History boasts some of the finest lecturers in the College. Morison is the closest thing the department has to a romantic historian. Nobody in History is capable of writing historical fiction of the equivocal past but the men in the department don't reduce history to a recital of dates and kings enlivened occasionally by the adventures of the kings' mistresses.

Morison, Merk, and Schlesinger handle American history with authority. The American history question on the departmental exam can be answered after taking Merk's History 61a, one of the most rewarding half-courses in the department. Blake's course on the Byzantine Empire of Bruck's on Roman Law is the answer to the ancient or medieval question on the exam.

Owen, who heads this well-organized department, Jordan and Perkins (English history), Karpovich (Russian history), and Brinton (European intellectual history) combine unquestioned academic brilliance with an infectious interest in their subject. Altogether, there is an impressive enough array of professorial talent to please every intellectual taste.

She Ain't What She Used to Be

Now that the ironclad rule that History 1 be included in every concentrator's program exists no more, History is definitely one of the easier fields for the man with a pretty good memory. The exams aren't overly taxing and the field offers perhaps the greatest opportunity for rewarding scholastic effort.

The field examines man as a political animal and studies the directions of the world's historical background. You get a chance to read a lot of great classical history. History strikes a middle of the road line between retrospective sociology and a study of the uniformities of history. You can even read Toynbee. But don't contemplate going into History just because you think it's easy.