History

Course summary

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. The study of History fires the imagination: can we imagine being a Roman, an African American hearing Martin Luther King speak, an RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain, perhaps even a Nazi? Everything that we have has been inherited from the past; we ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. Our societies were not invented on the spur of the moment; they have evolved over the course of the life span of the human species. Everything from the laws we abide by to the cars that we drive were developed by our ancestors. To understand History, then, is to understand what it is to be human.