Reviving the Study of Western Civilization

It has been about four decades now since courses on Western Civilization began to disappear from American high schools and colleges. In retrospect, the golden age of the Western Civ textbook fell in the decades from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Courses on the subject were a standard curricular offering, often required, for most of the Cold War period. The typical survey course covered Western history from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ending with the Enlightenment and the contemporary West. In our parents’ and grandparents’ time, the Western Civ survey was commonly the linchpin for other humanities courses, providing a framework for deeper study of Western literature, philosophy, and the arts.