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The University of Kentucky’s History program prepares students to shape the future by understanding the past. Historians are skilled at gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information, and the discipline cultivates communication, argumentation, and evidence-based reasoning essential in a rapidly changing world. Students learn to analyze how people across the globe have experienced change, synthesize and interpret historical data, and communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively. The program fosters creativity, empathy, and intercultural understanding, equipping graduates for careers resistant to automation and vital to problem-solving in the 21st-century economy. Alumni apply their training in education, government, business, and the nonprofit sector, making a lasting impact in their communities.

What is the Study of History? 

Historians interpret all human endeavors including politics, economics, the construction of social institutions, and the methods of cultural expression. The interpretive tools that historians use to address these fundamental human activities inform the present and the future. From ancient carved inscriptions to modern newspapers, historians examine the sources of past cultures in order to explore the ways in which human beings understand the world around them, and how they make the decisions that influence their times.

History is thus not a collection of names and dates to be memorized, but a means of addressing the human condition. The tools that the historian uses to achieve this goal are drawn from every discipline; political science, sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism all contribute the training of a historian.

If you seek to study a field that offers you the broadest possible range of skills and subjects, from understanding the organization of the Roman army to the political background of the authors of the American Constitution to today's news, then history is the major for you.  

What Can You Do With a History Degree?

History majors find employment across a vast spectrum of industries. While traditional roles in education and museums remain popular, the majority of graduates apply their research, analytical, and communication skills in other private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Here is a graphic representation of where our graduates end up.

(Image: AHA)