The guide

History

Humanities & Social Sciences

The disciplined reconstruction of the past from incomplete, biased and often contradictory evidence. You build and defend an argument about what happened and why, rather than memorise a settled account of it.

This suits you if…

You would rather build a case from documents that disagree with each other than accept a single tidy account. You can rewrite the same argument five times as new evidence complicates it, without losing patience with the process.

Look elsewhere if…

You want a straight line from your subject to your first job. Or you dislike weekly written argument more than you expected. A vocational route, communications or education or law, gives you a nearer destination. This degree's actual skill, argument from contested evidence, transfers there anyway.

What this subject actually is

You will also see it called

Historical StudiesThe same subject, under a different department in a different country. Search for all of them.

What the first year is really made of

Dates and names aren't the subject. They're its raw material. The actual work is turning a handful of ambiguous, self-interested documents into an argument nobody else in the room has made, in a graded essay every week or two. Most applicants arrive expecting a narrative they can learn. Instead they are handed a stack of conflicting sources and told to argue a position from them. The ones who leave usually wanted the story, not the argument about what the story even is.

The catch

A history degree trains argument from evidence better than it trains anyone for a specific job. Almost nobody graduates directly into 'a historian' role, outside a small number of archive, museum and academic posts. The translation into paid work is left to you, the same way it is after philosophy or pure mathematics. It takes real, separate effort during the degree rather than after it.

What to do about it now

The school subjects that actually matter

History
English
A second language where offered

What admissions screens on, and what the first year assumes you already have. The only thing on this page you can start today.

Where it leads

Kinds of work this opens

A list, not a prediction. Most people in these jobs did not study exactly this, and most people who study this end up doing something the list does not name.