Studying History at Dartmouth

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.