It is the desire of the History Department to see every history student succeed. To get to this point, history teachers provide students with welcoming classrooms, opportunities for success and a demonstrable love of history. They also utilize a wide variety of activities to encompass all learning styles to make learning fun and successful.
To apply sophisticated tools of historical analysis to past events, we must come to understand how and why people thought and acted the way they did. Learning history requires students to become familiar with the interrelationships among political, social, economic, and cultural forces in a wide variety of places and time periods. It's difficult to look at the past with out taking our contemporary ideas with us. People tend to examine past events, people, and ideas with the benefits of hindsight rather then the perspective of the people living in that point in time. This is what history classes teach us.
Topics
The Individual and the Community
This theme examines the relationship between rights of the individual and the demands and powers of the state.
We will consider topics such as:
- Political philosophies
- Human rights
- Dissent
- Revolution
Humanity and Nature
This Theme considers not only the interrelationship between humankind and the global environment, but the changing attitudes toward the world as reflected in art, music, science, and society.
Economy and Technology
Some of the topics we will consider include:
- The industrial revolution
- International trade and trading blocks
- Economic theories
- Post-industrial technological change.
Values
Human values and beliefs are critical to understanding past events. Why did certain events happen? How have the experiences of the past shaped the contemporary ethical values of Western civilizations? These are some of the questions we will consider.
The Arts and Society
Visual arts, music, drama, architecture, and literature show a reflection of social values at their respective times. Artistic movements took place all though history and helped mold the society of the times through new ways of thinking.