JBA Geneology Course

All history, like all politics, is local. In this course, we work through the concept of genealogy — the systematic study of how things got to be the way they are, where they came from, what forces converged to produce the world we know; we treat genealogy as a way of thinking about the world. In order to structure this inquiry, to make it concrete and personal, each student will produce a carefully researched family and local history, with heavy emphasis on web-resources. Students will learn how their specific ancestors lived — what the locales were like, what working- and family life consisted of, the joys and sorrows of the place and time. But we will also inquire into how genealogy is a central principle in the understanding of artistic movements, languages, biological diversity, even morals. We will learn to evaluate oral tradition, historical documents, images, secondary accounts and other sources of information, and how to reason and articulate our way to a coherent and defensible account.

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