Bachelors in History

The past is fleeting, passed down to us often only in fragmentary form. Whether that material consists of published accounts, personal diaries, eyewitness chronicles, or shards of pottery, the task of historians is to arrange these remnants into meaningful patterns based on the evidence at hand. The questions which guide historians pattern-making change in response to the exigencies of the present; yet, even as the questions change, historians seek to use this material to understand the nature of causality and change and continuity across time and geography. As interpreters of the past, they connect one account with another and identify the relationship between these particulars and the cosmic, as a great scholar once said. To study history is thus to make it. History majors hone this craft as researchers and writers, and they do so in the classroom, among other scholars, and as members of the community at large.