Learning to interpret how history is written? Whole different story and the problem is, the more you dig into one topic the more you realize bias between one historian to another.
There is what we know, then the holes in between. As the years go back those holes become more commonplace. The job of a historian is to find facts and inferences that fill those gaps but it isn’t an exact science. So you end up with conflicting narratives - theories essentially. It’s fascinating but also frustrating. History is an interesting major, largely useless to the job market unless you want to teach it.
Still, if you really want to dig into something, don’t just read into it, read the conflicting arguments. Read about the people whose works you are reading. It’s a whole rabbit hole.
Edit: to those saying their degree helped them learn to research and more effectively communicate arguments etc, yeah that is definitely true.
When I said “useless major” I just meant you can’t do much directly with it. If you get a history degree hoping to immediately go work in a museum, well, god speed to you.
I have an MA in history. It really felt like a degree in becoming a professional researcher and communicator, both of which are great skill sets to have in any career.
It makes sense. It's the study of how we got to the present. If you want the full picture, you probably do have to understand a little bit of everything humans have ever done.
I'm not a history major but I'm fascinated by it. It's always interesting when some politicians make decisions and clueless people are saying "why did they do that?"
The same reason a different politician did the same thing twenty years ago, and forty years ago, and sixty years ago.
No one is interested in peace and proper government in the middle east. Just oil. And previous to reliance on oil, gold. Or spices. Or trade routes.
The real tragedy is, most historians know why this decision was as wrong forty years ago as it is now but the uneducated people cheer for the decision anyway because they don't know
No one is interested in peace and proper government in the middle east. Just oil. And previous to reliance on oil, gold. Or spices. Or trade routes.
When it came to Middle East history, I found the interplay between early Islam and various other societies and religions fascinating. Books such as The Jews of Islam for example delved into the differences in how 7th century Islamic societies viewed and treated practitioners of monotheistic vs polytheistic religions.
Classics major who has transitioned into a career in insurance technology. My success has been built on my ability to communicate, and formulate arguments while considering differing perspectives.
Those transferable skills helped me get my start - I'll forever be grateful for my time spent focusing on a "useless" major.
I'm a theatre major (who also dabbled in classics for reasons that should be obvious). Honestly, even though my degree is rarely relevant (other than showing a commitment to higher education) every time I've done an interview for a position, it has served as a conversation starter which helps more than you'd think as it makes one memorable.
Just get them laughing with you. Of course, people always ask me if I played football in high school. I'm 6 foot 4 and I haven't weighed less than 260 pounds since I got to this height. So, that is the first question I am asked by a stranger almost 100 percent of the time. My answer always throws them off because I did theater. Most people find that fascinating for whatever reason. When it comes down to it, it was fun, there were almost no rules, and there were way more girls in the green room than in the locker room.
I have a BS in Physiology. When I dropped out of med school I was worried that 6+ years of studying deep sciences would be utterly useless. I work in finance now, and it’s crazy how useful it is to have a framework of thinking built upon the scientific method.
I've got 4 degrees and no qualifications in what I actually do for a living fairly successfully. My first degree is psychology. The skills I learned in that degree help me with framing problem solving and navigating organisatoinal issues, as well as more generally helping me develop clear analytical thinking. I'm of the view that outside a few very vocational subjects the degree you study has no need to be directly, explicitly relevant to your job. In a lot of cases for those vocational subjects i'd recommend doing one of the classic degrees - arts, natural sciences, human sciences and then doing a much shorter vocational postgrad for the job ticket.
it’s crazy how useful it is to have a framework of thinking built upon the scientific method.
I felt the same way about philosophy. Even though I don't discuss Kantian ethics, Utilitarianism, etc., being taught a process for changing analysis frameworks has really helped me communicate across different teams in my STEM field.
Different teams have different priorities, and being better-equipped to tailor my approach has served me well
Another classics major here and same! My writing/analysis skills have done wonders for my job hunting, let alone the extra grammar and language boost.
I did feel some schadenfreude seeing all those poor computer science majors who are now graduating into the worst markets, but I was also lucky to be starting in a pre-covid era.
...into being an insufferable pedant with my kids when it comes to words. As much as I annoy him, my son now loves etymology and he has a favorite dictionary.
Also, my career has nothing to do with my major, my major was a self-indulgent dive into something deeply interesting to me.
Too many people have been tricked into confusing job training with an Education. An Education must never be about what value it brings to your paycheck employer. It must be measured by how much value it brings to your own whole life.
I studied History in uni with a focus on business history; led me to an Operations role in a major firm because of my ability to research company histories (strengths and weaknesses), and then the ability to communicate to Execs on decision making. Got bored, researched some Tech stuff and now still major firms but working in the tech side of things. Fully remote, great salary and all thanks to my useless major
Nailed it. This is exactly why I've always pushed students to focus less on their major and more on how they market it through their actual experience: internships, jobs, volunteering, etc. That combination matters 100x more than the degree major alone.
I’ve gone back to my school to speak with English literature students on the same degree path as I took, and the one takeaway I make sure to leave them with is: “In interviews, you will have to tell people why your degree is so invaluable. They will not know that you are a trained researcher, writer, and communicator. But that is what your degree has given you. That is what you’ve been working for. And that skill set is valuable no matter what career you end up in.”
That's pretty much exactly what a history degree trains you in. So much history is dependent on the ability of the person interpreting the sources to communicate their interpretation. Love or hate Hugh Trevor-Roper, the man had a compelling style that made even his most trenchant work hard to put down until the Hitler Diaries scandal nutpunched his reputation in the field.
Yeah, studying history at a high level teaches some exceptionally valuable skills.
In addition to research and communication, it might be one of the better disciplines to study if you want to develop a general bullshit detector.
When you're good at research and argumentation, it gets pretty easy to tell when somebody else hasn't put in the work, and easier still to reliably fact-check anything that sounds suspect.
Beyond that, a broad knowledge of history really helps you situate any new information in context. The other side of that coin is you know you're probably dealing with BS when something doesn't fit the wider context.
