This is a shameless plug from me as a history major:

I thought those presentations were really great, and having known a lot of the presenters and seen their projects evolve over the year made it doubly rewarding. That said, I thought it was so interesting that almost every thesis talk was introduced with a couple minutes of historical background, as well as relevant theory. I think that in many ways, communities of color cannot be defined without being at the same time historicized, placed into a temporal context; the Asian American community cannot be completely understood without a solid knowledge of US immigration policy and the history of race in this country.

Elaine Wan's presentation, in particular, observed that the progressive social justice mission of the AARC at pomona is strongly informed by history and theory, and that AARC interns are assumed to have a background in that history and that theory during conversations planning events, doing outreach work, etc. Part of the problem with the way college classes are structured is that there never seems to be a time when each discipline has a chance to actually force students to read all of the theory that underpins its analysis of texts, events, communities.

I was personally reminded of this the other day. I was talking with a first-year about the direction history seminars take: more theory, more analysis of and synthesis from texts, less name-and-date memorization. She asked me if I'd read Hegel, and I blushed, admitting that while his work is in some sense foundational for a lot of what I've studied, I've never actually picked up any of his texts. "You should," she said, "his philosophy of history is pretty short."