The Future
of History “They come to us for an elective, and then they stay,” says Stephanie McCurry about Penn undergraduates who decide to major in history. “But it takes more and more creative strategies to make the value of education and knowledge apparent, and also just to be open to new media like Coursera.” When McCurry became the Department of History’s undergraduate chair, a post she held from 2009 to 2012, the number of history majors was dropping at Penn and across the country. The same was true for many other humanities disciplines. She believes a general trend toward business-oriented commercial education was greatly heightened by the financial crisis and recession. McCurry and the other faculty reworked the curriculum. They added a new world history survey focusing on transnational approaches to history. Because a historian’s expertise is usually location-based, professors co-teach. They’re also holding seminars on topics of interest; right now, the history of capitalism is hot. Some of it is marketing, but McCurry knows there is an audience for history and the humanities. “You let kids go to college, you don’t know what they’re going to find interesting. Our majors, many of them do wind up on Wall Street, and they’re very good at it. They can write. They can reason. They can think. They can make a case,” she says. “Conan O’Brien’s a history major,” she points out. “Intelligent, astute, observant, funny people—that’s what we turn out.”
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