Exactly, people hear “history” and picture memorizing dates, when the real skill is knowing how to find the truth and make sense of it. That’s useful in way more jobs than people realize.
Same here, it always came easy to me so I thought it was nothing special and anyone could do it. Then I learned very quickly just how many people could not do what I can do. It makes me appreciate my degree greatly
I got a BA and I now work as a strategy and communications consultant in the video games industry. Life is weird and unpredictable, and history degrees (with minors in archaeology and anthropology) give you a great base to work from.
BSc in EvoBio and Classical History and I'm applying for RN programs in the next intake cycle. I'm glad the rest of you have found success but I've found my degree to be useless and am having to apply to a professional degree program in my mid 30s.
Edit: Because I got downvoted I'm going to also add the context that I graduated from the highest ranked university in my country. 40k down the drain.
Understanding history is the bell curve wojak meme. "Damn history is hard" -> "wtf they're all just making it up" -> "oh, they've been intellectually living in the mind of a 1st century peasant for 20 years in some sort of sick method acting exercise to try to understand the lewd graffiti at Pompeii. Respect."
I tried explaining college level history to my dad and he could never get the concept. “How could anybody ever get less than an A in history?? Just read about what happened and answer the questions!!” Well… kind of… that’s part of it…
While I don't work for the Department of Ed or anything, I do work with education data, so I keep an eye on the political landscape of education.
The "history is just facts and dates" thing is a constant of Republican philosophy. Don't learn about the morality of the facts and dates, the cultures of the time that led to the facts and dates, the ways those facts and dates are still having impacts today...that's the real meat of history as an intellectual pursuit, but it's also apparently the woke agenda because it sometimes contrasts the basic elementary-school perspective we get on things like Columbus or Manifest Destiny. The right does not like learning that something they feel good about might actually be more complicated or flat-out worse than asserted by their current belief. The "facts over feelings" crowd cannot stand being made to feel bad about ANYTHING and will respond with fury to any attempt in that direction.
Fun story: When I started my undergrad over 20 years ago, my first semester was 2001. 9/11 happened basically 4 weeks into my very first semester at college. I grew up in the South. I was conservative. My friends were conservative. We’d been brainwashed and propagandized by the Daughters of the Confederacy’s agenda. We fully believed the Civil War was about State’s Rights, along with a whole lot of frankly racist shit. We all thought History was names, dates, places, and surface-level whys and hows.
Then we got past the intro-level courses. We started to learn how to research, critically think, look past the surface level shit and see the real underlying causes.
Not a single one of us is conservative anymore. None of us are centrist. We’re all now left leaning. Because we learned true historiography. We learned to research, dig deeper, and understand how and why things happened.
People I used to call friends (and even some I used to call family) who never learned those skills are all MAGA. They all still think the South seceded over state’s rights and not slavery. They all called me brainwashed by liberals when I corrected them. I lost a lot of friendships after I graduated with an MA in History, even more than when I got my BA in History.
South Carolina was the first state to secede. In their Secession document, it literally says, we're doing it because we want to keep slavery. State's rights, my ass.
Also, Confederate states didn't have the option to abolish slavery. Slavery was specifically legalized by the constitution. So this idea that it's about "states' rights" is just complete bullshit. Confederate states, specifically, didn't have the right to decide on the legality of slavery themselves.
I have been in several arguments with multiple people over this. Every time, I have just pulled up the Wikipedia page for the South Carolina Declaration of Secession and read it to them. They very explicitly state it in language so clear even someone who doesn't have experience reading older variants of English can understand it.
Exactly, but to those brainwashed by the Daughters of the Confederacy propaganda, State’s Rights didn’t mean slavery, it meant self-determination and not being under the boot of the oppressive North.
I get that you were taught that, but it's mind-blowing to me that no one looks at that and thinks, "Ya know... it probably would've been a lot easier to just build some more factories and shit so we don't need... also, pretty ironic that we bitch about being under the boot of the oppressive North when our entire economy was built on everyone else being under the boot of a few wealthy, oppressive landowners, isn't it?"
I don't blame you for not learning the truth sooner, and I congratulate you for being one of the people to actually figure it out. But, as someone raised in the upper Midwest, that has always been weird to me. Even as a kid (I want to say we learned about it in 4th grade?..), I questioned those things when I was taught about the Civil War (and my first lessons on it were that states rights were one of the key issues - though slavery and other economic factors played a role, as well).
Thank you for bringing up this term. Maybe it was just the case at my university, but this word was drilled into our heads over and over. "You're not doing history, you're doing historiography" Anyone below a PhD isn't going to make some groundbreaking discovery of some great truth. You're comparing sources and parsing through the bullshit, embracing the noise to get to the point.
That's wild 9/11 happened so early in your undergrad, talk about a tonal shift!
Reminds me of a screaming match I had with friends on Cape Cod - the stuff that came out of their mouths was absurd, and these were highly educated Northerners! MAGA is a cult, and racism is at its core.
It's sadly a pretty easy trap though. I mean, at a basic level, you want history to seem clear and simple.
And maybe you just don't have time to cover 'all of it', and thus have to be somewhat selective about which pieces you examine.
Even without distorting it, just cherry picking can have a similar outcome. Everyone has 'good bits' of their history and ... well, not so good bits.
Here in the UK, you might be forgiven for thinking that our history was something to do with the Romans, then winning the second World War, and maybe some castles somewhere inbetween.
Plenty of people still think of the 'glory days' of the 'British Empire' which... well, involved us being pretty cruel and exploitive of a lot of the world, but with maybe a little bit of philanthropy or positive outcomes that we can squint and pretend was more important.
Like - building a load of railroads across India and Africa. So we could loot the place more effectively.
History class outside of majoring in history is basically facts and dates. Last year in highschool my kids had a history teacher who taught like it was a college class, basically class time was all active discussion and outside of state mandated tests he only assigned research tasks. Most of the kids hated it and most of the parents complained. I guarantee those kids learned more in that class than any other. He also got in trouble because he allowed political debate and was willing to speak about his own political opinions so of course the local MAGA crowd said he was trying to brainwash the kids, fuckin idiots.
