Welcome to History at Puget Sound for 2023!
What you have before you is year in review—giving you some snapshots of what has been going on this year with regard to the past. This book is assembled largely from the periodic dispatches from the chair, about history-related events on campus and history-related events at large in the world. Our hope is that this may give you a sense of how we do history at Puget Sound. “Doing history” is one of our cornerstone classes in the department, and that says something about what we like to do here.
Our faculty are published scholars and dedicated teachers, whose expertise and interests span the globe, from the Pacific Northwest and the Americas, to Asia, Europe, and to Africa. Within those areas of the world, we have research and teaching interests in race and gender; material culture and public history; war, nationalism, and empire; law and justice; social and civil rights movements; the environment and the history of science, technology and medicine; religion and society; cultural history; Indigenous, African American and Latinx histories; class, capitalism, and labor; and more….
We enjoy doing history together with students. History, far from being dead and gone, continues to shape our world in ways large and small. Seeing how this is so means opening a conversation about how human beings have lived their lives in many places and times around the world— how they have understood themselves, their relationships to one another, and their place on the planet. In our classes, we explore a wide range of vital topics, including race, gender, politics, religion, technologies, ideologies, international relations, war, migration, class, culture and the global exchange of goods and ideas. We also consider how narratives of the past have been created, contested, and deployed for a variety of purposes. History courses invite students to engage in the practice of doing history— discovering and assessing sources, considering controversies, forming interpretations, building arguments and ultimately creating their own narratives about the past— alongside faculty. History is something we do together. We invite you to come join us! Take a look through this and get a glimpse of what a year in history at Puget Sound looks like.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. (You can write to Doug Sackman: dsackman@pugetsound.edu)
Not pictured: Jennifer Neighbors and STHS/History faculty Amy Fisher & Kristin Johnson
Download the 2023 Year in Review (PDF)