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.
