Major program: History is not a body of facts to be transferred from the erudition of a professor to the memory of a student. It is a way of understanding the whole of the human condition as it has unfolded in time. Education in history aims to produce students who can identify and analyze historical problems, interpret difficult bodies of evidence, and write clearly and eloquently. Each History major chooses a field of concentration, and within the concentration chooses a faculty adviser.

Concentrations: Worlds, Empires & Encounters; European; Gender and History; Intellectual History; Religion and History; United States
The department asks everyone to try their hand at real historical research and writing. This may take the form of a senior thesis (required to graduate with honors; typically at least eighty pages long, requiring a two-semester research tutorial); a senior essay (roughly half the length, in a one-semester research tutorial); or a research paper submitted as part of the work in a course.

Sample Courses: World History: The Long Civil rights Movement in 20th-Century America; Modern Europe; From Clay Tablet to the iPad: History of the Book in Intercultural Perspective; Inside Nazi Germany, 1933-1945; Japan and the Atomic Bomb in Historical Perspective

Number of Professors: 35

For more information, visit the Department Homepage .

Brendan Larkin

History Major, Class of '09

Thesis Abstract: Improved telegraph connections and printing technology, expanded foreign bureaus, and increased circulation coalesced to make the mid-1870s the zenith of newspaper influence in Great Britain. These changes in mass media coincided with the Bulgarian massacres in May of 1876, perpetrated primarily by irregulars in the Ottoman Empire's army against Bulgarian Christians. From June to October, the British public, led by the press, formed a passionate agitation movement against the Ottoman state as well as their own government for its lack of transparency and its support for the unchanging, repressive Sultanate. This thesis studies the impact of the "The Times," the most prominent British paper, on directing public opinion, driving public outrage, and ultimately, influencing governmental policy, as the British government moved to finally abandon its deteriorating ally.