Learning Goals in the History Major

The history major is one of the oldest recognized majors at Connecticut College. Its curriculum has long reached beyond Euro-America to include the histories of people and nations on all continents. In the past decade, the department has increasingly emphasized comparative, global, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspectives through new course development, faculty hiring, and thematic tracks in the major. We expect students to develop an awareness and critical understanding of both the universality and the particularity of human experience, including differentiating factors such as religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We also expect students to understand the development of structures of power and their consequences over time and space. Examples of these structures include patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism.

Students in the history major will learn to:

• Read primary and secondary sources critically. Critical reading includes the ability to identify the perspective of the author, the relationship between the author and the audience, and the author’s intended and unintended meanings. Students also learn to explain an author’s main argument and place it within the context of larger historiographic issues and/or a broader range of original sources when appropriate.
• Write clearly about historical topics, themes, and sources. Effective writing includes the ability to write both short well-argued response essays and longer research papers that incorporate primary and secondary sources derived from students’ own investigations. Some students choose a year-long honors project that requires extensive planning, conceptualizing, researching, and writing in close collaboration with a faculty advisor through an honors seminar.
• Conduct historical research by locating primary resources both in libraries and at local archives, and by using online research databases, interlibrary loan, and other scholarly repositories.
• Communicate ideas about readings and research orally to a group of peers and professors.