History Program
The history department helps to fulfill three of LMU’s major educational goals: (1) to promote academic excellence by emphasizing the skills and knowledge necessary for a lifetime of intellectual growth; (2) to provide a liberal education by challenging all students to think critically and reflect on basic values and issues and free themselves from prejudice; and (3) to encourage students to understand their fields of studies in a broad intellectual, ethical, and social context. The contributions of the history department to these goals can be summed up as follows: All history courses will include in varying degrees different forms of historical interpretations. Students must realize that each new generation of historians re-interprets the past and that within the same generation there are conflicting views about the same body of evidence. Such an emphasis on historiography aims at developing the students’ ability to think critically and to reach sound and well-informed judgments on past events and trends.