The Department of History is committed to excellence in research, teaching, and community service. We are dedicated to fostering a vibrant intellectual community at the University of Kentucky.

We train our students to appreciate the significance and relevance of the past in order to understand the varied and diverse historical creators of the present.  We emphasize the development of critical faculties, including the identification of historical problems, their contextualization, and the ability to interpret, synthesize, and analyze historical texts and sources. We also train them in a variety of historical methodologies and information technologies. We are privileged to have an outstanding resource in The William T. Young Library of which we and our students make excellent use. We engage students in our own production of knowledge not only to learn that process but also to recognize the responsibilities inherent in the writing of history.

We are committed to teaching students how world events have affected Kentucky and how what transpires in Kentucky has global implications. Our research, teaching, and community service not only serve the Commonwealth of Kentucky but also the United States. Our work as scholars, teachers, and students also enhances historical and contemporary knowledge about regions and countries as far afield as Brazil, Mexico, and the Caribbean, China, Japan, Britain, Western Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Union, and Southern Africa.