History Program
General Overview
Historians seek to understand and critically analyze how kings and everyday people lived, believed and impacted the world around them. There are historians of every region of the world, of every era, and many more focused fields such as global history, military history, political history, and social history.
Engaged as they are in community and regional outreach, our professors have earned a strong reputation by providing their students not only with an understanding of people and the effects of their actions and ideas, but, also, with analytical and problem solving skills useful in any occupation that demands intellectual discipline and articulate expression, be it written or oral.
Part of PSU's College of Arts and Sciences, History offers classes that attract students with interests from across campus. Our department maintains a broad selection of courses in a rigorous undergraduate program, where students have a tremendous opportunity to interact with high-quality professors. Students who elect our internship program, available to seniors and graduate students, benefit from successful partnerships with archives and museums featuring local, regional, state, and national history. Aspiring teachers should know that PSU's first-rate history teacher education program enjoys a consistently high job placement rate and is directed by a practicing historian. And, History houses one of the few distance-friendly M.A. programs in the United States.
Program Profile
There are 7 full-time professors. Offering courses for approximately 140 undergraduate majors and 35 graduate students, the program provides a wide variety of survey and specialized courses that command the attention of not only major but of students from across campus who want to learn about some aspect of history.
The student to faculty ratio for freshman/sophomore classes is approximately 40:1 and for junior/senior classes, 20:1.