SMC Core Curriculum Course Proposal Form Fall 2013

Electronically submit this course form and attachments to the Chair of the CCC by October 1. Please submit a separate proposal for each desired learning goal.

  1. Name of Proposer:AeleahSoine
  2. Email address:
  3. Department/Program of Proposer:History
  4. Name of Department/Program housing the course: History
  5. Name(s) of Program Director/Department Chair:Myrna Santiago
  6. Course Acronym, Number and Title: HIST 5: Western Culture and Ideas II (1500-Present)
  7. Proposal is for All Sections of the course: __X___

Proposal is for instructor’s section(s) (Pathways to Knowledge only): _____

  1. Course Prerequisites (if any): none
  2. Unit Value of Course: 1.0
  3. Mark with an X the Learning Goal for which the course is being proposed.

Pathways to Knowledge(at most one)

Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding: _X__(already completed—Fall 2011)

Engaging the World(as appropriate, generally zero to two)

Common Good: __ X ___

Teaching and Learning Narrative for theCommon Good:

HIST 5: Western Culture and Ideas II (1500-Present), is an introductory history survey course that traces the modern trajectory of Western Civilization in an increasingly global world. It fulfills one of four lower-division requirements for History majors, but is designed to capture and sustain the interest of students at any level or from any disciplinary background. All of the assigned readings, activities, assignments, and in-class activities will contribute to at least one of thethree learning outcomes, and they will collectively provide comprehensive engagement with the questions, values, and intentions raised bythe Common Goodcurriculum standard.

Specifically, students in HIST 5:Western Culture and Ideas II (1500-Present) will…

1-2.…“reflect and write substantively on ways in which human beings find fulfillment in community” by exploring the shifting geo-political definition and organization of Europe and “the Western World” as the sites within which we trace the historical origins of our Western intellectual, cultural, and social values. While contemporary perspectives often assume a natural and simultaneous progression toward national self-determination, individual liberty, democracy, and peaceful stability, historians of Europe know this has never been the case. This course begins in the early modern age of exploration, renaissance, economic imperialism, and religious reformation/fragmentation, in which humans increasingly identified and found community among co-religionists—a confessionalized continent of Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, Anabaptist, and other semi-autonomous religious and political communities that characterized Europe from the 16th to the 19th century. At the same time, communal bonds between kings and subjects, aristocrats and the rising middle-class, and lords and peasants were increasingly strained by a restructuring of the local and global economy; capitalism challenged traditional hierarchies and introduced new forms of economic and cultural relationships through urbanization, technology, mass culture, and populist organizations, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Even in the crisis decades of the twentieth-century, we see economically and culturally desperate people driven toward the embrace of extreme ideological communities in the forms of fascism, communist dictatorship, and global terrorist networks. Such communities continually re-imagine the social order through defining processes of inclusion and exclusion.In response, students will develop the historical tools to “articulate, in prose or through other communicative medium (oral presentation and creative expression), a critical account of a just social order” drawing upon primary documents, lectures, literary and popular sources, and established historical narratives to challenge students to wrestle with the way humans seek, find, and maintain communities—for better and worse—and around ever shifting identities.

[Learning] The course begins with an introduction to historical geography (i.e. the use of maps as historical sources and assessed by map quizzes), which initially break down preconceived notions that national, religious, or even linguistic identities are natural or stable. However, learning outcomes #1 and #2are best reflected in and assessed by the three paper assignments focused on the interplay between literary representation and personal lived experiences in history. The first looks at the an Italian peasant accused of heresy, first defended and then ostracized by his family and neighbors,against the Church in the 16th century, the second follows an ensemble of alternating victors and victims in the French and Industrial Revolutions as depicted in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and the third follows the tale of Vladek, a Nazi concentration camp survivor through the comic illustrations of his son in Maus. (I know they will read this simultaneously or previously in Seminar, and I am okay with it and will build upon it). In all these cases, the protagonists have been forcibly ostracized by their communities and must try (and often fail to) reassimilate among new constellations of people around other forms of shared affinity and/or experience. As a history course, it is particularly important to approach the bigger question of The Common Good in terms of contingency. How do we understand, and perhaps try more effectively in the future to prevent, a) a war nominally fought for the purity of religious faith that lasts 30 years and kills nearly half of a continent’s population, b) revolutionaries, who began a quest for liberty and equality before succumbing to a brutal reign of terror and genocide against their own comrades, or c) scientists and doctors who set out to save and improve the lives of the poor through new fields called eugenics and atomic physics, but become complicit in mass murder?

