History Majors

juillet
Fri, 20 Mar 2015 20:17:17 +0000

As an undergraduate, you are not selecting (in most cases) a specialized program of study. It’s not like graduate school, where you’re selecting a department and will work closely with professors only in that department, rarely taking classes outside of it, and where your entire life kind of revolves around it. In undergrad, only about 1/3 of your required coursework happens in your major department; the majority are general education classes and electives that you will take in other programs and departments. That said, it’s probably a better idea to focus on the overall strength of the undergraduate education at X school - you can major in history pretty much anywhere, and a school with a strong undergrad program will likely have a strong history department.

The exception is if you have some sort of special interest that you are likely to maintain through college. For example, most colleges have strengths in modern American history and some measure of modern European history, with scattered coursework through other regional areas. But if you had a special interest in the history of some region - like Southern studies, East Asian history, or African history - you might want to look for schools that have those specializations (like Ole Miss, UNC, and Mercer for Southern history; Chicago, Yale, or Columbia for East Asian history; and a place like Wisconsin, Michigan, or Northwestern for African history). You might also be interested in the history of a certain period, like the colonial period, medieval history, or even ancient history. While again, remember, your job is not to specialize - you do at least want to make sure that your college has a few classes in the area in which you are interested. If you are interested in antiquity/ancient history, you might also want to be in a place that offers a classics major/department and significant coursework in Greek and Latin. Another special offering would be the history of technology and science, which is a special major or concentration offered at some schools.

With that said, the Midwestern large universities that have top history departments (measured on the graduate level, which doesn’t always completely overlap with undergrad quality) are most of the usual suspects - UChicago, Case Western, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Indiana, Ohio State, Loyola Chicago Wisconsin, Notre Dame, UIUC, Michigan State, Iowa, Purdue, Oklahoma, and Miami of Ohio (not necessarily in that order). If Pittsburgh is a nice middle ground, there’s also UPitt and Carnegie Mellon. But of course, any list of doctoral programs excludes places that don’t offer a doctoral degree in history. That includes places like Kent State, Xavier University, branch campuses of the major systems (like UW-La Crosse or UMN-Moorhead, Truman State University, and the College of St. Scholastica.

I also know that you said you wanted medium to large, but there are a bevy of excellent small liberal arts colleges in the Midwest - Carleton, Macalester, Oberlin, and Grinnell, but also St. Olaf, Denison, Wooster, Earlham, Lawrence, Kenyon, Kalamazoo and Beloit (also others I am leaving out).