达拉斯大学

The purpose of history is to seek knowledge of the truth about the human past and, through that study, understanding of human conduct.

History is a subject particularly appropriate to the University of Dallas, which defines its purpose in terms of the renewal of the Western heritage of liberal learning and the recovery of the Christian intellectual tradition. History provides a unique bridge between the two. It represents the Greco-Roman cultural tradition which lies at the foundation of the Western heritage in an especially powerful way. History is also of particular relevance to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is predicated on the significance of events in time as revelatory of the relationship of man to God.

History Degree Requirements

The history curriculum consists of the core courses in Western Civilization and American Civilization, upper-division courses both topical and geographical, and a junior seminar required of majors. As their comprehensive examination, majors also write a Senior Thesis under the direction of a member of the Department, and defend that thesis before the departmental faculty.

This curriculum is based on the university's stated purposes and on the Department's view of the discipline. The core courses are designed to introduce students to history as a mode of knowing which offers truth about men through the study of individual instances of their activity in the past. These courses both introduce students to the fundamental elements of the Western heritage and the Christian tradition and demonstrate the contribution of historical thinking to mature and thoughtful reflection on the human condition. First, by concentrating on the essential qualities of European and American civilization from a developmental viewpoint, the courses offer a solid grounding for the more specialized treatments of Western culture confronted in other core courses. Second, by introducing all students to the critical attitude which historiographical issues necessarily raise, the courses attempt to instill a realization and appreciation of the complexity of human life.

Advanced history courses proceed from the core courses. Each course adds to the factual data possessed by the student, but the goal is not simply to increase the number of items to which a student has been introduced, but rather to use this increasingly detailed information to involve the student in more complex and demanding exercises in historical method. That method is at once critical in its attitude toward evidence and empathetic in its use of that material to understand the individuals of the past and their actions. It further engages the power of the imagination, both to comprehend the motives which lay behind the specific occurrences attested by evidence and to draw connections among various pieces and kinds of evidence. And it demands an accurate and delicate form of expression, both oral and written, which can convey with clarity the conclusions of the historian without sacrificing a sense of the complexity which is always present in human affairs.

The culmination of the program for majors is a seminar which studies history historically. By concentrating on the development of the historical method and involving the student in the critical yet sympathetic analysis of the works of specific historians, the course also seeks to prepare the student for the rigorous exercise of practicing history through extended research on a particular topic and the careful exposition of conclusions in the Senior Thesis. It is appropriate, given the structure of the curriculum and the premises on which it is based, that the comprehensive examination in history should be in the form of such a project rather than a more conventional test. The object of the major program is not merely to provide a familiarity with, or ability to enumerate, the facts of the Western past;