Majors and Minors
History majors thrive in part because they learn valuable skills such as how to research and analyze documents, artifacts, and media; critically evaluate competing interpretations; work collaboratively on group projects; prepare and present persuasive arguments in oral and written forms; and how to apply your past to your future.
Why study history at Christopher Newport?
- Enter small classroom settings with award-winning teachers.
- Collaborate with active scholars and mentors who invite students to work with them individually on research projects.
- Tap into our network of internship partners throughout Virginia’s Historic Triangle and the Mid-Atlantic region.
- Join us on our faculty-led study abroad programs around the world.
All of these opportunities allow you to earn credit toward your degree, and more importantly, to create unique experiences and establish lasting professional relationships.
We offer courses in the regional histories of the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as significant themes – political and economic, social and cultural, legal and spiritual, scientific and technological, environmental and medical – all in the contexts of the ancient and modern eras.
Sample Courses
This course provides an in-depth study abroad experience focusing on different cultures and people by visiting important cities, key historical sites and major museums. Destinations have included Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Morocco and China.
Explore warfare‘s social impact on the founding cultures of Western civilization, and examine specific conflicts that influenced the rise and fall of Athens, Sparta, Macedonia and the Roman Republic.
This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will pay particular attention to how American understandings of gender and sexuality have been created and maintained through a variety of institutions, such as religion, law, science, medicine, language and popular culture. Key themes include family and community life; race, class, and citizenship; the role of the state; the medicalization of the body; the politics of reproduction; and activist responses.
There was no single wartime experience. Examine through film how Europeans have remembered the Second World War and how those memories are used for political purposes to help understand what it means to be German, Italian, French, British, Polish and Russian.