Test for HIST 1013 (Brad Faught)

Professor Brad Fott is excited to offer a course on the History of Western Civilization and Global Perspective. He discusses the idea of Western civilization and its defining features. These features include the invention of the city, Roman law, Judeo-Christian morality, the Papal Revolution, and intellectual liberalism. Throughout the course, students will explore how these features are represented in Western history. Hello, everyone, my name is Professor Brad Fott, and I'm really pleased to be with you and to be able to offer this course. As you know, the course is called The History of Western Civilization and Global Perspective, and in the course we'll be examining several features, defining features, of Western civilization all the way back to the ancient world, and we'll bring our examination forward to about AD 1600. Sometimes people ask the question, or are interested in, or perhaps even critical of, the idea of Western civilization. What does it mean, what's its currency, what has it wrought, what have been its successes, what have been its challenges or even failures? And I think in a course like this, it's important to begin the course with at least some kind of working definition of what is meant by Western civilization. And I think over the past several years in particular, this has become clearer, certainly For scholars, historians, people working in the field, the idea that Western civilization is something discreet, something distinctive, has become more and more apparent. And I'm thinking of people like Johann Fichte, or Julian Benda, or more latterly, the French philosopher Philippe Nimo. So what I'd like to do, just to get us started, before we plunge in to ancient civilization, is to think for a moment about what is meant by Western civilization. Or maybe even more pointedly, how do we answer the question, what is the West? And to help us do that, I think we can look to five ideas or features. And the first one of those is the invention of the city, the invention of a defined urban space. When we think of the invention of the city, we almost immediately think of the Greeks. But we can in fact go further back than the Greeks and talk really about the ancient Sumerians in what we now would call Iraq or the Fertile Present. And the building and maintenance of urban spaces of cities that then the Greeks will clearly make their own and create within their poli, their cities, a particular understanding of what that means. Second feature that we can look to when talking about the West is the invention of Roman law, especially private law, contract law, private property, individual ownership. That feature is quite clearly something that speaks of Western civilization. Thirdly, we can look to the morality of love and compassion, the biblical morality of love and compassion that we find in the Judeo-Christian tradition. That charity surpasses justice, that the greatest of these things is love. That idea becomes more and more central to the idea of Western civilization. Fourthly, what some scholars call the Papal Revolution, or really what we can think of as the period of the Renaissance, of intellectual renewal, of artistic achievement. And then finally, fifthly, the advent of intellectual liberalism, freedom of expression, tolerance of opposing points of view, tolerance of opposing political parties, political leaders, the development of the market economy. What has really, for a few hundred years now, come under the heading of classical liberalism. So what I'd like you to think about all through the course as we proceed along together is in what ways are these five features represented in the history that we will now examine. How can they be seen, how can they be understood, how do they inform the kind of history that Western society over the past several thousand years, but particularly the past couple of thousand years, from the era of the Romans, how are those things expressed? Really looking forward to spending the next several sessions with all of you.