For good or ill, none of us can escape the past—ever. Both the world in which we live and we as individuals are products of a long and complex development. The History Department offers a broad range of courses that tell you about the past and that will help you understand yourself and the social environment in which you'll spend the rest of your life. Those courses will also help you learn to think and write critically about politics, business, society, and culture.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from Antiquity to the 21st century, from social history to military history to the history of medicine and beyond, we offer substantive courses on a wide variety of interesting topics.

The following pages contain information about the courses that will be taught in this and upcoming semesters (Fall 2011), as well as a comprehensive list of history courses taught at Wake Forest. For courses taught in previous semesters, please consult the news and archives.

For more information about any of these courses, please consult the faculty member concerned.

A European bartering with a West African slave trader in the early modern period. Until the 19th century, Europeans were obliged to deal with African middlemen to obtain the slaves demanded by plantation agriculture in the Americas. Slaves were sometimes traded for guns, which led to a gradual militarization of some parts of West African society.