If I can disagree a little bit with the people who have replied so far, while a specialty can wait languages probably can't. While you may not know if you want to do, say, the reformation or the rise of the third reich, if you know you want to do Germany, now is the time to learn German. European languages are probably a bit easier to do later on if you're a native speaker of a European language but early undergrad (if not sooner) is the time to start investing heavily in, say, Chinese, or Arabic, or Turkish, or Swahili or whatever if that's what you think you want to do. If you don't, people who did put in that language time will have a serious leg up when you do decide to specialize.

Even if you have absolutely no idea what you want to do I would encourage you to consider a very broadly useful classical language like Latin or Greek. As someone who has a background in neither I find myself hitting walls in very odd places despite the "deadness" of those two languages (e.g. it turns out that all explanations of Arabic grammar in English are done in reference to Latin, or, it turns out that non-Arabic sources are suuuuuper important for early Islamic history and those are written in Latin/Greek/Syriac/Armenian, etc.)

As for how I figured out what I wanted to do, it's a bit cliched for Arabists at this point but 9/11 being of my formative life experiences played a part. But mostly I point to an 8th grade social studies teacher during our lessons on WWI who, when I asked her why we only focused on the western front, replied that nothing much happened on the eastern front. A BA in Arabic and Islamic studies and three years in the Middle East later, I still find that to be one of the most astonishingly mis-informed sentences I've ever had the privilege of hearing.

I did indeed consider a variety of topics to become specialized in, among them Byzantine History and Antiquity and others but due to my political convictions and a couple of other factors, I in the end was very set for the subject I ended up specializing in. Also, right after high school, I did consider something else entirely and did for a short time study law (you can do that as an undergrad here) but that quickly turned out to be not the right for me.

The good thing about starting university education is that you'll be able to try things out and that when you decided to pursue history through your studies you might be able to discover things you are interested in you didn't know about before. History is such a vast subject to study and the requirement to take at least some classes in different eras and geographical areas can be amazingly eye opening and rewarding in terms of developing an interest. I mean, that is essentially one of the things undergrad education is for: To get a general picture and develop interests in a variety of subjects before having to decide to specialize in one certain era or area.

The important thing is to pursue what interests you and incites your passion. The moment when you are not satisfied with what they taught you in class but actually want to read more about a subject was a great one for me.

Best of luck!

As /u/commiespaceinvader has said, the whole point of your undergraduate degree is that it is designed to introduce you to a wide range of interests. Though many people do develop a specialism at undergraduate, the average student doesn't. Undergraduate courses are broadly speaking best looked at as exercises in skill development and professional training: they are there to teach you the skills you need to be a historian, and introduce you to a wide range of fields of interest and research. You may well even find that your speciality ends up being something you didn't cover at all at undergraduate level - for many people, their Master's degree is where they identify a particular field of interest or finally pick from competing fields (although I would warn that the time between starting an MA and starting to apply for a PhD, if you want go through the process without interruption, is often not nearly as long as you expect).

There are also multiple paths to different specialisms - there is no 'right way' into a speciality. For instance, many of my colleagues are scholars of American history who happen to specialise in slavery. I am not; I am a historian of unfree labour who happens to specialise in slavery. That's more than a flavourful quirk - it has significance for how we approach our shared topic, what kind of ideas we bring to the table and what kind of research interests we have. My speciality evolved from a broader interest in labour history, rather than any particular time period or geographical context. Don't worry at this point in time if your interests are a little abstract or non-specific; you will learn how to refine your interests and pick out research avenues that interest you. Part of the process of putting together projects in your final year should include learning how to identify a research question that interests you, and the process of researching and writing for those projects will give you a taste of what extended research is like.

What's really good is that you know where you want to be at 19, and that you're seriously thinking about how you go about getting there. I know that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do at 19. Take the time of your undergraduate degree to explore your interests and your passions, and narrow down your options. Make sure that when the time comes you pick a final year thesis subject you find personally engaging and exciting, so that you get the best possible glimpse into what undertaking extended historical research is like.

I've always been interested in the parallels between literature and history, got both bachelors in undergrad. Knew I wanted to do history and teach college so I went to grad school for history of the book. There I had to do something unique, that's the requirement for an MA so I focused on the history of pornography because it's relevant and such a new field. :)

I study food history, and as a sideline, agricultural history. The two are bound together pretty solidly.

