Amidst all the talk of US News' law school rankings, we might forget that US News ranks other programs–including, this year, history departments. Here's a link to them. The history rankings rely exclusively on peer assessment scores. This invites comparison with the law school rankings' methodology, of course–and may also suggest some fruitful lines of additional analysis for ranking history departments. I don't know whether students' entering credentials are available, but that might provide some useful additional data–in part because a good deal of a student's experience in graduate school is the interaction with other students.
There's a four way tie for first–Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale, each at 4.8); Harvard and University of Chicago are close behind at 4.7. Chapel Hill and Cornell are tied for twelfth at 4.4.
There are specialty rankings for areas like African American History (Duke, Harvard, and Yale are tied for first; Chapel Hill is tied with Princeton for seventh), Colonial American History (Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale are tied for first; Chapel Hill is tied with Princeton for eight), Modern U.S. History (Yale is first; Columbia University and Harvard are tied for second; Michigan, Penn, Virginia, and UNC are tied for eighth), and Women's History (Rutgers is first). However, there are not specialty rankings for Southern history or for legal history.
No word on how Harvard's beloved History of American Civilization Program contributes to the Harvard history department rankings.
The illustration is Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, which houses the fantastic Southern Historical Collection.