About the Major

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. Like the other social sciences, it has established methods of investigation and proof, but it differs from them in that it encompasses, potentially, every area of human culture from the beginning of recorded time. Like the other humanities, it uses ordinary language and established modes of telling its stories, but it is constrained by evidence left us from the past. Education in history aims to produce students who can identify and analyze historical problems, interpret difficult bodies of evidence, and write clearly, even eloquently.

Of course, you have to know a lot about some area of the past to be a historian at all. For students entering the major before January 1, 2013, the History Department has defined six areas (concentrations) in which you may acquire this knowledge. Two are geographically defined: Europe and the United States. The others are thematically conceived and cut across geographical boundaries: intellectual history; religion and history; gender and history; and worlds, empires, and encounters. In addition, a student may construct his or her own concentration with the advice and consent of an advisor. The requirements of a concentration are met by taking six history courses that fall under its purview. Breadth is encouraged by the requirement that everyone take at least two courses outside the concentration and one course in the history of the world before the great transformation wrought by industrialization. Students declaring the major in history after January 1, 2013, will follow a different path through the major, identifying and completing two focused modules of four courses each.  These modules may be selected from the list approved by the department faculty (see the Requirements for History Major page, below) or may be created by the student, with the approval of the major advisor.  More intensive work in short periods or special problems is done in at least three seminars, one of which (HIST362) is devoted specifically to introducing the varieties of contemporary historiography and the variety of methods and concepts that historians have worked out to understand the past.

Finally, and most important, the department asks everyone 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 80 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 an advanced seminar.