Department of History
About the Department
"History teaches everything, including the future"
— Alphonse de Lamartine
Discover your future with the Washington College history department.
Our faculty is passionate about history. Dr. Richard Striner is known for wearing vintage clothing to class. The professors are mentors who enjoy collaborating with their students. For her new book, Dr. Carol Wilson asked one of her students to compile the index.
Students also do their own independent research. All students must complete a senior capstone, and there are fellowships, such as the Comegys Bight Fellowship as well as opportunities to submit work to competitions sponsored by the Phi Alpha Theta honor society.
History comes alive here on Fridays in the spring and fall, when students and faculty play town ball on the campus green. The college, one of the oldest in the nation, and Chestertown, with its charming buildings and rich history, are valuable resources to anyone interested in American history.
Understanding the past is key to understanding the future. What does your future hold?
Meet Professor Clayton Black
Clayton Black, Associate Professor of History
When we grow up without learning another language, says Russian history scholar Clayton Black, we miss out on the opportunity to learn other sensibilities. Europeans, with their shared borders, are much more attuned to their neighbors.
"One of our big problems as Americans is that nothing requires us to step outside of ourselves and see ourselves in the way others see us," says Black, who spent his summer months in Russia examining the Bolshevik worldview as represented in popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s. His particular interest is in pulp fiction—the cheap "boulevard" novels whose themes reflect the chaos of the modern world. It's a world of criminal demons, spies, terrifying new weapons, and international plots.
"After World War I, there was a lot of paranoia. In the West people were angry about why the war happened, angry that the terms of the Versailles Treaty gave no guarantee of peace, and frightened by the likelihood of renewed conflict with even more catastrophic outcomes."
We are familiar with the despair of the so-called lost generation and poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But the authors of "low-brow" forms of popular culture had been capitalizing on the dangers of the modern world even before the war, and the market for their stories grew steadily through the 1920s. G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, Fritz Lang's film Spies, the Nat Pinkerton detective stories, and the tales of Mayne Reid were but a few of the dozens of adventure tales from the West translated into Russian before and after the revolution that portrayed a world of vast conspiracies and diabolical inventions. These types of stories may not have made people paranoid by themselves, but they did reflect popular concerns and provide simple, clear explanations for the chaos of the modern world.
"I believe that, in part, explains their popularity," says Black. "After 1917, the simplistic presentations of a black-and-white world accorded with and reinforced the Bolshevik state's sense of vulnerability and made it easier to identify enemies as agents of a grand capitalist cabal."
It also makes for interesting class discussions that often beg comparison between the 1920s and today. Professor Black teaches a first-year seminar called "Enemies, Terror and Paranoia."
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