Study of History
The Study of History at Western Michigan University
At WMU, professional training in History at the undergraduate level develops skills in analyzing historical evidence, using both documents and objects, such as architecture, clothing, and furniture. Students learn to develop historical questions, to research in a wide variety of resources, to analyze and evaluate evidence, and to communicate their conclusions. While writing remains the most frequent form of expression, increasingly students use visual forms, such as slide or computer presentations, posters, museum displays, oral presentations, and radio and video documentaries.
The History Department at Western Michigan University offers three undergraduate programs, each designed for different professional careers. Each requires thirty-six hours of history, foreign language, and additional requirements geared to its special needs.
For more information about the undergraduate opportunities offered by the Department of History, CLICK HERE.
- For more information about the Liberal Education Curriculum (LEC), see the Undergraduate Handbook for Majors.
The Liberal Education Curriculum (LEC) provides classic liberal arts preparation appropriate for many occupations, such as law, journalism, government, and college teaching. The LEC emphasizes "early" history in many parts of the world, allows many options for minors, and requires students to complete the equivalent of two years of a foreign language as a research tool.
The Public History Curriculum (PUH) provides professional and technical training for occupations in museums, archives, historic sites, government, and consulting. The term "public history" applies broadly to work historians do outside a classroom setting. This program requires an Internship experience in a public history setting, working with and learning from practicing professionals. In addition to the skills required of all historians public history specialists often need to have experience with grant applications, museum and archive administration, public relations, and historic conservation.
- For more information about the Public History Curriculum (PUH) see the Undergraduate Handbook for Majors.
- WMU's Public History Program Website is located at http://www.wmich.edu/history/publichistory/
Option III: Secondary Education
- For more information about the Secondary Education Curriculum (SED) see the Undergraduate Handbook for Majors.
The Secondary Education Curriculum (SED), combined with professional education courses in the College of Education, meets State of Michigan certification requirements for teaching history and social studies in middle school and high school. Individual certification is also conditional on passing State of Michigan tests in these content areas. History requirements include courses in United States history, Non-Western history, and European history. Social Studies requirements include economics, geography and political science. A course in teaching methods and a semester of Intern Teaching complete the program.
The
University and nearby communities offer rich historical resources. The
Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections, WMU's
Waldo Library, and the Kalamazoo
Valley Museum are just some of those available. In addition,
Western Michigan University libraries subscribe to national on-line
data-bases, and provide access to books and journals held in other
libraries across the country. Trough the Internet, students have
access to manuscript collections from the State of Michigan, the
National Archives, the Smithsonian Museum, and numerous other sources.
Cultural and social historical theory and research, use of multidisciplinary research techniques, and the projection of research across the widest possible spectrum of the academy and the informed public, constitute the main focus of activity in the Department of History at Western Michigan. Several broad program characteristics derive from this focus.The program is designed to introduce students to historical theory and its relationship to theoretical issues in the allied social sciences and humanities. Doctoral students in particular are expected to explore systematically the theoretical links between historical studies and allied disciplines. Students receive broad training in historical and multidisciplinary research techniques for generating evidence. In addition to traditional training in locating and criticizing documentation, students are expected to become effective users of a variety of research and interpretive skills derived from ethnography, archaeology and artifactual studies, physical anthropology, sociology and other disciplines. Students develop expository writing and interpretive skills applicable to academic life as well as to a broad range of public communication venues. The program is designed to train both independent and collaborative scholars and educators to function in all realms of public exposure to history, including colleges and universities, secondary and primary schools, museums and historic sites, and forms of mass communication.
Our faculty and graduate students research, present, publish and perform professional activities primarily in the following areas:
Material arts and culture; technology and culture. The built environment, artifacts of material life and human artistic endeavor occupies the attention of many faculty and students in the department. Preservation and interpretation of the diversity of material culture, in addition to offering a wide range of historical evidence in itself, draws historians into new dimensions of communication with the informed public. The History Graduate Faculty includes a number of scholars active in public history. Historical and contemporary subsets of population identified by gender, ethnicity and community of experience. The forces of cultural uniformity and standardization of material culture threaten to eradicate specific knowledge bases of demographically and/or geographically small-scale communities, and therefore lend a sense of urgency to the huge task of preserving diversity of culture and social organization in historical forms and in contemporary life. The History Graduate Faculty is particularly strong in several areas of women’s history and ethnic studies. The breadth of specific faculty interests offers many opportunities for comparative research.
Historical theory and the philosophy of history. Faculty and student research in corporate these topics not only into their discipline of history, but also into many realms in which historical studies have articulated the dynamics of culture. Examples include the recent and widespread revival of historical research in and about allied disciplines, and the varied products of historical research for public consumption, including biography and life history, planning and public policy studies, and the enrichment of public culture.
The History Graduate Faculty also works closely with scholars and graduate programs in allied disciplines, including:
The Medieval Institute, with which faculty in more than a dozen departments and colleges are affiliated, representing the university’s long-standing commitment to medieval studies; related programs are found in the Institute of Cistercian Studies and the Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon and Manuscript Studies.The Department of Anthropology, which concentrates on prehistoric and historical archaeology, social science theory and symbolic anthropology.The Department of Comparative Religion, which offers one of the few graduate programs in the country concentrating on comparative religion based on social science theory.The Department of Sociology, together with the Kercher Center for Social Research, with an excellent reputation in both quantitative and qualitative and qualitative methodology applied to local and regional social and economic issues.
