William G. Thomas III

William G. Thomas III is the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He currently serves as the Chair of the Department of History and is a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

As a Guggenheim Fellow he will be working on a book called A Question of Freedom: The Ordeal of an American Family in the Age of Revolution, chronicling the history of a mixed-race family over four generations in Maryland and their one-hundred-year struggle to become free from slavery. Using legal records to reveal family and kinship networks of early Washington, D.C., and Prince George’s County, he will also produce a series of experimental digital essays titled One Hundred Years an Enslaved Family. These essays will burrow into the historical record to explore how we know what we know about family histories and why we need moral imagination to confront what we find in the past.

Thomas’s research and writing endeavor to demonstrate the full capability of digital scholarship to give voice to people whose lives have been out of reach and to send their histories into the public and scholarly realms through digital media. He served as the co-founder and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, where he was an assistant and associate professor of history in the Corcoran Department of History. He was a co-editor the award-winning digital project, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. With Edward L. Ayers, he co-authored “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” one of the first pieces of digital scholarship published in the American Historical Review. In 2008 he was awarded a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and he has received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also published essays in Civil War History, The Journal of Historical Geography, The New York Times, EDUCAUSE Review, and Inside Higher Education. His previous books include The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (Yale University Press, 2011), a shortlist finalist in 2012 for the Lincoln Prize. Thomas is a graduate of Trinity College (Connecticut) and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. He currently serves on the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Follow this link to the Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War.

Follow this link to “The Differences Slavery Made.”

Follow this link to Thomas’s current research project on the families who petitioned for freedom in Washington, D.C.