For History Professors & Department Chairs

This resource is part of the AHA’s Department Advocacy Toolkit.

Data on careers for history majors? Enrollment trends and departmental strategies to attract students? Stories of student success? Find all these and more to make the case to students, colleagues, parents about the value of studying history.

 

What Is the Value of a History Degree?

• 2016 History Discipline Core
• History Is Not a Useless Major: Fighting Myths with Data by Paul B. Sturtevant
• Making the Case: The Many Venues for Historians’ Advocacy by Jim Grossman
• The Case for History and the Humanities by Gabrielle M. Spiegel
• Advising Mom and Dad: History Majors and Family Worries by Anne Hyde

Department Strategies

Improving Introductory Courses

• History Gateways Resources
• Webinars on Introductory History Courses

Rethinking Curriculum

• Tuning the History Discipline
• Learning Outcomes in History: Further Reading

Enrollments and Majors

• What Good Is a History Major? by Stephen Smith
• History Enrollments Hold Steady as Department Efforts Intensify: Results of the 2019 AHA Enrollment Survey by Julia Brookins and Emily Swafford
• Decline in History Majors Continues, Departments Respond by Robert B. Townsend
• How Departments are Tackling Lower Enrollments by Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
• Major Renovations: Reviving Undergraduate History at Sam Houston State by Brian Domitrovic

Other Resources

• Undergraduates at the Annual Meeting
• Questionnaire: Why Study History
• Everything Has a History
• Data on the History Profession