Everything and Everyone has a History
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Chart Your Own Path
Our program empowers you to explore your interests and passions within history and gives you the flexibility to pair the major with advanced language study, internships, study abroad experiences, undergraduate research, and community engagement.
Black Music
What is black music, and how do we know what we think we know about it? Examine musical creations pioneered by Africans and individuals of African descent over several centuries and across hemispheres.
Western Worlds: Ancient and Medieval Societies from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe
Explore Western societies from antiquity to the early modern age in western Asia, North Africa, and Europe; with an emphasis on cultural exchange, migration, and the transmission of knowledge, ideas, technologies, and arts.
American Environmental History
Learn the ways that "natural" forces have helped to shape American history; the ways that human beings have shaped, altered, and interacted with nature over time; and the ways that cultural, philosophical, scientific, and political attitudes toward the environment have changed from pre-history to the present.
Digital Documentary Publishing
Learn about the craft of publishing historical materials, with a special focus on how to publish the past in the digital age.
Modern Japanese History
Explore the history of the Japanese people, their social and cultural systems, politics, and economy, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.
Constructing Race in America
An interdisciplinary examination of the historical, cultural, and social dimensions of race and ethnicity in the United States.
Global History of Intelligence
Examine the role of both diplomatic and military intelligence in the political history of major global events and developments from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Middle East since World War I
Explore political-economic, social and ideological developments in Egypt, Arabia, and Fertile Crescent (including Israel), Iran and Turkey since 1918 to the present, including U.S. involvement.
History of the American West
Explore the history of the American West in the continental U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the process of annexation of Indigenous lands, colonization of Indigenous peoples and U.S. settler-colonialism on Indigenous lands.
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Conduct Your Own Research
Research is embedded in the history curriculum with an emphasis on transforming students from consumers of history to critical producers of it. All students have access to the resources of the second largest university library in the country.
Calendar
Alumni Spotlight: Clarence Lang (PhD 2004)
Clarence Lang is the Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. The below comments were obtained shortly after the completion of his PhD.