Early American History Area - History at the University of Missouri

Early American History

As befits the first public university west of the Mississippi, University of Missouri-Columbia is one of the best places anywhere to study the peoples and cultures of early America and the development of the United States through the Civil War. The MU History Department has one of the highest concentrations of experts on early American history and culture of any public research university. Ranging across a wide variety of approaches and specialties, our faculty in history and allied departments are able to provide graduate training of unusual breadth. Present are leading scholars in the cutting-edge fields of social and cultural history, in traditional fields in which new approaches are generating renewed interest, like political history.

Research opportunities for graduate students abound despite Columbia’s distance from the eastern regions where the early decades of US history were played out. Important collections of archival and printed materials relevant to early America are available at the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, just across the street from the department offices. The same building also houses Ellis Library’s vast collection of book and microforms, including one of the largest collections of newspapers on microfilm anywhere in the country. Other archives and research libraries are available near at hand in St. Louis and the state capitol, Jefferson City. Departmental fellowships are available for travel to archives further away.

Faculty

John L. Bullion, professor, PhD, University of Texas-Austin. American colonial and political history.

Mark M. Carroll, assistant professor, PhD, University of Houston. Old South, southwestern frontier, legal history.

Susan Flader, professor, PhD, Stanford University. American West, American environment.

Wilma King, professor and Arvarh Strickland Chair, PhD, Indiana University, African American history, slavery.

Kerby A. Miller, professor, PhD, University of California-Berkeley. American immigration, modern Irish history.

Michelle Morris (PhD, Harvard University) specializes is early U.S. women’s history. Her dissertation, "Under Household Government: Family and Sex in Massachusetts, 1660-1700, is a community study that challenges conventional understandings of how Puritan social control worked. Dr. Morris teaches courses in US women’s history and early American history.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, associate professor, PhD Harvard University. Early American Republic, political history, history of news media and popular culture, American Indian history.

Steven Watts, chair, professor, PhD, University of Missouri-Columbia. American cultural and intellectual history.

LeeAnn Whites, associate professor, PhD, University of California-Irvine. Civil War and reconstruction, women, 19th-century South.

John H. Wigger, director of graduate studies, associate professor, PhD, Notre Dame University. United States social and cultural history to 1865, history of American religion.

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Early American History Courses

Graduate Program
Graduate Financial Aid

MU Libraries
State Historical Society
Western Historical Manuscripts Collection

Free Soil Ticket

Quakers

The Artist in His Museum
Charles Willson Peale
1822

Watson and the Shark
John Singleton Copley
1778