The University of South Carolina at Columbia is putting a new face on its history department. In the last three years, the department has hired a slew of well-known scholars - eight in all - and it is busily carving out a niche for itself as a leader in Southern and African-American history.

This fall, one of the biggest names in the business arrived on the campus: Dan T. Carter, formerly of Emory University. His was a surprising move in historical circles, to say the least. Mr. Carter, an award-winning historian of the South, abandoned an endowed professorship at a higher-ranked, wealthier university for a job at an institution still struggling to edge its way into the lofty circles of the Association of American Universities.

But for Mr. Carter, the challenges of the job were part of its appeal. "I felt a kind of excitement about this place, that something was happening here," the historian explains.

He may be right. In 1998, South Carolina persuaded Patrick J. Maney to leave Tulane University for the history chairmanship in Columbia. His mandate: to transform his new realm into a top department. He quickly made an offer to Valinda W. Littlefield, a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Littlefield, who focuses on African-American teachers in the rural South, was an attractive hire in her own right. But it didn't hurt that she was married to Daniel C. Littlefield, a senior scholar at Illinois who wrote a path-breaking book on slavery in the colonial period. South Carolina snapped up the pair, and narrowly staved off an attempt last year by Illinois to lure them back.

Mr. Maney also landed another top junior scholar: Bobby J. Donaldson, a student of Dan Carter's at Emory. Mr. Donaldson, who studies the African-American intelligentsia in late-19^th-century Georgia, passed up an endowed chair at Davidson in favor of the South Carolina post.

Scholars of the South are not the only notable additions to the department. Page Putnam Miller, a well-known Washington lobbyist for historians, recently signed on to teach public history. And freshly minted doctoral recipients, including Anna Krylova, a historian of modern Russia from the Johns Hopkins University, and Karl G. Gerth, an expert on China from Harvard University, have also joined the star-studded line-up.

But, naturally, Mr. Carter - who earned his undergraduate degree at South Carolina - remains the biggest feather in the university's cap. In fact, Mr. Carter, who has been approached during the last few years by Yale University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was so eager to return to his alma mater that he did not even let Emory make a counteroffer.