British history has a long tradition at the University of Maryland. Currently it is taught by Professor Richard Price who specializes in modern British history, Julie Taddeo, who specializes in cultural history, and Sabrina Baron, whose field is early modern history. At the moment, our curricular emphasis does not permit any course offerings before the late fifteenth century. But we typically offer a full range of courses at the lower and upper levels for undergraduate students who are interested in studying Britain. At the graduate level, our training is concentrated on the modern period with a particular emphasis on the history of the British Empire.
Richard Price has his degrees from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. He is the author of many articles and papers in British social and labor history. His books include An Imperial War and the British Working Class 1899-1902 (London, 1972); Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control and the Rise of Labour in the Building Trades, 1830-1914 (Cambridge, 1980); Labour in British Society 1780-1980: An Interpretive History (London, 1986); British Society 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge, 1999). He is currently completing a book titled Encounters of Empire: the British and the Xhosa on the Eastern Cape Frontier 1820-1860 , which is about the creation of the British Empire in southern Africa.
Julie Anne Taddeo is visiting assistant professor of British history and director of the undergraduate internship program. She received her Ph.D. in History at the University of Rochester in 1996. She has taught history and women's studies at Temple University in PA (1996-2002) and at University of California, Berkeley, where she also was the Assistant Director of the Center for British Studies (2002-2005). Her publications include Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity (2002) and articles on British modernism, gender, and sexuality. Her current projects examine the relationship between identity, gender, and class in post-WWII British popular culture. Her teaching specialties include Victorian culture, the history of sexuality, Modern British and European social and cultural history, and women's/gender studies.
Sabrina Alcorn Baron holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has published on censorship, book collectors, the book trade, and news writing, as well as the history of reading and culture of publication in early-seventeenth-century England. Baron co-edited (with Brendan Dooley) The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001). Also in 2001 she was guest curator for the Folger Shakespeare Library Exhibition, The Reader Revealed , and compiled and edited the exhibition catalog of the same name. She wrote 13 biographies for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Baron was a Fulbright scholar in 1997-8 and has been awarded other fellowships, most recently at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is a co-founder and co-director of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies at the Library of Congress.
We offer a full range of survey and lecture courses in British history from the early modern period through to the present day. A recent addition to our program is a survey course on the history of the British Empire from the mid-sixteenth century to the twentieth century. Our survey courses fulfill the University's CORE requirement in Social and Political History or, in the case of HIST 233, the British Empire course, in Diversity. Our upper level courses that are offered periodically, as faculty schedules permit, take an in-depth look at particular periods or topics.
Courses offered on a regular basis include
HIST 233 Empire! The British Imperial Experience 1550-1997
HIST 235 History of Britain 1461-1714
HIST 236 History of Britain 1688 to Present
HIST 426 Age of Industry. Britain: 1760-1914
HIST 427 Age of Decline. Britain 1914-Present
HIST 430 Tudor England
HIST 431 Stuart England
Undergraduates focusing on British history may wish to spend a year or semester studying in Great Britain. Opportunities offered by Maryland include study aboard in Liverpool and London. More information can be found through the university's Study Abroad Office.
British history has proved a popular area for graduate students to concentrate in or to take as a minor field. Currently, we offer graduate training towards the PhD degree in the modern period of British history and in the history of the British Empire. Students who wish to study modern British history and/or the Empire will have several options to ensure that they receive a full and comprehensive training. Highly qualified adjunct faculty are available to provide the necessary background in the early modern field, should that be part of the student's course of study. The field of British history is becoming progressively less internalist, and it is therefore increasingly important that students of British history embed their studies in a European or Empire context. With strong fields in European history and in some non-western areas of history, Maryland is well placed to provide this kind of training. The basic course for graduate studies is the seminar:
HIST 739 Readings in the History of Britain and the British Empire
Graduate students in the field may be interested in joining the North American Conference on British Studies, which holds conferences and offers a dissertation fellowship.
British history has a long lineage at the University of Maryland. Over the years, the various British history faculty have devoted close attention to the development of library resources. The result is that the University Libraries possess a very strong collection of secondary material in all fields and areas of British history. We also have some important primary collections, such as the Goldsmiths'-Kress Collection of Economic and Social Literature, 1600-1900 and the British Parliamentary Papers. The University of Maryland libraries are also increasingly providing access to web based digital collections.
The Washington area is richly endowed with resources for research and study in all fields of history. British history is certainly no exception to that. The Library of Congress ( holdings meet most of the needs for virtually any research topic in British history that could be imagined. And specialized libraries--ranging from the National Library of Medicine to the Wirtz Labor Library of the Department of Labor--only enhance the resources available at the Library of Congress. Students who wish to pursue Ph.D research, however, should expect to have to travel to Britain to consult primary documents that are only available in libraries in the United Kingdom.
