David Quigley (History)

Promoted to associate professor with tenure

Ph.D., New York University

Faculty member since 1998

Specialization: 19th-century U.S.; Civil War and Reconstruction, race and American democracy; urban history; the 19th-century Atlantic world

Representative publication: Second Founding: New York City and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (Hill & Wang, 2003)

“There’s a quote by W.E.B. Du Bois that explains both the book I’ve finished and the one I’m writing right now: ‘The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and world implications.’ I’m working on an international history of the American Civil War, reading newspaper coverage and the paper trail of individual lives on all parts of the globe in the 1860s and 1870s. I volunteer to teach the modern history core class, and I hook it to questions of America’s place in the world. It’s disorienting to start talking about the Civil War in relationship to the Taiping Rebellion, for example, but I try to convey the sense that to get at world history, you’ve got to put all of these into conversation with each other. In an age where publishers are not putting out many academic books, historians have a special place, because our domain is basically telling stories.”