  1. …“demonstrate a capacity for coherent, principled analysis of concrete social problems” based upon the course’s emphasis on seeing history as a narrative of continuities and changes, in which the amelioration of one social problem can be the root of another. For example, the late industrialization of Germany allowed it to present major social problems with environmental pollution and labor exploitation at the same time that such relative stability did not press the masses to overthrow their monarchyfor a 19th century democratic national republic. Within these broad narratives of continuity and change, there are a series of “moments,” in which we will peer deeper into the social fabric to think about the origins, experience, and combating of social problems by intellectuals, politicians, subjects/citizens, and the masses.

[Learning] The ability of students to analysis social problems in the historical context of “Western Culture and Ideas” will be facilitated regularly through the practice of primary document interpretation. Clusters of primary documents are assigned along with textbook reading and provide material for in-class activities that start with recognizing points of view for the author and the intended audience, and build throughout the semester through discussion and reading journals toward a full engagement with the documents’ purpose, point of view, evidence/information, and impact. More formally, each student will participate in one of the historical character debates, for which they will be independently responsible for representing the ideas and values of a particular historical figure on a contemporary social problem, including: women’s suffrage and citizenship, nation-building in Germany and Italy, European imperial ambitions in Africa, the rebuilding of Europe after the First World War, and individual and community decisions to either resist or collaborate with the Nazis. The learning goal for these debates is for students to recognize the impact and significance of multiple points of view, a range of ideas and values, and to demonstrate the ability to articulate and understand alternative perspectives on common social problems (even when they may be foreign or disagreeable).

Finally, in the lead-up to and execution of the final exam, students will be prompted to think about the rapid changes in the ideological and experiential factors shaping historical and contemporary European conceptions of “a” or “the” Common Good. In an era of peaceful, but often uncomfortable, co-existence among overlapping local, regional, national, and European communities, Europeans continue to wrestle with new possibilities and old fears for what the Common Good might entail; students will be asked to wrestle [in essay form] with these questions in a historically-reflective and contemporarily-engaged way.

Response to Request for Clarification (11.10.2013)

Dear Zach and Common Good committee:

Thank you for your careful reading of my proposal, and for the opportunity to clarify or elaborate on those dimensions of the proposal that were not communicated clearly the first time.

With respect for your time and service, I will try to address these directly in the order presented in Zach’s email for easy reference.

Best, AeleahSoine

“Regarding the “integral” nature of the Common Good to the course”:

HIST 5 is a survey course, but it is not required for majors/minors with AP or HIST 2 (World) credit or by any outside program. Instead of contemplating discontinuing it for eventual lack of enrollment, we decided last year to reconceptualize and rebrand the entire Western Civ sequence (4&5) to serve a different purpose: namely, to preserve the importance of the Western tradition to our identity as a liberal arts, Catholic, and Lasallian institution, and offer a 21st century version of Western Civ driven by the big question of what is the “Common Good,” whose “Common Good,” and how these ideologies and social movements experimented with creating new, more just social orders by tackling major social problems of their time. This course conceptualization builds upon historiographic and pedagogical trends that locate Western Civilization not in a geography or a deeply entrenched narrative of history, but rather an intellectual and social project aimed at bringing a sense of Western cultural and political ideas to the people of Europe, the Western hemisphere, and eventually the entire world. The historical nature of the course means that social problems and social orders are always contested and changing—one community’s “justice” is another’s “tyranny,” one generation’s solution to a vexing social problem is the root of the next generation’s social crisis. The “‘integral’ nature” then is not in the individual topics but in the consistency of the cause and effect narratives that tie them together under the broad umbrella of what the West was imagined to be throughout history and how that vision continually created and ameliorated conflicts and social problems across time and place.

Reflection of “Common Good” in Course Objectives:

The “Common Good” is integral to all four course objectives, so it felt repetitive to me (given space limitations in objectives to keep repeating this). However, I think I see now the difference in how I addressed issues of community vs. social order and social problems and offer the following revisions to the course objectives.

