History

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard.

There are only two ways to gain perspective on the world you inhabit, and your own experience of it: travel around the current world, and time travel through past worlds. Our business is the latter. 93% of humans who have ever lived have died. The dead outnumber the living 14-1. History is the single biggest store of knowledge we have. To not study it is the intellectual equivalent of trying to walk in the dark. 

Yet, many people currently living pay insufficient attention to the dead, and the lessons we can learn from them, even though the past is really our only reliable source of knowledge about the fleeting present. A great deal of the problems that the world is facing today have happened before in approximate analogous forms. If you want to communicate and problem solve in contemporary local and global contexts, it cannot happen without an understanding of history. 

As such, historians are uniquely placed to help answer many pressing problems of the current day using their historical knowledge. In one sentence, our course mission is to study the past to understand the present and help shape a better future. 

Assessments vary in their form and purpose, but broadly they fit into the following: document analysis of historical sources; presentations; essay writing; group tasks including debates. There will also be an end-of-year examination.