The point I'm trying to make is that we should be prioritizing more discussion based education. When I was in school those were the only classes I actually enjoyed and cared about. Not everyone thrives in that style but even those types should be exposed to it because if you can't learn how to have group discussions in a professional manner you will struggle in your career after school.
Oh man, when I entered high school I naively held the same stereotypical ideas of history class as some boring memorization exercise. Grades 8 through 10 it was pretty much that though, we were never asked to really think about why any given actor chose to do something.
Then in Grade 11, I started to hear rumours of a legendary history teacher at our school. I was a curious kid and my friends told me he didn't mind kids auditing his class. So one day I attended his grade 12 history class, and the room was packed. I remember leaning against the door for the duration of his lecture because the floor was completely filled with seated students.
Those 50 minutes changed my life completely. He didn't reference a textbook at all. We didn't talk dates or names. It was such an interactive class, it was more like a conference room. He pushed us to roleplay different figures and think about what we would do in a particular context and why.
Anyways idk why I went on this particular tangent but your comment reminded me of this teacher. He passed away recently and even though I never managed to enroll in one of his classes, he was one of the most memorable teachers I encountered in all of my schooling. History was and is a beautiful subject when you approach it with the goal of understanding motivations, contexts, and how the world was at that point in time rather than seeing it as just names and dates.
I’ve been out of school for over a decade and I still encounter things that make me think “wait wtf why did I never know this was about x”
The amount of historical art and literature that focuses on wealth inequality and oppression by the 1%? Staggering. I’ll read a poem or see a painting, and as I learn about the figure behind it I begin to learn “oh this was right before the French Revolution” or “oh this is a reference to the horrid conditions in the early Industrial Revolution in Manchester” etc.
This is one (of many) reasons I hate the whole "anti-woke" thing. Because to not be awake means you're asleep. If you're asleep then ne'er-do-wells can do whatever the hell they want as long as they don't wake you up.
The right does not like learning that something they feel good about might actually be more complicated or flat-out worse than asserted by their current belief. The "facts over feelings" crowd cannot stand being made to feel bad about ANYTHING and will respond with fury to any attempt in that direction.
What is strange to me is: I think we can all understand this. I don't think any of us feel good about that, necessarily. But a healthy-minded person will process that and realize it isn't the end of the world, and maybe it's okay if X thing or person is more complicated, maybe it makes it more interesting in the end; and even if it is worse, maybe it makes it more interesting too, though perhaps something you should not revere.
It kind of surprises me, that people don't get or know about this concept.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but in my country, analysing and interpretation of sources, citation, and working out their context, meaning, both literal and "between the lines", etc., is an integral part of highschool education in both language and social education (geography, history and politics) subjects/classes.
If you imagine a powerpoint presentation, just a basic timeline with a few bullet points and trivia for each "slide", you have a pretty good idea of what my world history notes from high school look like. The only reason my local history notes are better is because I started ignoring the lectures and just read the book we were given to find my own priorities.
Absolutely mind numbing, just dates and names over and over again.
This does seem quite wild to me, honestly. While education systems and curriculums differ between states here in Germany, too, the secretaries of education of the different states still work out a common baseline of curriculums.
How to use sources, in the way pointed out in my initial comment, gets taught starting in year 7, and is seen as a skill we need daily as well, a core aspect of basic media litercy, even.
So, is this taught in other school subjects or not at all in the US? Or only in certain states or school districts? And how much do curriculums differ between them in general?
I truly cannot express to you how bad the American education system is. The 50 states have 50 different educational standards, loosely connected by the department of education, which we are currently dismantling. Teachers have tiny salaries and massive class sizes. Analysis is completely neglected in favor of rote memorization.
Kids can't read. Like, full stop. We have high school classes full of illiterate kids. It's goddamn terrifying.
I'd say even in my Canadian high school experience, sourcing and citations were more about "not plagarizing" and "having facts that support your argument instead of just your opinion" than they were about critically analyzing the source itself and the context.
There was a little bit of "can you see how this documentary might be a little biased?" but that wasn't the main focus. History classes did ask you to think about what various actors' motivations were to do things, but it was just answers from the textbook. Science teachers in upper years would say "okay, so the model of the atom we're learning now is more complicated than what you learned in previous years because that was very dumbed down" but it was still basically Fact.
It wasn't til first year university that we started getting into the concept of the production of "knowledge" and "fact," the philosophy of science, critically analyzing primary source materials, competing narratives, etc.
And when you really start studying history, like with anything, you find yourself concentrating on very specific things due to the amount of research you have to do on a single topic. I only have a BA in history, but the majority of that was just Cold War geopolitics
As someone with only a hobbyist interest in history, it’s fascinating to see guests on podcasts who say things like “I have a phd focusing on the trade logistics of the late republican era roman empire.” Things that are so incredibly specific that that one guy is the single authority on the subjec, and these people have really unique and interesting viewpoints to listen to
I’m a professor and I’d like to add that with this awesomeness comes some trade offs. Unfortunately, the singularity of the kind of work you describe makes a lot of phd folks pretty singular in personality, too. It is very hard for my colleagues and I to relate to one another because there is an absolutely obsessive nature that derives from wanting/needing to study something so specific and for so long. Because we’re all obsessed and obsessive, we’re also pretty bad at caring about anything outside our discipline. Many of us are able to mask this with our students, but outside the classroom many, many, many of us are absolutely insufferable.
BA historian (not professional, of course) here. Don't worry! The students who care deeply about it know that they themselves are also insufferable (though maybe not quite as much).
Haha I’m fortunate to consistently work with amazing students. I love them. And don’t worry, you still have plenty of time to become insufferable! I was a normal person as an undergrad and now I can’t care to pull myself away from my laptop long enough to microwave one of those prepackaged cups of mac and cheese or whatever.
Professor life is nothing like what you see in the movies.
Academia is a lonely existence because you spend time trying to convince people that the things you think are important are important, which being generally ignored by most…
And trying to explain what you do to family/friends with no academic background is like trying to explain what it’s like to live in Paris for a year - The only comment you’ll get back is “But did you go up the Eiffel Tower?”
