A computer science major learns algorithms. An engineering major learns mechanics. An astrophysics major learns how classical and quantum principles interact with the theories of space, time, and gravity. However, students can easily leave thinking this learning is limited to objective bodies of knowledge. What is often left unexamined is how these bodies of knowledge came to exist in the first place.
The theories, methods, questions, and assumptions that define a discipline today did not emerge out of thin air; they were shaped by people, institutions, historical events, and intellectual debates. Yet, in the process of becoming specialists, students are rarely asked to consider the histories that produced their fields of study. We learn what our disciplines know, but not necessarily how they came to know it. This is precisely why every college student, regardless of major, should take at least one history course: not simply to learn about the past, but to understand the origins of the sectors of knowledge they study and how it shapes the present.
Every academic discipline is, in some sense, a product of its historical circumstances. The questions a field asks, the methods it consi...