About the History Department
History of the Carleton History Department, 1875-present
Alphabetical List of Faculty and Staff, 1875-present
Chronological List of Faculty Members and Staff, 1875-present
History Department Awards and Endowments
Career and Graduate School Opportunities in History: After Carleton
Advanced Placement (A.P.) and International Baccalaureate (I.B.) Credit
The field of history is at the core of liberal arts. It is concerned with the human condition in all of its manifestations in the past, and it relies heavily on reading and all forms of analytical and narrative writing. You will not be surprised, therefore, to learn that History is perennially one of the most popular majors at Carleton.
The discipline of history is unified not so much in its methodology as in its goal: the reconstruction of the past, of the ideas, actions and emotions of men and women in other times and places. Most faculty members and students are engaged in this enterprise for the sheer pleasure of it. It is fascinating to travel through the past, to visit wholly different civilizations and cultures. Please visit our Internet Resources Index for a variety of other sites to explore.
The goals are both to gain self knowledge and to broaden cultural horizons. The department faculty would like history students to gain a sense of their own cultural roots, but they also insist on a comparative perspective and some significant knowledge of the rich cultural diversity of the past. The department offers a broad range of courses not only in European and American, but also in East Asian, South Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern/Central Asian, and African history. Students are expected to get at least a taste of one of the non-western cultural traditions. Whenever possible, faculty encourage the use of foreign language in student research.
The backgrounds and interests of the members of the department reflect this insistence on diversity. Faculty members were educated at Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, Stanford, Yale, UCLA and Berkeley, University of Punjab, Seoul National University, and the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. They are active scholars in the fields of American, African-American, African, East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern/Central Asian, Latin American, Ancient, Medieval, British, French, German, and Russian history; they have published in Chinese, English, French, German, including translations from German and Russian.
Personal teaching styles and emphasis on different approaches to history (political, economic, social, intellectual, etc.) vary, but members of the department share important assumptions about teaching and learning history. They regard wide and critical reading as essential for a broadening of knowledge and experience, the ability to organize material and ask critical questions as vital for working with historical sources, and the skill of effective writing as the ultimate key to the enterprise. They rely on close faculty student interaction in class discussion and on individual teaching and advising to help foster the development of these skills. For more information about the History Department Faculty,
The History Department faculty members express these assumptions in the department program in several ways. The introductory course is a seminar in which an instructor and 15 to 18 students examine together a particular period or question of history to gain insight not only into a moment in the past, but also into the way historians think. Different sections of the freshman seminar deal with different topics (e.g., Conversion in Medieval Europe: Transforming Religious Identities, Partition of India, Slavery in the Ante-bellum U.S., German Revolutions of 1848, The Silk Road); but all stress reading, writing, and class discussion. By the end of the course, the seminar group has generally become a close community of learners.
The department requires no single course of study for history majors. However, we strongly recommend that all prospective majors, including those who had A.P. European or American history or I.B. coursework in high school (see A.P. and I.B. credit), take one of the seminars for first-year students. Thereafter we ask each student majoring in History to structure his or her major within a set of general requirements. Each student is expected to gain considerable depth and sophistication in the history of a civilization or region such as East Asia, Europe, Latin America, or the United States. The student is also asked to do coursework in the history of two other cultural areas. One of the student's three fields must focus on a non western civilization or region (i.e., non European and non-American) while another must examine Europe or the U.S.
Most courses in the History Department focus on particular nations (China, India, France, the U.S.) or social groups (women, African-Americans); but the department also encourages comparative and global approaches to the study of the human past. For example, a new junior seminar, "Studies in Traditional Societies," compares medieval and early modern European societies with traditional societies of the non western world. A course entitled "Disease and History" examines the impact of contagious disease on societies throughout the entire course of human history.
Each student's program will typically progress from an introductory seminar through the appropriate survey courses that introduce him or her to some of the larger fields of study (American, European, East Asian, South Asian, African, and Latin American history), to the third level of courses on shorter spans of national history (such as the French Revolution or the Chinese Revolution) or topical problems (such as American intellectual history or the peoples of central Asia). Every major takes part in our junior year colloquium on the methods and traditions of historical study. All majors take at least one research seminar in their junior or senior year. These seminars concentrate on the student's own research and the evaluation of his or her research and writing by the rest of the class. Finally, the senior comprehensive exercise gives the student the opportunity to reflect upon the central questions of his or her major either in a senior thesis or an interpretive essay.
Most members of the History faculty are fluent in at least one other language besides English, and several are native speakers of other languages. All have traveled extensively; most have done research outside the U.S. The department strongly encourages students to gain mastery of other languages and enthusiastically supports their travel and study in other countries. Many History majors participate in programs sponsored by Carleton or by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest that are located in the Czech Republic, France, Switzerland, Japan, India, Mali, Sri Lanka and Italy. Others join non-ACM programs located in a variety of other countries. Members of the History faculty sometimes lead seminars in Europe and Asia. For information about off-campus programs, see our Off-Campus Study page for programs and credit assessment information, and:
Carleton College Off-Campus Studies Office
In recent years, each graduating class has included about forty History majors; these young men and women have found their way into a great number of careers. Some go on to teach at the secondary level or to become professional historians; more follow careers in law and management; others choose professions such as the foreign service, medicine, public administration, or social work. For information about gathering recommendations, graduate programs, internships, the wide variety of career opportunities that exist for History majors, how and where to find jobs after Carleton, e-mail links to History major volunteer alumni consultants for advice about both graduate school and career opportunities, see After Carleton. We also have a Graduate School Index for History majors.
What our graduates find in their pursuit of further study and careers are the advantages of a strong liberal arts major in a rigorous academic program: a good foundation in our cultural tradition and in the cultural diversity of the past, and very strong skills in research, analysis and writing. The study of history at Carleton equips students with vital general professional skills and with broad cultural perspectives. They know where and how to find information quickly; they can cope effectively with large quantities of reading material; they can integrate ideas and information from a variety of sources; they can express themselves with clarity, economy, and elegance. Above all, however, they have gained a depth of intellectual curiosity and openness to the diversity of human cultural achievements that will enrich their lives.
