I’ve attended Stonehill for three years now. I’ve taken many courses, both for my history major and as electives or Cornerstone requirements. Most of these classes have been good. Of course, everyone has at least one class in college that they can’t stand, but I can’t say those have tarnished my overall experience in any substantial way.

I have really enjoyed my history major. Taking writing-intensive courses has undoubtedly improved my communication skills. Being exposed to different cultures at various points in the human past has also made me more informed about the greater world. And my professors have been great to work with.

All this being said, I feel as though I haven’t gotten a well-rounded education in my field of study. The reason for this? The types of sources history students have to deal with.

Every history student will know about primary sources. The term has been so furiously drilled into our heads that most of us probably don’t ever want to hear it again. They form the backbone of historical research, so regardless of how we feel about the term, we have to consult them when writing papers. The problem is that we aren’t exposed to enough forms of them. Sure, we can take a written document, analyze its contents, and place it in the greater context of the time it was created, but what about non-written sources? Those are still considered primary sources, yet they receive scant attention in an undergraduate setting.

I first heard about different subfields of academic history last spring when I took HIS 420 for my Writing-in-the-Disciplines requirement. I remember one day, my peers and I were discussing material culture studies. This subject inextricably requires analysis of non-written sources in order to uncover historical realities. I was floored; why hadn’t any of us ever been taught to use these kinds of materials? What if some of us were interested in a culture that did not leave written evidence behind, like the Inca Empire? How could we hope to further our studies and passions when we didn’t have a clue of how to write about them?

Until the later twentieth century, many scholars did not accept anything other than written documents as valid sources for studying history. Some went so far as to say that any culture that did not engage in writing did not even have a history. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel was a notable proponent of this idea, writing that Africa, a continent where most cultures passed down information orally, was “no historical part of the world.”

Hegel and like-minded scholars were wrong. The fact of the matter is, written sources can only provide so much information about the human past. They are not holistic; in many past societies, only elites could read and write. The result was written records and chronicles of the past, but they did not paint any kind of picture of how ordinary people lived. Non-written sources such as material culture and other disciplines entirely, such as archaeology and even genetics, have proven essential in scholars’ quests to uncover information about illiterate cultures.

A history professor of mine recently said something that will stay with me for the rest of my time in college. Academic disciplines are like a box, he said. They provide a solid foundation for those engaging with them, but they are also inflexible. Often, the only way to introduce new ideas to them is to force them through. History is no different. Despite all the advances made in scholarship since the 1960s, undergraduate history departments remain largely stuck in the old way of teaching only written documents as valuable historical sources. They have been slow to develop, despite the efforts of individual scholars. By only relying on written primary sources, students and scholars of history risk glossing over or otherwise obscuring the stories of countless peoples and cultures who have inhabited the Earth.

The time to change education in history is now. Academic history has not kept up with the changing research interests and methodologies of individual scholars. We remain mired in a narrowly-focused academic landscape. History professors and students alike need to recognize this issue and work together to enhance the undergraduate history major experience.

It took me until my junior year to understand just how narrow my education in history has been. I plan to spend the rest of my time at Stonehill trying to decipher other sources of historical information. But Stonehill cannot make this mistake again. History majors need to be exposed earlier on to other forms of primary sources. Only then will we be able to break out of the disciplinary box and allow history students to pursue their interests to their fullest extent.