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On The Art Of Teaching And Learning About Civilizations: History, Diversity, And Plot, David Curley

Global Humanities and Religion

This is the transcript of a lecture given at Western Washington University in the Department of Liberal Studies. My lecture will be part memoir, part book review, and part a history of the department in our early days. There will be three sections: ‘The History of Western Civilization’ at the University of Chicago; Great Books and Teaching about Diversity; and Plots and Curricula in the Department of Liberal Studies. My fundamental idea is that a course about a civilization’s history must be a kind of narrative, and that we can evaluate courses by thinking carefully about the relation between forms …