History

1876 Dr. William S. Clark, then president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College in the Unites States is invited to be Vice Principal of Sapporo Agricultural College.
1907 Sapporo Agricultural College becomes Agricultural College of Tohoku Imperial University.
1918 The University becomes the 5th prestigious university in mainland Japan to join a league of seven Imperial Universities formed by the Imperial Japanese government- this distinction continues to hold prominence in Japan today.
1947 The School of Law and Letters is established. There are 6 departments, Philosophy, History, Literature, Law, Politics, and Economy.
1947 Hokkaido Imperial University is renamed Hokkaido University.
1950 The School of Law and Letters divided into the School of Letters and the School of Law and Economics.
1953 New Graduate Schools of Letters is established.
1977 4 departments, Philosophy, History, Literature, and Behavioral Science are established in Faculty of Letters.
1995 Faculty of Letters has experienced organizational restructuring. 4 departments are united into a Department of Humanities.
2000  4 Divisions, Philosophy and Cultural Sciences, History and Area Studies, Linguistics and Literature, and Human Sciences are established in The Graduate School of Letters. Slavic Research Center is joined as a cooperative department.
2007 Center for Applied Ethics and Philosophy and Center for Northern Humanities are established.
2019

The Graduate School of Letters has been reorganized into the Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences and the Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences.
The Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences is a research organization to which research faculties belong, and comprised of 2 divisions, 9 research groups, and 18 laboratories.
The graduate students belong to the Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, the original 4 departments in the previous the Graduate School of Letters were reorganized into 2 divisions: the Humanities Division and the Human Sciences Division. Overall, the Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences is made up of 2 divisions, 11 departments, and 20 laboratories
The School of Humanities and Human Sciences is an educational organization which undergraduate students belong to, and has changed from a 9-course to a 4-course educational system.