News & Views
OMNIA: Children of Freedom
Historian Sarah Gronningsater’s new book, about efforts toward slavery’s abolition and equal rights in New York from the Revolution through Reconstruction, shows how Black people found ways to advocate for their freedom—and helped mold a new nation.British Academy Book Prize 2024 shortlist announced
The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 by Marcy Norton (Harvard University Press)Carceral Recycling: Zero Waste and Imperial Extraction in Nazi Germany
New publication in The American Historical Review by Dr. Anne BergThe Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn History Department launches political history concentration for undergraduate majors
By Chloe Norman Full text and images at The Daily PennsylvanianNew Publications by Department of History Faculty
New Publications by Department of History Faculty The Rising Generation: GraduNew York Times Book Review: Sometimes Protest Movements Are a Slow, Slow Burn
In “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,” Benjamin Nathans takes stock of the generation of dissidents who helped loosen the bonds of tyranny in the Soviet Union.Dr. Kathleen Brown wins SHEAR Mary Kelly Prize
From the the SHEAR websiteOmnia: Telling the story of a Hispanic war hero
In his new book ‘The Ballad of Roy Benavidez,’ Penn historian William Sturkey explores the life of this Hispanic war hero, his fight to maintain veteran disability benefits, and the ways in which Hispanic Americans have long shaped U.S. history with scant acknowledgement.Penn Today: Redlining and rentals
Historian Brent Cebul in the School of Arts & Sciences is working on a new digital mapping project looking at the impact of Federal Housing Administration policies on the availability of affordable rental housing post-World War IIThe Atlantic: What the Civil Rights Act Really Meant by Prof. William Sturkey
An overlooked effect of the legislation, passed 60 years ago this week, was its powerful message of hope for Black Americans.
Welcome to the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Over thirty historians in the standing faculty with a broad range of research specialties advance our understanding of the past.
Upcoming Events
Discord in American Academia: An Italian Perspective
This panel will discuss a recent special volume on national discord in the United States published by Limes, Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica, the leading journal of geopolitics in Italy. We will focus…
Paper Gourdes, Coffee Beans and Metal Coins: The Many Currencies of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity
Arielle Alterwaite, with Marlene Daut
Race & Slavery Working Group
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In an age of wrenching social change and momentous global challenges, history gives us fresh perspectives, important distinctions, and a sense of how we got here. This year, join Penn historians for lively discussions of the past that seek to better orient us in the present. Because as events unfold, that’s History Speaking, too.
The Penn & Slavery Project teaches us that no colony, state, or well-funded university was buffered from slavery’s reach. Penn’s story is a national story, and one of great importance to our ongoing efforts to come to terms with our nations’s history of slavery.
Featured Students
Bianca Serbin
My name is Bianca, and I’m a senior pursuing the general history major and minoring in French. From a young age, I was certain I wanted to study history. I was influenced by my father, who is a historian and who always encouraged me to value stories about the past.
Carson Eckhard
Carson didn’t come to Penn set on being a History Major. Yet her freshman year she enrolled in “The American South” and there wrote a paper about Southern U.S. universities and slavery.
John Mullan, class of '20
John double-majored in History and Arabic and Islamic Studies.
Archana Upadhyay
I’m a senior from Chicago majoring in World History. I transferred to Penn as a sophomore from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