  • To articulate thoughtful and informed observations about the historical construct and contestation of Western culture and ideas, which at their best reflect ongoing individual and collective quests to imagine and realize a more just social order and to tackle major social problems, and at their worst fail to see the injustice and new problems created by their visions.
  • To recognize and critically engage with the historical identities, perspectives, and experiences ofindividuals and communities through a deeper understanding of geography and chronology, the major events in the modern history of the West, and their global context and impact since 1500.
  • To demonstrate the an ability to read understand and question historical narratives,with primary documentssources, andcontemporary literature, daily life, and popular media and culturecritically as tools forin order tobetter understanding how they have shaped our understanding of the tensions among local, national, European, and transnational community identities have defined and driven the history of the West roughly over the course of the last half millennium.
  • To develop writing and oral presentation skills as methods for clarifying and communicating how individuals and communities have identified, pursued, contested, and fallen short of the “Common Good” in a variety of historical contexts.

So, now objectives #1 and 4 should explicitly speak to the “Common Good,” while #2 and 3 are implicitly also about the “Common Good” but more explicitly are addressing issues related to the goals of the History department and the “Social, Historical, and Cultural Understanding” designation.

Reflection of “Common Good” in Reading List:

I realized that I changed my book order after submitting the proposal. Here is the updated list:

  • Lynn Hunt, et. al., The Making of the West: A Concise History (Bedford, 2013)
  • Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins, 2002)
  • Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Simon & Schuster, 2004)
  • John Merriman, The Dynamite Club:How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (Houghton Mifflin, 2009)
  • Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Pantheon, 1996)

For me, these books self-evidently propose grappling with the “Common Good” because they are all call into the choices of individuals and communities when facing major social problems or problematic social systems in European history: religious dissent, poverty, industrial economic upheaval, the violence and chaos of revolution, the tyranny of early democracy, terrorism, racism, and the Holocaust are all represented here (as well as others that will be posted to Moodle)—not as historical processes, but as individually and collectively lived experiences requiring interpretation, resistance, and/or adaptation. As a unifying text, Hunt’s book is driven by a constant questioning the costs of creating and spreading Western Civilization. Also, as the syllabus schedule indicates, but doesn’t list in detail, the primary sources posted to the Moodle are chosen to represent competing or conflicting interpretations of what the “Common Good” should be in response to these major social problems in that day’s catastrophic (or occasionally laudable) historical events.

#2: Articulate…a critical account of just social order:

To me, all major intellectual/political/social movements in the history of the West all have to be considered as expressions or interpretations of a “just social order.” To take the most extreme example, Fascism was introduced as an ideology and social order that offered people a higher calling in sacrificing their individual interests for the good of the national community and promised to free them from their fear of revolutionary Bolshevik communism and the chaos and uncertainty of democratic capitalism. So, even the Nazis had a concept of a “just social order” and the “Common Good,” which I think students must recognize and understand before they can posit a substantive historical critique of it. What makes the “Common Good” integral to this course is not nature of the individual topics, but that students must recognize an effort in all of the topics (no matter how misguided or how badly we know it will all fail later) to implement a vision of the “Common Good”—both in how it attempts to ameliorate existing social problems and implement a new, more just (for whom?) social order. Thus, in 500+ years of history there are few constants in social problems, but the constant is in the dynamic of there always being new social problems and evolving ideologies and strategies for dealing with them that build upon the legacies of those before it and set up the foundations for those to come.

The discourse I use to frame discussions of justice and a just social order is to ask, “What is the problem and how does this propose to be the solution?” Then later, “Did it solve the problem, now what is the problem?” “Was it worth it?—for them? for others at the time? for the future?”

As an introductory course, I am most interested in the students understanding that there are multiple perspectives on historical events, social problems, and systems of social order and most of them represent some “truth” or fair interpretation of the situation. Only then, can the assignments ask students to really contemplate the historical costs and benefits, dangers to society, and long-term effects of these varying perspectives more globally thereafter.

#3:Demonstrate a capacity for coherent, principled analysis of concrete social problems.

I’m not familiar with the concept of “principled analysis.” In terms of the question of sustained engagement, some of the social problems do run throughout the 500+ years of the course, but they morph into different forms. For example, the question of political legitimacy was first posed (in this course) by the Reformation’s 16th century bolstering of princely over papal authority, only then to succumb to attacks on monarchical authority by democratic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, then against democracy for excluding women, Jews, the poor, and imperial subjects, OR for just failing to maintain social and political order in the 19th and 20th centuries.