10 history topics you should avoid


As a college student, your professor expects you to know better than to discuss a topic that is inappropriate or boring to your field of study. This is also true with history. There are certain topics that you just wouldn’t get scored highly on because of certain factors. Let’s explore some of those factors now:

    Same old, same old

    There is a category of history subjects that have been exhausted in their analysis. Topics like these have the ‘yawn-factor’ and are the type that students write on all the time just because they are easy to research. When you take a topic that has been worn out, you professor may just role his or her eyes every time they look at your heading. Topics like this include:

  1. The Titanic
  2. Alexander the Great
  3. Julius Caesar and Brutus

  4. If it’s been done before, leave it alone; but if you can put an interesting twist on the topic, then do so by all means. Keeping it basic just seems overly redundant.


    Speculative history or legends

    One thing that can get frustrating for professors is when a student assumes that something is history when in fact it cannot be proven. When topics like these are put in an argumentative format (trying to persuade the reader with facts that they did really happen), they can be quite interesting, but just writing presumptuously on a theory is annoying. Stay away from the following:

  5. Robin Hood, prince of thieves
  6. King Arthur and the knights of the round table

  7. Being too graphic

    Don’t take a sadistic topic just for the sake of generating a cheap shock factor. If your intention seems like depraved sensationalism, your professor won’t respect your writing. Sensationalist movies depict horrible scenes of war and persecution that are often better left alone. If you are going to discuss the following topics, be more factual in your approach; or better yet, avoid them completely:

  8. The holocaust: A detailed description of how the Jews were treated in WWII
  9. The torture and deaths of Salem’s witches

  10. Politically incorrect

    There are some things that we all agree upon. Unless you want to be shunned by your class, try stay away from discussing topics that rile up angry and hurtful emotions about race, gender and ethnicity. Examples include:

  11. Hitler: misunderstood and unappreciated
  12. Martin Luther King Junior: An overrated ‘hero’
  13. Feminism: Historic reasons why women shouldn’t vote

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