HIST 124 - The United States, 1877 to the Present (GEKS)

This course provides opportunities to acquire the procedures, practices, methodologies and fundamental assumptions of history in two ways. First, you will gain the foundational content knowledge needed to understand and interpret the major trends, people, ideas and events that have shaped the United States since 1877. Second you will acquire and use the unique methods historians employ to critically select and evaluate evidence from the past, assess its significance, and analyze the interpretive accounts that give this past meaning. In this iterative process, you will discover that the discipline of history places unique demands on those who aim to interpret and communicate a strange past- a past that is difficult to truly know and articulate. The application of historical thinking skills will help you discover much of the meaning, mystery, controversy and drama of history. This process of discovery requires that you question how historians view the relationship between evidence and historical accounts. you Will learn to create interpretive accounts of the past by framing useful historical problems, marshalling and evaluating relevant evidence, detecting authorial bias, contextualizing or “historicizing” the past, assessing significance both in primary sources and in narrative accounts, debating competing theories of causation, using counter historical examples to critique narratives and exploring how theories of hegemony and human agency influence our understanding of the past.

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Course Rotation 1/15

Winter 2025 Course Sections

Fall 2024 Course Sections