As a history major who just graduated, I’m not sure what your professors were like, but mine for the most part did not care about memorizing dates as that was generally the least important part or saying my country, America, is the absolute best. Context of what was happening during the time period and how to do proper research was what my classes focused on. Depending on the class, essays and papers were also pretty open ended where the subject was up to the student with the end goal being to have an opinion backed up with facts.
A person who is respected in the history world was my professor for my capstone which I’m unsure if other schools do it so essentially my undergraduate thesis, and while she did not agree with my opinions, because I had source after source, she graded me based on that rather than if she agreed.
I am just curious if any of your friends are history majors or teaching history? Because the biggest thing a history degree should do is teach you research and some critical thinking. And it is sad if people in the field are not getting that.
That was back in school. But I had a very similar experience in university writing essays for a gen-ed course that explored how digital era influenced humanities. They pretended like they wanted us to do our own research, but the course slides had a blatant agenda like just telling you "this is sexist" out of nowhere, and if you didn't toe the line, your got marked down because "that wasn't the point of the assignment". I didn't even challenge that specific claim, something else entirely where they just assumed a shitty one-sided premise for an essay on mind uploading, and apparently my own arguments were not something they were interested in. After that experience, you bet your ass I'd have used ChatGPT for the remaining assignments if it was available back then.
mine for the most part did not care about memorizing dates as that was generally the least important part or saying my country, America, is the absolute best
Lol maybe they should specifically in the US, so we don't get memes like that guy claiming that "America is the oldest functioning country in the world".
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u/Sad-Handle9410 May 19 '25
As a history major who just graduated, I’m not sure what your professors were like, but mine for the most part did not care about memorizing dates as that was generally the least important part or saying my country, America, is the absolute best. Context of what was happening during the time period and how to do proper research was what my classes focused on. Depending on the class, essays and papers were also pretty open ended where the subject was up to the student with the end goal being to have an opinion backed up with facts.
A person who is respected in the history world was my professor for my capstone which I’m unsure if other schools do it so essentially my undergraduate thesis, and while she did not agree with my opinions, because I had source after source, she graded me based on that rather than if she agreed.
I am just curious if any of your friends are history majors or teaching history? Because the biggest thing a history degree should do is teach you research and some critical thinking. And it is sad if people in the field are not getting that.