2014-15 Catalog [Archived Catalog]
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HIS 120HP - Historical Perspectives(4 credits) (Fulfills IGE Historical Perspectives requirement)
HIS120HP offers students an introduction to the study of history. The topics of individual sections vary by instructor and semester. After completing this writing-intensive course, students will be able to describe how historical context shapes events and our understanding of events; evaluate the nature and reliability of historical evidence; develop a thesis-based argument using properly cited evidence; demonstrate familiarity with a body of historical knowledge; articulate how faith obliges Christians to pursue historical truth while acknowledging preconceptions, ideologies, and myths; and describe an approach to history based on the belief that God acted through the incarnation to redeem people made in God’s image. Topics include:
City, Empire, and Church in Antiquity explores the intersection of religion, political organization, cultural expression, and human community through a historical investigation of the ancient Greek city-state (the polis), the Roman Empire, and the ancient Christian church. We begin with the culture, politics, and history of the Greek polis. From there, we move to the culture, politics, and history of the Roman Empire while attending to how Rome appropriated the ideas of the Greeks. The course concludes with the ancient Christian church and the Christian Roman empire of late antiquity. Our focus will be on the ways early Christians engaged and appropriated Greco-Roman culture even as they developed their own religious, communal, and political identity both before the emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and after.
Following Jesus in America: This course is a historical exploration of beliefs and practices of Americans concerning Jesus. Within an overview of major developments, important institutions, and key events, the course will focus on several individuals as case studies. Key themes in the course will include religion as a major thread in American history, Christianity as both a set of social institutions and structures and also as lived religion, and the varied appropriations of Jesus throughout America’s historical experience.
The Search for a Useful Past: Students in this course will learn to ask and answer basic questions about the past creation of “useful pasts”. The course’s main question, “Why do people make and hand on histories?”, organizes our discussion, reading and writing. We will read primary sources from medieval through modern European history where an author has recalled a past significant to (mostly) his people and revised it to answer questions facing them in their age. We will evaluate how Europeans sought a past which interpreted properly would provide them with moral guidance (understood broadly) for the crises of our own generation.
War and the American Experience: This course aims to provide students with a broad survey of American history by looking at the military conflicts that have been an all too frequent part of the nation’s narrative. The American Revolution, Civil War, World War II and the Cold War (including the Vietnam conflict) will be studied in depth but other American wars will be examined as well. The course will look at the causes, course and consequences of these conflicts. Beyond the battlefield, the course will examine war’s roots in politics and diplomacy and will emphasize the profound effects that war has on the nations and people who wage it. The course will examine the “American way of war” and test the assertion that the country was made by war.
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