He convinced Goldwin Smith to leave his comfortable post at Oxford and travel across the Atlantic to rural, upstate New York.

[3] Also in 1884, Professors White and Charles Kendall Adams founded the American Historical Association with a handful of other leading historians of the day and both would later serve as its president.

Other Cornellians to head the American Historical Association include faculty members Carl L. Becker and Mary Beth Norton, as well as alumni Robert Roswell Palmer and William Leuchtenburg.

Adams notably did not interview the older Moses Coit Tyler, current department chairman, or Herbert Tuttle, an associate professor, to much annoyance of Taylor and the faculty in general.

[6] In September 1932, Cornell revived the White School by moving the two disconnected departments to Boardman Hall, allocating space for three classrooms, administrative offices, and graduate student areas.

[11] The French government awarded Steven Kaplan the Ordre national du Mérite and named Henry Guerlac Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.

The Onion, a parody newspaper, featured an article about fictional History Department professor Wallace Schroeder on September 9, 1997, titled "Byzantine Empire Will Fall To Turks, Historian Warns".

[15] The department's first faculty included university president Andrew Dickson White and English historian Goldwin Smith.

[1] Three of Cornell's twelve presidents have been members of the department: Andrew Dickson White, Charles Kendall Adams, and Hunter R. Rawlings III.

The longest teaching member of the faculty was Frederick Marcham who, upon completing his graduate work at Cornell in 1924, continued lecturing until a month before his death in 1992 – a total of 68 years.