Content Goals

I           The Exceptional Nature of Church Historiography

            A.  Approaches to Church History

            B.  The Definition of the Church

            C.  The Church Today

II          The Early Church (BCE-700)

            A. The People of God in the Old Testament

            B. The Church Jesus Founded

            C.  The Acts of the Apostles

            D.  The Christian Roman Empire

            E.  The Eastern Church

III        The Medieval Church (700-1450)

            A.  Clovis and Charlemagne

            B.  Christendom

            C.  The Eastern Schism

            D.  Scholasticism

            E.  The Crusades

            F. The Black Death and the 100 Years War

IV        The Church in the Renaissance, the Protestant and the Catholic Reformations, and

            early missionary activity (1450-1560s)

            A.  Humanism and the Arts

            B. The Protestant Reformation

            C.  The Catholic Reformation

            D.  The Church in Asia, Africa, and the Americas

V         The Church Confronts Modernity 1560-1918

            A.  The Enlightenment

            B.  The French Revolution

            C.  The Church Confronts a Materialist, Liberal and Nationalist Political Order

            D.  The Missionary Church in the United States”

            E.  The Industrial Revolution

            F.  World War 1

VI        The Modern Church (1918-Present)

            A.  World War 2

            B.  Vatican 2

            C.  The Collapse of Communism

            D.  The Church Today

Analysis Goals

Primary Sources

• Understand the distinction between primary, secondary, and inspired sources
• Interpret a written primary source according to the three steps of primary source analysis
• Interpret an historical object
• Interpret an historical painting
• Know how to take a position on a historical question using evidence from primary and secondary sources.

Chronological Thinking

• Students learn how major events are related to one another in time
• Know how to create a timeline that includes the key events, people, and periods
• Students understand the rationale for historians use of periodization
• Understand the concept of Historical Context

Historical Thinking

• Explain how a historian’s claim or argument is supported with evidence.
• Identify the main point of a paragraph
• Students learn to frame questions that can be answered by historical study and research
• Students are able to identify, explain, and utilize the six questions historians use to interpret historical events and processes
• Students recognize the role of chance, contingency, and error in history

Composition Goals

• Write a summary
• Write a precis
• Know how to write a definition using a Frayer Diagram
• Be able to write a historical definition
• Students are able to synthesize information to write a chapter summary
• Students learn to construct an allegory using historical actors and events.
• Cornell Notes based on lecture format
• Presenting and evaluating two points of view on a historical issue from a historian
• Presenting and evaluating two points of view on a historical issue from two primary sources
• Students learn to construct an allegory using historical actors and events.
• Describing and analyzing how a keyword illuminates a primary source
• Using 3 different types of artifacts to make a claim about a singular event, figure, group,  or process (synthesis)
• Media Res Exercise (to build skill of establishing historical context in historical narrative)
• Comic Frame exercise of complex events (creating narrative structures)
• Letter exchange from two historical figures