• Seattle U’s courses give students the theoretical, methodological, and research skills necessary to seek answers to the questions that matter today. Seattle U helps students develop nuanced responses that are attuned to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religious affiliation, time period, and geographic location. The department’s emphasis on historiography—studying the existing histories of a subject—is especially unique in undergraduate curricula. Seattle U teaches students how to analyze a range of primary sources—myths, archeology, architecture, novels, poetry, paintings, photographs, diary entries, census data, treaties, and cartoons—for the audience, message, and bias. Studying history prepares students to navigate a complex world.
  • The history program focuses on the values, as well as the ideas, personalities, and institutions that existed in the past and shaped the present. Concerned with perceptions of reality and historic reality itself, the history program attempts to exploit all forms of information concerning the past-myth, folklore, legend, and works of art, as well as conventional manuscript and published sources.
  • While the department attempts to assist all students in acquiring that knowledge of the past that is essential to the educated person in the modern world, it is especially concerned with developing the methods and techniques unique to historical inquiry,

  • By consistently raising questions regarding “how we know” as well as “what we know,” the department aims at the development of fundamental intellectual skills that will be of lifelong utility.