At 19, I had not the slightest idea how academia worked, what was actually involved in college, and was headed into a Natural Sciences degree that I could only have been less suited for if... actually, I can't think of any circumstances under which I would have been less suited for it, to be honest.

About five years ago (having dropped out of the Science degree and worked in web development and then marketing for nearly 15 years), I was starting a Humanities degree on a remote learning programme. I thought I was going to end up doing literature as the major (more or less), and making up the credits on a variety of other bits. I did not expect the history course to seize me by the lapels and go, "this is what you're gonna do". And had anyone told me even after that happened that food history was where I'd end up specialising, I'd have gone "what's that?". So, you know, these things are not predictable.

My best advice is to take advantage of the access that a university gives you. Join the college branch of the SCA, and find someone who specialises in late Gothic calligraphy or 12th century armour and get them to tell you all about it. Go to lectures in stuff you've never heard of, like domestic history or plague geography. Read journal articles in disciplines you know nothing about like economics and agricultural development. Wander down the library shelves, pull books down at random, and see if they're interesting. There are areas of specialisation so small that there still aren't books about them, so you'll only find them from side mentions in the introductions to books on larger topics. Your interests right now may just be the first step toward some awesome topic that, right now, you have no concept of. It might be in history per se, or it might be in economic history, or geographic history, or something that you'll invent as your own area.

Right now I'm a PhD student researching German immigration in the 19th century Midwest through the lens of beer. But I didn't decide on that topic while I was an undergrad. Hell, I didn't decide on that topic until a couple years into grad school.

You don't need to know what you want to study right now, but over time you should try to work out the broad strokes. Part-way through my junior year I settled on American history, by graduation I was tinkering with topics involving 19th century slavery, the South, the Civil War, and travel history. I later moved away from those.

Grad school introduced me to transnationalism and the market revolution in the U.S., and an unrelated interest in craft beer eventually helped me inject that into the mix. Combined in there are plans/goals for after my PhD, because my hope (I stress hope here because I have no idea if this will work out) is that picking a topic with some present-day popularity (craft beer is surging in the US right now) might help me get a job/sell a book/get tenure. I hope that it also gives me a shot at non-academic jobs in the beer industry if I decide to go that route.

If you haven't had these kinds of deliberations yet, that's ok. What I just described took place over 4-5 years and was very heavily influenced by my undergraduate courses, faculty advice, colleagues, and work I completed during that time. You'll have those experiences too!

Right now, just keep an ear to the ground. Read, pay real attention to your courses' content, talk to professors, go to any history-related public lectures that are held on your campus. Your interests will eventually sift through.

The best way to really figure out which area of history interests you more is to just keep reading. While you read pay attention to what piques your interest within that text. Do you find yourself being drawn towards discussion of artwork in the past? Does your heart get pumping over descriptions of battles, tactics, and armaments? Does your mind start racing as you think about models of socio-political organization? When your interest is piqued with one of these subjects, follow the references and citations. Write down ideas and questions you might have that you can look for in the future or ask a professor. After a while, you'll begin to narrow your focus as you realize what it is you do and do not like.

For me, it's taken years to go from an interest in Mesoamerica, to an interest in the Aztecs, to an interest in the Maya, to research the Tarascans, and finally settling on the shaft tomb culture of West Mexico. Within those shifts of culture, what I wanted to study about them has also changed. For the Aztecs it was warfare, for the Maya it was iconography, for the Tarascans it was pre-state migration, and for the shaft tomb culture it is socio-political and labor organization for the construction of monumental architecture. While I may not focus on those other topics right now, they are things that still interest me and influence the way I think about the past and what questions I hope to answer in the future.

All you can do is to keep reading.

I remember that at age 12 I knew I was going to join the USN. I was quickly immersed in WWII. This lead to a neighbor asking me to read the Congressional Investigation Into the Attack on Pearl Harbor, all forty volumes. It was a slog for a teenager but I finished them and reported to him that there was no "smoking gun" to be found. Fast forward twenty years (while still reading continuously) to my retirement and the freedom to indulge myself in my passion. I entered Purdue U. and spent eight years getting my bachelors in Psych and Soc. Strange choice for a historian? Not really, they have helped me understand public and private motivation more effectively. I then went on to get my Masters in History, you can guess my focus. The only thing I would have different is to study website design so as to make my sites more efficient.

