Curricular Goals
Curricular Goals
(Revised Fall 2025)
History majors will be broadly trained in careful reading, rigorous analysis, effective writing, and oral communication. Our courses expose students to many places and times, allowing them to develop expertise in a few regions, epochs, or comparative themes. We have four curricular goals with related learning outcomes:
Curricular Goal 1: Students will acquire substantial and substantive knowledge of the past.
Learning outcomes:
- Students can describe the major events, structures, and forces that have shaped a past.
- Students can describe a particular past through different perspectives.
- Students can summarize a historian’s main ideas and arguments about a specific place
and time period. - Students can identify the relevant historical context for understanding a phenomenon in
the past.
Curricular Goal 2: Students will acquire a conceptual understanding of history as a scholarly
discipline.
Learning outcomes:
- Students can describe a historical argument.
- Students can critically evaluate the use of evidence, i.e., fact and interpretation, in the
construction of a historical argument. - Students can recognize the provisional nature of all historical arguments.
- Students can articulate a scholarly debate about contrary views about respective pasts.
Curricular Goal 3: Students will acquire the professional skills necessary for independent
historical research and writing.
Learning outcomes:
- Students can situate a historical argument within a field of historiographic debate.
- Students can conduct historical research.
- Students can contextualize and interpret primary sources.
- Students can integrate historiographic issues raised in secondary literature with their
own analysis of primary source documents. - Students can effectively communicate historical arguments and research.
Curricular Goal 4: Students will acquire a sense of the perspective that historical study provides.
Learning outcomes:
- Students can describe a historical process, i.e., change over time.
- Students can articulate the role of contingency and the complexity of causes in events
and conditions of the past. - Students can recognize the roles of structures and human agency in the production of a
past. - Students can identify important categories of analysis for understanding the diversity of
perspectives, relations, and conditions in the past.