History, B.A.

“Around 85% of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 haven’t been invented yet.”¹This has implications for college students; first, it is likely that over the course of a lifetime, you may have several different careers. Second, if that is true, then organizing your studies around specific training for a single narrowly focused job may be a mistake. The more intelligent option requires you to graduate with a skill-set that allows you to adapt to new employment opportunities as they arise. You need…

Memory skills, allowing you to recognize and recall information relevant to a given problem;

Research skills, allowing you to seek out additional evidence from a variety of perspectives against a background of societal information;

Empathy skills, allowing you to better understand other peoples’ reasoning, values, and situations in this rapidly globalizing world.

The History B.A. is ideally suited to delivering this skill-set to diligent students. History is about memory; in learning so much about the past, your abilities of selection and recall are greatly expanded. Moreover, in pursuing a History degree you research across a great variety of historical sources; this continually asks you to make connections among different types of evidence. Finally, no other major immerses you so deeply in the experiences of peoples “unlike” yourself. You learn to understand societies of the past, and this enhances your ability to work with peoples in the present-an invaluable skill for 21^st-century careers.

Studying the past gives you the skills you need today and will need tomorrow. Someone you may have heard of put it quite well:

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

–Steve Jobs, 1996

Career opportunities with a History degree include the following:

Appointive or elective political office
Business careers, from insurance analysists, to project managers and public relations, to banking
Congressional staffing, including legislative-assistant work
Historical society archivists and preservationists
Law and legal affairs, whether law school, paralegal work, or litigation support
Library science careers
Media careers, ranging from documentary and scholarly editing to journalism, to television
Museum curating and educating
Teaching, through certification in social studies education

There are many more: you may wish to see the series “What to do with a B.A. in History,” published regularly by the American Historical Association at https://tinyurl.com/ya5rtesa. Or just contact the History faculty!

^{1. Dell Technologies, “Emerging Technologies’ Impact on Society and Work in 2030,” July 12, 2017, accessed 6 Nov. 2018, http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/realizing-2030-dell-technologies-research-explores-the-next-era-of-human-machine-partnerships/}

General Education Requirements (39-42 sem. hrs)

For a complete list of general education courses click here . For additional information on general education requirements click here .

Ethics Course Requirement (3 sem. hrs)

PHIL 330 - Ethics 3 hours

Foreign Language Requirement (6 sem. hrs)

For information on how to fulfill the foreign language requirement click here .

Multicultural Requirement (3 sem. hrs)

All courses that meet this requirement can be found here .

Core Requirements (18 sem. hrs)

All must be completed with a grade of C or higher. Courses in the major cannot be taken Pass/Fail.

History Electives (21 sem. hrs)

Global History Emphasis (9 sem. hrs)

Students will take 9 credit hours of courses in the Global History emphasis:

United States History Emphasis (9 sem. hrs)

Additional Major Area Electives(3 sem. hrs)

Students will take one 300- or 400- level history elective of their choosing. For this category, History majors are especially encouraged to explore History Internships, HIST 399 or HIST 499 .

Other Electives (28-31 sem. hrs)

Total: 120 (sem. hrs)

The total reflects the minimum number of hours to obtain a bachelor's degree. Some courses listed above may fulfill more than one requirement block. Please speak to your academic advisor to plan your specific degree path.

Note (s):

HIST 494 - Senior Seminar in History 3 hours is the culminating evaluative course that assesses the outcomes of the major. Students (majors) must pass the course with a grade of C or higher prior to graduation.

* Course meets multicultural graduation requirement

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