History

History as a discipline views the past from today’s vantage point, asking how experience guides us. The diverse material of history — documents, artifacts, historical contexts — calls for rigorous analysis expressed in cogent written and oral argument. Its study prepares students for employment and further study in a wide variety of professions, among them law, business, government, nonprofit management, library and museum leadership, and teaching.

Skills essential tocontemporary life are important products of the history major, but the curriculum of this department is more ambitious. It grounds students’ lives as well as their careers. Majors are educated to appreciate their own traditions and understand others. Their attention to politics, ideas, social structures, and economic systems informs their public contributions and their private choices. Just as we encourage Colorado College students to understand how their predecessors in this country and around the world invested their lives with meaning and beauty, we empower them to frame their own futures with flexible imaginations, forceful intellects, and a lively sense of the expanse of human possibility.