Facilities

The Department of History is in Wooten Hall on the southeastern edge of the university campus. Most classrooms and faculty offices are in Wooten Hall. In the same building is the History Help Center, staffed by paid graduate students and designed to provide advice and tutoring for undergraduates enrolled in history courses. The Kingsbury-Thomason Departmental Library, available to students and faculty, includes thousands of books (including many standard reference works) on various aspects of history.

The Department has a copier in WH 226 that Teaching Fellows can use to make instructional copies/prints.

The University Libraries include the Willis Library, the Sycamore Library, the Media Library, and the Music Library. These facilities contain about two million printed books, periodicals, maps, documents, microforms, audio-visual materials, music scores, and electronic media. The Willis Library houses the general collection, and many special collections. Research holdings directly relevant to graduate study in history include the Oral History Collection, federal and state documents, microfilmed papers of U.S. presidents and other important figures, Texas newspapers, U.S. census records, service records of soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, a large collection of U.S. State Department papers, parliamentary records of the larger European nations, Captured German Documents (1867-1945), British Cabinet Records (1868-1945), major European newspapers, documents on the Nuremberg trials of the 1940s, the Bexar Archives collection on microfilm, sixty-seven volumes of unedited documents relating to the Spanish empire in the western hemisphere, and other collections.

The Oral History Collection, one of the oldest and largest in the nation, contains more than 1,400 bound volumes. Taped and transcribed interviews focus on the political, cultural, and business history of Texas, the Pacific theater of World War II, local African-American history, and various other local and regional topics. Numerous books and articles have been based on materials in the Oral History Collection, especially works on World War II and twentieth-century U.S. politics.

Graduate students also have access to several other major libraries and institutions in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, including Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum, the Southwest Branch of the National Archives, the Dallas Public Library, the Dallas Historical Society, and the libraries of numerous colleges and universities in the area.