It was never my plan to declare a major during my junior year at Hope. I had a solid psychology major in process and on the way to completing my degree. My feet were firmly planted on the on the snowy sidewalks of Holland, so it was a surprise to many, especially my parents, when …
Author Archives: Raquel Niles
Student Feature: Avery Lowe
Anger and guilt are left at the doorway. Class begins with a prayer, and then for an hour and twenty minutes, my classmates and I listen attentively as Dr. Johnson enlightens us in his 300 level history course- the History of Slavery & Race in America. We are different races, we have different political affiliations, …
Two new history courses start march 1st!
Faculty Feature: Pliny was the Answer
Coming out of a class one evening I got a text from my wife: “Guess what the answer was on Final Jeopardy.” I replied, “Since I don’t know what the question was, I can’t know the answer.” She couldn’t remember the exact wording but it had to do with letters written by a Roman and …
Student Feature – Noah Switalski
When I decided to pursue a history degree, I never expected to be able to experience history firsthand; however, I proved myself wrong by traveling abroad to Seville, Spain in the fall of 2017. There, and throughout my European travels, I visited museums and historic sites and greatly deepened my understanding of history and how …
Alumni Feature: How to Answer “What are You Going to Do with That?”
If you are a student of history or simply the humanities in general, you get asked the following question A LOT: “So, what are you going to do with that? Teach?” I’m pretty sure if I had a dollar for every time I was asked that about my studies in English and history, I would …
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Alumni Feature: Claire Barrett, ’15: “Do What You Love”
I grew up in a family that loved history. As a child I would attempt, in vain, to keep up with my father and older sister at dinner as they jumped from topic to topic, war to war. Tired of not contributing, I began to read. What began as an earnest desire to be part …
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Faculty Feature: Marc Baer
Historians don’t create information: they read what’s handed to them, or rather what they can discover that was created by people in the past. Often, one bit of information contradicts another, and the historian is forced to compare and then choose between them, or ascertain which data are the truest, or construct a narrative from …
Alumni Feature: Samantha L. Miller, Ph.D.
After Jeff Tyler’s History of Christianity class, the two courses I am most grateful for in all of my education are Janis Gibbs’s HIST 140 and Marc Baer’s HIST 400, the history major’s introductory and capstone classes, respectively. It was in these classes that I learned the art of research, which served as a foundation …
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Alumni Feature: A Hedge-Fund Lawyer Explains Why You Should Major in History
“I’m interested in business and finance, so why should I major in history?” or, more bluntly, “Business is about buying and selling things, not writing term papers, so why should I study history?” I asked myself these same questions before I became a history major, and, today I am an in-house lawyer for a private equity and …
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