pittsburgh involve a biography of K. Leroy Irvis (former Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives), a co-authored book on August Wilson’s Pittsburgh, and an effort to document and annotate (via newspapers and oral histories) the recent acquisition of over 80,000 photographic images of Black Pittsburgh taken by Teenie Harris, staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper. The second teaching focus is race, caste, and ethnicity in world perspective. Publications on this topic include a comparison of the social thought and racial identity of two black intellectuals, W.E.B. Du Bois of the United States and Juan Gualberto Gómez of Cuba.
Maurine Greenwald Maurine Greenwald is associate professor of history. She specializes in modern U.S. social history with a particular emphasis on gender and race in labor history. Her current research uses the advertising since 1950 to examine gender relations in small and large corporations; feminist activism inside and outside the industry; marketing to female consumers; and the rise of woman-owned agencies. This study involves extensive oral interviews. Her newest teaching ventures include a course on interpreting photographs as historical documents and another on the recent history of gender relations in Japan, Argentina, and the United States.
Van Beck Hall Van Beck Hall, an associate professor of history, has published on the politics of Massachusetts and Virginia during the early Republic. He is currently completing a manuscript on the political economy of Virginia between 1789 and 1830 and is also working on a comparative study of how five states responded to issues involving banking, internal improvements, education, and crime during the same period. He has taught courses on the history of the south and on the U.S. Civil War, and the general field graduate seminar in early U.S. history
Peter Karsten Peter Karsten is professor of history and also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology. His two research and teaching fields deal with legal and military systems. While some of his publications and two of his undergraduate legal and military history courses deal primarily with the U.S. experience, the rest of his publications and all three of his seminars (one graduate, two honors college) place law and military in a broad comparative context. His publications include The Naval Aristocracy (Free Press), Between Law and Custom (Cambridge, 2003), and Encyclopedia of War & American Society, 3 vols. (Sage, 2005). His current research interest concerns "go-betweens," men and women in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in the Americas and Australia who "crossed over" sufficiently to serve as bridges between the native people and the Euro-diaspora newcomers.
Edward K. Muller Edward Muller is professor of history and director of the Urban Studies Program. His research focuses on the history and geography of American cities with an emphasis on Pittsburgh and urban planning. He teaches undergraduate courses on the history of Pittsburgh, American cities, and the American landscape, He recently taught a graduate course on Pittsburgh and the World and will teach one on Cities in Local and Global Contexts. Recent work includes North America: The Geography of a Changing Continent (co-editor, 2001); DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good, (editor, 2005); Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889–1943 (2006); and articles or chapters on industrial suburbanization, industry targeting, Pittsburgh's rivers, and the transformation of Pittsburgh's landscape.
Richard Oestreicher Richard Oestreicher teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century U.S. workers, comparative labor history, and popular culture and cultural production. His publications include Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Illinois: 1986) and "Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940" (Journal of American History, 1988), which won the Binkley-Stephenson Award in 1989. He is currently working on two books: a study of how working-class formation shaped American cultural and political development from the Revolution to the Civil War and a book on class and American politics from the Jacksonian Era to the present.
Marcus Rediker Marcus Rediker is professor of history. He specializes in early American and Atlantic social and labor history, or "history from below." His recent books include (with Peter Linebaugh) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000) and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004). His new book, The Slave Ship: A Human History, will be published by Viking-Penquin in October 2007. His work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Robert Ruck Rob Ruck is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and on the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies. He has focused his research and writing on the history of sport and the history of Pittsburgh. While a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, he coauthored Steve Nelson, American Radical with fellow grad student James Barrett and Steve Nelson. His dissertation, “Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh,” was the basis for his Emmy-winning documentary “Kings on the Hill: Baseball’s Forgotten Men.” Ruck is the author of Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. He is currently writing a history of Pittsburgh with Pitt colleague Edward Muller and a biography of Art Rooney with Maggie Patterson and the late Michael Weber. Ruck is co-producer of the “The Republic of Baseball: Dominican Giants of the American Game,” a documentary that was a featured presentation at the New York and San Diego International Latino Film Festivals and is currently airing on PBS. Ruck is the guest historian for the Senator John Heinz Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum and served as a voting member of the Hall of Fame’s 2006 election of Negro Leaguers.
Liann Tsoukas Liann Tsoukas is a lecturer in the Department of History. She teaches courses in modern American history, social movements, African-American history, and women’s history. Her research is on interracial social movement activism, particularly the anti-lynching movement of the 1930s. She is currently writing a book, tentatively titled Uneasy Alliances: Interracial Efforts to end Lynching in America.
Recent Books
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Marcus Rediker |
 Ted Muller Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943 |
Laurence Glasco |
Peter Karsten
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