When we examine the history of nursing, we take into consideration the broad components that affected its development: the labor market and labor laws, political issues of the day, the economy, religious and secular institutions and their influences on each other, gender relationships, and technological and scientific developments. We cannot just look at what happened, but rather we also need to explain how and why it occurred. At the same time, the complexities of health care and the knowledge explosion of the twenty-first century will bring new challenges to graduates of nursing and the health professions. This compels us as historians of nursing to develop, and to teach our students to develop, new ways of thinking about issues. This article argues for a broad historical approach that takes an interdisciplinary view into consideration as we do our work in nursing history. Indeed, there is great potential for interdisciplinary study. Anne Marie Rafferty, Jane Robinson, and Ruth Elkan point out that nursing history recognizes the inescapable social, political, economic, and cultural factors influencing nursing.1 In this way, nursing history is linked to the social sciences and the humanities. It also has connections to anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, ethnic studies, American studies, and women's studies. In his book, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Georg G. Iggers argues that the concept of unified historical development on which a grand of history can be based, with its confidence in progress, has broken down. Instead, historical narratives have found forms of expression that look more at power relationships, gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, and ideology. Invisible in the grand narrative are women's contributions, played out today in women's history, gender history, and feminist history.2 These disciplines all have implications for nursing. For example, to understand why women compose the major nursing workforce and why so many immigrants found nursing attractive, it is important to study women's and immigration history. At the same time, historians of nursing can provide valuable insights for other disciplines regarding how women negotiated in a male-dominated health care system and created opportunities to expand their autonomy and the nursing profession over time. Ethnic and immigration history can help us understand not only the lives of immigrant nurses but also the ways that different ethnic groups have been marginalized. This includes looking at the underlying links between immigration and public health. When historians study public health nursing, they can examine how society received immigrants in the past. Amidst the huge changes that immigration brought, nativist fears linked certain diseases to specific immigrants.3 Did Irish, Filipino, Japanese, or other immigrant nurses to the United States face these social prejudices? Historians of immigration have variously described the immigrant experience. Did immigrant nurses go through an uprootedness and alienation, as Oscar Handlin portrayed early immigrant experiences?4 Or a transplantation, as John Bodnar described? To Bodnar and others, immigrants brought their own institutions that aided them in fashioning a life for themselves.5 Finally, ethnic and immigration history help us understand changes in migrations and their global connections to the world. Another area of scholarship includes oral histories about nurses' work. Women's history, anthropology, and sociology have also seen the collection of oral histories as important to their disciplines. Using strategies from cultural history that involve greater attention to language, Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, assert that in analyzing the production of oral histories, the fields of speech communication and linguistics can be used. …