In October 1989 the Department of History announced a new multi-year fellowship program for graduate students in order to professionalize graduate education and recruit teaching assistants for fields such as Latin American, Soviet and Japanese history. Student...

In the spring of 1969 the first course on African-American history was taught at Columbia by a young instructor called Eric Foner. It was a volatile time in the university’s history [see 1968], and with growing numbers of African American students and others...

During the 1968 demonstrations at Columbia, students at the department of history called for the creation of a joint Faculty-Student Committee. “We propose that a permanent bipartite student-faculty committee be created whose decisions on policy are to be binding,”...

Women had been hired for full-time professional appointments in the department only from the late 1960s. Marcia Wright, a scholar of East Central Africa, was the first woman to be hired as an assistant professor of history in 1967. Nina Garsoian, who taught at the...

Nina Garsoïan (1923-), Gevork M. Avedissian Professor Emerita of Armenian History and Civilization. Garsoian taught at Columbia from 1962 and was the first female professor to receive tenure in the department in 1969 where she taught until she retired in 1993. She is...