Major in History

Ideally, majors should take the History Core as freshmen. The sophomore year should include The Study and Writing of History seminar. Junior and Senior years should be used to complete the remaining requirements.

Upper-division electives (4000-level) and the senior colloquia (5000-level) are distinguished from 2000-level electives by their substantial reading and writing assignments.

There is no formal requirement to select a field of concentration but we encourage you to give some thought to the kinds of big questions you care about. That way, you can explore those questions as you pick your courses, which will bring coherence to your trajectory through the major.

Traditional ways of looking at history courses include time periods (eg, medieval, early modern), methods (eg, social, intellectual) or regions (eg, African, Latin American). In addition to thinking of your course selections in this way we also encourage you to select courses with a sense of the themes and concepts that interest you.

Some possible ways of thinking about thematic concentrations:

• The Power of Ideas
  ideas matter, can emerge in a variety of contexts, can emancipate and constrain, and appear in various media
• Political Economy, Law, and Social Order
  organization of economic life, capitalism, hierarchy, equality, the politics of human rights
• Power, Politics, and War
  nations and nationalism, mass violence and war, inequality and justice, imperialism
• Identities, Inequality and Justice
  society and the self, race, gender, class, sexuality, social movements and social change, civil rights and social justice
• Science, Health, Environment
  sciences old and new, humans and their environments, technology for better and for worse, medicine and global health
• Global Geographies
  oceans, urban history, migrations and diasporas, material culture
• Religion in Context
  world religions, pluralism past and present, religion and race/gender, Catholics and Jesuits

The Study and Writing of History is a course required for all history majors and open only to history majors. Ideally it is taken during the Sophomore year. Taught in sections of 13-15 students, this course serves as an introduction to history as an intellectual discipline. It is a three-credit course, where you will have the opportunity to do history for the first time. The course is demanding, requiring a significant commitment of time and energy. But the result is gratifying. You will research and write a major paper based on primary source research.

The course is designed to create a common understanding of historical method among our majors. After taking it, they should understand from practical experience:

• the difference between primary and secondary literature;
• how to find and evaluate primary sources;
• how to interpret and synthesize the many different works they read;
• how to generate a question to guide their research;
• how to refine the question as they learn more;
• how to compose an argument and organize a paper; and
• how to revise their work in response to the questions and criticism of other readers.

After taking the class, our students should know what historical scholarship is.

Because of the small class size, the students experience a great deal of interaction with their fellow students and, in particular, with their instructor, with whom they normally meet individually several times during the semester in addition to class meetings.

Guidelines require at least 30 pages of written work for the course, including a historiographical writing assignment and a major (normally 25-page) research paper submitted in both draft and revised forms.

Each section of The Study and Writing of History addresses these general historiographical concerns while focusing on a specific topic.

The department houses a chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society. Admission is open to all students who meet the basic criteria for admission: an overall B+ average (3.33) and a 3.5 average in history with at least four courses completed.

Each year, the faculty moderator of the Phi Alpha Theta chapter reviews the transcripts of junior and senior majors and invites students who qualify to join the society. There is a small admission charge, payable to the national organization. The Boston College chapter holds an annual induction ceremony for new members and elects officers who collaborate with the faculty moderator to organize various other activities. The chapter also confers an annual award for excellence in teaching to a member of the history faculty.

Sometimes students' transcripts fail to reflect their eligibility for Phi Alpha Theta (for example, because foreign study has temporarily given them an incomplete transcript), so seniors interested in joining might wish to contact the moderator by November 1.