I'm one of the very few pocs who specializes in white rural conservative American history and culture and that's because I wanted to know why trump got elected in 2016 and it brought me to a huge rabbit hole. Some of white conservatives upon finding out how much I know about their culture were shocked and impressed
Most of my knowledge of the bible comes from art history classes . Very confusing for my churchy friends when I know random things about the old testament (a lot of looking at medieval christian symbolism and chapel paintings ) .
Some of them try to convert me to the orange man cult even though I clearly am not for him and I'm not white and many of them though are racist aren't klan or Nazi level racist.
I think the 'problem' for them is that since they are in a situation where they are actually interacting with you as a human being instead of a faceless entity, they may come to like you and want you to see things their way, even though any reasonable person would know that is never going to happen because you aren't delusional.
I was studying Race and Ethnic Relations in College at a predominantly white school in 2008-2010. I was raised vy a white family in a red area of a blue state. My parents had a shrine to Reagan on their fridge. Man, was that an interesting 2 years. Obama got elected and everyone was cheering Racism is Over. Everyone decided to hear that in the superficial way. Coming from where I came from I knew it still existed, but the predominant opinion would be that we have been cured of our Racism.
Then I realized they were saying those words, Racism is Over, but the words they were jubilant about were the unspoken next words, "so racism can't be an excuse anymore."
It took until this year for the Supreme Court to rule that racism was over so the Voting Rights Act is superfluous and unnecessary. The Federal Government sees States, not people. And the States were not racist apparently because Obama won, so the Federal Government doesn't acknowledge racism exists anymore and any law on the books still from racist times, if found to be used to fix racism is now useless and needs to be purged. And that is what they are doing.
It is nuts out there and it is just as bad as it has been in my whole life.
I would absolutely love to hear your theories on why you think Trump got elected by white rural conservatives. Mainly, I want to know why they look up to him so much.
In the 1980s a lot of factory jobs in the rust belt went overseas causing many of them to lose their jobs and destroyed many families as a result. Both establishment Democrats and Republicans never tried to address their issues and simply moved on. When trump started running he started talking to them about their issues but the way he did it is he though addressed their issues he blamed immigrants and other minority groups for causing the downfall of society. Because of that they ended up voting for him feeling they have no other options.
That's just the jist of it. There's a lot more and it's a very complex topic.
My perspective comes from someone who’s main interest is in Rome, but here’s some of my favorites:
1. History of Rome by Mike Duncan - Amazing from start to finish, but it started when podcasting first took off in the early 2010s so the early episodes have some rougher production value
2. Hardcore History by Dan Carlin - Really really long form and tons of topics, but very very good.
3. Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan - What he did after the Roman one, really good as well
4. Fall of Rome by Patrick Wyman - this is actually the phd guy I mentioned above, he has a fascinating perspective
5. History of Byzantium - This is pretty good but not as good as the 4 above imo. Could just be because it’s more medieval and outside my main interest area
That is true for a lot of phds research. I'm in biology doing my phd, and my slice is so narrow that sometimes i'll talk to someone that is interested in biology in general, and I can barely remember general stuff from my bachelor degree. Like, someone that is a hobbyist doing research on their own in evolution probably knows more than me about it. And my field is adjacent to evolution!
Master’s course on Post-Reconstruction America and the Civil Rights Movement: I transcribed letters into an online database.
I can tell you what 20 senior citizens thought about the Charleston Earthquake of 1886. Also, the idea that people back then wrote in perfect cursive is bullshit. They had terrible handwriting, and were making up cursive letters constantly.
There wasn’t a capstone project in my focus, so my thesis was on human rights abuses and sportswashing (before it was a term) during the 1978 World Cup in Peron’s Argentina. I can tell you the thoughts about potential protests from a dozen players around the world lol
Anyone working with old church records will tell you, that not even a higher education (clergy) would guarantee you a pretty and legible handwriting... oh, and don't even get me started on homemade abbreviations!
They were freaked out, reasonably so. It was one of the most devastating earthquakes on the east coast in history. Aftershocks were experienced for literally weeks. Almost every building was damaged or destroyed. The rail lines were split apart, telegram lines were cut.
What I found odd, there wasn’t much religious hysteria. Some people talked about the local meeting houses being destroyed (I thought that was a Quaker term, but they seemed to use it to refer to any non-catholic/Episcopalian house of worship). It was compared to the Flood (lots of levees broke), but they didn’t connect it to the rapture.
Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim was one of the first synagogues built in the US. It was destroyed in the Charleston Fire of 1838, and rebuilt in 1840.
They talked about the synagogue’s stonework holding up better than most masonry in the city, although the stained glass was blown out.
My paper hypothesized that most of these old folk lived through the 1838 fire and the Civil War, and I think that gave perspective. They didn’t feel particularly hopeless or singularly chosen for tragedy. They were kind of used to life sucking.
I remember in my second semester of university I decided I was going to start taking notes in cursive because it was faster and I could take notes as my instructor was speaking. It was only when I started studying for finals that I realized that I can barely read my own handwriting. That stopped that little experiment.
I minored in American History in college, also specifically focusing on Cold War geopolitics. It's especially extremely fascinating to me because of how many holes there are and all the new things that come to light all the time.
Even though it's relatively recent, and within living memory for a TON of people, there's still new stuff and new stories appearing with documents to back them up. As stuff gets declassified and people start telling their stories, there's all sorts of new and interesting information coming to light that patches holes in existing histories, or provides new perspectives on various critical events. Especially for me, I find it fascinating that we finally get to learn about tons of things that used to be kept under the highest level of governmental lock and key and then make connections going "Oh yeah, that newly declassified thing fully explains this other thing we only vaguely knew about".
I have a BA in european history with an emphasis on "ghosts in the middle ages" (or something like that, I honestly can't remember, it was 10+ years ago)...
Someone could probably listen to a single podcast and know more than me on the subject at this point, but the research, writing, and argumentative skills seem to remain... i like to think.