The Department of Art, which collaborated with the Department of History, as well as scholars in other venues, to offer a rich variety of courses in traditional as well as social history of visual arts.
Graduate programs in political science also feature strong applied and comparative components, and support the Institute for Government and Politics and the School of Public Administration. The Department of Geography complements the department’s focus on public history with a broad array of course work in urban and regional planning and state-of –the –art facilities in geographic information systems.
Western Michigan University has brought together an engaged group of scholars working in the field of ethnohistory. Particular areas of expertise include culture contact, colonialism, material analysis, historiography, oral history, gender, historical archaeology, ethnography, tribalization, globalization, and modernization. These topics are not restricted to any particular geographic area nor any particular societal structure. The core of ethnohistory lies in the realization shared by practitioners of the benefits obtained through the use of multiple lines of evidence to study history and culture. Ethnohistorians recognize the documents, archaeological findings, oral histories, and ethnographies can be profitable compared, contrasted, and integrated to elucidate the histories and cultural contexts of groups that have been ignored in conventional historical accounts. Thus, interdisciplinary study is incumbent in ethnohistory. By juxtaposing multiple lines of evidence, the ethnohistorian can at once examine the distant and the local, the general and the particular, bringing human experience into better focus.The Ethnohistory Certificate is open to students enrolled in a graduate degree program at Western Michigan University. The Certificate requires that students take two Ethnohistory courses, at least one of which is outside their home department, and the Ethnohistory seminar. The seminar will be taught every year, alternating between the Departments of History and Anthropology. Students must take the course once in each department.
- WMU's Ethnohistory Program Website is located at: http://www.wmich.edu/ethnohistory
Graduate Studies in Medieval History
The Department of History at Western Michigan University includes twenty-five full-time faculty members and offers both the M.A. and Ph.D. in History. The department is strong in medieval European history; modern European and Latin American history; and in U.S. history, especially Public History and the History of the Great Lakes region. The department is committed to cultural and social historical theory and research and the use of multidisciplinary research techniques; the History faculty includes members with their degrees not only in history but in Anthropology, Art History, American Studies, and Medieval Studies, and the faculty cooperates with numerous other departments, interdisciplinary institutes and university units. The largest contingent of our 40 to 60 actively enrolled graduate students in medieval history, and medieval history faculty, including emeriti, available on campus to students number ten members. The resources of the Medieval Institute, which annually hosts the largest medieval conference in the world, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and of medieval faculty in numerous other departments are also available to students in the History Department specializing in medieval history. Graduate work in medieval history at Western Michigan University includes the preparation of subject-area specialties through private tutorial, readings and topics courses often bibliographical or historiographical in orientation, and research seminars providing rigorous training in original research through exposure to primary sources and source criticism, and various research tools and methodologies. All students must be continuously enrolled in Latin until they pass a seminar in Medieval Latin, and all students study other medieval and/or modern languages. The department offers courses in Latin paleography, art, archaeology, and material culture, and students are not only encouraged but required to take courses on other departments. Ph.D. students are required to take a seminar in College Teaching and Professional Activities, and are afforded an ample opportunity to compile a complete teaching portfolio. Western Michigan University M.A. students in medieval history or M.A. students directed by History Faculty, such as those in medieval studies at the Medieval Institute, or in other departments or programs, have been accepted into Ph.D. programs at University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, University of Arizona, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Notre Dame, Northwestern University, University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, and numerous other universities. Western Michigan University Ph.D.s and current Ph.D. Candidates are employed in a wide variety of editorial, administrative, and faculty reaching and research positions at various institutions of higher learning.
For more information about graduate studies in Medieval History at Western Michigan University, contaDr. James R. Palmitessa at james.palmitessa@wmich.edu
Graduate Studies in Public History
Public History is most identifiable as the presentation of history and culture outside of the traditional classroom setting. These pursuits include, but are by no means limited to, museums, historic preservation, historic site management, archival management, cultural resource management, and policy applications. Working from this tradition, Western Michigan University's (WMU) Public History Program, established in 1980, stresses an interdisciplinary approach to the field. It does so in the hope of preparing professionals to engage the widest public audience in the continually emerging questions of history and culture.
WMU's Public History Program seeks to train socially responsible professionals who can facilitate historical awareness in diverse venues on the local and regional level. With the aim of making history a useful educational and planning tool in communities, WMU's Public History Program employs a unique and rich blend of resources and methodologies and emphasizes public history practice in ecological terms through the examination of regional environments, places, and economic systems. Students seeking a Master of Arts or Ph.D. with a concentration in Public History are encouraged to develop a course of study that corresponds with the Department of History’s strengths in Cultural History, Medieval History, or Environmental History. An internship and a comprehensive exam are also required. Students can select the option of writing a thesis or completing a final Public History project.Non-credit courses, workshops, and programs on specialized topics or methodologies are also offered as part of the Public History program. A growing network of WMU Public History graduates are employed in museums, historic sites, and other cultural institutions in the Great Lakes region and beyond.
- A list of Public History Class Descriptions can be viewed by CLICKING HERE.
- WMU's Public History Program Website is located at: http://www.wmich.edu/history/publichistory/
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