American history
Our department has a range of expertise in the fields of American political, diplomatic, intellectual, social and cultural history.
We have particular strengths in histories of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, mental health, crime and punishment, and the post-Cold War United States.
Research impact
The Promise and Peril of the US in the World
Led by Dr Bevan Sewell, this Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network features members from the UK and Europe and a partnership with the AQA Exam Board. The network focuses on U.S. history and U.S. in the World Studies, the latter concerned as much with the activities and travels of tourists, workers, artists, writers, teachers, activists, business leaders, schoolchildren, travelling sports teams, and missionaries as it is with presidents and politicians, in order to better understand how the world has impacted the United States and how a broad range of domestic influences have shaped U.S. history.
The network also examines how U.S. history is taught in schools at GCSE and A-level, and the extent to which wider intellectual and methodological shifts in the profession have translated into school-level teaching in order to understand what students know when they arrive at university. A core strand of project is being developed in collaboration with the AQA Exam Board, around working with schools and teachers to consider the future of teaching U.S. history at GCSE and A-level, and whether the field’s transformation - in terms of focus, skills, sources, and reappraisals of power and causality - has affected how it is taught in UK secondary education. The network has been extended with funding from the Arts and Humanities Impact Accelerator Award.
Research activities
- Professor Vivien Miller won a British Academy / Leverhulme Small Grant for her project on "Vitriol-throwing and acid crime in the United States, 1840-1960."
Recent publications
- Christopher Phelps, Capitalism, Work, and Sexuality from the Lavender Scare to Now Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 21, no. 3 (2024): 84-90.
- Vivien Miller, “‘I wanted satisfaction and I got it': Women, Homicide, and Capital Punishment in Jim Crow Florida," Crime, History and Societies/ Crime Histoire et Sociétés 27, no. 1 (2023): 81-106.
- Christopher Phelps, Class: A Useful Category of Analysis in the History of Sexual Harassment. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 19, no.1 (2022): 140-64.
- Vivien Miller, “Vitriol Throwing in Victorian America,” American Nineteenth Century History 23, no. 1 (2022) : 1-20.
- Christopher Phelps, Why Did Teachers Organize? Feminism and Socialism in the Making of New York City Teacher Unionism. Modern American History 4 (2021): 1-28.
- Vivien Miller, "‘A Ringer Was Used To Make The Killing’: Horse Painting and Racetrack Corruption in the Early Depression-Era War on Crime,” Journal of American Studies 55, no. 5 (2021): 1153-1177.
- Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, eds., Marxism and America: New Appraisals (Manchester University Press, 2021).