Graduate Certificate in History (Online)

Dr. Allen is a nationally recognized expert on American slavery and the Constitution, having written an important book and several articles on the Taney court and its infamous Dred Scott ruling. Dr. Allen teaches courses on the Antebellum South, Slavery and the Law, American Legal history and various courses in nineteenth-century U.S. history.

Dr. Beilakowski Alexander M. Bielakowski is a former U.S. Army Reserve officer who has published on such diverse topics as the final years of the U.S. horse cavalry in the 1920s-30s, African Americans in World War II, and Dwight D. Eisenhower as the first commander of NATO. He spent more than decade educating military officers at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal U.S. Military History Review.

Dr. Case explores working-class history with a special emphasis on social and cultural history. Her book, The Great Southwest Strike and Free Labor (2010) reconstructed a major railway strike of the Gilded Age. This helped to build and then undermine the first mass organization of industrial workers in US history. Her work on this topic delved into the working lives of "railroadmen," the racial hierarchies and alliances involved in strike organizing, and the context for and debates around industrial violence. Her new area of interest is the history of race and labor in the early twentieth-century South centering on black working-class protest in WWI-era and postwar Texas.

Dr. Chism is a religious scholar who specializes in African American Religious History. His research explores the intersection between religion, race, and politics and seeks to enhance understanding of diverse ways African American religious groups and figures have pursued social justice and transformation in the twentieth century. His dissertation provides a critical history of Church of God in Christ (COGIC) members' engagements in the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis, Tennessee and dispels some scholars' assumption that black Pentecostals' religious beliefs prohibited them from being involved in the Movement. Besides preparing the dissertation for publication, he is interested in continuing to do descriptive work and to use historical, sociological, and theological methods to examine how African American religious groups have endeavored to address post-Civil Rights social concerns such as the "mass incarceration" of blacks and other ethnic minorities in Penal Institutions in the United States.

Dr. Preuss is an associate professor of History. His research focuses on the history of public education in Texas and the nation. His book, To Get a Better School System: One Hundred Years of School Reform in Texas” (2009). He and former US Secretary of Education Lauro F. Cavazos, Jr., co-authored A Kineño’s Journey: On Family, Learning, and Public Service (2016). He teaches courses on US, Texas, the American West, Mexican-American, and African-American history. He is active in state, regional, and national history organizations.

Dr. Ryden's research interest focuses upon slavery in the age of Revolution. He is author of the internationally recognized book, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition (2009), which challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the political and economic motivations behind the final decision to abolish the British slave trade in 1807. He has made presentations on slavery and abolition at a number of centers for Atlantic World research, including the John Carter Brown Library (Brown University), Columbia University, the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), Oxford University, the University of Minnesota, and, most recently, the University of the West Indies, Mona.