“Nothing is more incongruous for people or groups than to have no history. Ignorance of one’s own past leads fatally to a crisis and the loss of identity of individuals and communities.”
– Pope Saint John Paul II, Message for the 50th Anniversary of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, 16 April 2004
Committed to advancing “the dialogue between faith and reason,” The Catholic University of America occupies a unique place in American higher education as the national university of the Catholic Church in the United States. The Department of History and Anthropology, one of the most prominent departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, is dedicated to fostering this mission through excellence in teaching, research, and preparing students for active civic engagement in the world.
Emerging from the venerable Christian tradition of study of the liberal arts, the disciplines of history and anthropology seek to further the goals of humanistic learning through their own set of distinct questions and methods. In its search for meaning, history and anthropology first and foremost teach students how to understand events, institutions, ideas, cultures, and individual lives in the past and present through careful attention to the complexity of social and historical context. In addition, the study of history and anthropology aims to show us who we are. Questions of religious, national, ethnic, racial and gender identity are today at the core of historical and anthropological study. Through systematic study of such topics, students confront their own core values, an essential contribution to the university’s mission of educating the “whole person” in the Catholic humanistic tradition. Moreover, through the study of multiple perspectives of unfamiliar peoples, places, and ideas, the practice of history and anthropology instills empathy for other human beings and systems of thought. By examining the record of both human achievement and failure, we demonstrate how various societies, both past and present, engage with the world, equipping students to better understand not only the human condition but also the challenges that we face in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.