While going further into your history studies, you will be introduced into a wide range of historical time periods, events, cultures and more. Whether choosing a topic for your coursework, writing your dissertation, or applying for postgraduate studies, finding the kind of history you want to focus on will help you work through your degree and build your academic expertise in your chosen subject.
When choosing a concentration, it is best to think about what interests you and what you want a future career in. If you have a historical niche you are super passionate about and want to stick with, you may want to dedicate yourself to it in further education or working in related museums. If you know you want to branch out into business, politics, economics, journalism, marketing, or a less historical career, it may be in your interest to pick a less niche and more modern area of history to focus on.
Types of History Concentrations and their Advantages
Time Period
- Examples: Ancient, Medieval, Modern
These different forms of periodization will introduce you to temporally bounded studies with geographical connections of many countries, civilizations, and cultures around the world. Studying a more modern history is useful for history students who are looking to expand into a political or business sphere after graduating or going into postgraduate studies. Modern studies best inform how to advise current political and business issues because they provide you with a historical background to ongoing events and how to critically address them. Focusing on earlier studies will keep you more within the history industry and provide you with a background for museums, archives, or even archaeology.
Geographical
- Examples: Country, Continent, Civilization
Oftentimes, historians have niche geographical areas they are interested in, so if a specific place calls out to you, you may want to specialize in that. Focusing on one country, continent, or civilization will give a substantially more in depth understanding of their history than other concentrations would. Specializing in one of these places could make you a useful asset to heritage based jobs in those places or in advising their politics. It’s also important to consider where you want to live because this area-based knowledge will go further in that country.
Cultural
- Examples: Ethnic, Women’s/Gender, Queer
Cultural studies may be similar to geographical studies by focusing on a specific ethnicity’s culture. The other forms of cultural studies are less geographically bounded and look for similarities in international societal cultures. These often focus on less privileged subjectivities to help bring their histories to light. This contextualizes the workings of the culture and its lasting effects. The nature of this subject lends towards NGO and non-profit work because you will gain a great understanding of the culture and, thus, how to best help them.
Military
Military history takes a focus on the history of major wars, but also different types of warfare, ethics, politics, and military law. It also goes into the broader effects of war and how these events impact other sectors like the economy and operations in peacetime. For your career, this makes you particularly useful to war and security governmental departments as well as NGOs that try to aid in mitigating the effects of military conflicts.
Business/Economic
As the name suggests, the business or economic concentration is great for students looking to work in a less history-related field. This may be strictly focused on business management and using historical knowledge to help a business thrive in certain geographical markets. It can also look at how economic inequalities grow and fester which lends itself to NGO work. This is a great intersection of business, economy, and people and how they work together to create adverse or beneficial capital conditions.
Science
This gives a more specific understanding of how different scientific innovations came to be. The scientific topics are usually on the ripple effects of practical inventions, but will also tackle the philosophy and ethics surrounding the innovations. This is a great option for people considering archival and museum studies because of the practicality. It is also a good option for people who may be less satisfied with how BA-focused a history degree is. Science history will make your historical studies more interdisciplinary and if you get a degree in it, it will typically be a BSc rather than a BA. If you are looking for a more STEM career, this may be the concentration for you.
Religious Studies
The concentration may focus on a specific religion, but can also encapsulate the similarities in all religions and people searching for a meaning to life. Religion is the driving force of many historical and ongoing events and conflicts and a deeper understanding of religion will help you understand why those events and conflicts occur. This gives you a great background in both governmental and NGO careers because you have a deeper understanding of religious conflicts.