History

Overview

The History Major at University of Southern California offers students a means to encounter the peoples and cultures of the past and develop critical thinking, research, and writing skills essential for understanding the present. The program exposes students to underlying connections between the study of past times and places and the roots of that study in human concerns about values, identities, issues, and policies.

In their lower-division courses, majors will have the opportunity to explore the histories of different cultures across time. Students at the upper-division level tailor their studies to a thematic, temporal, or geographic concentration in line with their own interests. While working in their concentration and across the major, students have an opportunity to reflect both on what historians do and how and why they do it.

The History Major at USC helps students both to explore the entirety of the human past and to shape a major that has personal and academic meaning.

History majors will demonstrate:

• Skill in evaluating individuals, societies, organizations, cultures, and cultural expressions on their own terms across time and space.

• Skill in reading texts, images, and artifacts.

• Ability to research and to evaluate evidence in historical context.

• Skill in critical thinking and expository writing based on logic and evidence.

• An understanding of how the knowledge, skills, and abilities acquired from historical studies make it possible to negotiate the contemporary world.

• Preparation for a wide variety of professions and post-graduate programs and professional schools.