Department of History Learning Objectives

Students will engage history as an interpretive discipline that investigates changes and continuities over time. They will:

• Examine change over time by analyzing the complex interplay of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces that people both participate in and experience.

• Develop the ability to empathize with peoples from different time periods, world regions and cultures, and social positions as a way to understand the complexity of human motivations and historical contexts.

• Understand history as a constructed narrative - woven together from fragmentary and incomplete evidence and shaped by the narrator’s world view.

• Learn to formulate persuasive written and oral historical arguments and support them with reasoned choices of evidence and analysis that takes contradictory evidence into account.