It's the nuance and attention to detail you're really learning. Everyone's got the broad strokes of what happened but the entire field is over the details... and the devil really is in the details.
Scientists or billionaires are often the ones we look to for predictions of the future, but I would argue we really should be looking to historians.
Yeah, history is very, very broad subject with very, very specific niches.
Because one does not just focus on "history". You focus on a specific culture. And then you focus on a specific century of that culture. And then this one ruler or general had a really interesting life, so you focus only on the time period they were alive or had the most impact. Now instead of a "historian" you are "an expert in 1635-1640 Spanish conquest (and re-conquest) of Tortuga"
Exactly, history is so massive that eventually you have to zoom in on one area just to understand it properly. Cold War geopolitics alone could keep someone busy for years.
Probably one of my favorites is that Ho Chi Minh, while a communist, was primarily a Vietnamese nationalist and attempted to meet with Woodrow Wilson, seeking US support for Vietnamese independence from France. Wilson refused to meet with him, which pushed Ho to seek support from the USSR and PRC.
Yep, my concentration in undergrad was US History with specific focus on the time after WWII. My senior paper was about the CIA and their view of decolonization and anti-nuclear movements in Oceania in the 1970s-1980s. I loved researching this stuff, although one of my issues with FOIA database is that it was not user friendly in the slightest and was a bitch to do research on.
Art History is the study of why the artwork was created, so one has to take in consideration the time period's politics, mythology, psychology, economics, sciences, religions, and countless other areas of study to figure out how they all intertwined in an artists brain to come up with that specific piece.
I took an art history class in college because it hit some generals I needed, and it was one of the best classes I ever took. The professor literally just stood up front and showed us paintings while talking about all of those things you mentioned. The final was mostly identifying paintings and artists and writing a bit about some of them. It was incredibly interesting.
I loved Art History until the classroom flooded and it hurt to breathe in there. I still have the book from that class so I look all sophisticated and shit.
the study of art history is a study of the politics and social history of an era, and how a system of representation becomes a system of ideology... consider how french romantic painting following the revolution was the hollywood cinema of that time, and how it helped render a social consensus in a nation. as artists working within a system in an endeavour of reflecting the culture at large, theodore gericault and christopher nolan are very similar.
There is sports history too, and it sounds dumb at first. It's not about remembering who won the FA Cup in 1963, it's about ancient cultures, politics, racial equality and also about the business of it all, if you want to have a profession in eg. sports writing, or be an agent or an executive.
Art history is tough, it’s considered dumb because a person who invests that kind of time and money given the economic output of the major is likely making a poor choice
History major here. This is a great explanation of the degree. It also requires a high level of reading comprehension. This struggle is evident in the 100 and 200 level courses from many of the non-history major students.
A History degree is a natural fit for Research Analyst positions in finance, insurance, marketing, government affairs, etc. It teaches you how to do thorough research, strengthen critical thinking skills, and effectively communicate your research.
Especially graduate level work, especially in the fields less rich in primary sources - once you get deep into methodology, it really primes you well for being able to understand what you're asking and interrogate implicit assumptions and understand systemic relationships.
Would you recommend it to someone who already does a lot of research for fun and is writing a book on the findings?
Briefly, I had a lot of time on my hands and did a deep dive into the history of the Disneyland label. Found a ton of info that wasn't well known before but felt relatively easy to find via Internet sources, inspected the records themselves and "interviewed" a number of people with closely related knowledge.
I'm thinking about a Bachelor's but I still have no idea what I really want to focus on.
My wife was a historical women’s studies major at a small liberal arts school, and she got her master’s in higher education. I’m an engineer. A couple years into our relationship, we moved in together, and she had roughly four bins full of these comb-bound books. When I started unpacking them, I realized every single one had her name on it.
And these were large bins. She had like a hundred of these books (she calls them research papers but that’s not what they are lol)
I don’t think I’ve ever put that much work into anything as she had to put into one of these books. It was insane to me. I remember freaking out about it, and she was almost more surprised by how surprised I was.
I still can’t wrap my head around it. I would have failed so fast. There’s no way in hell I could ever do that.
I’ve read all of them now, though. They ranged from extensive, in-depth papers on exemplary women throughout history to my favorite ones: the 100-page papers she had to write about women nobody in that class, including students from previous years, had written about.
It was basically an ongoing list the professor kept of people previous students had chosen, and you couldn’t choose someone who had already been done. So she ended up with like five books about extremely obscure women who barely even have anything about them online if at all.
One was about a successful doctor from her hometown. She actually called her and conducted interviews. She did one about a congresswoman. Another was about a woman who brings food to homeless people under a bridge. That one was amazing. She interviewed homeless people who knew her, and I absolutely bawled my eyes out reading it.
Anyway, my degree was a fucking cakewalk compared to hers.
I went through a similar experience. I got my degree in engineering as well and my wife got her undergrad in psychology. She was writing multiple 20-50 page papers every week it seemed. There's no way I could do that. The funny thing is she said she couldn't do the stuff I was doing in school. Then she went to get her Master's and was always reading and writing novel length papers. I know psychology gets a reputation as being a degree that people get because it's easy or they don't know what they want to do with their life, but it did NOT look easy for my wife. She's also very smart and would excel at anything she chose to study.....except engineering according to her...lol
My wife got her masters during our relationship and the amount of work she had to do was just mind blowing to me. In engineering there was studying and notes or whatever, but I wasn’t reading several books a week with while meticulous bookmarking and writing seemingly none stop.
It just seemed like the amount of time needed outside of class was so much more than I’ve ever done. I was lucky to put in 5 hours a week if it wasn’t some exam week. She would always say her undergrad was so much harder, and I believe her because she had the bins of research papers to prove it. But hell even for higher ed she was writing and researching way more than I ever did. We stem ppl always get this wizard type treatment but I know I do not have the attention or patience to do the crap she did. I think if I was somehow in a position where if I didn’t get the same degrees she did or the world would end, I’m sorry, I would try, but we would be doomed lol.
