HistoryDegree.org

Find History Degrees Near You

History is one of the few subjects taught everywhere, and you’ll find history degrees across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Our directory lists 2,499 history programs at 1,195 colleges and universities across the country, and the program options vary from state to state. Pick your state below to see the schools and history degree programs near you, plus our picks for top options and affordable history programs.

How Much Does Location Matter?

It depends on which degree you are after, and the answer flips as you go up the levels.

For a bachelor’s degree, location is mostly a tuition question. Undergraduate history coursework looks similar from school to school, all of them built on survey courses, research seminars and a capstone, so staying in state for the resident tuition rate is usually the sensible call (the exception being a department with a genuine specialty you cannot get at home). Our directory lists 1,690 bachelor’s programs, which is two thirds of everything we track, and most students have several within driving distance.

At master’s and doctoral level the calculation inverts, because you are no longer choosing a curriculum. You are choosing a supervisor. A thesis on the Reconstruction South is directed by one or two people, and a regional public university with a specialist in your period will serve you better than a famous department with nobody working on it. That’s worth crossing a state line for. Doctoral study narrows the field considerably in any case: 254 of the programs in our directory are doctorates, and we found at least one in 45 states.

Questions Worth Asking History Departments

  • Who would supervise this? Ask for the names of faculty working in your period and region, then check what they have published in the last five years. A department page listing a specialty is not the same as an active researcher.
  • What archives can students actually reach? History is the rare major where physical proximity to primary sources still shapes what you can write about. Ask which collections the department has working relationships with.
  • Where do the graduates go? Departments that place students into state archives, museums, teaching posts or law school usually know it and will tell you (a department that changes the subject has told you something too).
  • Is there funding at the graduate level? Teaching assistantships and tuition waivers are common in history doctoral programs and change the cost of the degree entirely.

How History Programs Are Distributed

History programs cluster where the population is, with a few exceptions worth knowing about. Four states account for roughly a quarter of everything in our directory: New York has 193 programs at 82 institutions, California 161, Texas 153 and Pennsylvania 148. At the other end, Alaska has 2 and Wyoming has 3, both concentrated in a single university system.

Washington DC is the outlier that does not follow population at all. It holds 45 programs across just 7 institutions, which is the densest concentration of any jurisdiction in our directory, and it is what happens when a small number of research universities sit beside the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. If your interest is archival or curatorial work, that matters more than the raw program count suggests. The federal government is a significant employer here: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 40,200 archivists, curators and museum workers nationally, earning a median of $57,100 in 2024, with employment projected to grow 6% through 2034.

Public history, the applied side of the field that leads into museums, historic sites and preservation offices, follows its own map. Our directory flags 149 programs with a public history designation, led by Pennsylvania with 11, then North Carolina, Illinois and California with 9 each. These counts are conservative, since we only flag programs that name the focus rather than burying it in a concentration. The public history guide covers what the designation means in practice.

What Your State Says About Your Job Prospects

Less than you might expect, with one real exception. Most careers that history graduates enter are distributed roughly in line with population, so a degree from a good department in a small state is not a handicap in the way it can be in fields tied to a single industry cluster.

Teaching is the exception, and it runs the other way. Certification is granted state by state, and the requirements differ, so a teaching career is one of the few history paths where studying where you intend to work is much simpler. The American Historical Association reports that 40% of US social studies teachers hold an undergraduate degree in history, making it the most common single route into the classroom. High school teachers earned a median of $64,580 in 2024.

For everything else, the degree travels. History majors reach a median wage of $80,000 by mid-career according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and they get there through law, government, business, publishing and research rather than through any single geographic hub. If the program you want is out of state and the funding works, take it. If it is in state and the supervisor is right, that is better still.

Not tied to a specific state or region? Consider an online program. Our online history degree listings cover the 219 programs in our directory confirmed to offer a fully online option, including 133 at bachelor’s level and 85 at master’s.