Political History

Historians in the Corcoran Department of History working in political history understand it as an eternal human process of contests, cooperation, collaborations, and compromises over power and rights, broadly defined.  We study many and varied historical means for executing, exerting, and expressing power and rights. Within different temporal, spatial, cultural, and environmental constraints of historically researchable human experiences, political maneuverings occur among individuals, families, clans, tribes, ethnicities, states, cultures, nations, empires, international alliances, interest groups, and social categories based on age, class, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, and sectarian differences. Such maneuverings have sometimes been conceptualized as “elite” or “popular” in domestic settings and in terms of other binaries in global contexts.  We, however, investigate political relations as multi-layered and multi-dimensional phenomena. While we fundamentally value the power of the archives, we also appreciate and take advantage of research methodologies, tools, and theories that have been developed and deployed in other fields of history and branches of social sciences.