Department Facts

Key Benefits

  • Critical reading, writing and thinking skills.
  • A critical understanding and appreciation of the past.
  • An informed understanding of the connections between the ideas and institutions of the past and those of the present.
  • Conceptual skills, research competence and writing fluency.
  • Strong foundation for graduate study.

Allegheny Distinctions

  • Emphasis on student/faculty interaction in small classes such as first-year colloquia and junior seminars.
  • Wide choice of areas of concentration within the broader confines of the discipline.
  • Opportunities for one-on-one interaction with faculty in independent study projects and Senior Projects.
  • Emphasis on history as the central discipline in the humanities and social sciences, through use of multidisciplinary materials in the study of the past.
  • Closeness of student/faculty working relationships, most notably when students work as research assistants to faculty.
  • History department faculty includes two past recipients of Allegheny’s Julian Ross Award for excellence in teaching.
    • Stephen Lyons (1990)
    • Paula Treckel (1996)

Facilities Strengths

Pelletier Library: collection of rare books from 18th and 19th centuries; unusually extensive American and English history collection; the Ida M. Tarbell Collection: her personal papers and collection of materials on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War; and artifacts and papers of former governor Raymond P. Shafer ’38. The library is also a repository for government documents.