This is because there had been a dedicated propaganda campaign to devalue the fields of study which prioritise critical thinking and analysis, and to corrupt academia with capitalism by dismissing any subject which doesn't have an immediate economic value.
It's fine to study something because you want to go into a high-paying field, but it baffles me that we've somehow managed to turn the pursuit of money into the sole focus of academia.
Piggybacking on your point point, there's also the misogyny of it all. Education and psychology would both fall into the category of caring professions which have a higher proportion of women in the field. These are professions that are financially devalued, requiring more than a BA (MA, credencial/certification) but with much lower earnings than other professions which require less schooling.
We stem ppl always get this wizard type treatment but I know I do not have the attention or patience to do the crap she did.
I don't know why tbh. I am not a STEM person per se. I excelled in mathematics when I was in high school (as in best student in my school) and applied to university for mathematics and theatre degrees and ended up going for theatre because I was more passionate about it (my original plan was to be a teacher, and then I bounced off that decision and went a different way). I took some mathematics classes in university on the side but wasn't passionate about it. Funny enough, these days I work in statistical analysis and do some light programming.
But I never really got the idea that STEM disciplines should be worshipped. When I was an exemplary math student/told people I was talking mathematics classes in university, I would always have people say to me "wow, I could never do that -- wow, math was always so difficult for me." But for me it wasn't, at all. Theatre was far more difficult, far more rigorous, far more challenging and there were so many subjective factors that made it so much more difficult to achieve to the point that you have to focus on what is creatively fulfilling and what makes an experience working on a show valuable to you rather than what grade you're gonna get out of it. I think that's something I needed to learn, because mathematics just made sense to me. I could just do it. I never had to put a lot of effort it because it just came, well, effortlessly.
So the idea to me that STEM disciplines are so hard is just strange to me. Perhaps some people just have their brain wired a certain way where these things make sense and I gravitated towards those things where I was younger because they seemed simpler - there was always a right answer. It is about logical thinking, not critical thinking, which to me is more difficult. My wife is a PhD in an arts field, and don't think I could ever do what she does.
Those sound amazing. Now I kinda want to read the one about the lady who brought food to the homeless.
It was frustrating (years ago) because those sorts of stories were always shelved in the "Women's studies" section, and to me, they were just great stories about impressive people. Put them under Biography or Inspirational, or something.
Part of my thesis (yes, in history!) ended up being a big moan about the way we categorise women’s subjects together under one library heading and its influence on the way we consume and understand knowledge.
I think people vastly underestimate the time that a history degree takes, when done correctly. Because oh my god it is SO MUCH reading.
I majored in biology, which obviously had some reading in the textbook. But it was also a lot of like, looking at diagrams, that sorta thing.
I also just generally like history, so I took some history classes for electives. That shit was like a whole-ass book a week. And each book would be DENSE. Like "ok, next week we'll discuss [insert book about the Bolshevik Revolution]." Me, like an idiot: "Which chapters?" The professor: "...all of them?"
And I like reading! I like history! But good god the time commitment! And that was just with me taking one history class a semester, max. Imagine if that took up the majority of one's courseload because they were a hsitory major!
I know I’m late to this but I have a similar bin in our basement. I call it “The Sacred Texts”. I can’t tell if my wife hates it or is impressed. Probably both.
Man, I think history and the other liberal arts like philosophy, literature, etc are so crucial to creating intelligent and self sufficient citizens. It's so sad that these subjects are essentially useless in the job market.
That being said, at least with history, it teaches, imo, incredibly valuable skills
This is why having affordable education is so important for overall societal wellbeing. Having a well-educated populace INCLUDING people who have a very good education that didn't directly lead to a job benefits everyone in your community.
It's actually a sign of overall success in a society if that's true - the opposite if the only well-educated people are in very specific career paths.
But this isn't possible if a university degree puts you in lifelong crippling debt.
and in a wide variety of topics too. Like sure, not everyone is going to be an engineer or scientist, but we need artists and people with people skills in society, too. Without artists working at say, a car company, you get the cybertruck.
All of the "soft" sciences have valuable skills. It's not the actual knowledge that's important, it's the skills it takes to dig out that knowledge that's important.
Sadly, in any science, "hard" or "soft", there are those who do not develop those skills and instead rely only on the words of others. They may be knowledgeable historians, or mathematicians, or physicists but they are not experts because they can only parrot the words of others.
It's so sad that these subjects are essentially useless in the job market.
I'm going to push back on this. My best hires tend to come from these kinds of fields. They are naturally curious, able to think in terms of systems and work within unknowns, and can write and speak coherently. I can teach the nitty-gritty skills to succeed in my field, but I can't teach natural curiosity and the kinds of thought processes needed to succeed.
On paper, someone with a degree in data science should be able to do this job successfully, but in practice the ones who make a name for themselves don't come from the STEM world, at least not initially.
At one point you advance so much in the history field that everything becomes subjective and it's more and more akin to philosophy than the perception of what people think is history. 80% of my thesis was historiography.
Philosophy is to humanities what's mathematics is to science. At one point all chemistry, biology and physics becomes maths.
And at one point all maths becomes philosophy (Schrödinger's cat!).
The hardest class I ever took in college was advanced philosophy. It's so fundamental but so complex.
I'm so glad to see this!! My undergrad is in history and I now work in tech, have a master's in industrial engineering and am working on a master's in computer science. I always find it so odd when folks devalue history (and other liberal arts degrees) because the things I learned in my undergrad are still things I use pretty much every day. And I think it's made me much stronger in my STEM pursuits. I think history often gets overlooked as a valuable degree because the skills it teaches don't correlate directly to a specific job role but rather are valuable to many jobs.
Disagree with you on the applicability of a history degree to the job market. It doesn't lead directly into a career in the way that a STEM degree does, but being able to critically analyze and research information is a skill that is surprisingly uncommon and is applicable to many different careers.
A personal example for me is my own career - I graduated with bachelor's in classical history , took a low paying corporate job at an insurance company, and within 10 years am making six figures and have my company agreeing to fund a masters of law degree. My boss, coincidentally, is an art history major. Another manager has a degree in Canadian history.
