American Civil war period or world war 2 period
For the Civil War, Gettysburg College is very strong.
I think undergrad is way too early for specialization in a specific area of history. Undergrad is for developing some measure of breadth within a field, and any undergrad major would have to take classes in a variety of historical areas. It’s fine to go to a good well-rounded university that has a specialization in a particular area if there are other reasons you might want to go there, but college is not grad school - you don’t have to pick a college on the basis of their offerings in a specific niche area of history.
Yes, any undergraduate history program will have requirements that impose a certain amount of breadth within the discipline. On the other hand, not every history department will have people focussed on the historical topics a particular individual is interested in. So it makes sense to look for schools where there are faculty who are interested in the things you’re already interested in, even as you recognize that your interests are likely to change. And history is a field where first-rate faculty, end up in all sorts of places (i.e. not just the Ivies).
So rather than tell a HS senior who wants to prove s/he can do excellent work in history that s/he is aiming too high (and suggest that s/he choose a college based on a host of non-academic factors or the best/most well-rounded school that routinely accepts kids with similar stats), why not start from academic interests, generate a list of schools whose history departments would support them and THEN sort through that list using other criteria (such as support for kids with LDs, availability of other interesting programs if you decide not to major in history, cost, likelihood of admission, etc.)
While an excellent approach for a prospective graduate student, that is precisely backwards for a prospective undergraduate.
US history is the dominant field in nearly every American history department. About 1/3 of new faculty openings are in US history, and 50-60% are in US and European history combined. Due to the extreme overproduction of history PhDs, especially in US history (where the competition for jobs is nearly double that of any other history subfield), one can find solid history programs at nearly every good college. The list of decent history programs is many, many times longer than for other majors like, say, classics or biological anthropology.
Also keep in mind that senior surveys have shown that ~65-70% of college students change their majors, often more than once – and the OP is still two years away from college! There is a very real chance that (s)he may pursue a different path in college. Many college students are surprised to develop an interest in something they’d never been exposed to before college, like geography, anthropology, or geology. So many high schoolers are “sure” they want to do pre-med or study engineering or creative writing in college, only to change course once they’re there.
Starting with the “non-academic factors” and then narrowing down the list based on the attractiveness of their history programs allows some flexibility should a student decide to pursue another major. It also makes it easier to compose a list thanks to search engines such as [IPEDS[/url], [url=College Search - BigFuture | College Board]College Board](College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics), and [url=http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_search/]CC[/url]. Using engines like these and then analyzing history programs is more much likely to lead to a good list than attempting to compile a list of good history programs, which is highly unlikely to be even remotely complete. The same goes for any student with vague interests in a popular field like English or biology.
I’d make an exception for kids with an interest in specialized disciplines – ancient Egyptian history or medieval Russian history, say – which would require some courses and languages that aren’t widely offered. A student interested in the more popular history subfields, however, should have no problems whatsoever finding a decent program.
I’d rather encourage kids to look for exciting academic programs in decent social/climatological/cultural
environments than to look for decent academic programs in exciting social environments. I agree that, in choosing a university, undergrads should hedge their academic bets in ways grad students need not (and usually cannot), but it’s still an education you’re seeking and, from that perspective, equally decent/solid programs are unlikely to be equally interesting to a particular student. A department that has excellent early American history may have little or nothing that appeals to someone who is fascinated by WW2. My take is find a best-case scenario for studying the thing you’re interested in – embedded in a university that has lots of other programs that look interesting to you as well. That way you can switch majors, but if you do, you’ll be trading up (to something you like even better than the thing you thought you’d like best) rather than abandoning a program that wasn’t a good fit to begin with.