It also always helps to bring in the human interest element to help students understand the perspective of people back then, like if you are studying a major world event (like the bombing of Pearl Harbor) have the students read some eye witness accounts, or even smaller details like hygiene to catch their attention. I know my students always loved about hearing how dirty and stinky things were back in the day.
Students certainly do complain that history is boring quite often. I usually found it to be at least somewhat interesting.
One way to increase the interest level would be to show how history affects us today. Most students feel that learning history is actually pointless. An exceptional teacher can tell his/her students how historical events impact their own lives today.
If you are able to add anecdotes about people during that time period, particularly famous people, you might humanize them and thereby keep your students more interesting. This technique has always worked for me. I have told them that George Washington was a serious minded man who didn't tell jokes or shake hands. There are many stories about Abraham Lincoln that show him as a human being. If can show that these were real people with real attributes and at times real human failings, you can keep your students intrigued. They will be waiting to hear the next tale!
The second response, for me, is the key to making history interesting. It's about the narrative. I like to include stories, novels, and poems to create a jumping off point for any era. There must be characters and feelings for students to be engaged. This can be flipped, as well, having students write stories and poems about an era, from the perspective of someone in that era, an ordinary person or a great leader. I have the advantage of having taught English and social studies, so it's easy for me to find literary texts, but frequent consultation with someone from your English department will yield many good text choices.
The MOST EFFECTIVE trick to teach history is to do correlations. For example, my students had no clue that there was a connection between "Mad" King George, George Washington and Marie Antoinette: They all had a role in the American Revolution! Or that Oscar Wilde, Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria, at one point, must have read the same newspaper, each from the comfort of their favorite restaurant, White House, or castle.
These correlations not only help them make more connections, but also denote your own universal and general knowledge about history. History cannot be taught isolation; it would be a crime to our intellect and creativity!
Teaching history as a discipline and a way of thinking rather than simply a series of things to be memorized is one way to go about it. Students ought to be introduced to the fact that different historians have interpreted events in different ways. They should be encouraged to investigate these interpretations and...
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above all, to use primary source documents. I am aware, after teaching history my whole adult life, how difficult this can be, and sometimes, as pohnpei says, we just have to bite the bullet and plow through material. But I think that an emphasis on the skills of history, rather than simply the facts of history makes it more alive for students. I also think, again to cite pohnpei, that encouraging students to empathize with historical people is an extremely important skill that ought to be emphasized.
However, there are lots of aspects of history that can't be made personal or connected in any meaningful way to the present day. So you're just going to have to deal with the fact that some students will find some lessons dull. What I try to do is to get them to think about the historical people as real people. I try to frame my lessons in such a way as to get students to think "why would people react like this in a given situation?" Or, "if this happened in my life, how would I be likely to deal with it?" But again, you'll never reach everyone and some lessons will seem dull to some students.
I agree that you have to connect the events of the past to current day events to make them relevant. How did an event in history make an impact on the modern world? How did an invention transform the world into something new? How did this person help change our beliefs and actions? If you can focus on these types of questions, even when you are building background, you students will find things much more interesting.
History can easily be dry when it becomes all about dates and people that we feel no connection to. In order for history to be interesting, we have to be able to relate to it. Looking at events on a larger scale and asking students to imagine this type of thing happening in their own life can be helpful. Finding some way to relate the information to students can also be helpful. For instance, I always found the study of WWII boring until I saw the movie Pearl Harbor. The story was about a nurse and I realized that this is exactly what my grandmother lived through as a nurse during the war. Suddenly I understood her so much better and I cared about history so much more. In order for any subject to be interesting, we must relate to it and teachers must vary the presentation of the material.