Taken as a whole the curriculum for the major in History aims for majors to:

• Understand history as a discipline. This involves developing knowledge within a chosen area of concentration, realizing that historical interpretations change over time, and seeing the ways in which historians find layered, complex causes and connections in human affairs.
• Build critical and analytic skills. This involves defining research questions and framing them as part of ongoing scholarly conversations, establishing what contexts matter to those research questions, finding a variety of evidence – from speeches to visual materials to court records and beyond – and analyzing it to help refine and answer their questions.
• Enhance their skills in written communication. This involves writing with clarity and cogency and understanding that, in History, content (what something says) cannot be separated from form (how it is said).