The Center's Goals

The Center for Historical Studies was established in 1999 to create a flourishing environment for the study of history at the University of Maryland. In 2006, the Center was renamed the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies, to honor the generous endowment of two Maryland alumni who took a special interest in history.

The Center brings together faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff within the university and scholars and teachers throughout the state of Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region to discuss important historical issues, both old and new, from ancient times to the present, and pertinent to all areas of the world, from the United States and Europe to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Through such discussions, the Center hopes to increase an appreciation of the importance of historical knowledge in the education of citizens, to underline the significance of universities in producing and disseminating new ways of exploring the world, and to generate excitement about the processes of intellectual inquiry, exchange, and debate.

Every year the Center runs a seminar series on its annual theme. It sponsors scholarly conferences, works-in-progress seminars with faculty members, workshops with public school teachers, and public lectures and presentations to undergraduate classes. It also awards research grants and an annual dissertation fellowship, and it gives prizes to Maryland graduate students for exemplary research papers and dissertations.

For information on the Center's current program, especially its seminars and conferences, and on any other aspect of the Center's activities, please call the Center at 301-405-8739, or e-mail to: historycenter@umd.edu.

Nathan and Jeanette Miller

David Kennedy, who held the first Miller lecture in December 2001,
stands between Jeanette and Nathan Miller.

Nathan and Jeanette Miller were proud alumni of the University of Maryland who generously supported the Department of History and the Center for Historical Studies. Jeanette Martick grew up in Baltimore at 214 W. Mulberry Street, the location of her childhood home and of Martick's Tavern, owned and operated by her parents. Graduating from Forest Park High School in 1942, Jeanette joined thousands of other women who seized the opportunity offered by wartime labor shortages and took a job at a bomber factory in Middle River, Maryland, located just outside Baltimore City. After the war, she earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a master's degree in social work from Smith College, and began a twenty-nine year career as a mental health counselor in the District of Columbia. She married Nathan Miller in 1962.

In 1944, Nathan Miller left his hometown of Baltimore to join the Navy. After earning both bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Maryland in the early 1950s, Nathan began a career as an investigative reporter, first for the Evening Capital in Annapolis, Maryland and then the Baltimore Sun. He joined the Sun staff in 1954 as a police reporter, but soon worked his way up the newsroom hierarchy. As a seasoned journalist, he covered Latin American affairs from the Sun's bureau in Rio de Janeiro and worked as a political correspondent in Washington, D.C. In the mid-1960s, he made a difficult decision and left his job with the Sun to pursue his dream—studying and writing American history—with the full support of his wife Jeanette.

To those who knew him, Nathan possessed an insatiable curiosity and an infectious love of history that inspired his work and those around him. Throughout his life Nathan never lost that passion and, with the publication of Sea of Glory in 1974, he began a successful career as a historian in his own right. His second book, The U.S. Navy: A History (1977), expanded upon the success of the first. As the author of more than fifteen books over the next three decades, Nathan's interests expanded well beyond naval history to encompass a wide range of topics: including the life of President Theodore Roosevelt, a history of political corruption in the United States, and a book on the 1920s. A four-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, Nathan Miller was a gifted storyteller, a patient scholar, and a vocal advocate of history's importance to the present.

Together, the Millers demonstrated extraordinary support and enthusiasm for the University and for the Center's work. Drawing a lesson from Nathan's own success at capturing readers' attention, their interest in the Center for Historical Studies developed from a conviction that professional historians had not done enough to make their work accessible to a wider audience. The Center presented an opportunity to bridge the divide between academic historians and a public eager to learn more about the past. Today, the Millers' steadfast patronage is honored and remembered by the annual Nathan and Jeanette Miller Lecture in American History and Public Affairs and by the continuing effort to enhance the study of history through the Center that now bears their name.


top of page

historycenter@umd.edu
2115 Francis Scott Key Hall
College Park, MD 20742-7315 USA

main: 301.405.8739
fax: 301.314.9399