No other discipline in the humanities and the social sciences covers so wide a range of topics as history. Instead of studying just one or another segment of human activity - e.g., politics, economics, literature, art, philosophy, etc. - history integrates all of them. Located at the intersection of multiple disciplines, it is of crucial importance to all students of the humanities and the social sciences.

Finally, and most important, history teaches students how historical knowledge is constructed. Through hands-on instruction in seminars, students learn how to locate documents relevant to an historical subject and what questions to put to those documents: Where do the documents come from? Through what intermediary stages did they pass before they reached us? Who wrote them? And why?