At this point, I wouldn't worry yourself about it. I'm 28, have a family, and finish my undergrad next spring (I didn't go to college until 26). I start my undergrad thesis next Spring, and I still have no idea what I want to do it on. The areas I had the greatest interest in (Civil War, WW2) are now falling by the wayside and being replaced with topics I knew nothing about before (WW1 Anti-war movement), areas I've become interested in (the impact of war casualties on American culture) or topics I feel will give me the greatest benefit entering into my career field (New England maritime trade and slavery). Grad school is on the table, but at this point I have absolutely no idea what to do.

At this point, just read anything and everything you can on the topics that interest you. Find a university that fits your interests, and check their bookstore to see what texts their faculty are assigning for courses. Order those books (from anywhere but the university bookstore) and just focus on learning. The rest will come eventually.

I never was particularly interested in history, but I thought ancient Greece and philosophy was interesting subjects in high school. Then at age 19 I began studying history BA at university thinking it was an okay entry into studying in general, and from the start I was very open to the thought of switching subjects after some time, either to political science or philosophy. The only thing I knew for certain was that humanities and/or social science was the thing for me. Now I'm 23 years old and, with undergrad courses in both politcal science, philosophy, middle east studies (and even media studies), I'm currently pursuing to write my MA thesis in history on radical Islamism (for those interested, the birth of The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the ideology of Hasan al-Banna). The main reason for the pathway I've taken, I think, is the emphasis on extreme ideologies, terrorism and political violence at the university I attend, with several courses being in the intersection point between political science and history. I thought for some time I'd write my MA on far-right political violence and/or neo-Nazism (my BA thesis was on the vitality of violence of Mussolini's squads and Fasci Italiani di Combattimento), but after taking several courses on the middle east at the same time as well, the outcome now is somewhat clearer than ever, I guess, as Islamic fundamentalism (especially the ideology of salafi-jihadism) is what I want to delve into. The weird thing to me is, however, I always think other peoples subjects are more interesting than mine. Like, I could easily see myself switch to early medieval history... or linguistics... or philosophy of science! Even architecture. If you're like me, you just "have to" choose some time, I guess.

I started out as a history major in undergrad but quickly realized that I had a knack for political science and was encouraged to do that instead. I fell back into history, in a way, through Latin, which was a large part of a Classics major at my school. While political science was my "serious" major, I added Classics as my second as it was my passion and also prevented me from having to graduate early. Now I am halfway through a Ph.D. in political science, focusing on international relations and methods. I still read lots of Roman history and seek out experiences related to that, like joining excavation teams at Roman sites, visiting parts of Europe that they occupied, and attending lectures at the local universities and museums whenever they crop up. While my undergrad degree was invaluably fascinating and set a framework for what I continue to learn on my own, I am happy with my decision to pursue political science in grad school instead. The tools and knowledge I am gaining now are more transferrable to other fields and job markets and are ever-expanding.

The Late Roman Republic and Early Roman Empire, particularly the political and social reforms that paved the way to imperialism and the way that various foreign cultures were integrated. And the Hellenistic Period, with an emphasis on the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires.

I was always attracted to the stories about ancient Greece, Rome, Israel, Carthage and Egypt my dad told me or that I read or watched a TV show or movie about as a kid, more than any other subject. Three figures fascinated me in particular: Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Cleopatra VII, and when I learned about the ways that their legacies were connected and the social, cultural and religious backdrop of their respective eras and locales, I was hooked. I've read the writings of Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, etc. and even of later authors like Jacob Abbott (fuck that guy, he used no context in judging the hell out of antiquity)

I enjoyed reading about the famous speeches and orations by people like Cicero, and about figures like Diogenes and Hypatia of Alexandra, so I decided studying philosophy might be my cup of tea, and it was. I also liked the Italian Renassiance and I study it, but it never really captured my imagination the same way. For me it was always kind of a no-brainer that I would want to study Greco-Roman, and Middle Eastern\North African history because so much of my biggest influences came from there. Plus, I have ancestors from that area, particularly Tunisia, but some from the surrounding area as well.

I have learned some Hebrew, Arabic, and am trying to Latin, and Greek but still rely on translations for many things, Coptic I would like to learn but I don't have enough time or patience at the moment. One thing that helped me out was kinda silly, I asked myself if I had the ability to travel through time and spend the rest of my life a particular era or empire (not considering factors like quality of life, hygiene, technology etc) just if I could meet people from there, see their cities, learn firsthand about their cultures, what I choose? I don't know if that will help you, but as a thought game (if you can call it that) it helped me.

Military History, primarily Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency. I was interested in it, and figured I'd end up working in the DoD anyway.