History

Giving Day contributions of every size make a major difference! Support the Department of History today or give to another area that helps the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

• Ready! Set! Give! Once 25 donors make a gift to the C.H. Johnson Memorial Endowment, a generous $25,000 gift from Leslie Giordani will be unlocked!
• Double your dollars! Dr. Marion White is matching donations to the History Department Annual Fund – up to $5,000!

Wayne State University's Department of History teaches students to think critically about the past and how it influences the present, conduct research, synthesize information and communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively. We are a research-intensive department with a strong profile in both scholarly publishing and the public humanities.

Our faculty specialties are loosely organized into three teaching and research clusters:

• Social and economic history (urban history, labor and working-class history, the history of Detroit, the history of capitalism and of work)
• Gender and women's history and the history of the family (gender ideology and constructions of femininity and masculinity, women and men in the past, family patterns and ideology)
• Political history (formal and social politics, state formation, foreign and domestic policy, law and legal culture, human rights)

Into each of these clusters is interwoven the history and historical construction of race and ethnicity. We also have a concentration of faculty members in the history of science, medicine, environment and technology.

• Gifts supporting the History Department Annual Fund help provide department-specific resources; expanding the department’s ability to support a wide range of College to Career and experiential learning opportunities, including: paid internships, awards for student travel to professional conferences, departmental events and programs, funding for student and faculty research, and more.
• Professor Christopher H. Johnson was a dedicated History department faculty member at Wayne State from 1965 until his retirement in 2003. Professor Johnson’s primary focus was French social and labor history, but he also developed expertise in labor history in the United States, focusing on labor in Detroit, Michigan. Created by his family, the purpose of the Christopher H. Johnson Memorial Fund is to provide support to WSU's History Department for expenses associated with academic research conducted by History Department faculty members, with a preference for research that pertains to subjects and areas of study similar or relevant to Professor Johnson's work.

Achieve your charitable goals and create your WSU legacy with a gift in your estate plan.

Wayne State faculty and staff can give via payroll deduction here.