Countless students begin and graduate from college with an impoverished humanities education, a reality that should disturb any proponent of the liberal arts. According to a recent report by the…
Colleges and universities across the country don’t require students to study history. Although students at many colleges are “technically” required to take a history course to fulfill their general education…
I’m sometimes asked why it is so difficult for PhD students of a conservative bent to survive and flourish in history graduate programs these days. It’s not enough to say…
On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western…
I taught history from 1976 through 2013 at Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. The 37 years of my career coincided with a drastic change in the…
In the fall of 2018, the trustees of Washington and Lee University voted to paper over parts of the university’s history. On the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s “Commission on…
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the history field has seen a precipitous decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in American colleges. As Benjamin Schmidt, a historian at Northeastern…
Jenna A. Robinson, President Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, has been a revelation—of my own inadequate history education. As the title says,…
The Raleigh News & Observer recently published a contentious exchange between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s history professor Jay Smith and vice chancellor of communications Joel Curran…
New Year’s Day means a time to take stock of what’s happened on college campuses. Higher education in 2017 had more of students leading campus protests, college administrators struggling to…