How to Get the Most From Your History Major

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History is unlike many academic disciplines in lacking a mandatory formulaic sequence of required courses that provide the essential information and techniques for practicing that discipline. For better or worse, its subject is virtually infinite. Historians learn their craft by exposing themselves to a wide range of past times, places, and processes to educate their intuitions and hone their ability to ask probing questions.

Although this can be frustrating for students who prefer a tidy, well-defined body of information and rules to master, this open-ended quality of historical knowledge is precisely what makes history so endlessly fascinating. There is nothing that cannot become grist for the historian's mill, so the more wide-ranging a historian's curiosity becomes, the better able that person is to make sense of the complexities and nuances of the world. As a result, few majors give students more choices and greater flexibility in the topics they study.

The baccalaureate history major requires broad exposure to different geographical regions and different periods of world history. At UW-Madison, history majors are required to take at least some courses in U.S. history, European history, and the history of another major region of the world. They are likewise required to take courses in both modern and pre-modern periods. Any student seeking the best possible training as a history major should embrace the study of widely differing places and periods not because it is required, but because the more different the places and periods we study, the more we realize how different our own historical experience has been from that of other human beings who have lived before us.

An ideal history major involves not just broad exposure to different times and places, but a deeper exploration of a more limited time, place, or approach to historical knowledge. Toward this end, history majors are encouraged to take a cluster of courses all centering on a given place (France or China, for instance) or a given time (classical Rome or colonial America, for instance) or a given aspect of human experience (the history of religion or politics or race, for instance) or a given human group (Jewish history or American Indian history or the history of women, for instance). By taking several courses at intermediate and advanced levels that share a common analytical thread, history majors deepen their understanding and learn how to ask better informed and more rigorous questions that can then serve as models for rigorous thinking in domains very far afield from the focus of those particular courses

History majors are also required to gain key methodological experiences that demonstrate the practice of history, the ways in which scholars take the raw material of the past—primary documents—and assemble those documents into the arguments and stories of which history is constructed. An ideal history major should learn at quite a deep level the ways in which history is made by the act of asking questions and interpreting the past so as to improve our understanding in the present. No history major should graduate from college without having had at least some experience doing original research in primary documents.

Indeed, the ideal history major—as defined by the History Department's rules for "Honors in the Major," and which even non-Honors students should consider as an option—should consider performing one or more original pieces of historical research in a seminar or as an independent project or as a capstone senior thesis. Nothing makes history come alive more vividly than framing an important research question, researching that question by gathering relevant documents, assembling those documents into arguments, and finally presenting one's findings in clear, compelling, rigorous prose. As a capstone experience, the senior thesis in history can become an extraordinary rite of passage in which the student majoring in history finally realizes how rich, how complicated, and how creative the act of trying to understand the past truly is.

One final point. Because history studies all past human experience, it is an ideal major if one's goal is to seek a broad liberal education. Most courses one takes in college have important historical elements if only one remembers to look for and keep track of them. Courses in philosophy or art history or foreign languages or comparative literature, courses in sociology or political science or economics or women's studies, courses in geology or biology or physics: not one of these is irrelevant to history. An ideal history major turns the entire undergraduate curriculum into an integrated search for an ever widening and deepening understanding of the human past.

It would be hard to imagine a more exciting or rewarding intellectual adventure.