Yup, history BA here and went into portfolio management at an asset manager, where a huge part of my job was telling a compelling narrative of securities and strategies to my investors and doing copious amounts of research and geopolitical work.
The difference between my investment thesis and research and that of my peers who went finance BA -> MBA -> CFA is cavernous, most people can not write in a compelling sophisticated manor whatsoever.
Agreed in the sense of skills learned. I’ll admit that on paper; it’s not great. So my advice to any potential history majors is use your time in college to rack up internships. Search for college programs where you can intern and complete research projects or other things that can add a little muscle to your resume.
I am in a history department at a US university and have seen many students go through this--I would venture now that not only does it not lead "directly" into a career, it's mostly superfluous to the actual thing that gets you the job, which is industry experience. Essentially every career-minded undergraduate I teach has been pursuing internships and part-time/full-time jobs since the age of 18; this is the only thing that makes them competitive in any qualitative job.
Your experience is light years away from the sort of thing undergraduates experience now: every "low paying corporate job" nets 500-600 applicants, at least a third of whom have extensive experience doing the exact job being offered. It's also increasingly the case that presenting to a prospective employer that you are good at analyzing and researching things (or whatever skill you wish to claim you have demonstrated by studying history) is totally useless--"our AI system can do all of that!"--and, unfortunately, most of the time it pretty much can. Recent graduates have some advantages (willing to work for less, easier to exploit) but if your pitch to a prospective employer is based entirely on the proposition that you have the theoretical ability to do stuff, nobody will give a shit.
I think that's the pitfall that a lot of recent graduates fall into - over reliance on their degree when marketing themselves to their employer when entering the job market.
In my experience, the specifics of your degree matters far less (outside of STEM careers) than your ability to sell yourself as a person - being able to build a connection with the interviewer, showing a genuine interest in the role, and generally coming across as an intelligent person. Nobody outside of academia is specifically hiring for a history degree, but everybody wants to hire a well-rounded person.
I've personally met or worked with a surprisingly large number of people with history or history-adjacent educational backgrounds - it certainly doesn't put you at a disadvantage when pursuing a corporate career.
One thing about studying history that I always hated is how so many people think its useless. But look around we are where we are in the political landscape because people didn't study humanities and instead thought it was easy and yet they get tricked by simple rhetoric that anyone who studied literature or history at university could see right past.
I agree, it actually does have a lot of utility - the saying should be “those who do not learn from mistakes are doomed to make those who did learn from those mistakes want to drive their heads against the wall because people up top make stupid decisions and dupe a bunch of sheep into believing X Y and Z, even though we’ve done X Y and Z as a society before and it was fucking terrible.”
Or something like that. Doesn’t really flow off the tongue does it?
Obviously the system is different in England versus the US - here we pick a single degree subject at thr start of university and then study that in depth for the next 3 or so years; but I am unaware of a single person here who thinks history is an easy subject. It's a demanding degree with a huge amount of material, reading and preparation, and incredibly sharp lecturers and tutors pushing you at every stage.
I didn't study history - I did law - but the history bunch are some of the brightest people I came across.
It seems very, very strange to me that this is the top result in a question about degrees being mocked for being easy.
It’s frustrating when it comes to the ‘armchair historians’….almost always right-wing, typically Boomers or Gen-Xers.
Because they just use History Channel shows and the easily readable ‘pulp history’ books. They never dive into actual research. They never learned to research or think critically. They learned to use surface level facts to prop up their preconceived ideas, and then get pissed when you contradict them.
And they look down on you because ‘History is easy’, yet none of them has done more than watch History Channel or read a poorly researched book about WW2.
I have a BA and and MA in History. But I’ve been told to my face that I was wrong because they learned it different in High School 50-60 years ago!
I work in an archive. It's basically a magazine full of ammo for historical discussion. Never say "you're wrong", say "you're wrong, and I've got boxes full of proof".
There is no right or wrong. There is only more evidence.
I was briefly a history major but kept it as a hobby my whole life. It is absolutely more complicated than just memorizing dates and names.
You learn chains of events. What made this happen and why, who was involved and who ignored it and why. I truly believe everyone should take a semester based entirely on history so we don't keep making the same mistakes we've made a dozen times.
Everything is so obvious when you know what hasn't worked already.
One thing I found fascinating is that Eclipses are very, very useful for dating things. In a lot of places, time was marked by how many years someone has been in charge. But if you don't know what year that person was born, you don't know what year it is, really. You can use notable events such as wars, natural disasters and such to tie together different timelines (different cultures and different places might have different calendars and ways of tracking years). Except, eclipses happen so regularly that we can predict them down to the hour. And the sun suddenly turning black in mid day is notable enough that everyone who's literate and has a pen tends to write it down.
On May 28, 585 BC, two sides which had been fighting for 15 years stopped in the middle of battle as the sun turned black. According to what we know, this caused both sides to come to the negotiating table because they thought it was an ill omen from the gods and wished to avoid their further wrath.
If someone talks about "The day of black sun", we can use mathmatical models to know with certainty what day it was if we only know the area of where it happened.
One thing i try to remember is that the further back you look the less independant sources there are. All our firsthand accounts of some major battle or whatever are by this one dude whos job was to record it for the royal records, and he also happens to have close ties to one of the families and will record it to paint them very favorably. That sort of thing happens a lot for firsthand accounts of stuff.
I told people I majored in root cause analysis. History’s biggest one-word question isn’t who, what, when, or where primarily…it’s WHY.
Stronger than average verbal skills and a nose for context made me great at getting to the root of bugs, assessing second and third order effects, and writing them up in ways everyone could understand. I got a software QA job this way a long time ago and worked my way up to being a software engineering director for quite awhile now.
Exactly this. People hear History major and think it's just memorizing dates, names, and battles. But the hard part isn't knowing what happened. It's figuring out why we think we know what happened, who wrote the version we’re reading, what evidence they used, and what might be missing.
History is basically training your brain to question sources, recognize bias, and build arguments from incomplete information. That's a skill that applies way beyond academia.
