History B.A.

At this critical moment, there are few majors more important to understanding the past, navigating the present, or imagining the future than history. History majors make sense of the world through the study of ancient times, the recent past, and everything in between. History majors are detectives, analysts, critical thinkers, and storytellers. Asking interesting questions about the past and examining a range of oral, written, visual, and material sources, history majors explore and explain how peoples across time and space have lived, loved, built community, warred, reconciled, and made sense of their worlds. Deep analysis invites new understandings of the past and the peoples, movements, ideas, technologies, and organisms propelling change. As much as history is a window into the past, it also helps us understand ourselves, our identities, and how we have come to inhabit the moral, ethical, social, economic, political, religious, national, environmental, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual communities we live in today. History helps us understand how our present and possible futures grow out of a very usable and interesting past.

History majors develop all of the skills required to thrive in today's world from an understanding of the engines of change and an ability to assess and interpret conflicting evidence and arguments, to robust oral and written communication skills that will allow you to shape the conversations in your professions and communities. History majors bring powerful skill sets into the world and many go into the legal and medical professions, become business people or scientists, are journalists and teachers, work in the civil or foreign service, run for office, or work in the arts or non-profit sector. Regardless of your career path, a history major will enable you to bring a fresh and critical historical perspective to the communities you live and work in. Historical thinking strengthens communities by encouraging them to think deeply about where they have come from and where they would like to go. This is an incredible time to declare a history major.

Many history majors are double majors. A history major is well paired with the study of political science, economics, sociology, psychology, global studies, journalism, education, foreign languages, biology, math, and engineering. History is a very popular double major due to the broad range of courses offered by our faculty. Students are invited to study local, national, comparative, and global histories, which fascinate them and frequently provide the type of deep contextualization that complements other areas of study.