Western Civilization

3 units

This course is a history of Western civilization from 3500 BC to AD 1600. Western civilization may be characterized as one long debate on the holy. In no other civilization did this debate about the limits of the sacred and the profane -- this constant effort at trying to grasp the divine through word and deed -- last continuously for more than 5000 years. To argue over the holy is to argue over the very nature of how to live a life, from the most mundane daily activity to the most sublime act of the imagination. It is to argue over how politics, economics, art, philosophy, literature, and religion are realized in a society. Apart from many types of polytheism, we study the three great world monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We study the ancient cultures of northern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the empires of Alexander the Great and imperial Rome, the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, the early medieval world in the North Sea and the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople, the formation of Latin Christendom and the papal monarchy, the Crusades and the reaction of the Islamic lands, concepts of individuality, the persecution of Jews and heretics, chivalry and peasant servitude, the Mongol Empire, the Black Death and the devastation of the 14th century, the Renaissance in Italy and the Protestant reformation, the hunt for witches and the scientific revolution, and the medieval origins of the African diaspora and the European conquest of the Americas. What defined being human -- and so a man, a woman, or a child -- over five millennia? Fundamental questions of this course include the following: What is Western civilization? When do the characteristics defined as Western come together as a coherent phenomenon? What, then, is historical truth? This course (through lectures, reading primary sources, discussion sections, and essay writing) gives the student a learned background in almost 5000 years of history. This is an introductory course for the history major and minor.