An Invitation to Cross Boundaries

Darlene Clark Hine

There are many reasons to focus the presidential columns for 2001 and 2002 on new concentrations in history and innovations in graduate history education. Aside from an inherent interest in the prospect of reinvigorating graduate study, I do wish to encourage American historians to cross boundaries of specialities, engage in more collaborative and comparative work, experiment with new configurations of old fields, and advertise and promote the study and teaching of history whenever and wherever possible to diverse audiences.

I am not calling for us all to suddenly become generalists. But, of course, inasmuch as we are required to teach U.S. history survey courses covering issues, events, personalities, and themes that span periods from the colonial to the present, we are generalists. Our undergraduate teaching obligations dictate that we know a bit about a lot. In smaller departments, and increasingly in larger ones, we American historians are sometimes required to teach global history, and to internationalize American history. If this is what is expected of us, then perhaps we should devote more discussion to how best we should train our present and the next generation of graduate students and encourage them to become simultaneously specialists and generalists. How do we do this effectively to meet the exigencies of the twenty-first century? But this must not become a conversation exclusive to graduate history programs at the major research institutions. Our freshly minted Ph.D. graduates will seek employment in a wide spectrum of colleges and universities and historians at these institutions have thoughts and preferences as to the type of scholars best suited or prepared to meet pedagogical needs of their institutions.

Clearly, one of many challenges before us is to promote reading in areas outside of our intellectual comfort zones. One of the things that I did to further this process was to appoint members to the various prize and service committees with an eye towards field crossing. Who is to say that a specialist in Civil War military and antebellum southern history cannot be asked to read with a critical eye works in American intellectual history, or a specialist in African American intellectual history to assess dissertations in women's history? What is to prevent a specialist in Labor History from being able to evaluate and recommend the best applications for travel awards in political history? To be sure, this experiment with boundary crossing may rankle some colleagues deeply invested in field specialization. After all, we do spend years, decades, even lifetimes trying to master an area. In our field, as is true across the academy, command of a topic deserves recognition and respect. Thus, I hasten to assure one and all that the experiment probably does not signal a permanent disruption in the profession. Nevertheless, I believe that the more we know about each other's specialities and fields the better off the profession and the more exciting our graduate student training will be. Let us turn to the two institutions pursuing efforts to develop new Ph.D. concentrations in history.

In 2000, the University of Illinois at Chicago launched a new Ph.D. concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World (WRGUW pronounced "argue"!). When Leon Fink joined the department he was impressed by the uncommon gathering of scholars with overlapping interests and the remarkable research resources located in the city of Chicago. The new program is framed around a United States history core but offers four graduate seminars linked each year to the concentration, with one addressing a topic in comparative or global scope. Students pursuing a concentration in this field must select three minor areas, two of which should focus on non-U.S. or comparative topics. A regular lecture series sponsored concurrently facilitates conversations and discussion across the department and the university. The printed description pledges, "Among participating faculty and students alike, we aim to build a supportive but critical community of colleagues." Among the twenty-six scholars participating in the concentration are: Eric Arnesen, race and labor; John D'Emilio, gay and lesbian, sexuality, and civil rights; Leon Fink, U.S. labor, occupational culture, comparative labor and immigration; Sonya Michel, U.S. women's history, gender and the welfare state; Michael Perman, U.S. race relations, history of disfranchisement; Barbara Ransby, African-American history, women, and the history of the civil rights movement; and Daniel Scott Smith, comparative demographic and family history. Both Leon Fink and history department chair Eric Arnesen welcome inquiries about the new Ph.D. concentration.

The Comparative Black History (CBH) Ph.D. program or concentration at Michigan State University will graduate its first two students, Jacqueline McLeod (assistant professor of history at Western Illinois University) and Matthew Whitaker at the spring 2001 ceremonies. When I joined the history department at Michigan State University in 1987, I, like Leon Fink, was struck by the overlapping interests and depth of faculty teaching and researching in the history of diverse regions of the African diaspora. After five years of conversations a group of us mapped out the contours of the program.

Today, the Department of History at Michigan State University has a dozen participating faculty and over a dozen majors and minors in Comparative Black History. The program offers an annual Comparative Black History foundational seminar usually organized by one faculty member but is attended by all who have interest or time. The coordinator invites or selects individual fellow faculty to lecture on specific topics or ongoing research. Our graduate students are encouraged to take at least three CBH seminars and majors in CBH must have at least two minors in different regions of the diaspora.

The objective of Comparative Black History is to prepare students who have teaching competency in at least three areas, along with a specific research focus grounded in one of the fields. Students and faculty are encouraged through formal and informal seminars and special symposia to cultivate comparative analysis skills deemed essential to the development of a diasporic perspective. These events help to cement relations between faculty and students and to foster the development of, as the U.I.C. example illustrates, a "critical community of colleagues." One of the benefits of the program is that it has enabled M.S.U. to recruit a national and international graduate student population. These students have in turn created a dynamic critical community among themselves. Among the United States history faculty participating in CBH are: Christine Daniels, colonial U.S.; David Bailey, southern U.S.; Daina Ramey, African American, U.S. southern; Richard W. Thomas, African American urban history; Darlene Clark Hine, African American women and history of the professions (medicine, law, nursing). In other regions of the western hemisphere we have coverage by Laurent DuBois, the Caribbean; and Peter Beattie, Brazil. The Africanists include: David Robinson, West Africa; Harold Marcus, Ethiopia; and Elizabeth Eldredge, Southern Africa.

I would appreciate hearing from others who are considering, or have tried to develop new graduate history concentrations that take advantage of unique institutional strengths and resources. How are we faring in the effort to internationalize American history? How do we best prepare our American history graduate students to teach global history courses? We will all benefit from knowing what works and what we should perhaps avoid.

Darlene Clark Hine is the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of History at Michigan State University. Hine has edited and written widely on African American history, particularly on black women in the nursing profession and in the Midwest.