Department Head: Paul F. O'Rourke For additional faculty, click here.
Ignorance is the curse of God William Shakespeare The history program at Pierrepont has two main objectives: to guide students through a comprehensive and context-grounded study of world history and to provide the tools necessary to be effective students of social and political life. The curriculum is best described as traditional: we teach primarily through primary sources and rely heavily on the study of contemporary literature and art forms -- the icons of a given culture – to gain insight into a particular culture or historical period. The youngest students begin with specific topics -- life in ancient Egypt, the Trojan War, Arthurian England and Medieval Feudalism – and read a range of stories distilled from the literature of these periods. A subsequent course, Origins, undertakes an intensive study of hominids and the advent of the modern human. Then follows an overview of the development of cities in the late Neolithic Period and the early history of the Near East, in which the students read translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Law Code of Hammurabi and Genesis. A subsequent course on Greek history includes the Iliad and the Odyssey; selections from Hesiod, Herodotus and Thucydides; several Greek plays; and dialogues of Plato. A course on Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages includes selections from the New Testament, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, the Poem of the Cid, among others. The study of the Renaissance includes serious engagement with Dante’s Inferno and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Each of these courses includes a comprehensive study of contemporaneous art forms, often in conjunction with other departments. From the outset, we teach students how to produce organized and thorough research papers. With the youngest students, we focus on narrow topics that they can research comprehensively; later, students undertake research projects that are broader and more encompassing. Through a series of exercises, we take students from sentence to paragraph writing to, ultimately, producing comprehensive essays that present research findings in a structured and well-reasoned format. Classes include readings, discussion and lectures to help students gain a greater facility with reading such texts and the challenges they present. The history program is designed to be cumulative: later courses build on the themes and work of earlier courses, which provide the basis for comparison and the study of difference. Each course revisits recurring themes in the dynamics of human society: the scope and definition of culture; the relationships among various socioeconomic strata; the impact and repercussions of political actions; the place of religion and ethics in social and political life; and the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of government; among others. Carrie Thomas Timothy Morris |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
