Students take one course that examines a historical time period and will analyze a range of primary sources and scholarly interpretations. All Historical Inquiry courses satisfy the Critical Thinking and Information Literacy requirement of the core, which is defined as the students’ ability to use and analyze appropriate evidence to make a clear argument.
Goal: Students must identify and formulate significant historical questions, analyze a range of primary sources, weigh competing scholarly interpretations, and effectively communicate their findings.
Student Learning Outcomes
Students will:
- Identify and formulate significant historical questions.
- Access information effectively, and use information ethically and legally.
- Analyze a range of primary sources (texts, photographs, visual art, audio recordings, films), articulate historical context, and use these sources as evidence to support an argument.
- Find secondary sources to weigh against competing scholarly interpretations and learn to employ various interpretive strategies. These Learning Outcomes align with the Critical Thinking and Information Literacy (CTIL) Outcomes. Thus, CTIL is formally embedded in Historical Inquiry, and courses that satisfy Historical Inquiry will also satisfy CTIL.
Example of course that satisfies this area of inquiry
HIST 128 - African American History
This course examines the history of African Americans from the ascendance of slavery on the West African coast to black life on the contemporary racial landscape. Who are African Americans? What realities, socio-political ideologies, and cultural practices ground African-descended people? How has and does inequality unfold in the lives of African Americans and systematic mechanisms catapult their perpetual marginalization? Through what means have black communities resisted oppression and how have these methods changed overtime? How do the positionalities of African Americans evolve across gender, class, ethnic, and regional lines? What does the black experience reveal about the pronounced American values of racial transcendence, as well as master historical narratives? How have African Americans created and influenced the contours of American society? Together, we will strive to answer these questions. Together, we will concern ourselves with the fullness of black humanity.