Undergraduate
Students decide to become History majors for many different reasons. Maybe you are curious about the Revolutionary War because of Hamilton. Or maybe you grew up in Alabama and want to know more about the state or Birmingham. Perhaps you saw a TV show about how aliens built the pyramids (they didn’t, btw), or you find gladiators or Nazis fascinating. Or, maybe you just want skills that employers are looking for. In the History Department, we teach all these things and so much more.
One of the best things about a major in History is that the degree is flexible and can be tailored to your interests. Once you’ve finished two introductory sequences (U.S. history and either World History or Western Civ.), the majority of your classes are going to be courses that you want to take and fit into your schedule. The only other required course is HY 497 (the capstone) which you will take in your senior year.
Program Requirements
All program requirements and courses are outlined in the UAB Undergraduate Catalog. You can also look at a proposed four-year program of study for History majors. You can download the 
Undergraduate Program Handbook for a brief synopsis of the program.
Ready to Apply?
All the information you need to apply can be found on UAB's Undergraduate Admissions site.
The History Honors Program is designed for outstanding history majors at UAB. It helps prepare you for graduate work in the field or post-graduate studies in areas such as law, theology, and medicine. If accepted, you will have access to advanced classes, enjoy one-on-one interaction with faculty, and will write an honor’s thesis based on original research. Faculty-led independent research for the senior thesis provides you with experience in applying historical methods and analytical writing techniques.
Members of the program are invited to join Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors organization. Members of UAB's Chi Omicron chapter of Phi Alpha Theta publish the Vulcan Historical Review annually.
Eligibility
You must complete at least 60 semester hours while at UAB, with a minimum 3.0 overall GPA and a minimum 3.5 GPA in history courses. You must complete at least 24 hours in the history major before you can be accepted into the program.
Interested students must apply for the program. Before you apply you will need to find a History Department faculty member who will direct your honors thesis. They can help you with the application process, and they will need to sign your honors application form. If you are accepted into the program, you and your thesis director will choose two additional faculty members to make up your thesis committee. This committee will determine whether your completed thesis qualifies for honors.
Requirements
A complete list of honors requirements and courses are available in the UAB Undergraduate Catalog.
Contact
For additional information on the History Honors Program, contact the Department of History at
Whether you are planning a future in education, law, museum curation, business, healthcare, publishing, or politics, we have the program and tools to help you get where you want to go. Along the way, you will discover what our students tell us time and again: history is fun. The history major offers an endless array of fascinating topics—and dynamic classroom teaching—that will bring the past to life.
We invite you to learn about the many offerings for History majors. For example, we give you the opportunity to work closely with faculty in small classes, publish your work in a journal, join the History honors society, and get course credit for an internship at many excellent sites around Birmingham.
What Can You Do with a History Degree?
History teaches the research, writing, and persuasive arguing skills that are so essential to every professional field. Some of our former students are curators of historical sites, such as Sloss Furnaces or Rickwood Field (the oldest baseball park in the country). Others are archivists, IT experts, military officers, directors of schools and banks around the world, and non-profit professionals.
We're Here for You
We are a hands-on department, made up of professors and instructors who are committed to teaching in many different styles—from lectures, to small discussion groups, to historical reenactments. At UAB, our goal is to make sure you have access to academic and student experiences that will launch you toward a lifelong love of history and into a rewarding career.
Spring 2025 Special Topics Courses
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HY 200-1C: Work & Labor in Bham (Fulfills Blazer Core: City as Classroom)
Instructor: Zaretsky
This course explores the history of labor and work in Birmingham from the 1880s to the present. Founded after the Civil War, our own Magic City is a perfect place to examine this theme over the long twentieth century. The course begins with the rise of the iron and steel industries in the late nineteenth century and then turns to workplace organizing, the formation of industrial unions, and famous workplace actions like the Coal Strike of 1908 and the Textile Workers Strike of 1934. We then ask how the city’s labor history intersected with the history of Jim Crow segregation and the fight for African American equality at mid-century. In the final part of the class, we look at how work and labor conditions changed as the city transitioned from an industrial to a service-based economy, one that today revolves largely around the healthcare industry. Throughout the class, we will ask where Birmingham’s unique history fits within the history of labor and work in the United States over the last 150 years.
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HY 200-1E: Civic Engagement in Bham (Fulfills Blazer Core: City as Classroom)
Instructor: Murphy
This class evaluates the relationship between civic engagement and American democracy. It surveys the events, social issues, and institutions that historically inspired collective action among Americans and facilitated social change. Students will study Birmingham's rich labor, civil rights, and religious history as a reflection of and impetus behind national trends. Throughout the course, students will participate in direct volunteer service projects in collaboration with Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. Each class will explore diverse expressions of civic engagement including, but not limited to, volunteerism, philanthropy, political and labor activism, and electoral politics.
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HY 201-1C: Magic and Medicine (Fulfills Blazer Core: Humans & Their Society)
Instructor: Rodrick
Magic and medicine are systems of knowledge that have been intertwined throughout ancient, medieval, and early modern history. This course provides an opportunity to examine this relationship more closely and look into how both developed. We will explore the ways in which boundaries defining and separating magic, science, and religion emerged and influenced these pursuits with an emphasis on the history of medicine. Topics include medicinal properties of historically significant plants, historically contextualized healing rituals across multiple societies, & models of holistic spiritual transformation in contexts such as the following: Plato and Neoplatonism, Aristotelian philosophy, Hippocrates and Galen, the Hermetic Corpus, the Renaissance magic of figures such as Ficino and Pico, Paracelsus on the metaphysics of disease, magic and medicine in Elizabethan England, Hermetic influences on major figures of the Scientific Revolution including Copernicus and Kepler, and more.
