Welcome to the Department of History!  We find it a particularly vital time to be studying the past. Studying past societies and cultures can teach us much about the changing world we inhabit today. Events we read about in today’s headlines—such as tensions in Korea, the fallout of the end of the Cold War, the rise of populism, the #metoo movement, controversies over Confederate monuments, natural disasters, refugee crises—can be better grasped by delving into the long histories that came before.  But studying the past also allows us to enter worlds that may be completely different from our own--from medieval monasteries to seventeenth century New England villages to mid-twentieth century Taiwanese migrant communities.

We are a department of award-winning scholars, teachers, and students of history, who are part of a wider MU community of professional historians and fellow travelers at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, Black Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Ancient Mediterranean Studies, MU Libraries, The State Historical Society of Missouri, and the newly launched Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education.