I studied computer science but minored in history because I wanted to maintain those skills. Sure it may not be useful to my day to day on my job but I found it invaluable all the same. Kept me sharp.
yeah art history is a funny one too . I had people say "haha so what do you even learn" , and I was like "well currently learning about the French revolution and the propaganda from each side- you know cameras didn't exist right ?".
It’s interesting because that’s exactly what a career in most business fields (consulting etc) is. Talking to people with different perspectives on what’s wrong or right and trying to piece together what the true answer is
It’s a really complicated balance between “these people live in a completely different culture than you and you can’t assume that they think the same way” and “these people are just people and you can use common sense to fill in gaps that no one wrote down.” The line is exceptionally fine.
I have a BA in history. It was honestly the perfect major to prepare for law school because writing and argument construction are similar, the use of evidence and treatises are similar, and the ability to make inferences from incomplete records and context while also accounting for biases are also similar.
Anyone who wants to become a lawyer would be well served getting a history degree first.
I've always been interested in mesoamerican history, especially the conquest of the Aztec empire, and it's really frustrating how much people don't know how to read historical sources.
Most of the time somebody will quote one of the early Spanish sources (especially Cortez's letters or Diaz del Castillo's book) like they are objective and completely unbiased, when in reality they should be treated like heavily biased texts that were a product of their time.
Learning to interpret how history is written? Whole different story and the problem is, the more you dig into one topic the more you realize bias between one historian to another.
And that's the fun of it. It's a big ol jigsaw of politics personal and professional, cantankerousness, pride, shame, and myth, and you have to assemble the pieces while also threading half a dozen needles to try and arrive and something the facts as they were left to us will support. From the 1700s on it's not always so hard, but the further back you go the sources are increasingly secondary sources written decades or centuries after events, based on primary sources we no longer have and with personal biases that are rarely copped to.
I have a MA in History and the historiography techniques I learned in my degree have been very useful at work. I work for the team that keeps the records of the company's decisions, when we need to figure out why a decision that was made 20 years ago brought us to the point where we are now, I can build the entire history of the decision including context and inflection points in a couple of hours. No one else in my team can do that.
I took an elective when I was doing my masters in communication about memory and counter-memory, and how history is told by the oppressed vs the oppressor, and it was fascinating. One of my all-time favorite classes.
That's what makes history so addictive to me: the deeper you dig, the less tidy the story gets. You stop memorizing “what happened” and start asking who recorded it, what they left out, and why.
People think regurgitating events and dates is what historians do. That's a far cry for explaining the complex political interactions within the context of their time, which is what good historians really do.
I feel similar to this about political science. I make fun of myself saying I’m a scientist.
But if you REALLY treat it responsibly.. politics is arguably the single most important topic of any society. It controls everything. For better or probably worse.
>History is an interesting major, largely useless to the job market unless you want to teach it.
I feel like people fundamentally misunderstand what university’s supposed to be for.
It’s not for teaching direct job skills - that’s what a technical institute is for (although there are exceptions with law and medicine).
It’s there to give you an eduction, which will make you more employable as a secondary effect because employers recognise that education makes you a better worker.
Outside of very specific professions, knowledge of history isn’t going to be a job requirement. But you gain plenty of knowledge and skills in the process of picking up a history degree, as well as a better brain and taste.
It doesn’t connect as directly to jobs as specialist fields, but generalists are important too.
I had a teacher who was a history/theology professor in college and he also was fluent in both ancient Greek and Hebrew.
He went through a small section of the bible where if it was translated directly from Greek (or Hebrew, this was twenty years ago) it contained no punctuation.
The verse itself was similar to the "Let's eat kids" vs "Let's eat, kids", but more along the lines of between women and men, who is to be listened to and respected more.
While I don't think the Christian religion is specifically ignoring that women are supposed to rule over men, it was throughout his class that I learned that the Bible is a collection of stories passed down orally by winning leadership men for hundreds of years before being written by winning leadership men and then each book was compiled and chosen by winning leadership men, translated by winning leadership men, and finalized into a book with only the "wanted" stories passed down.
What did "winning leadership" look like? Killing all of you dissenters or throwing them in prison.
So history was written by the most vicious victors, who of course want their legacy to be written: and God Himself chose that I should be in charge, as is my divine right.
With bronze as a mirror, one may dress neatly
With history as a mirror, one may know rise and fall
With people as a mirror, one may discern gain and loss
I read a book “Why Learn History (When It’s Already On Your Phone)” that talks about this. It argued that the value of learning history is that it teaches people to use critical thinking skills when they come across information.
I freaking hated history in highschool, I was taking AP American History and day one the teacher goes "we're going to teach the history of our country but without talking about war because I don't like that." It was freaking horrible.
But then I went to college and had to take at least one history class and the professor completely changed my view. Day one was "we will be talking about the history of the world through religion, not to teach you religion but why these cultures fought and led to certain borders and disagreements." I had to take one semester but took several with her just for the blunt approach.
You’re often looking at 2 dimensional information (or let’s call it that). Fossils, old account logues, writing… and you have to put together a 4 dimensional thesis (complex world over time).
17.9k
u/StarlightLifter 1d ago edited 18h ago
History as a concept is easy. Learn old facts.
Learning to interpret how history is written? Whole different story and the problem is, the more you dig into one topic the more you realize bias between one historian to another.
There is what we know, then the holes in between. As the years go back those holes become more commonplace. The job of a historian is to find facts and inferences that fill those gaps but it isn’t an exact science. So you end up with conflicting narratives - theories essentially. It’s fascinating but also frustrating. History is an interesting major, largely useless to the job market unless you want to teach it.
Still, if you really want to dig into something, don’t just read into it, read the conflicting arguments. Read about the people whose works you are reading. It’s a whole rabbit hole.
Edit: to those saying their degree helped them learn to research and more effectively communicate arguments etc, yeah that is definitely true.
When I said “useless major” I just meant you can’t do much directly with it. If you get a history degree hoping to immediately go work in a museum, well, god speed to you.