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.