Department of
History

Surviving an Invasion during a Pandemic in the 14th Century

The people of Provence were undergoing multiple crises of war, famine, and plague in 1360. Their stories about a miracle woman, collected during an inquest considering her for sainthood in the Catholic church, helped them understand what was happening, and gave them ideas for how to recover from these devastating issues.  

Winter 2019/Spring 2020

Something You Won’t Find in the Archives

Most of us are looking for the wildlife, admiring the foliage, and navigating trails when we visit Rocky Mountain National Park. But for a group of CSU students in the Parks as Portals to Learning program, they’ve been challenged to look for – and document –  the park’s history.

Spring 2019

Building Maps of the Past with New Technologies

Robert Ower (’18) uses the research skills from history classes to build maps and create ‘mappable data’ for high tech industries. Ower’s path from work to college to a meaningful career reflects the maps that he makes with ArcGIS. Layers of skills, research, patience, effort and luck are the mappable data. His emerging career is a world of his own creation.

Winter 2018

Sharing the Lessons Learned during the 2013 Colorado Flood

What can a historian do in response to life-threatening flooding like we’ve seen in Northern Colorado? Quite a lot it turns out. By documenting the communication, cooperation, and activity of  disaster responders, historians capture the knowledge and information-sharing process that is so crucial to future response and recovery.

Spring 2018

Family, Culture, and French Immersion in Cajun Country

A new documentary film, Theo’s Choice/Le Choix de Theo, by assistant professor Thomas Cauvin takes viewers into French immersion classrooms of southwest Louisiana and explores the complex history of French in the Cajun culture.

Winter 2017

Bringing communities together through memories, stories, and the National Park Service

From Japanese American confinement camps to National Heritage Areas, Alex Hernandez brings communities together for historic preservation projects as an assistant program manager and historian for the National Park Service.

Spring 2017

Poppie Gullett Explores Public History in Antarctica

Poppie Gullet, master’s student in the public history program, writes about her experience doing field work in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.