Reasons to Choose - Department of History

In the material you received from the Graduate College the brochure called "The Graduate Experience" contains pictures of the campus and descriptions of some of the University's resources, such as the University Library system. The general historical collection is first-rate, and includes unusual (and, in some cases, unique) documentary resources in a number of fields. The library has an exceptionally fine Government Publications collection, in part because it is a Regional Federal Depository for American documents, but also because it has been for many years collecting government publications from the principal European nations and member states of the British Commonwealth. A systematic attempt has been made to assemble documentary collections of various international organizations including the League of Nations and the United Nations along with their constituent bodies, and regional organizations, e.g., the Organization of American States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It has been library policy to try to buy all current publications appearing in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Latin America that are of interest to historians. As a result of Iowa's membership in the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, moreover, materials from a large and fast-growing microfilm collection of press, archival, and series materials can be made available in Iowa City, often within 24 hours. Recently, a number of computer database collections have been added, such as the collection of medieval authors in Corpus Christianorum on CD-ROM.

The library holds valuable collections of French and English primary materials, including for medieval and early modern France the Histoire générale de Languedoc, inventories of provincial archives, microfilms of fourteenth-century administrative and scholastic documents in manuscript, a rich collection of Roman, medieval and early modern French legal treatises, and extensive holdings of French Revolutionary pamphlets and nineteenth-century French periodicals. English local history holdings are extensive, and nineteenth-century British government materials are particularly well represented, including a complete set of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. A project to film the entire 400 volumes of the private papers of Sir Robert Peel is in course. A large collection of labor and radical periodicals for the U.S. and Britain is also available. Biographical sources for nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain are plentiful. For German social history the holdings include local histories, histories of business corporations, and Gymnasium histories. An excellent collection of printed primary sources in the history of medicine is held in the John Martin Rare Book room in the medical library.

A fine research collection exists for all periods of U.S. History, including the papers of Vice-President Henry Wallace, valuable for investigating such topics as agricultural policy and the Progressive Party in 1948. The library also has an extensive microform collection in areas of American social reform, African-American history, Southern plantation records, and labor union records. There is also an expanding Women’s' History archive. The Iowa State Historical Society in Iowa City has important materials for studying the social, political, and labor history of Iowa and the Upper Mississippi region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, in West Branch, ten miles from Iowa City, contains basic sources for the study of federal policies of the 1920s, isolationism between the wars, depression programs, governmental reorganization, and related topics, and for the history of American foreign relations.

The University Library has acquired on microfilm (from the Library of Congress) the entire collections of American presidential papers, giving students ready access to and opportunities for training and research in vast manuscript collections important to American political history for the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. The government documents collection of the University Library has extensive National Archive series on film pertaining to U.S. relations with Mexico and China, and to American participation in World War I and the subsequent peace negotiations.

Collections for China, Japan, and India are expanding rapidly. The Chinese collection, started in the 1950s, has some 50,000 volumes including a large number of reprinted local histories. There are excellent collections for Russian and Latin American history. The library is unusually strong in codices and collections of documents pertaining to sixteenth-century Spanish American history; it also has an extensive microfilm collection of nineteenth-century Mexican publications and a wide range of materials for modern Mexico and Argentina.

Not only do we ensure that our graduate students get excellent training to pursue independent research in history, but we also are at the forefront of training our students to become excellent college teachers. As described above, our graduate students get a great deal of experience in the classroom. We prepare our students for that experience in a number of important ways. One of our senior graduate students, known for his or her excellent teaching, is appointed as a Graduate Instructor Advisor each year. Working with the Director of Graduate Studies, the Graduate Advisor prepares an introductory workshop for all graduate students about to enter the classroom for the first time as instructors. We also offer an innovative "Teaching Proseminar" during Fall Semester. This is a graduate level course devoted to learning how to teach history to undergraduates effectively, including how to have lively discussions, how to get students involved in small group projects, and how to use the new instructional technology to motive students and to help them learn to think historically. We learn how to think about teaching and learning, and hence how to improve our teaching skills over time. We also learn how to bridge the supposed gap between `teaching' and `research' by bringing our excitement about our own research interests and methods to our students.

In conjunction with the position of Graduate Instructor Advisor, the Department has also started a History Writing Lab staffed by senior graduate students. Undergraduates who want to improve their writing in history papers work one-on-one with a Writing Lab Assistant. This experience benefits both the undergraduates and the graduate student as they learn about effective writing.

The faculty, staff and students of University of Iowa's History Department take care to maintain open and easy communication between everyone in our community. There is a high level of mutual respect and understanding that persists through our most heated intellectual debates and sustains critical thinking both in and out of the classroom. In addition to talks by visiting speakers, three to four times a year faculty in the department present their current research in Friday afternoon seminars. The Graduate History Society (to which all graduate students in History automatically belong) also sponsors colloquia for graduate students to present the results of their dissertation research to each other. Finally, the faculty and senior graduate students regularly put together mini-workshops on professional issues, such as preparing a curriculum vitae for job applications and how to give effective presentations at academic conferences.

In the summer of 1997, the History Department moved back into Schaeffer Hall, one of the historic buildings on the University of Iowa Pentacrest. First opened in 1902, Schaeffer Hall reopened after being superbly renovated with an eye to preserving its original architectural details. It now houses the entire Department for the first time in many years, as faculty all have offices in the building and all of our teaching assistants have desk space there. Many classrooms are equipped with the latest in instructional technology, including projection of computer images and direct access to the internet. Smaller seminar rooms, however, still have the original slate blackboards and chalk to use for more spontaneous records of discussion. Nearly all History courses are given in the building and hall-way conversations about history can be quite lively; students and faculty can be heard carrying their discussions on as they walk to nearby restaurants for lunch and to coffee houses for late afternoon stimulation.

The History Department spends a great deal of time and energy when searching for scholars to join the faculty. We are a "reading" department, and just as the admissions committee reads the essays that every applicant to the graduate program sends us, we also read what every applicant for one of our positions sends us to demonstrate his or her scholarly abilities. Every search committee has a graduate student as a member, moreover, and candidates always meet with our graduate students when they come for a campus interview. As demonstrated in the list of faculty and their publications which closes this Guide, we hire historians whom we know will challenge our graduate students in seminars and will guide them through successful dissertations.