COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Why should we twenty-first century people, working so diligently to the brave new future, study history, let alone a cultural history of artefacts and monuments? In the most familiar answer to this question, people look to at past civilizations to validate their own lives in a search for the their historical origins, which serve to provide them a clearer context for the present by offering insights into long established traditions and accumulated experiences. While this process certainly serves worthy goals for clarifying our immediate world and how we live now, it limits our understanding of the past to that which we can directly understand in terms of our own, familiar traditions, namely the things that we can readily anticipate.

Please see the syllabus for information on this class.