The interior design profession has been working to establish itself among its peer design professions as an active participant in protecting the health, safety and welfare of the public, thereby requiring licensing. Part of that effort has involved instituting accreditation standards for its educational programs. The standards are well developed in most knowledge areas, but by comparison the standard specific to history is lacking in structure and definition. Past literature has focused on how to teach history, not what content to include. This study was designed to discover the common course content of history courses required in accredited undergraduate interior design education programs during the 2001-2002 school year. Further, the study attempted to identify whether the standards used for accreditation needed to be refined to better explain what programs are expected to teach their students in history. Because the study was exploratory in nature, a qualitative approach was used. History instructors at all accredited interior design programs were asked to submit specific course documents for every required history course they taught and to complete a short questionnaire. The data was then analyzed using a combination of simple tabulation and constant comparison analysis. A composite profile of the current interior design history course was created from survey data. Ten knowledge categories emerged from analysis of course syllabi, with two core categories, Objective Knowledge and Competency Skills, being identified. Analysis of all the data resulted in a grounded theory of interior design history, and a suggestion for a rewritten standard. Fort-four programs participated in the survey, and thirty-six submitted course documents.