

Until the twentieth century, historians focused mainly on elites: those with the means to record their own experiences in publications, letters, diaries, and official documents. This method tended to produce historical narratives in which change was understood to come from those in positions of political, economic, and social power. Social history, in contrast, seeks to understand change from the bottom up—by focusing on the lived experiences of many types of people in the past, with special attention to those who found themselves in oppressive situations. Social historians often focus on class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, geography, and other categories which have constrained and shaped human experience. Social historians at Harvard work across a wide variety of time periods, populations, methods, and sources, but their work seeks to answer the same basic question: what did people do with the resources, material, symbolic, cultural, legal (etc.) that they had in order to advance their interests or achieve their goals within the constraints imposed on them by their context?
FACULTY
(Courses offered by History Department faculty automatically count for the History concentration)
*Please be sure to check the Courses section of the History Website for more information on which of these courses count towards the History concentration and secondary field. Also, while we endeavor to keep this list current, it may not reflect all courses actually offered.*