History Department

Welcome to the History Department and thank you for visiting our webpage at Emmanuel University. Our professional History degrees each offer unique and challenging learning opportunities. Men and women who graduate from Emmanuel with a degree in History are successful in many satisfying and rewarding career fields. We offer preparation for careers in education, communications, the legal profession, sociology, political science, and geography. The faculty members in History are intensively trained in their fields and stand ready to help you plan an academic program that will lead to challenging and rewarding work.All of our History courses incorporate a Christ-centered worldview. We offer instruction employing many different teaching models and techniques. Our faculty members use lectures to supplement course readings and sources, but students will also experience student-centered, hands on instruction using multi-media and digital resources, debates, projects, and directed research studies. The variety of instructional methods help to prepare our students to develop useful skills that they can utilize in different career fields, as well as in preparation for graduate school:

• Effective oral and written communication, including editing, revision, and content creation,
• Debate, discussion, and argumentation techniques,
• Analysis and critical thinking methods, and
• Research skills.
  

History professors strive to prepare Christlike disciples who will integrate their own faith, learning and living into effective careers, scholarship, and service. We believe that God’s plan is directly reflected in historical developments, and He has a Plan for you as well. Please know that as a student at Emmanuel University, our faculty are always available to help you with advice and counsel on coursework and with your career plans. We are here for you.

–Dr. Robert Fulton and Dr. Matthew Simmons, History Department faculty

Jeremiah 29:11 [NIV]“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Goals and Outcomes: Our Commitment To Your Learning

The History program is designed to prepare well-rounded students who are familiar with an array of history developments around the world and their continued impact on the present. History provides perspective and the accumulated experience of the past so essential to one’s personal enrichment and personal balance. As a result, all students take courses in American, Western, and World history as well as courses in methods and in research. All are oriented towards comprehension, evaluation, and analysis using reading, writing, and presentation skills.

Goals

The specific course requirements in sophomore, junior, and senior level History courses are designed to accomplish three goals:

1. Provide a solid base of knowledge of major historical developments and their associated complexity,
2. Provide a fundamental understanding of the contingency and interpretive nature of historical analysis, and
3. Provide the skills needed to use spoken and written words to effectively express ideas.

Student Learning Outcomes

Graduates of the History programs offered by the School of Education should possess the following knowledge and skills:

• History graduates should know the following:

• Fundamental historiographic devices, themes, forms, and genres,
• Major periods, movements, and events in American, Western, and World histories,
• History is both interpretive and contingent, and that our ideas about historical developments change over time, and
• The basic structures and terminology of both standard English grammar as well as the methods by which historical research, writing, and sourcing are presented.

• History graduates should be able to do the following:

• Continually cultivate an understanding of how a Christian worldview – morals and theology – affects our interpretation of historical developments,
• Employ research methods appropriate to academic study of primary and secondary sources and incorporate such methods into analytical writing.
• Analyze historical developments by forming a thesis about those developments and arguing persuasively for that thesis in a well-supported essay.
• Write clearly and fluently, organize coherently and logically, and edit writing to conform to standard usage.