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Founded in 1894, the History Department has long offered one of the most
popular majors and course selections in the undergraduate College. While
relatively few students come to Dartmouth intending to concentrate in History,
the stimulating experience they have in the History courses they encounter
translates into healthy enrollments and a major that consistently hovers among
the top handful in the College.
History traditionally has stood at the heart of Dartmouth's emphasis on the
liberal arts. Our curriculum broadly international in its reach and deep in
its chronological perspective serves to prepare society's future citizens and
leaders to understand the world in which they live, its historical development
and inter-relatedness. History helps students appreciate their place within
that world, and hence something about who they are and what makes them tick.
Not surprisingly, History achieves special relevance during periods of global
crisis and uncertainty, as young people grapple with the confusing and
troubling events of the day.
Some of our graduates go on to enrich our profession. The Department
currently has former majors pursuing advanced degrees at Berkeley, Brown,
Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Stanford, Virginia and
Wisconsin among other graduate schools and former students teach in some of
the most prestigious universities here and abroad. Yet most of the students
drawn to our courses have no interest in becoming historians. Instead, they go
on into careers in business and the professions, embracing any number of
interesting experiences and occupations along the way. Wherever they end up,
our graduates find continuing value in what they learned in our courses we
know this because they stay in touch and tell us so.
The breadth of our discipline's appeal is understandable. The perspective of
History has practical use as a mode of thinking and inquiring with everyday
applications. The things historians do in exploring the complex relationships
between causes and consequences, in adducing explanations that best fit the
evidence, in constructing and articulating nuanced arguments not only can
have enormous importance in one's daily life, but also in whatever world of
practical affairs one happens to inhabit. Students necessarily develop skills
of critical thinking and analysis that include awareness of sources, contexts,
interrelations and interactions, comparisons and contingency. Students in our
more advanced courses also come to appreciate History as an empirically based
discipline that operates within historiographical traditions appreciating,
indeed, that History itself has a history. All our students are required to
develop bibliographic research skills in varying degrees, and quite a few apply
them to independent projects of impressive scope and sophistication. Finally,
History at Dartmouth is writing-intensive. The skills honed in writing many
papers that are thoroughly critiqued by faculty who care about style as well as
substance can be applied in any walk of life where persuasiveness and clarity
of expression are valued.
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