History (BS)

• Demonstrate “information literacy.” This includes effectively utilizing scholarly databases to identify appropriate and relevant primary and secondary sources, assessing the quality and relevance of secondary sources available, and successfully accessing relevant and appropriate sources.
• Formulate a significant and substantive historical question and construct and develop an effective historical argument. This includes articulating a substantive and defensible thesis; presenting informed and insightful analysis of relevant and appropriate historical evidence; and recognizing deficiencies, contradictions, and omissions in one’s interpretation.
• Analyze, evaluate, and contextualize various kinds of primary historical sources. This includes assessing each source’s reliability, claims, perspectives, interests, and limitations and analyzing/evaluating primary sources in relation to each other.
• Demonstrate knowledge of historical chronology, central developments and conflicts, and multiple cultural perspectives in the history of the United States, Europe, and at least one of the following: Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
• Evaluate historical arguments in scholarly literature and synthesize the central interpretive issues in a historical field. This includes identifying key scholarly works, identifying historians’ interpretive arguments and assessing the validity of evidence and interpretive methods utilized, comparing and contrasting scholars’ questions/methods/interpretations, and producing an effective synthetic discussion of key points of scholarly debate.
• Effectively communicate historical knowledge, interpretation, and ideas to non-experts. This includes articulating scholarly arguments clearly, explicating scholarly debates, explaining historical forces, and presenting one’s own interpretations in a clear, organized, and convincing manner.
• Demonstrate knowledge and effective practice of disciplinary conventions of attribution. This includes citing sources when appropriate and constructing properly formatted footnotes and bibliography.