The history of the U.S. South is an area of particular strength, as the department boasts seven specialists in the field. Course offerings and faculty research investigate all areas of southern history, from politics and labor relations to the history of race, gender, religion, and the environment. UA is also conveniently located near many important archival resources for the study of the South.

The one-day symposium, “Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South,” to be held Friday, October 6, 2017 at the Ferguson Center Great Hall on The University of Alabama’s campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is the largest conference in the country on World War I and the South

Women’s and gender history is an active field of study at UA. Faculty teach courses in a variety of geographic locations and time periods, enabling students to gain transnational and comparative perspectives on the diversity of gender roles and on how a gendered analysis changes our understanding of historical problems.

Alumnus William C. Harris, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University, began his fifty-year career as a Civil War historian here in Tuscaloosa, earning both his undergraduate and graduate history degrees from The University of Alabama Department of History.

Graduate students will find the History Department an intellectually stimulating environment for studying the role of religious ideas, behaviors, people, and institutions of the past. The department offers a wide variety of courses in religious history, and students can work on religious history topics in many subfields, including Southern history, Early and Modern American history, and Medieval and Early Modern European history.

The department has a longstanding history of excellence in areas of German, Central European, and Russian history, French history, English history, Medieval history, and Early Modern and Modern history. Faculty specializations range across political, diplomatic, social, cultural, gender, intellectual, religious, imperial, and economic history, as well as the history of science and medicine.

Students in military history study the full range of conflict, from the ancient world to contemporary problems. Graduate study of military history at UA is especially strong in colonial and Civil War America and Early Modern and Modern Europe, with a strong emphasis on naval history, diplomacy, international relations, and the home front.